Memphis Voices

289 Pages·2017·1.36 MB·English

by  Gritter, Elizabeth

Memphis Voices:
Oral Histories on Race Relations,
Civil Rights, and Politics

By

Elizabeth Gritter

New Albany, Indiana: Elizabeth Gritter Publishing 2016

Copyright 2016

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Table of Contents

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………..3

Chapter 1: The Civil Rights Struggle in Memphis in the 1950s………………………………21

Chapter 2: “The Ballot as the Voice of the People”: The Volunteer Ticket Campaign
of 1959……………………………………………………………………………..67

Chapter 3: Direct-Action Efforts from 1960 to 1962………………………………………….105
Chapter 4: Formal Political Efforts from 1960 to 1963………………………………………..151

Chapter 5: Civil Rights Developments from 1962 to 1969……………………………………195

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………..245

Appendix: Brief Biographies of Interview Subjects…………………………………………..275

Selected Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….281

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Introduction

In 2015, the nation commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act,
which enabled the majority of eligible African Americans in the South to be able to vote and led
to the rise of black elected officials in the region. Recent years also have seen the marking of the
50th anniversary of both the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in public
accommodations and employment, and Freedom Summer, when black and white college
students journeyed to Mississippi to wage voting rights campaigns there. Yet, in Memphis,
Tennessee, African Americans historically faced few barriers to voting. While black southerners
elsewhere were killed and harassed for trying to exert their right to vote, black Memphians could
vote and used that right as a tool to advance civil rights. Throughout the 1900s, they held the
balance of power in elections, ran black candidates for political office, and engaged in voter
registration campaigns. Black Memphians in 1964 elected the first black state legislator in
Tennessee since the late nineteenth century. Even before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the
New York Times reported that Memphis had “made more progress toward desegregation with
less strife than any other major city in the Deep South.”1 So what accounts for the formal
political mobilization of Memphians before the Voting Rights Act of 1965? How did they
become a powerful political force? What accounts for the New York Times’ comment that
Memphis had made so much progress with so little strife? What did civil rights activists think of
this assessment?
Although archival documents, newspaper articles, and other secondary and primary
sources shed light on these questions, oral history provides crucial and unique information.

1 John Herbers, “Integration Gains in Memphis; Biracial Leadership Takes Hold,” New York Times, 5 April 1964,
Schomburg Clipping Files, University of the District of Columbia, Washington D.C.
3
Much has been written on the black freedom struggle in Memphis, but aside from Michael
Honey’s Black Workers Remember, which examines the intersection of civil rights and the labor
movement, no oral history collection exists on the civil rights movement in Memphis.2 This
book not only will help remedy this gap but also will focus on formal politics there and the
intersection of this prong of the freedom movement with direct action, legal, and economic
equity campaigns. The two major civil rights organizations in the 1960s in Memphis were the
Memphis NAACP branch, which became the largest branch in the South in 1961, was
consistently recognized nationally for its activism, and powered the local civil rights movement
that encompassed people of all ages and backgrounds, and the Shelby County Democratic Club,
the black Democratic club in Memphis that mobilized black voters to hold the balance of power
in elections and vote successfully for black candidates; these organizations worked together with
overlapping leadership and membership. Because most of the records are lost for the
Democratic club as well as some records of the Memphis NAACP branch, oral history becomes
all the more important for telling the story of civil rights in Memphis. These organizations were
so strong that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of Racial Equality, and
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee made few inroads into Memphis. Both
organizations also assisted with the struggles for voting rights in the nearby and rural Fayette and
Haywood Counties. Black Memphians had a locally driven struggle in which they relied on their
own activism and organizations although they paid attention to national civil rights
developments.

2 Michael K. Honey, Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom
Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

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By incorporating the voices of more than twenty civil rights activists (both leaders and
grassroots workers), politicians, and others involved, this book, which focuses on the years from
1954 to 1969, includes not only valuable information on the Memphis NAACP branch and the
Shelby County Democratic Club but also on strategies of and resistance faced by civil rights
activists. Voices of black and white Memphians paint a picture of the racial climate of the time
and the impact of civil rights activists then and later. Memphis Voices not only provides crucial
behind-the-scenes information but also includes stories and perceptions of women and grassroots
workers, whose work often was neglected in newspaper accounts of the day and often in
subsequent historical scholarship.3 Certainly, firsthand accounts of participants discuss the inner
workings of the local movement, show how it connects with national and state developments,
and highlight largely unsung heroes of the civil rights movement, which was one of the most
important and transformative developments in American history.
Understanding civil rights movement and political developments in Memphis is crucial to
the development of an in-depth, nuanced portrait of the black freedom struggle and, more
broadly, southern politics. After all, the overall civil right movement was a movement of
thousands of local movements. By discussing the prevalence of the black vote in Memphis in
the 1950s and 1960s, the book disrupts the conventional narrative of the civil rights movement
that focuses on voter discrimination before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. To be sure, numerous
scholars have looked at voter mobilization, including voter registration campaigns, in the years
before 1965, but less noticed among scholars than direct action, labor, and legal prongs of the

3 The work of historians Michael Honey and Laurie B. Green, in particular, provide an invaluable spotlight on the
activism of working-class people. Yet while Honey focuses on labor and Green does not focus on formal politics
and the Memphis NAACP branch, this book builds on their and other work as well as provides new information on
the black freedom struggle in Memphis through highlighting the stories of Memphians that little attention has been
paid to by scholars. Laurie B. Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights:
Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993).
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movement are the ways in which African Americans in the South who could vote before 1965
used their voting power as a tool to advance civil rights. This book explores how formal politics
was part of the civil rights struggle in Memphis and how African Americans there contributed to
making the Democratic Party more progressive, a development that occurred across the South.
The book also looks at the gains and limits of the black freedom struggle in Memphis by
including assessments of the struggle by oral history subjects, all of whom were interviewed in
the 2000s.
Historical participants provide behind-the-scenes details on strategies and conflicts;
valuable perspectives on change over time; and other information that might or would be
forgotten or not emphasized enough if their stories were not captured. These goals were all part
of the author’s strategy for conducting oral histories. To be sure, memories can be flawed and
stories can be jaded, so this oral history collection relies on other primary and secondary sources
in order to assess their words and tell the story of Memphis. Yet, this collection contends that it
also is invaluable to learn about history from those who lived it.
Furthermore, voices of Memphians breathe life and provide enhanced understanding of
existing documents and other information in the historical record. Oral histories reveal the
feelings and emotions of interview subjects as well as how civil rights developments had a
personal impact on people. They get at the motivations of historical actors as well as how
previous generations influenced them. They shed light on what can be a confusing newspaper
articles from the time as well as spotlight covert resistance that is not so discernable. Oral
histories provide us with perspectives of what civil rights activists saw as important and may
lead future scholars to pursue angles that they otherwise might not have.4 While this author has

4 For instance, Memphis civil rights activists stressed how the leadership and membership of the black Democratic
club and NAACP branch overlapped. After learning this information, this author’s research led her to see that
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extensively utilized oral histories, employing minor edits for the sake of clarity and flow,
readers, however, may want to consult the actual recordings as the written word cannot convey
the voice, tone, emotion, and laughter of these conversations. To say a bit more about the
transcription methodology, certainly the spoken word does not have the finesse that the written
word does. Yet, it is possible to add some clarity and flow by eliminating “ums,” “you knows,”
and the like as well as to combine some excerpts of oral histories in order to make stories and
insights more complete in meaning. This collection has done just that in conveying the oral
histories to the readers.
Scholarship on both the civil rights movement in Memphis and formal politics there
continues to evolve.5 On the one hand, histories have been top down, focused on formal political
and civil rights leaders and institutions.6 On the other hand, histories have focused on grassroots
and working-class activists and construed politics more broadly to encompass not only formal
political institutions but also direct action, legal action, labor activism, and so forth.7 In addition,

overlapping leadership and membership of black political clubs and NAACP branches existed elsewhere in the
South too.
5 For historiographical work more generally on the civil rights movement, see: John A. Salmond, “’The Long and
the Short of It’: Some Reflections on the Recent Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement,” Australasian
Journal of American Studies 32, no. 1 (2013); Danielle L. McGuire and John Dittmer, eds., Freedom Rights: New
Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 2011); Emilye Crosby, ed., Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local
Struggles, a National Movement (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2011); “Bibliographical Essay” in Steven F.
Lawson, Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America since 1941, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw
Hill, 2009), 347-79; “Bibliographical Essay” in Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 25th anniv. ed.
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 245-78; Steven F. Lawson, “Civil Rights and Black Liberation,” in A
Companion to American Women's History, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002), 397-413; Kevin
Gaines, “The Historiography of the Struggle for Black Equality since 1945,” in A Companion to Post-1945 America,
ed. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2002); Charles Eagles,
“Toward New Histories of the Civil Rights Era,” Journal of Southern History 66, no. 4 (2000), 815-48; Steven F.
Lawson, “Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement,” American Historical
Review 96, no. 2 (1991): 456-471.
6 These works include David M. Tucker, Memphis since Crump: Bossism, Blacks, and Civic Reformers, 1948-1968
(Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1980); G. Wayne Dowdy, Crusades for Freedom: Memphis and the Political
Transformation of the American South (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2010); Marcus D. Pohlmann and
Michael P. Kirby, Racial Politics at the Crossroads: Memphis Elects Dr. W. W. Herenton (Knoxville: Univ. of
Tennessee Press, 1996).
7 Two prominent works in this vein are Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality; Honey, Southern Labor.
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works on Memphis have focused on specific slices of the movement, such as the role of white
women in the civil rights struggle and the kneel-in movement at a local church.8 The sanitation
strike and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s murder in Memphis remain the city’s most remembered
and written about point in civil rights movement history as the amount of scholarship reflects.9
Memphis Voices focuses both on formal and grassroots leaders in order to better make
sense of political and civil rights developments from 1954 to 1969 years, which remain under-
explored in scholarship. No work, for instance, focuses on the Shelby County Democratic Club
or Memphis NAACP branch. To be sure, Laurie B. Green in Battling the Plantation Mentality
explores this time period but she particularly examines the roles of popular culture, working-
class black women, and students in the civil rights struggle and does not focus on the NAACP
branch or formal black politics. Michael Honey’s work on civil rights during these years
emphasizes the connection of civil rights with the labor movement and 1968 sanitation strike.10
To be sure, Memphis Voices builds on and extends the aforementioned work on Memphis. It
uniquely focuses on the role of the Memphis branch of the NAACP, legal efforts in the 1950s,
direct-action protests in the 1960s, and local politics in the 1950s and 1960s. Thus, Memphis
Voices gives a new and more nuanced understanding of the civil rights movement in Memphis
by including voices not before heard in scholarship by looking at key civil rights and political
participants, both men and women, black and white; putting a spotlight on formal black politics

8 These works include Stephen R. Haynes, The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-Ins and the Campaign
for Southern Church Desegregation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Kimberly K. Little, You Must Be from
the North: Southern White Women in the Memphis Civil Rights Movement (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi,
2009).
9 Works include Joan Beifuss, At the River I Stand: Memphis, the 1968 Strike, and Martin Luther King (Brooklyn:
Carlson Publishing, 1989); Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: the Memphis Strike, Martin Luther
King's Last Campaign (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007); Steve Estes, I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the
Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2005).
10 Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality; Honey, Southern Labor; Honey, Going Down Jericho Road; Honey,
Black Workers Remember.
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during this time; and revealing how the various strategies for civil rights worked together.
Although Memphis was ahead of much of the South in regard to civil rights and black political
progress, today it is impoverished and crime ridden to a greater extent than many cities, and it
became one of the last major cities to have a black mayor. By including the long-term
assessments of the oral history subjects on race relations, this collection also sheds light as to
why developments took place as they did—why Memphis was ahead, why Memphis fell behind,
and yet what long-term gains were achieved by black political power and civil rights
developments.
Although civil rights scholarship is a voluminous field that continues to grow, so
voluminous, in fact, that keeping up with it would be a full-time job, there are not nearly as many
oral history collections focused on the black freedom struggle as one might expect although
thousands of transcripts exist in archives all over the country. None, to this author’s knowledge,
focuses on formal black political mobilization before 1960, which is not surprising given
Memphis was unique in regard to its large number of black voters. It is not commonly
recognized, for instance, that 25 percent of eligible African Americans in the South could vote
by 1956 and black formal political organizations and clubs existed in many southern cities and
states.11

11 The statistic is from Donald R. Matthews and James W. Prothro, Negroes and the New Southern Politics (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), 18. For a database containing information about oral histories on civil
rights, see the Civil Rights History Project at www.loc.gov/folklife/civilrights. Oral history books on the Jim Crow
South and civil rights movement include William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad, eds.,
Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South (New York: The New Press,
2001); Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the
1950s through the 1980s (New York: Bantam Books, 1991); Kim Lacy Rogers, Life and Death in the Delta: African
American Narratives of Violence, Resilience, and Social Change (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1996); Anne
Valk and Leslie Brown, Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).
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This author’s own book, River of Hope: Black Politics and the Memphis Freedom
Movement, 1865-1954, examines the role of formal politics in the long civil rights movement and
makes the argument that a small but significant number of African Americans engaged in the
right to vote and other formal political activities even though most black southerners were
disenfranchised. Memphis has a strong tradition of black political mobilization given African
Americans could vote there because state political conditions did not hinder their political
participation as much as other places in the South, the role of skilled black leadership such as
Robert R. Church, Jr., and George W. Lee, the two-party political system that existed in
Tennessee, and the fact that black votes were needed for the maintenance of the longstanding
Edward H. Crump machine. Crump, who was white, dominated Memphis politics from 1909 to
1954. However, River of Hope only utilizes this author’s oral histories in a limited way given
just its conclusion covers the 1954 to 1969 time period. Memphis Voices continues this author’s
scholarly focus on the formal political aspect of the civil rights movement by spotlighting how
African Americans in Memphis were able to engage in formal political activity in the 1954 to
1964 time period even though most eligible black southerners could not vote until the passage of
the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Because so many African Americans were disenfranchised,
scholars have neglected those who could politically mobilize, particularly for the period before
1960. Memphis was on the cutting edge of black political activism in the South, and this
political action intersected with legal and direct action aspects of the black freedom struggle.12
More generally, although scholars have written on formal black political mobilization
before 1960, it has not been a focus of civil rights scholarship as direct action, legal action, and

12 Elizabeth Gritter, River of Hope: Black Politics and the Memphis Freedom Movement, 1865-1954 (Lexington:
Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2014).
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