Memphis 68

by Cosgrove, Stuart;

  Coincidentally, it was Carver High School, with its student body of 2,500 teenagers, that witnessed the worst unrest of the era with riots flaring up there sporadically from February to May 1968. On the most intense day of disturbances sixty-five windows and glass doors were smashed by students protesting on behalf of the Invaders, who had applied to the school to be recognised as an on-campus organisation. The school principal Richard Thompson was reluctant and tried to fend off the Invaders until the disturbances escalated and police were called. The most intense violence followed an incident in the school cafeteria when a female supporter of the Invaders set off a firecracker, deemed by some to be a signal to start the disruptions. A few days before the Carver High School riots, John Burl Smith, John H. Ferguson, Oree McKenzie and Larry Davis (all members of the Invaders) had visited the campus to try to recruit students to what they described as a new Negro theatre unit called the Beale Street Players. It may have been a front for the Invaders but was most likely a legitimate ambition, since both Smith and Ferguson were community workers who focused on youth affairs. The deputy principal, against the wishes of his boss, had in fact welcomed the idea and they were invited back, but their return coincided with acts of violence, and both men were arrested after the police dispersed the crowd with tear gas. Smith and Ferguson were initially charged under an arcane law – refusing to vacate a school property – and later charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct. They were held overnight in jail, having failed to raise the prohibitive bond condition of $50,000. The Memphis chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took up their case and challenged the scale of the bail money. Smith commented to the local press: ‘Who do they think we are – a couple of John Dillingers?’

  The Carver High School riots were most likely sparked because a group of students had petitioned the principal, asking for greater rights and student representation, improved cafeteria food and an end-of-term prom. All of their demands were denied, but a seed was sown, and a year later the official wing of the civil rights movement, the NAACP, began a series of protests at Memphis schools called the Black Monday campaign. Students declared themselves absent from school every Monday, parents were encouraged to co-operate, and many teachers joined in, forcing most of the schools in black neighbourhoods to close.

  In a subsequent court case John Burl Smith argued his right to be on the Carver High School campus on the grounds that he was a former pupil and, for a period in early 1962, before he was drafted to fight in Vietnam, he had been the captain of the school’s football team and had turned up at several sporting events over the years. In the dock he denied being a member of the Invaders and told the court there was no such organisation. It sailed close to perjury but not quite; the group’s official name was the Black Organising Project (BOP) – the Invaders was a nickname appropriated by an inner circle from the briefly popular ABC sci-fi drama about alien invaders.

  The Memphis Invaders came from across the city, from the blighted ghetto neighbourhoods of the inner city, from the mainly segregated high schools, and from the politically fertile campuses of the southern states. Two prominent members, Curtis Carter and Don Neely, had grown up on East McLemore and were familiar faces at Satellite Records and in the doorways outside Stax. The Invaders had flourished while John Gary Williams was in Vietnam, and by 1968 the group had been infiltrated by the FBI as part of the now-notorious Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). The FBI were experts in covert action and black ops, and by the mid sixties deployed a catalogue of dubious techniques to destabilise political groups, using agents provocateurs, anonymous hate mail, burglary, forgery, defamation and extortion. One popular technique of the time was ‘snitch jacketing’, in which an FBI agent would set up an activist to make him seem like a police informer, thus undermining trust within radical groups and fostering internal dissent. The Memphis branch of the FBI and the Intelligence Unit of the Memphis Police Department (MPD) had twenty-one different and unconnected sources spying on the Invaders, ranging from paid informers to frightened and compromised young people arrested for minor offences. From February onwards, the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the Memphis FBI collated an eight-page communiqué summarising the activities of the Invaders, which was sent to the paranoid and obsessive director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. It painted a picture of low-level local political activism and showed hives of activity at Le Moyne College and Owen College, two historically black colleges that had been set up by church groups to educate freed slaves. The FBI were focusing on a cadre of young Black Power activists who had taken to wearing sawn-off denim jackets with the word ‘Invaders’ emblazoned on the back, much like an inner-city street gang or a chapter of the Hells Angels. Among them were: John Gary Williams’ friend and fellow Vietnam veteran, John Burl Smith; Calvin Taylor, University of Memphis journalism graduate; Coby Vernon Smith, a student at Southwestern College and one of the first two black students at Rhodes College; Edwina Jeannetta Harrell, a student at Memphis State University; and a charismatic but combustible young man with big plans and a distinctive name – one Charles Cabbage.

  In March, all of them were listed in FBI documents and considered to be a threat to American society. Concern was raised that the Invaders were targeting Memphis high schools to recruit more members and to bring a more aggressive dimension to local politics, thereby escalating support for the sanitation workers. Young veterans returning from Vietnam were another group that the Invaders successfully targeted. Stax singer-songwriter William Bell and songwriter Raymond Jackson had also been swept up in the conscription drive of 1966. Bell was recruited to the 14th Infantry’s mortar platoon and did his basic training at Fort Polk, Louisiana, where he met and befriended one of the titans of the New Orleans soul scene, the super-producer Allan Toussaint. He was then airlifted to Pleiku, where he saw active service for nearly two years. Before he was flown out, Bell was allowed two weeks’ vacation back in Memphis, and he naturally gravitated to his old haunts on East McLemore. He had first recorded at Stax as an ambitious singer with local Memphis group the Del Rios, a featured band at the Flamingo Rooms. His mother warned him that he would end up like ‘the rest of these blues bums’ and ‘would die without a penny’, so, under pressure to conform, he studied to be a doctor. Stax knew of Bell’s promise and called him in, ostensibly to do backing vocals for Carla Thomas on her first major single ‘Gee Whiz’. Another group had been given the job, but they failed to cut it and were sacked. When there was no studio work, he hung out at Satellite Records sharing ideas with Axton, and once watched transfixed as the unknown Otis Redding, doubling as Johnny Jenkins’ driver, recorded ‘These Arms Of Mine’. Producer Chips Moman talked Bell into recording ‘You Don’t Miss Your Water’ (1961), which has since become one of the defining, most durable ballads in soul music, covered by Otis Redding, the Byrds and Taj Mahal. As Vietnam loomed, Bell recorded two songs that directly addressed the lives of departing soldiers, ‘Soldiers Good-bye’ and ‘Marching Off To War’, both released in 1966. A rash of Vietnam soul songs tried to tap into a new and growing market – girlfriends, parents, and family members heading to war – but few made any great commercial impact and Bell’s songs soon disappeared from sight. He tried again in the first solemn month of 1968, recording a song for his dead friend Otis Redding. Called ‘Tribute To A King’, it was a mournful and at times over-literal requiem to the dead star; it attracted some attention but few sales. When success finally came, it had another tangled connection to Redding. Prior to Redding’s death, Stax had scheduled the recording of a new duet with his favoured partner Carla Thomas, then a masters student at Washington’s Howard University. The song planned for them was ‘Private Number’, a telephone love song co-written by Bell and his collaborator Booker T. Jones. Soul duets were at their all-time height, and Tammi Terrell’s songs with Marvin Gaye had set a standard that few could match. Bell offered to record ‘Private Number’ himself, after Redding’s death, and Stax scoured its own stable of talent for a female pa
rtner. Atlantic boss Jerry Wexler argued on behalf of Judy Clay, a former member of the gospel group the Drinkard Singers. Clay had a pedigree that spoke to the era. She had recorded with the white Californian singer Billy Vera in a bid to bring an interracial love story to the charts. Their partnership attracted fascinated attention, but network television shows were reluctant to schedule a black–white duet, fearing it would alienate mainstream audiences. After two indifferent releases, Clay and Vera drifted apart, and she moved south to Memphis to eventually record the song as one of Stax’s great love songs, William Bell and Judy Clay’s ‘Private Number’ (1968). It was the first time that Bell had truly shaken off his Vietnam veteran past, and his career as a writer-producer took off.

  By contrast John Gary Williams’ career had stalled. His greatest work was yet to come, and for much of 1968 the Mad Lads treaded water. Their release ‘So Nice’ was a throwback to the old doo-wop styles of previous decades, which seemed curiously at odds with Williams’ own life as a disaffected veteran and an advocate of social change. Throughout the spring and summer of 1968, anxiety about Black Power and inner-city riots was at fever pitch, and anyone remotely connected to radical politics was harassed, pursued or spied upon. The Invaders taught black history lessons in North and South Memphis communities and Williams often joined them to recount the racism he had witnessed in Vietnam.

  The Invaders lacked meaningful resources and moved their base across the city from community hubs to family homes and on again to college campuses, relying on small-scale grants, local fundraising drives and a short-lived protection racket that drew taxes from stores in black arcades across the city. Charles Cabbage, a prominent member of the Invaders, whose brothers followed him into the movement, had ambitions to become a national leader in the burgeoning Black Power movement. A friend of both Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, Cabbage had graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta, and while studying there had gravitated towards the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Martin Luther King’s Christian-inspired civil rights group. Like many young men of his era and disposition, however, Cabbage had tired of the creed of non-violence and pacifist resistance, and on his return home to Memphis became a street fighter and advocate of Black Power. One of Cabbage’s contemporaries at Morehouse was the film actor Samuel L. Jackson, who describes an era fraught with disagreement. ‘Morehouse was breeding politically correct Negroes,’ he told the Guardian newspaper. ‘They were creating the next Martin Luther Kings. They didn’t say that because, really, they didn’t want you to be that active politically, and they were more proud of the fact that he was a preacher than civil rights leader. That was their trip: they was into making docile Negroes . . . And all of a sudden things kinda went haywire on them. I met guys in my freshman class who had already been to Vietnam – they had afros already. Guys that had killed people in a war zone and knew what was goin’ on, and had discipline and leadership, those guys got hold of us. And suddenly we were talking politics and finding out how the war was getting run, who was getting killed.’

  Briefly, in 1968, Jackson dropped out of Morehouse to join the Black Panthers, while Cabbage returned home to Memphis to immerse himself in community politics and street-level insurrection with the Invaders. Short of funds and unable to even afford a car, the Memphis Invaders were always on the lookout for people who would either sponsor them or support the cause with donations. They approached Stax on several occasions but were rebuffed. They tried to secure grants from the major churches but were regularly sidelined, and so, without operational funding, they tended to take risks. In February, as the high-school protest campaign was under way, the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division, under the leadership of George C. Moore, recommended that the Bureau extend its counterintelligence programme of spying on black militant groups. With greater resources at their disposal and encouraged by Washington, the FBI recruited another Vietnam veteran, a Military Police officer by the name of Marrell McCollough. His first undercover assignment was to infiltrate the Memphis Invaders. McCollough owned a prized street possession – a 1967 Mustang Fastback – and with that small, but not insignificant, asset at his disposal he was welcomed into the organisation. Within a matter of weeks he was given the grandiose title of Minister of Transport of the Black Organizing Project (Memphis Invaders). It was a catastrophic decision. McCollough, who had enrolled as a student at Memphis State University, was connected to military intelligence, and his real job was to infiltrate and destabilise the Invaders. To cover his tracks, McCollough was not even on the payroll of the FBI, the Military or the MPD; he received his salary cheques from a Memphis utility company, in a convoluted arrangement tied to his electricity bill. It was a well-crafted deception that allowed McCollough to burrow his way deep into the group, participating in drug deals, smoking dope at the Invaders’ network of inner-city apartments, and on one occasion he was conveniently arrested for disorderly conduct. All the time, he was reporting to Lieutenant Eli Arkin, a senior police intelligence officer working with the MPD, who in turn had been assigned to collaborate with the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations in the city. McCollough was to become a rogue figure in the events of 1968, and as the Memphis Invaders became more deeply entangled in a web of intrigue, his name came to be associated with the dark network of informers working surreptitiously across the city.

  It was against this backdrop of intrigue and rising youth militancy that Martin Luther King arrived in Memphis, to lead a march in support of the strike. His flight from Newark New Jersey was late, touching down in Memphis at 10.30 a.m. on 28 March. King was tetchy and hungover. The night before, he had attended a fundraising drinks do at the home of the actor Harry Belafonte and then slept over at the Manhattan home of Albert Logan and his wife Marian, who was a civil rights activist and SCLC board member. They had sat up drinking sherry after sherry into the early hours and latterly drifted into an argument about King’s big idea – a Poor People’s March on Washington, DC. The Logans were critical of the idea and saw it as a distraction from the movement’s core business: challenging discrimination. King became frustrated that his pet project was being argued down so vociferously and he slept fitfully. By the time he arrived in Memphis he was not in a good mood.

  Larry Payne had risen early in anticipation of the march. He had read about King’s arrival in flyers circulated by the Invaders at his school. His friends at Fowler Homes, the project where his mother lived, had also been talking excitedly about going to the march. Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Martin Luther King, described the scenes that unfolded in dramatic detail. ‘Pandemonium greeted King at 10:56. Young people engulfed his borrowed white Lincoln . . . the assembled march . . . was numbered anywhere between six thousand and twenty thousand, with estimates clouded by spectators teeming the sidewalks along Hernando Street. At the eye of the demonstration, King . . . recognized the first hint of abnormal tension in faces that pressed against the car’s glass . . . Police motorcycles roared ahead of a flatbed press truck loaded with cameras facing backwards, and the huge throng began to stretch out north along a block of Hernando to famous Beale Street, turning left by the park named for W.C. Handy, pioneer of the blues. Next to the statue holding a trumpet, a wreath of fresh flowers marked the tenth anniversary of Handy’s death in 1958. Above, officers in police helicopter 201 sighted a clump of thirty students with rocks and clubs trotting west along Beale Street to merge at the turn.’

  It was to become a moment of historic significance when two eras met and the spirit of ’68 won out. A supposedly peaceful march, led by black America’s most revered minister of change had been hijacked. Something strange had happened – driven by rumour more than fact. Earlier that morning, at Hamilton High School, students had refused to join assembly, to show their support for the striking sanitation workers. Unable to control the angry students, the principal called the police, and on their arrival violence erupted, with bricks and bottles being thrown. Oral historian Joan Turner Beifuss reco
rded witness statements and described a scene of utter confusion. ‘Students were trying to enter or leave the school, milling in front, standing in the street. A few desultory bricks were hefted at a laundry truck passing; the back door opened and the clothes fell out. The driver scrambled to reload the truck and get out of the way. A white woman unwarily drove her car onto the back honking her horn to clear the way. Her car was also bricked before the space opened. At 8:30 a.m. a message to headquarters from police helicopter 201 reported that students were massing at Hamilton. Then majestically along the street came a garbage convoy – the trucks and a police escort. Missiles began to fly. Police radioed for aid. Hovering overhead was the police helicopter. Police cars zoomed in and police began sealing off the school area to traffic.’ It was a cavalcade of sheer chance. First, a laundry van bearing the logo of the hated Loeb family, then garbage trucks manned by scab labour, and finally a police convoy. An officer radioed back to his control room. ‘The situation is now out of hand . . . request permission to break it up . . . request permission.’ Bricks rained down on the officers, batons were drawn, and fierce fighting broke out. In the crossfire a fourteen-year-old girl was injured and rushed to hospital. The news spread like a malicious virus, and by the time the story of Hamilton High reached the main march at Beale Street, it was believed, wrongly, that the teenager was dead, killed by a police bullet. The rumour had spread before the truth was out of bed.