Memphis: Sites and Sounds of Labor and Civil Rights History

Michael Honey

The OAH meeting will highlight movements for social justice in American history, and they are well represented in the Bluff City. You will not find all of them on signs or maps, however, for a lot of people would like to forget this history. You will have to do some historical geography to map the movements of the past.

One might start with the downtown core where we will be meeting. Here along Front Street and Riverside Drive, from the northern end at Confederate Park down south to Beale Street and beyond, you will find the life's blood of the early city. Cotton Row, where the dealers, shippers, and insurers of cotton made their fortunes, and the tugboats and steamboats on the docks, made Memphis a hub for the regional economy, from St. Louis to New Orleans. If you move out from this area to mid-town, you will find the mansions and magnolia-scented neighborhoods of the middle class. Near the University of Tennessee medical centers you will also find a monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest (at Union and Manassas), the wealthy slave trader and Confederate general. . During the Civil War, he led the massacre of black and white Union Army troops at Fort Pillow, north of Memphis on the Mississippi River. Following the war and the bloody riot of 1866, in which whites burned nearly every black church to the ground, he organized the Ku Klux Klan.

In the twentieth century, the legacy of the plantation lived on through the powerful political machine of Edward H. Crump. You will find testament to his presence in Crump Boulevard south of downtown, which takes you across the Mississippi River at I-55, as well as at Crump Stadium. The "plantation mentality" and political apathy that ruled Memphis during his era, from the 1910s to his death in 1954, are less visible parts of his legacy. You will find reminders of many of his allies in the cotton economy as well as memories of the Old South in the names of streets, such as Snowden, Forrest, and Beauregard. You can find Crump's "clean streets," beautiful flowering trees and handsome middle and upper class housing along Central Avenue.

You can also find another legacy of old Memphis if you know where to look. The old downtown is also the neighborhood of intermingling slaves, Indians, riverboat men, and poor whites confined in fever-plagued areas with names like "Pinch Gut" and "Bear Waller." If you drive north on Second, here you can imagine the poverty and yellow fever plagues that killed thousands in 1878 and the 1880s. That plague reshaped the town, as German and Irish immigrants left, replaced by people from the surrounding plantation districts. Irish immigrant Mother Mary Jones--who lost her entire family to the plague--was only one of the many people who might have helped to organize a labor movement, had they been able to stay in Memphis. Jewish immigrants did come to the old downtown, establishing many of the department stores and other businesses that helped keep it alive. These Jewish businesses like all others owned by whites were segregated during the Jim Crow era.

If you continue north of the downtown on Second Street, you will find yourself in the neighborhoods of the black unemployed and working poor. To your east from where Firestone Ave. intersects with Danny Thomas (who donated the money to create St. Jude's children's hospital), you will see the remains of the old Firestone tire factory, once the city's largest industrial facility. Here company thugs, with the blessing of the Crump machine, beat labor organizers nearly to death in the 1930s. This is also the place where the Congress of Industrial Organizations built its strongest interracial union. You will see the remains of the United Rubber Workers Local 186 union hall near Firestone and Decatur, where striking sanitation workers in 1968 held many of their meetings, and began a historic three-mile march to the downtown on February 12. Once the home of a proud blue collar middle class, North Memphis (north of Jackson and west of Watkins) became a deindustrialized basket case in the 1980s. Former unionists and community members have been trying to stabilize it ever since.

If you drive far enough north on Second, you will find yourself in the middle of what looks like a plantation in the city. Much of Memphis has been, and some of it remains, very rural. Ultimately, you come to Frayser, once dominated by the white industrial working class, and now an interracial mix of working-class, middles class, and poor people. If you search closely enough near the Mississippi, off Frayser Blvd., you might find the old International Harvester plant, now operating under another name. Here black and white workers in the United Auto Workers struggled over the terms of industrial unionism in the 1950s and 1960s. Some whites joined the John Birch Society and black workers like George Holloway found their homes and families attacked for challenging segregation on the job. Returning south on Second, if you drive across the Wolf River to Volunteer Park and Mud Island, you will think you have found the newly rich, and you have. The reality of this area, however, is quite different from a historical and social movement perspective.

Volunteer Park at the end of this drive may not jog your memory in the right direction: the people of Memphis first voted against joining the Confederacy. Union troops ultimately invaded, but the city saw little of the violence that visited other southern cities. However, if you come back across the Wolf River and locate yourself on Beale Street, you will remember that this city has always been a magnet for black migration (and white migration too) out of the plantations of the Delta. The area is now filled with restaurants and entertainment, but take the time to drive around it. If you were to continue south on Riverside Drive, there is a way (find a good map!) to end up near DeSoto Park. In this little area south of the Memphis Bridge, where the Metal Museum now stands, the old Fort Pickering neighborhood provided a meeting place and a battle ground for black dock workers and white riverboat hands. Irish longshore workers allegedly came from this area to lead the attacks against black workers and citizens during the Memphis riot of 1866. But later, blacks and poor whites joined CIO unions in shops and along the waterfront around Ft. Pickering (which was a fort once). At the base of Illinois Street is where riverboat owners and police tried to murder black longshore leader Thomas Watkins, after he provided crucial leadership in an interracial strike that shut down river traffic in 1939. Other black workers allegedly were dumped in the river as well.

If you drive back to the Beale Street area, you will come to another scene of struggle. You may see parks named after musician W.C. Handy or Robert Church, the South's first black millionaire (Boss Crump ran his son out of town in the 1930s for his civil rights activity). But don't stop there. Continue further, along Vance Avenue, and you will see the poverty that plagued black Memphis in the 1960s. You may find Clayborn Temple, where marches to support the Memphis sanitation strikers began and snaked their way downtown, where they picketed merchants and enforced a boycott of the city's newspapers for their biased coverage of the strike. Near Beale and Second is where police maced and beat marchers on March 28, forcing Martin Luther King to return to Memphis in order to maintain the national credibility of his Poor People's Campaign. He gave his last speech at nearby Mason Temple on the night of April 3. It will not be difficult for you to find the National Civil Rights Museum, the old Lorraine Motel where an assassin shot King down (He died at the nearby St. Joseph hospital, which AFSCME later tried and failed to unionize). The entire around the Museum is the historic grounds for one of the least examined struggles of the 1960s, that of the black working poor, who have inhabited the core of downtown and north and south Memphis for many years.

As you go out east, you will find much of white Memphis, and now some parts of black Memphis as well. The new Shelby County Library, a block west of old East High School, and the Mississippi Valley Collection at the University of Memphis McWhorter Library, contain treasure troves of this history. The racial geography of the city has been reconfigured many times. But you can still find reminders of the struggle of the working poor that King and the sanitation strikers tried to address in 1968, in neighborhoods like Hollywood in North Memphis, Orange Mound, and even the (now misnamed) "Whitehaven." You may want to see Elvis Presley's home, you may want to visit the Pyramid and other attractions created to make Memphis a tourist haven. And don't forget the Rockin' Soul Museum and the old studios of Sun Records and Stax Records. But don't forget that you are also visiting the scene of one of the most inspiring and saddest moments in the history of social movements in America.

Mike Honey is the Harry Bridges Chair of Labor StudiesUniversity of Washington and Professor of American history, and labor and ethnic studies, at the University of Washington, Tacoma.