King did not know Memphis well. Over the years he had breezed into the city for one purpose or another, a speech to a Baptist convention or a brief stopover en route to a nearby state. He was always, more or less, passing through.
The SCLC waged campaigns in many southern cities but steered clear of Memphis. Everyone knew that Memphis was a NAACP town. The Memphis chapter of the NAACP championed a civil rights agenda of its own under the leadership of accomplished African Americans. Prominent among them was lawyer, minister, and later judge Benjamin Hooks and Maxine Smith, who held a master’s degree in French from Middlebury College in Vermont and who served as executive director of the NAACP in Memphis.
Unlike some other chapters of the NAACP, the one in Memphis did not turn to the SCLC for help—until 1968. As Andrew Young said years later, reflecting on the prevailing view at the SCLC toward Memphis: “They had it all together, and I said, ‘They don’t really need us.’”1
Memphis differed from southern cities like Little Rock and Birmingham in having navigated the turbulent years of racial tension during the late fifties and sixties without major strife until 1968. Yet in its racial profile it was undeniably deeply Southern. “Keep Memphis Down in Dixie” was the bumper-sticker slogan of a prominent mayoral campaign in the late fifties.2
A visitor to Memphis in 1968 need look no further for confirmation of the city’s down-in-Dixie tradition than the prominent statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate cavalry general and first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The lofty statue of Forrest sitting erect in the saddle stood in a downtown park bearing his name. A plaque memorializing Forrest noted his “heroic raid to recapture Memphis from federal troops.” What the plaque did not say was that he was one of the city’s most successful slave traders in the years before the Civil War. The commerce at “Negro Mart” on Adams Avenue, where he dealt in slaves, was highly lucrative. One of his slaves could fetch as much as $1,000, a huge sum at the time.3
Once King accepted the invitation to support the strike in Memphis, he had much to learn about the city. It seems likely that he knew little about Henry Loeb, who had been mayor only three months. The perfect source for guidance about what made Loeb tick was Methodist minister Frank McRae. But King did not know McRae and was not in touch with him.
When the strike began in mid-February, Mayor Loeb turned to McRae as his confidant. The lanky, affable McRae and the mayor were old friends. During the crisis Loeb would invite McRae to the white-marbled city hall for lunch several times a week. Loeb would send out for hamburgers. The two men would eat in the mayor’s office while two or three policemen in plain clothes stood vigil nearby. “He was so cheap he’d never buy anything but hamburgers, but I loved him,” McRae would remember.4
Loeb’s red-carpeted, wood-paneled office was spacious and handsomely appointed in a modern, manly style. The mayor sat in a high-backed leather chair at an oversize desk that seemed to magnify his bigger-than-life persona. Loeb, who stood six foot five, cut a strapping, square-jawed figure. “You knew damn well he was in the room when he was there,” Joe Sweat, who was the city hall reporter for the Commercial Appeal, would recall years later.5
Loeb thought so highly of McRae that he asked him to officiate at his wedding and swear him in as mayor. Loeb was not a Methodist. Born a Jew, he had married an Episcopalian and in 1963 converted to his wife’s faith. Loeb might have chosen an Episcopalian priest or a rabbi to marry him or swear him in. McRae presided at both ceremonies.
McRae was thirty-seven, ten years younger than the mayor, but they belonged to the same generation that came of age in the years before and during World War II. They grew up in a Memphis defined both by a high regard for courtly Southern manners and a rigid allegiance to white supremacy. When, decades later, McRae looked back at the Memphis of his youth, he spoke in fond superlatives. Memphis had been the cleanest, safest, quietest city in America, he would say.
The view of Memphis as an upright, exceedingly livable city was a general point of pride among its residents. It motto officially was the City of Good Abode.
It had not always lived up to its self-image. Before the Civil War, according to historian Joan Beifuss, it was “a brawling, muddy, Mississippi River town, jumping off place to the frontier Southwest.”6 Its mosquito-friendly swamps made the city an inviting host for yellow fever. During the 1870s, an epidemic of the mosquito-borne disease killed many thousands of residents and led to a mass exodus from the city.
The city flourished anyway. Its location as a favored port for paddle steamers plying the Mississippi advantaged its economy. It emerged, notably, as a bustling market for the trade in cotton. Its brokerages on Main Street handled not just cotton but also, as in the case of Nathan Bedford Forrest, slaves. Another leading slave trader, Wade Hampton Bolton, placed this ad in the Memphis Appeal in 1846: “I have for sale plenty of boys, men and women and some very fancy girls. I intend to have a constant supply through the season.”7
The Memphis of McRae’s youth was strictly segregated by race. He knew well the oddities and grotesqueries of Jim Crow life. There were water fountains for “whites,” separate ones for “colored.” Blacks had to sit in the back of buses even if there were no white passengers
