More Than a Test of the Movement
With them it will be a matter of winning significant victory on the unlikely field of Memphis. Failure, including inconclusiveness, would strengthen their hand greatly and, in principle, decisively.
Ironically, but of course, the outcome will depend to a large degree upon the establishment, local and national. Memphis, at this writing, is shaping up as the serious test, not of the movement, but of the national will and value system that the Washington campaign was meant to be. Perhaps Memphis will not be decisive, but it will be crucial: it will greatly increase or decrease the already too-slim chance of averting months -- maybe years -- of agony for American cities.
The prospect is not good. The evidence thus far indicates that decision-makers will rely upon police power to do the simply impossible job of making men resign themselves to intolerable injustice and indignity. There is still no indication that the white people are many or powerful in Memphis who understand that Negro leaders have no choice but to escalate the protest. They have been allowed no alternative but the totally unacceptable and impossible one of reverting to the status quo ante. The pundits delineate two alternatives for Dr. King and those he represents: nonviolence or nonprotest. There is a third possibility: justice.
On Friday, the day after the "riot," two or three hundred adult Negroes, mostly sanitation workers and ministers, marched from Clayborn Temple to the city hall and back. As they had been doing for seven weeks, they marched single file, silently, two-car lengths apart, carrying their placards.
But this time they were escorted by five armored personnel carriers, five jeeps, three huge military trucks, and a covered pickup truck -- all loaded with guardsmen. The tracks of the personnel carriers chewed up streets. The guardsmen, with bayonets fixed and rifles at ready, scanned downtown buildings for snipers -- as they had been drilled to do, no doubt. Gunners kept ready hands on machine guns. All of this attracted larger crowds of spectators, of course, than the demonstrators had enjoyed for any other such march.
One rather homely sanitation worker trudged along, eyes downcast and brow knitted in bewilderment. Clearly that any affair of his could be so important and dangerous was quite beyond his ken. "I just don't understand it," he said. "All we're asking for is justice. What could be wrong with that?"
It is not the nonviolent movement that is on trial in Memphis, but -- once more -- American democracy. Not the leadership of some Negro ministers is threatened, but the nation itself.
