Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  It is interesting to contrast him with another preacher’s son—James Baldwin. Baldwin became a boy preacher himself as a way of getting out into the secular world. King became a student as a way of getting into a larger world of religion, where the term “preacher” would not be a reproach. He needed a weightiness in his work which only that “Doctor” could give him. He needed it for personal reasons—yes, he had all along aspired to be “De Lawd”—and in order to make Southern religion relevant. That is why King was at the center of it all: he was after dignity, which is the whole point of the Negro rebellion. His talent, his abilities as a “quick study,” his versatility, his years studying philosophy and theology (for which he had no real natural bent) were means of achieving power. His books and degrees were all tools, all weapons. He had to put that “Doctor” before his name in order to win a “Mister” for every Southern Negro. They understood that. They rejoiced in his dignities as theirs. The Nobel Prize didn’t matter except as it helped them. As T. O. Jones put it, “There can never be another leader we’ll have the feeling for that we had for him.”

  Our three buses had a long ride ahead of them—ten hours, an all-night run, through parts of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. They were not luxury buses, with plenty of room; the Greyhound company had run out of vehicles and leased these from a local firm. One could not even stretch one’s legs in the aisle; the folding chairs prevented that. Ten hours there. Ten hours back.

  Minutes after our departure, the man behind me said, “We’re in Mississippi now.” “Oh no!” his wife groaned. It is well to be reminded that our citizens are afraid to enter certain states. The man most frightened was T. O. Jones. He knows what risks an “uppity” Negro takes in the South. He does not give out his address or phone number. The phone is changed automatically every six months to avoid harassment. He has lived in a hotel room ever since the beginning of his union’s strike, so his wife and two girls will not be endangered by his presence in the house. “This is risky country,” he told me. “And it gets more dangerous as you go down the road. That Mississippi!” We were going down the road.

  The lead bus had no toilet, and the chairs in the aisle effectively barricaded it from anyone’s use in the other buses. The technique for “rest stops” was for all three buses to pull off into a darkened parking lot; the chairs were folded; then people lined up at the two toilets (one bus for men, one for women). At our first stop, some men began to wander off into the trees, but T. O., sweating in the cool night, churning all around the buses to keep his flock together, warned them back. “Better not leave the bus.” I asked him if he expected trouble. “Well, we’re in Mississippi, and folk tend to get flustered at—” He let it hang. He meant at the sight of a hundred and forty Negroes pouring out of buses in the middle of the night. “You didn’t see that man over there, did you—in the house by the gas station? There was a man at the door.” Some had tried to go near the dark station, to get Cokes from an outdoor vending machine. T. O. pulled them back to the buses. He carries his responsibility very self-consciously.

  Back in the bus, there was a spasm of talk and wakefulness after our stop. The deep rumbling voice from the rear got chuckles and approval as he mused on the chances of a strike settlement. “We got Henry Loeb on the run now.” (“Yeah!” “Sure do!”) “He don’t know what hit him.” Fear is not surprising in the South. This new confidence is the surprising thing. I had talked to a watery little man, back in the church, who seemed to swim in his loose secondhand clothes—a part-time preacher who had been collecting Memphis’ garbage for many years. What did he think of the Mayor? “Mr. Loeb doesn’t seem to do much thinking. He just doesn’t understand. Maybe he can’t. The poor man is just, y’know—kinda—sick.” It is King’s word for our society, a word one hears everywhere among the garbage men; a word of great power in the Negro community—perhaps the key word of our decade. It is no longer a question of courage or fear, men tell each other; of facing superior white power or brains or resources. It is just a matter of understanding, of pity. One must be patient with the sick.

  Henry Loeb does not look sick. He is vigorous, athletic, bushy-browed, handsome in the scowling-cowboy mold of William S. Hart and Randolph Scott. And he has a cowboy way of framing everything as part of his personal code: “I don’t make deals. . . . I don’t believe in reprisals. . . . I like to conduct business in the open.” There is an implicit contrast, in that repeatedly emphasized pronoun, with all the other shifty characters in this here saloon. He even has a cowboy’s fondness for his mount”—the P.T. boat he rode during the war, a loving if unskilled portrait of which hangs behind his desk. (His office biography makes the inevitable reference to John F. Kennedy.)

  Loeb is an odd mixture of the local and the cosmopolitan. He comes from a family of Memphis millionaires; he married the Cotton Carnival Queen. Yet as a Jew he could not belong to the Memphis Country Club (he has become an Episcopalian since his election as Mayor); and he went East for his education. A newsman who knows him made a bet with me: “When he hears you are from a national magazine he will not let five minutes go by without a reference to Andover or Brown.” When I went into his office, he asked for my credentials before talking to me (he would later boast that he talks to anyone who wants to come see him). Then he asked where I live. Baltimore. “Oh, do you know so-and-so?” No. Why? “He was in my class at Andover, and came from Baltimore.” That newsman could clean up if he made his bets for money.

  Loeb did not mention Brown. But he did not need to. As I waited for him in his office, his secretary took the Dictaphone plug out of her ear and began flipping through her dictionary, and confided to me, as she did so, “The Mayor was an English major at Brown University, and he uses words so big I can’t even find them.” Later, his executive assistant found occasion to let me know that his boss was “an English major at Brown University.”

  But the Mayor also plays the role of local boy protecting his citizens from carpetbaggers out of the North. He has the disconcerting habit of leaving his telephone amplifier on, so that visitors can hear both ends of a conversation; and when a newspaperman with a pronounced Eastern accent called him for some information, he amused local journalists, who happened to be in his office, by mimicking the foreigner in his responses. When a group of white suburban wives went to his office to protest his treatment of the garbage strikers, he listened to them, then slyly asked the five who had done most of the talking where they were from; and his ear had not betrayed him—not one was a native “Memphian.” He has a good ear for classes, accent, background. He wanted to know where I had gone to college. The South is very big on “society.”

  But Loeb has no ear at all for one accent—the thick, slow drawl of men like T. O. Jones. He knows they haven’t been to college. I asked him whether he thought he could restore good relations with the Negro community after the sanitation workers settlement. “There is good understanding now. I have Negroes come to me to firm up communications—I won’t say to reestablish them, because they had not lapsed.” I told him I attended a mass rally at Mason Temple, where more than five thousand Negroes cheered as preacher after preacher attacked him. “Well, you just heard from a segment of the community whose personal interests were involved. Why, I have open house every Thursday, and just yesterday I had many Negroes come in to see me about different things.” Imagine! And Massah even talked to them! And they came right in the front door, too! It is the conviction of all Henry Loebs that the great secret of the South, carefully hidden but bound to surface in the long run, is the Negro’s profound devotion to Henry Loeb. After all, look at everything he has done for them. “I took the responsibility of spending fifteen thousand dollars of city money—multiplied many times over by federal food stamps—to feed the strikers.” Noblesse oblige.

  The odd thing is that white Memphis really does think that—as citizen after citizen tells you—“race relations are good.” Its spokesman cannot stop saying, “How much we have done for the Negro” (the So
uthern bigot is nothing but the Northern liberal caricatured—we have all done so much for the Negro). A journalist on the Press-Scimitar, the supposedly “liberal” paper in town, says, “We have been giving Negroes the courtesy title” (that is, calling Mr. and Mrs. Jones Mr. and Mrs. Jones) “ever since the Korean War.” (It embarrassed even the South to call the parents of a boy killed in action John and Jane Jones.) But the executive secretary of the local N.A.A.C.P. was considered a troublemaker when, arrested in a demonstration supporting the strikers, she held up the booking process time after time by refusing to answer the officer’s call for “Maxine” instead of Mrs. Smith. (“Why, isn’t your name Maxine?” one honestly befuddled cop asked her.)

  Mrs. Smith is one of the many Negroes who protested the morning paper’s use of the “Hambone” cartoon. But she ran up against the typical, infuriating response: “Hambone” was actually the white man’s way of saying how much he loves the Negro. It was begun in 1916 by J. P. Alley, who—this is meant to settle the question once for all—won a Pulitzer Prize for attacking the Klan. It was kept up by the Alley family (one of whom is married to the morning paper’s editor), and Memphis felt it would lose a precious “tradition” if their favorite darkie disappeared from their favorite newspaper—as, at last, a month after King’s death, he did; with this final salute from the paper: “Hambone’s nobility conferred a nobility upon all who knew him.”

  Nowhere is the South’s sad talk of “tradition” more pitiful than in Memphis. The city was founded as part of a land deal that brought Andrew Jackson a fortune for getting Indians to give up their claims to the site. The city’s great Civil War hero—to whom Forrest Park is dedicated—could not belong to the antebellum equivalent of the Memphis Country Club because he was not a “gentleman”—that is, he was not a slave owner but a slave trader. After the war, however, he took command of the Ku Klux Klan, which made him “society.” The Memphis Klan no doubt boasted of all the things it did for the Negro, since it was more selective and restrained than the Irish police force, which slaughtered forty-six Negroes in as many hours during 1866. Later in the century, yellow fever drove the cotton traders out of town; and Irish riffraff took over; the municipality went broke, surrendered its charter, and ceased to exist as a city for a dozen years. Then, just as Memphis regained its right of self-government, a small-town boy from Mississippi, Ed Crump, came up the pike and founded the longest-lasting city “machine” of this century. The main social event for the town’s “aristocracy”—the Cotton Carnival—goes back only as far as 1931, when it was begun as a gesture of defiance to the Depression: the city is built on a bluff, and run on the same principle.

  When Dr. King’s planned second march took place, four days after his death, men built the speaker’s platform inconveniently high up, so Mrs. King would be standing before the city emblem, above the doors of City Hall, when she spoke. It was meant, of course, as a rebuke to the city. But her standing there, with that background, is henceforth the only tradition Memphis has worth saving.

  Yet the city keeps telling itself that “relations are good.” If that is so, why was Henry Loeb guarded by special detectives during and after the strike? (One sat in during my session with him; they stash their shotguns under his desk.) Why did some white ministers who supported the strike lose their jobs? Why are black preachers called Communists in anonymous circulars? But the daily papers will continue to blink innocently and boast on the editorial page: “Negro football and basketball players figure prominently in all-star high-school teams selected by our Sports Department.” What more do they want?

  When dawn came, our buses had reached Georgia, the red clay, the sparse vegetation. By the time we entered Atlanta, it was hot; the funeral service had already begun at Ebenezer Church. The bus emptied its cramped, sleepy load of passengers onto a sidewalk opposite the courthouse (Lester Maddox is hiding in there behind his bodyguard, conducting the affairs of office on a desk propped up, symbolically, with shotguns). The garbage men who brought their good clothes have no opportunity to change. The women are especially disappointed; the trip has left everyone rumpled. Men begin to wander off. T. O. does not know what to do. He ends up staying where the bus stopped, to keep track of his flock. Some men get the union’s wreath over to the church. Others walk to Morehouse College. But for most, the long ride simply puts them in the crowd that watches, at the Capitol, while celebrities march by.

  It was a long ride for this; and the ride back will seem longer. The buses leave Atlanta at eight-thirty on the night of King’s burial, and do not reach Memphis until six the next morning. But no one regretted the arduous trip. T. O. told me he had to go: “We were very concerned about Dr. King’s coming to help us. I talked with the men, and we knew he would be in danger in Memphis. It was such a saddening thing. He was in Memphis for only one reason—the Public Works Department’s work stoppage. This is something I lay down with, something I wake up with. I know it will never wear away.”

  A week after the funeral, Mayor Loeb finally caved in to massive pressures from the White House. The strike was settled, victoriously. At the announcement, T. O. blubbered without shame before the cameras. It was the culmination of long years—almost ten of them—he had poured into an apparently hopeless task, beginning back in 1959 when he was fired by the city for trying to organize the Public Works Department. After the victory I went with him to an N.A.A.C.P. meeting where he was introduced, to wild applause, by Jesse Turner, head of the local chapter: “Our city fathers tell us the union has been foisted on us by moneygrubbing outsiders. Well, here’s the outsider who did it all, Carpetbagger Jones.” The applause almost brought him to tears again: “I was born in Memphis, and went to school here. I haven’t been out of the state more than three days in the last ten years. Is that what they mean by an outsider?” A man got up in the audience and said, “When my wife saw you on television, she said ‘I feel sorry for that fat little man crying in public.’ But I told her, ‘Don’t feel sorry for him. I’ve seen him for years trying to get something going here, and getting nowhere. He just won.’ ”

  When the strike was still on, Henry Loeb, if asked anything about it, liked to whip out his wallet and produce the first telegram he got from the union’s national office, listing nine demands. He would tick off what he could and couldn’t do under each heading, giving them all equal weight, trying to bury in technicalities the two real issues—union recognition and dues checkoff. When I went to see him after the settlement, he brought out the tired old telegram, now spider-webbed with his arguments and distinctions. Then he searched the grievance-process agreement for one clause that says the final court of appeal is the Mayor (still built on a bluff). He assured me that, no matter how things look, he does not make deals. They really settled on his terms. But isn’t there a dues checkoff? No. The city does not subtract union dues before pay reaches the men; their credit union does (a device the union had suggested from the outset). What about recognition of the union; wasn’t that guaranteed? No, it was not. There is no contract, only a memorandum signed by the City Council. Well, is that not a binding agreement—i.e., a contract? “No, it is a memorandum” (see how useful it is to be an English major?)—“but we have a way of honoring our commitments.” The code. Well, then, didn’t the union get a larger raise than the Mayor said it would? Not from the city. Until July 1, when all city employees were scheduled for a raise, the extra demands of the union will be met by a contribution of local businessmen. Noblesse oblige—see what we have done for our Negroes. Will the Mayor handle promised union agitation by the hospital and school employees in a new way, after the experience of the garbage strike? “No. Nothing has changed.”

  Wrong again, Henry. Everything has changed. The union is here to stay, it will spread: Jesse Epps and P. J. Ciampa and T. O. Jones will see to that. The S.C.L.C. is here to stay: Jim Bevel is in charge of Project Memphis. The city is his case now, and he is on it. A coalition of local preachers that backed the strikers has made itself a per
manent organization, Community on the Move for Equality; preachers like James Lawson, better educated than some Brown graduates, are convinced that the God of Justice is not dead, not even in Memphis. Most important, Memphis is now the place where Dr. King delivered one of his great speeches—those speeches that will outlive his labored essays.

  The excerpt most often published from that last speech told how King had been to the mountaintop. But those who were there at the Mason Temple to hear him, the night before he died, remember another line most vividly.

  He almost did not come to that meeting. He was tired; the weather was bad, he hoped not many would show up (his first march had been delayed by late spring snows in Tennessee); he sent Ralph Abernathy in his stead. But the same remarkable people who rode twenty hours in a bus to stand on the curb at his funeral came through storm to hear him speak on April 4. Abernathy called the Lorraine and told King he could not disappoint such a crowd. King agreed. He was on his way.

  Abernathy filled in the time till he arrived with a long introduction on King’s life and career. He spoke for half an hour—and set the mood for King’s own reflection on the dangers he had faced. It was a long speech—almost an hour—and his followers had never heard him dwell so long on the previous assassination attempt, when a woman stabbed him near the heart. The papers quoted a doctor as saying that King would have died if he had sneezed. “If I had sneezed,” he said, he would not have been in Birmingham for the marches. “If I had sneezed—” (“Tell it!” He was calling the roll now, talking “and a half,” tolling the old cadences.) He could never, had he sneezed, have gone to Selma; to Washington for the great March of 1963; to Oslo. Or to Memphis.