Black Workers Matter

What happened to Martin Luther King’s dream of economic equality in Memphis? For most of the city’s history, 80 percent or more of the black community has consisted of black workers. Slavery set the terms of cheap labor as the measure of profitability in Memphis, and white economic elites have pursued that measure of profitability ever since, but not without resistance from black working people. Drawing on the last thirty years of research on Memphis labor and race relations, this essay surveys the struggles of black workers and the black community as a whole for economic advancement. After documenting decisive, powerful advances for African Americans in Memphis during the “long civil rights movement” from 1934 to 1968, the essay surveys the fate of the black working class and poses questions about the legacy of the freedom struggle in the fifty years since 1968, during which time more educated and politically involved people have advanced, while the fate of undereducated, underpaid, or unemployed working people has worsened. The legacy of the black freedom struggle in Memphis continues in the increasingly difficult terrain of America’s racial capitalism in the twenty-first-century global economy.

“If the March Cannot Be Here, Then Where?”

This essay examines the role of Memphis in the Meredith March against Fear, a demonstration for black freedom that moved through Mississippi in June 1966. James Meredith began his journey from Memphis and was shot by Aubrey Norvell, who hailed from a suburb of the city. In the aftermath of the shooting, Memphis hosted important events that not only determined the character and success of the march but also influenced the course of the black freedom struggle. The titans of the civil rights movement orated from the pulpits of Memphis churches and engaged in contentious debates in the rooms of the Lorraine Motel. Even as the march continued south through Mississippi, its headquarters remained at Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, which achieved James Lawson’s vision of an activist church driven by grassroots pressure and militant nonviolence. The city’s whites exhibited both hostility and accommodation toward black protesters, demonstrating both connections to and distinctions from the racial patterns of Mississippi. For the Memphis branch of the NAACP, the demonstration presented an opportunity to assert its historic strength, even as the march highlighted the complicated dynamics between local branches and the national office.

“Since I Was a Citizen, I Had the Right to Attend the Library”

This essay concerns the fight to desegregate Memphis libraries, which encompassed not only legal challenges but also a 1960 sit-in campaign that inspired direct action protests throughout the city. Allegra Turner sought access to the white-only Cossitt Library in 1949, and eight years later her husband Jesse Turner led a public campaign to desegregate the public libraries. In a way, this struggle serves as a microcosm of the larger civil rights struggle in the Bluff City. While the white leaders of Memphis did not encourage the violence against civil right protesters seen in other southern cities, they were slow and reluctant to open the library to readers of all races—and the library was the first public institution to be desegregated. The 1960 sit-in campaign provided a critical mass mobilization that helped drive desegregation, even as the public libraries continued to reflect patterns of racial inequality.

Power and Protection

Gender bound together labor and civil rights, serving as a key axis in the struggles for racial justice from World War II to the 1968 sanitation workers strike, including the tragic murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Although the conflicts addressed in this essay are crucial to understanding the dramatic events of the later 1960s, they are usually obscured by national civil rights narratives that emphasize desegregation and voting rights, thereby pushing issues reflecting the intersection of labor, racial justice, and gender to the sidelines. This essay highlights conflicts ranging from the denial of World War II defense work, other than menial labor, to African American women to the support movement for the sanitation workers. In placing themselves quite literally on the front lines of that movement, women articulated their own interpretations of the strike’s slogan, “I am a man!” in relation to their own struggles as working women, mothers, and community activists.

Coda

This essay reflects on the enduring nature of racial subordination and inequality that black Memphians confronted, but it also contends with the equally enduring reality of black insurgency, rooted in a deep and abiding determination to pursue equality. It argues that although racially charged flashpoints can focus intense energy and attention on specific issues, they often obscure the complex set of social, political, racial, and tactical dynamics that make up the tensions of domination, survival, and insurgency. When we reinterpret these moments in Memphis history, we are better able to make sense of their meanings and to understand the truly complicated calculus of social and political change in the Bluff City. While chronicling recent protests and racial flashpoints, such as the DeSoto Bridge protest and the rise of #BlackLivesMatter, the essay follows the analytical frame set forth in this volume. It insists that we can recognize the contemporary moment as a resurgence of the black freedom struggle.

“There Will Be No Discrimination”

The 1937 flood of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers was one of the highest and most destructive on record. It affected millions of lives, devastated thousands of towns, and killed hundreds of people. The Bluff City, as its name suggests, escaped the worst of the deluge. Although waters did inundate the north and south ends of town, it became a massive refugee center that crammed tens of thousands of flood victims into space that should have accommodated hundreds. Black Memphis felt the flood in racially specific ways. Police trolled Beale Street looking for able-bodied men to put to work on levees. Area landlords driven from nearby farmlands jammed their sharecroppers into substandard housing, lest they escape their punitive labor contracts. As this essay shows, when the city broke down, the fate of local African Americans became a political tool in the hands of Mayor Watkins Overton and “Boss” E. H. Crump.

“In the Hands of the Lord”

This essay investigates black life in the aftermath of the Memphis Massacre of 1866, chronicling how new migrants helped reconstitute cultural life and political strength. It examines an alliance of black benevolent associations with white elites during the 1876 election. This alliance reflected a practical accommodation to political reality, and it reinforced a political culture built on white domination and black subservience. But it also revealed distinct aims among the black communities in Memphis. Long-term black residents and Republican activists tended to utilize the political process to promote racial equality, while incoming migrants were often the individuals most willing to challenge white supremacy on a daily basis. The migrant population was not monolithic, however. In South Memphis a community-oriented migrant population approached politics as one way to express their independence and desire for freedom from the political culture of white supremacy.

Beauty and the Black Student Revolt

At the height of the Black Power movement, African American students, especially those attending predominantly white colleges and universities, demanded access to and inclusion in their institutions’ resources. Their demands included Black Studies and Black History programs, the end of racist practices by faculty and administrators, and more culturally sensitive programs that reflected their lived experiences. This essay examines how the Black Power movement sought to redefine the beauty aesthetic by exploring how African American students at Memphis State University in the late 1960s and early 1970s politicized the campus positions traditionally reserved for white students. In 1970 Maybelline Forbes was elected the first black homecoming queen at Memphis State. As athletic teams began to integrate during the 1960s and 1970s, black women struggled to penetrate the membership ranks of cheerleading squads, serve as homecoming queens, and join other spaces that excluded them. This essay demonstrates how these positions became contested spaces for the larger black student protest movement, thus offering a different perspective on how black activists engaged in protest on college campuses in the Black Power era.

After Stax

Stax Records served as a neighborhood anchor institution throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, employing but also profiting from the wealth of talent in the South Memphis community. In the years after the assassination of Martin Luther King and then the decline and shuttering of Stax Records, South Memphis—or Soulsville, as it came to be known—underwent many of the changes that affected American inner-city neighborhoods in the wake of urban renewal, integration, deindustrialization, and globalization. Using oral histories, census records, and other sources, this essay shows how neighborhood change in the post-Stax era was shaped by the distinctive legacy of the company and its intertwined relationship with the community.

Nonviolence, Black Power, and the Surveillance State in Memphis’s War on Poverty

This essay examines the intertwined histories of federal antipoverty programs and the Black Power movement in Memphis, framed through the unlikely alliance of the Reverend James Lawson and members of the Black Organizing Project. Employing primary sources from antipoverty organizations in Memphis and newly surfaced FBI documents, it argues that the explosive events of late March and early April 1968 cannot be explained only by differences among black activists. The fracture within Memphis’s black freedom movement—a rupture that nearly thirty years of scholarship has attributed chiefly to deepening fissures between advocates of Black Power and advocates of nonviolence in the Memphis sanitation strike of 1968—is better explained by two factors: political resistance at both the local and national levels to black-led antipoverty efforts, and a robust and likely illegal effort by the FBI to infiltrate and undermine both the Black Power and nonviolent wings of the black freedom movement. The political efforts to halt the antipoverty movement and the black freedom struggle in Memphis were bound inextricably together.