Memphis: Pre-Summer Blues

Down the years since W. C. Handy midwifed the blues, his city of Memphis has been a passable paradigm of racial harmony and a pathfinder of Negro progress. Memphis schools are integrated. Its black citizens have voted since the early 1900s. Its white and black lawyers have been in the fore front of civil rights campaigns. So amicable has its climate been that Memphis police have never faced a serious charge of brutality. Yet last week Memphis simmered on the rim of racial rampage--a premonition in microcosm of next summer's national threat.

Step by Step. That summer heat, in Memphis as elsewhere, hinges not just on civil rights but on the bread-and-TV-set issues of economic parity. The city's 200,000 Negroes have discovered not only that they are poor but also, even by honky standards, undeservedly so. What began a month ago as a walkout by city employees is now a black-and-white confrontation. Memphis garbage collectors, most of them making $1.80 an hour, went on strike for a 60-c--an-hour minimum raise, recognition of their union and a dues checkoff by city hall. Nearly all of Memphis' 1,300 garbage men are black, only three of 13 councilmen are. Mayor Henry Loeb has spurned the strikers' demands. As the dispute escalated, labor solidarity has been replaced by a surge of Black Power, led by black ministers and manned by militant black youngsters.

The worker-employer impasse followed the classic pattern of conflict. Invoking Tennessee court decisions banning strikes by public service workers, the mayor brought in some 150 strikebreakers. The Negro community countered with a boycott of downtown stores with the slogan: "No new clothes for Easter." Seven hundred Negroes picnicked in city hall. A few youngsters tried to overturn a police cruiser. Nervous cops sprayed the kids' faces with Mace. Injunctions were brought against union leaders. When a contingent of Negro ministers and militants returned to city hall, a raucous exchange of words resulted in the arrest of 117 protesters. They went willingly and gently, two by two, singing "Leaning on the everlasting arms." For the most part, in keeping with Memphis tradition, police have kept their cool, even when 200 youngsters invaded the steps of city hall to hold a mock funeral, solemnly burying "Justice" in a borrowed grey casket.

Young raiders broke into a Beale Street department store. Fires were set to the garbage piling up at a rate of nearly 500 tons a day. Windows have been broken in laundries and barbecue restaurants bearing the Loeb name (they are owned by the mayor's brother). "I am not in favor of violence," said the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., an erudite militant who leads much of the Negro struggle. But "if I were inclined to advocate burning, it would be in East Memphis [where the mayor lives]--I think we've had enough talk of this burning down our own neighborhoods."

Hope & Danger. By week's end two mutations in the struggle had evolved. Growing weary of Mayor Loeb's intransigence, fashionably dressed white housewives urged him to give in, while council members called for the dues checkoff and for pledging Memphis' government to equal-opportunity hiring and promotion. And the scope of Negro demands was widening as swiftly as their mood could darken. Now agitators call not only for victory for the garbage men but better jobs and housing for all of Memphis' Negroes.

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