Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Holy Week Uprising

WYTS: Tennessee Titans. Original post here.

Well, we have a sad one: The Holy Week Uprising. Not all... or even most of these are going to be fun. We'll have fun with the next one.

On April 4th, 1968, 6:01 PM, Martin Luther King Jr., one of the most important people of the 20th century, stood on the railing of the second floor of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Somewhere across the street, holding a Remington Model 760 rifle was a thoroughly unimportant person whose actions this evening did not make him anything more than the nothing he was. Dr. King was in town for a labor strike, fighting for the black sanitation workers to win the right to unionize and be paid more than a $1 an hour. (It is almost like there is some kind of connection between labor rights and racial justice, ...nah, silly thought...) A shot rang out, and a bullet shattered King’s jaw, lodging itself into his shoulder. King knew this bullet was waiting for him. "This is what is going to happen to me too” he had told his wife in 1963, after JFK’s murder, "This is a sick society".

 

The strike in Memphis had been going on for months. On February 1st, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were two sanitation workers caught in the rain. Since Memphis was segregated, they had nowhere to hide except in the back of their truck. Somehow the compactor was turned on when the machine malfunctioned. They died horribly. A similarly grisly incident had happened in 1964, but Memphis did not care to fix anything. By February 11th, many of the sanitation workers, who were nearly all Black, stopped showing up for work. Soon enough, there were thousands of tons of trash on the streets of the city, piling up. Mayor Henry Loeb, a proud segregationist of the old school, began to hire strike breakers and scabs, causing more violence. King arrived later in March to help organize resistance. 

 

On March 28th, there was the largest single action of the strike, where 22,000 people marched through the streets of Memphis, many of them children skipping school. The march became disorganized and chaotic, some protestors began to loot stores, just what Loeb wanted. A heavy-handed police response caused the march to collapse after just a few blocks. A sixteen-year-old, Larry Payne, was blown away by a shotgun blast to his stomach by a Memphis police officer. The AME Church in the area, the Clayborn Temple, was hit by teargas as many protestors fled inside for safety. It was another horrible scene of many in the Civil Rights era.

Circling back to the 4th, King survived the ambulance ride to the hospital, but was pronounced dead an hour later. He had worked for another five years of inevitable martyrdom to save this sick society. He had famously fought for non-violent change. The segregationists in this country had made an unmistakable statement that non-violence was not going to be enough.

There actually does not seem to have been much rioting in Memphis itself this night. If there was any, it was tiny, just minor incidents. Mayor Loeb put the city on curfew and called in troops. Whatever happened there was nothing compared to that terrifying week that followed with civil unrest in over 100 cities at once. The level of anger in the country in the Sixties is hard to believe today, no matter how bad the takes on Twitter might look. Back then, it must have felt like the world was ending. The Holy Week Uprising was just a year after the "long, hot summer of 1967" which had 150 riots (watch this space). Some cities were able to avoid the worst of it, a heroic spur of the moment speech by Robert F. Kennedy in Indianapolis, settled things down. But it was very bad in a lot of places.

Washington DC, Baltimore, Chicago, and Kansas City were the towns hit hardest. During this week there were 43 reported deaths, thousands of injuries, tens of thousands of arrests. It would take the force of 58,000 armed National Guardsmen to settle things down. This during the Vietnam War, as if the Tet Offensive had come home. For many white families, this was the excuse they needed to flee the cities, and the excuse they needed for much darker political options. For Black rioters, I'm not sure how else they could have responded to King's murder. There are neighborhoods in Washington DC that did not recover for thirty years. There’s simply too many cities, too many people, too many stories to cover, and I don’t have the time or research skill to do it all justice. As this series goes on, we'll explore more of them in better detail.

Bobby Hutton, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party was assassinated by Oakland police on April 6th. This only increased the legend of the Black Panthers, who would be a major force for the rest of the decade.

Governor of Maryland, Spirow Agnew, did such a shit job handling Baltimore's riot that he became a bit of a star with segregationists. As if his neglect was bravery. Richard Nixon needed those votes, and thus, found his running mate. One more bullet for Bobby Kennedy later in 1968, plus some more chaos in Chicago made Nixon's path inevitable. ...But that's a story for another time.

President Johnson, already a lame duck, wanted to solve the underlying causes of these riots versus just beating back annoying voters. Imagine a politician wanting to do things, versus telling his own voters they're nagging too much - it's wild how badly the Democratic Party has degraded over the decades. He used the pressure of King’s murder and the riots to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The Fair Housing Act portion of this law has been one of his best legacies, creating the modern HUD public housing system. But Johnson's successors would never give the program the funding it needed, and urban decay continued. The depressing thing is that the 1960s were actually better than what was coming down the line for many Black urban areas.

However, on April 16th, Mayor Loeb gave up. The optic of fighting against labor rights that America's greatest saint had just died for was politically unfeasible. The Memphis Sanitation Workers won their union and pay increase. I don't know if the garbage trucks continued to kill people.