One Thursday in the late 1950s, a black chauffeur drove two grand dames from Greenville, Mississippi, to a special art exhibit at the Pink Palace art gallery in Overton Park. Upon their arrival the ladies discovered, to their dismay, that Thursday was “Negro Day” at the Pink Palace. Barred from entry, they returned to their car. All was not lost. They dispatched the chauffeur to enjoy the art exhibit in their stead.8
In 1967 McRae was named superintendent of the Methodist district for Memphis. He had a mandate from his bishop to address the poverty and other disadvantaged circumstances of the city’s African American inhabitants. He took the assignment to heart. But when the sanitation workers’ strike began the next year, McRae opposed it. He viewed it as an illegal, wildcat strike against the city. State law prohibited strikes by most public employees, including garbage collectors. McRae, moreover, was not aware of any grievance that would justify a step as extreme as a strike to shut down a service as vital to public health as garbage collection. Nor did McRae trust the garbage workers’ union. Like many Memphians he was wary of organized labor.
McRae loyally sided with his good friend, the mayor. They had become acquainted through Loeb’s wife, Mary. McRae had met Mary when they were students at Memphis State University, as the University of Memphis was then called. Mary, a stunning redhead, had been a Cotton Carnival queen. It was an honor reserved for attractive young women of high social standing. Her father owned large tracts of cotton-growing land in Arkansas and headed a large cotton brokerage in Memphis.
Loeb’s marriage to Mary Gregg linked two of the city’s wealthiest families. His family owned a large business, Loeb Laundry Cleaner Company. Its logo was conspicuous in brilliantly blue letters on its storefronts and the sides of the company’s trucks that roamed city streets. Loeb may have been a homegrown Memphian, but he had attended elite schools in the East: Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Like John F. Kennedy, he had commanded a PT boat as a naval officer during World War II. On the wall of his mayoral office he proudly displayed a photo of a PT boat a quarter century after his navy days.
As reporter Sweat would remember, Loeb retained a sailor’s command of “salty language, full of goddamns and son-of-a-bitches, and he enjoyed a good, bawdy story.” But Loeb had an old-fashioned Southern manner in the company of women. Sweat would put it this way: “He had this gallant thing about women. If a lady was coming into his office, he’d put on a coat.”9
After military service Loeb joined his father and brother in managing the family laundry business. His involvement in local civic affairs, including the Memphis Civitan Club and American Red Cross, kindled an interest in politics. In the early sixties, he launched a political career, first as public works commissioner, then mayor. As mayor from 1960 to 1964 he grudgingly complied with court orders to desegregate schools and other public facilities. But there was a limit to how much racial progress he was willing to accept. Rather than desegregate the municipal swimming pools, he simply closed them down.10
His father died in the mid-sixties, and Loeb quit city government to resume his work at the laundry. Not for long. In 1967 he plunged into a hotly contested mayoral race. His principal opponent was William Ingram, the incumbent mayor and, by comparison to Loeb, a racial moderate. Loeb presented himself as a “law and order” candidate. He had scant black support. He took office on January 1, 1968, under a restructured city government, in which a city council system replaced a five-member commission. The change resulted in three African Americans being elected to the council while vesting greater power in the mayor.
Just six weeks later, the garbage workers went on strike. As the strike took hold and garbage piled up throughout the city, the mayor reacted swiftly, sternly. He denounced the strike as illegal and demanded that the strikers return to work. “As a precondition to any rearrangement of wages and working conditions, the strike must end,” he wrote in a letter to the workers that the Commercial Appeal published on February 29.
Loeb was adamant on another point. He maintained that under no circumstances would he yield on either of the strikers’ central demands: recognition of their union as the workers’ bargaining agent or introduction of a dues checkoff.
The support among whites for Loeb’s tough stance seemed virtually unanimous. “Henry would go to the Rotary Club,” McRae would later say, “and, man, they’d give him a standing ovation. And everywhere he went the people were applauding him.”11 King’s embrace of the strike did not impress the white population. On the contrary, the prevailing view among them was that King was a menace, a radical troublemaker with communist leanings, who was inciting the city’s blacks to violence.
As the mayor’s friend and a community leader by virtue of his rank in the Methodist hierarchy, McRae had a close-up view of the strike. He came to see it as a transcendent racial conflict, and his and the mayor’s views diverged. He began to question, in his words, the mayor’s “bullheaded” position.
By mid-March, he was taking issue squarely with Loeb during their lunchtime chats. McRae recalled, “He wanted to live by the rules. I think he was hiding behind them somewhat.” McRae would remember one day as particularly awkward: “I said, ‘Henry, you’re a compassionate person. This is wrong.’ And Henry said, ‘No, it’s against the [Tennessee] law to strike against the municipality.’ And I said, ‘Henry, it doesn’t matter.’”
That the mayor would invoke Tennessee labor law as his line in the sand seemed shortsighted and legalistic to McRae. It was a logic that McRae shared with King. As King would say in his speech at Mason Temple on
