Police Response

After a brief time -- perhaps ten minutes -- the cordon of officers began advancing toward the corner of Beale and Main. Young people threw picket signs and other missiles at them. At the corner, tear gas grenades were exploded, and a crowd of young people ran down Beale Street in full retreat.

A block down Beale Street, reporters came upon a group of officers beating a Negro man in front of a store. The display windows of the store were broken and some merchandise was gone. One of the policemen had a bloodied head and later said that the man had struck him with a club. One reporter said he watched officers administer at least forty blows after the man was knocked down. Police dragged him, unconscious, to a cruiser and dumped him on the floor of the back seat.

The police were zealously clearing the streets of all Negroes and made little distinction between young and old or between the defiant and those who were only following instructions with decorum.

A 67-year-old Negro was trying to help someone off the street when an officer sprayed him with Mace and another punched him in the ribs three times with a gun. "I have a bad heart," he explained later. "I can't run."

A lone slip of a girl in a gay parti-colored dress straggled along the nearly empty street weeping. "What the hell are you doing here?" yelled an officer. He made a threatening gesture with his club. "Get off the street!"

Ozell Sutton, Negro field representative of the Community Relations Service, U.S. Department of Justice, was walking down Beale with a white reporter. A policeman, ignoring the white man, barked at Sutton, "Move on! What are you doing here?" Sutton, flipped out his Community Relations Service identification folder. The officer glanced at it and snapped, "Move on! We don't even want you here!"

The Memphis Press-Scimitar next day carried numerous reports of police excesses -- along with an editorial stating, in part, that the fact casualties were kept to one dead and 60 injured was "a credit to police restraint."

So began the Memphis violence, which resulted in the death by police gunfire of a 16-year-old boy, injuries to 60, mostly Negroes clubbed by police, and arrest of about 280 people, as well as considerable property damage. News media have reported the instances of looting, the numerous but inconsequential fires, the calling out of 4,000 National Guardsmen, a curfew hastily authorized by the state legislature and imposed from 7 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. The lid was clamped on quickly and effectively.