Those who experience historic events directly have their own unique memories of those events. As a historian I know the limits of memory and am wary of it. For what its worth these are my memories of Memphis at the time of troubles that reached a climax with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
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It is difficult to believe that forty years have passed since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., April 4, 1968. On that spring evening in Memphis a news bulletin on television stopped me as I was heading out the door. I was on my way to hear Dr. King speak to a group of striking garbage workers and their supporters. Martin Luther King Jr. was dead, the city of Memphis was placed under immediate curfew, and rioting erupted across the nation.

It was not just an important moment in history, but both the culmination and a turning point in the civil rights movement. It was part of a long and difficult struggle for human dignity in Memphis. And it was a significant part of my education.

Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis because after months of struggle the garbage workers of the city had called on him for help. In late January Memphis sanitation workers had gone on strike. They were looking for basics: a living wage, a chance to shower after the day’s work before heading home, a chance to eat lunch away from the garbage, and may most importantly to be treated like human beings.

When the strike began a call for help went out to both white and black Memphis. Each night supporters and strikers gathered at churches in the black community. There were prayers and speeches, and the singing of hymns, often the great black spirituals. A collection was taken for the workers and people were urged to bring food and clothing to the next rally. This went on night and after night into April.

For a young white Yankee college history teacher living in the South for the first time it was a learning experience, a crash course in Southern culture, both black and white. For two hours almost every night I was immersed in black culture. I was struck particularly by the dignity and kindness of those struggling people who were exploited by a system that did not recognize them as equal members of the human race. The love and compassion in the midst of struggle and suffering warmed those churches even on the coldest of nights.

I was amazed by the contrast within the lily-white community on the eastside of Memphis where I lived. My neighbors were filled with fear, especially as the strike went on and the street demonstrations began. Many armed themselves convinced that the black hordes were ready to descend on them. The differences between these two worlds in which I lived and moved always surprised and sometimes shocked me.

The all-white Memphis power establishment personified by Mayor Henry Loeb met the strikers demands in a manner befitting the Old South. Memphis was like a plantation in which the paternal figure of the owner took care of all the needs of the people on the plantation, including the children. The Mayor clearly saw his role as paternal, the good father and strong disciplinarian, who would not bow before the demands of his children. Let the garbage workers go back to work, and then he would talk with them. And of course the Mayor emphasized that he knew the “colored people” of Memphis were good and happy people, that the strike was just a case of “the coloreds” being misled by unscrupulous outside agitators.

But it wasn’t people from the outside who led this effort. It was largely the black ministers of Memphis, directed by Rev. James Lawson, a man trained in the experiences of the freedom rides while a student at Fisk University. The ministers rallied the community, provided the logistical support, addressed the white establishment, planned and led the demonstrations in downtown Memphis, and organized the boycott of downtown businesses. Slowly members of the white community got involved; nuns from a local college, ministers and priests, students, and members of the Memphis Human Relations Committee, an island of white liberalism in the conservative white South.

After nearly two months of struggle with little impact on white Memphis, assistance was sought from the outside. A request for help was sent to Dr. King. After some study of the situation he announced he would come to Memphis to address a rally and lead a march of the sanitation workers.

It was an important time in the history of Dr. King’s movement. By 1968 it had lost momentum. The earlier victories over segregation by legal means had been won. Attention now was focused on economic issues. The tactics of non-violence worked well against Jim Crow, but many doubted their relevance to the hard realities of economics. Memphis seemed to be a good opportunity to test Dr. King’s ability to make an impact on economic questions.

Indeed the entire strategy of non-violence was under increasing scrutiny in the black community. The rise of Black Power and Black Nationalism, along with the militancy of the young, led many to question the continuing relevance of Martin Luther King’s movement.

In Memphis a group called the “Invaders” proclaimed the irrelevance of non-violent demonstrations, and pointed to the inability of the strikers and ministers to move the white establishment off the dime. And when Dr. King announced he was coming to Memphis to prove that non-violence was still viable, the “Invaders” let it be known that they would prevent him from leading a non-violent demonstration.

Dr. King’s March on Memphis turned into a riot as the “Invaders” came out of the ranks of the marchers and began breaking windows along Beale Street. It appeared that the young militants had won their point as a riot followed. The city was occupied by the National Guard, Dr. King fled, and fear gripped the city.

We now know it was not that simple. The “Invaders” had been infiltrated by an agent provocateur from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. J. Edgar Hoover’s obsession with Martin Luther King Jr. had led him to provoke violence in Memphis to discredit King’s movement. And indeed it was a difficult and embarrassing episode for Dr. King.

A few weeks before that march I had the good fortune to see and hear Martin Luther King Jr. It was at a large rally in the Mason Temple near downtown Memphis. The building was full, and the crowd represented all the races and classes in the city, although no one from the Memphis establishment was there. The most impressive part of King’s speech that night was the fact that with the same words and images he could speak eloquently to everyone in the room, from the illiterate to the possessors of advanced degrees. The air was electric and the effect overwhelming.

He returned to Memphis a few weeks after the failed march, again saying he would prove that non-violence still worked. The night before his assassination he addressed a small crowd in that same Mason Temple. The weather that night was fierce, with tornado warnings in the forecast and severe thunderstorms pounding the city. And while the lightning cracked and the thunder boomed Dr. King stood at the pulpit and talked about the future. He had gone to the mountain top, he said, but like Moses, he did not expect to see the promised land. In retrospect it seemed prophetic. The next night he was dead.

As to the garbage strike, after the days of mourning had passed and the national guard was again out of the city, it resumed. The pleas from across the nation for a settlement had gone unheeded, the marches continued, and the city leaders continued to stonewall the strikers. It went on for approximately six more weeks, and when it ended little was achieved.

It is said by some that in the long run this experience changed Memphis, and for the better. That may be. But in the short run I noticed little, except that it had changed me. I had seen the face of hatred in Memphis and it was both black and white. I had seen the poor crushed by an indifferent white establishment, illustrating what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” I had seen poverty in an American city that matched anything I had seen in Africa.

But perhaps more important than any of this, I had seen the resilience of the human spirit, the dignity of the poor, and the joy and beauty of a black culture I had never before known.

And what of the debate about change and violence. Did Martin Luther King Jr. lose that debate on the streets of Memphis? In the forty years that have passed, history has answered with mixed signs. Much has changed but as the well- known adage has it, “The more things change, the more they are the same.” As to the catalytic nature of violence, the evidence seems to affirm its utility, and one wonders if substantive change would have come without it.

Richard C. Crepeau