As the tensions in Memphis escalated, McRae became all the more alarmed. He tried to persuade Loeb that the situation was urgent. He would remember saying, “Henry, you’re sitting on a powder keg. Please realize this.”13 But the mayor refused to yield to what he perceived as lawless intimidation.
Whites siding with Loeb saw King’s speaking and marching in support of the strike as part of the lawless intimidation that might lead to violence. King’s critics had a point when they accused him of deliberately provoking a violent reaction from Southern segregationists in elected office. That strategy had served him well in Birmingham. That city’s public safety commissioner, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, had cracked down brutally against protesters in the name of maintaining public order. Police sicced snarling dogs on youths, and firemen blasted them with powerful hoses. The sheer horror displayed on TV screens had galvanized public support for the civil rights cause. (Afterward, in a White House meeting with King, President Kennedy quipped: “I don’t think you should all be totally harsh on Bull Connor. After all, in his way, he has done a good deal for civil-rights legislation this year.”)14
But Henry Loeb was no racist caricature, no Bull Connor. He behaved respectfully, graciously toward blacks and whites. As Sweat would say years later, “Every Thursday he had an open house, and black kids would come looking for a job. He would open the newspaper and pore over the classifieds with them.”15 When a firebombing left a black family homeless, the mayor offered an apartment to them rent-free.16
Fred Davis, an African American city councilor, would say about the mayor: “He was in many ways a racist, like other white folk at the time. But in a paternalistic sort of way, Loeb had a real concern for the workers. He considered them ‘his men.’ And he felt like the union was selling the men out for the dues checkoff.”17
As Loeb saw it, even his refusal to recognize the garbage workers’ union was protecting them from harm. He regarded the national union officials who were in town demanding the city’s recognition of Local 1733 and a dues checkoff as paving the way to exploit the workers, and he would not allow it.
Loeb came to his anti-union bias naturally. His father broke a union that sought to organize workers at the Loeb laundry. Sweat would explain: “He grew up in a home where his father told him, ‘If you can just keep the trucks rolling, you can break the back of a strike.’”18 The Loebs’ anti-union attitude was widely held in Memphis. According to historian Michael Honey, union organizers had to contend with racial division, court injunctions, and police violence in the city. Such impediments were “standard fare to break unions in Memphis.”19
The mayor resolved to break the garbage workers’ strike. King’s return to Memphis on April 3 and the march he was planning for Monday, April 8, promised to inject new energy into the strike. Loeb was pursuing a counterforce: a federal injunction to stop King from marching.
A similar injunction had stymied King’s campaigns in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, and Selma, Alabama, in 1965. In those cases King obeyed federal court orders that stopped him from leading marches. (In Selma he had turned marchers back halfway across the Edmund Pettus Bridge rather than proceed to Montgomery, as originally intended. Federal judge Frank Johnson ruled that King did not violate his injunction.)
If Loeb’s hard line was breaking the strike, as seemed more likely each day, why should he settle on the union’s terms? In the November mayoral election he had received only 2 percent of the black vote.20 If he surrendered to the strikers’ demands, he would offend the voters who had elected him. He would be yielding to coercion from the union, the black community, and Martin Luther King. In the view of many of his white constituents it would be a political betrayal.
The mail flooding into city hall was running one hundred to one in favor of his stand against the strike.21 The city’s two daily papers, the Commercial Appeal and Memphis Press-Scimitar, were stoutly behind him. “Memphis garbage strikers have turned an illegal walkout into anarchy and Mayor Henry Loeb is exactly right when he says, ‘we can’t submit to this sort of thing!’” the Commercial Appeal editorialized on February 23.
Not everything was going the mayor’s way. Strike supporters were soon boycotting downtown stores. Sales were down, and merchants were pressuring Loeb to settle the strike. A few of Loeb’s friends, especially Frank McRae, were whispering to him about the risk that racial tensions in the city could boil over into widespread civil unrest.
Chapter 7
Lorraine Check-In
Now that I want you to come back to Memphis to help me, everyone is too busy.
—MLK, scolding his staff at a meeting in Atlanta, March 30, 1968
IT’S A TWENTY-MINUTE DRIVE from the airport to the Lorraine Motel, where King was staying in Memphis. Arriving close behind the Buick that delivered King to the Lorraine was the police contingent: Inspector Smith’s four-man security detail and the surveillance team of Redditt and Richmond. On Smith’s orders three other officers—Inspector J. S. Gagliano and Lieutenants Jack Hamby and Joe Tucker—arrived at the Lorraine in another patrol car. They were at the motel “to assist in securing the area,” as a police report would note.1
The Lorraine was a rare, if modest, example of urban renewal in a distressed area on the cusp of downtown Memphis. The motel, located at 450 Mulberry Street, looked spiffy next to the surrounding bars, pawnshops, and seedy warehouses located in the underbelly of Beale Street a half dozen blocks away.
The Lorraine had been a sixteen-room hotel that had fallen into disrepair until 1955, when Walter and Lorene Bailey bought it. In earlier years Walter had been a Pullman porter. After an attempt to run a turkey farm hit a dead end, the couple
