Memphis sanitation strike met with hostility, misunderstanding from media

On a rainy afternoon a half-century ago, the accidental deaths of two African-American sanitation workers in Memphis unloosed long-suppressed racial tensions and ripped open a new chapter in the civil rights movement, one that began with a bitter labor walkout and culminated with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

But as far as much of the Memphis media was concerned, there was a bigger story to chase that soggy Feb. 1, 1968: Elvis Presley’s daughter was born.

“Newest Presley Has Audience,” beamed a section-front headline accompanied by three photos in the next day’s edition of the Memphis Press-Scimitar, an afternoon newspaper that devoted days of coverage to the birth of the singer’s daughter, Lisa Marie Presley.

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Deep inside the Feb. 2 paper, on Page 10, was a story documenting the deaths of Robert Walker, 29, and Echol Cole, 35, who had been crushed when a packer on a garbage truck malfunctioned. A grim reminder of the workers' low pay, nonexistent benefits and brutal working conditions, the fatalities galvanized some 1,300 employees to launch a strike that convulsed the city.

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The coverage of that seminal event foreshadowed how one of the biggest stories in Memphis’ history — an unfolding drama that garnered national and global attention — befell a local media establishment stuck in a different era. In contrast to the reporting that lent moral force to civil rights crusades elsewhere, the city’s media generally responded with tepid interest to the workers’ plight and unalloyed hostility to the walkout and “outsiders” like King.

The two daily newspapers — The Commercial Appeal and the Press-Scimitar, both part of the Scripps-Howard chain — became in no small way a part of the story, strongly backing the refusal of Mayor Henry Loeb to negotiate and drawing public denouncements from strike leaders and workers.

During a news conference less than two weeks into the strike, the Rev. James Lawson, chairman of the strike committee, implored “Negroes and people of good faith” to refuse to subscribe, buy or even read either newspaper until “latent racism” was purged from their editorial pages and African-Americans were treated as “people before God and before man."

Later, before hundreds of workers gathered in the Mason Temple, nationally known civil rights activist Bayard Rustin said, “I am sure your papers do not report and debate fully the truth of what is happening.”

The primary target of the strike supporters’ ire was The Commercial Appeal, the dominant morning paper with a circulation of some 270,000. In 1968 it still carried a daily cartoon named “Hambone’s Meditations,” featuring an insultingly stereotyped African-American — a “philosophical Southern darkey,” as the paper once called him — who spoke in exaggerated black dialect.

The CA had consistently editorialized against civil rights legislation and — according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation" — even provided space to pieces penned by authors citing the supposed “scientific” evidence of the inferiority of African-Americans.

The paper’s editor, Frank Ahlgren, had arrived in Memphis during the 1920s and by the time the strike broke out was widely considered one of the city’s most powerful men. He would acknowledge in a 1991 article, however, that as editor he “never had any idea of being a big champion of Negro rights,” adding that the only African-Americans he had met had been “very ignorant and uneducated people.”

Under Ahlgren, the paper’s stance as the strike began was as predictable as it was unwavering. The city had a “firm and legal foundation” for refusing to negotiate, it said, and although the strikers were predominantly black and their bosses white, the issues behind the walkout were “not racial.”

Both daily newspapers' editors ascribed cynical motives to strike leaders, accusing them of conflating a local labor situation with the larger civil rights movement to accrue power and money. Some news stories also portrayed strike leaders unfavorably, particularly T.O. Jones, president of Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, who was described in a profile as having a poor work history and sketchy personal background.

Perhaps most galling to workers and their supporters was an editorial cartoon entitled “Beyond the Bounds of Tolerance” featuring a black striker sitting amid putrefying garbage above which the words “Threat of Anarchy” were etched.

Speaking to a large gathering of strikers later that day, AFSCME President Jerry Wurf almost shook with anger as he condemned the “filthy, rotten provocative cartoon.”

In news stories, The CA and Press-Scimitar did provide straightforward and often-compelling reporting on the strike and subsequent demonstrations, including accusations of police brutality.

But as local authors and reporters would later observe, the papers provided little coverage giving readers a humanized look at the workers and explaining why they were striking.

“There was just no appetite (among editors) for the sorts of stories that should have been done,” remembers Thomas BeVier, a CA reporter at the time.

BeVier, now 81, said reporters at the CA realized that given the views of top management at the paper, writing profiles humanizing the strikers would do nothing to help their careers. “You knew intuitively … nobody was going to be very enthusiastic” about such stories, he said.

The newspaper maintained a “hands-off approach” to Lawson even though he quickly emerged as a dominant force in the strike, BeVier said.

“Things that he said kept getting cut from stories, and it bothered the hell out of me.”

Eventually, BeVier solicited help from metro editor Angus McEachran in getting a profile of Lawson published. The two did little to notify other staff members about the story, and they waited until a certain copy editor — described by BeVier as an overt racist — had gone home for the day before filing the story.

But for all the paper’s flaws, BeVier rejects the accusation that the coverage was racist. “I think that’s too simplistic,” he said.

“My take on it was they were trying to maintain the status quo under Ahlgren. ... Memphis was stuck in the past, and it had always been that way. Nobody wanted to rock the boat, and here came the sanitation workers, of all people.”

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Some black leaders, such as James L. Netters, a pastor and one of three African-American City Council members in 1968, say The CA and other press outlets were "very fair" in exposing the working conditions strikers faced. “My honest opinion is the media were very fair and they covered the important features of the strike,” recalls Netters, now 90.

But the lone black member of the CA staff, Calvin Taylor, a college student and copy clerk during the strike, said the paper reflected the views of the white establishment. “The African-American point of view was not the one that was being presented by the CA,” he said.

Taylor, who was hired as a reporter after the strike, said staff members failed to see the paper’s biases, falsely believing they could fairly and comprehensively report on the grievances of African-American workers.

 “Angus told me, ‘Calvin, you’re not black, you’re not white. You’re a reporter.’ I could appreciate that except for one thing — what they were reporting on was from a white point of view.”

McEachran, who died earlier this month, acknowledged that biases pervaded the paper’s coverage, but he said it was unintentional. “We tended to believe that because we had some rapport with the black ministers we knew what was going on in the black community. That simply wasn’t true,” he said two years ago for an article on the newspaper’s 175th birthday.

The one news outlet that did provide an African-American perspective was the Tri-State Defender, the weekly paper serving the city’s black community. It gave prominent play to workers’ struggles and reports of police brutality against African-Americans, referring to officers as “Nazi cops” and “trigger-happy cowboys.”

“Rarely a day passes that a black man fails to visit the (Defender) office bruised, bandaged and/or stitched accusing ‘Memphis' finest’ of beating him,” the paper said in one editorial.

The city’s broadcast media occasionally tried to cover the story from different angles. WHBQ, for instance, interviewed black and white residents on Downtown streets to get their views on the strike — an informal poll that reflected the racial divide in the city.

Nearly six weeks into the strike, King, who was planning a Poor People’s March in Washington, came to Memphis to throw his support behind the workers.

The city’s media greeted the rights leader with general hostility, portraying him as a troublemaker embracing the strikers’ cause to enhance his own power and prestige. When a Downtown march led by King dissolved into violence, The CA and other outlets were quick to blame him with derogatory cartoons and editorials.

“Dr. King’s pose as leader of a nonviolent movement has been shattered,” the CA said, while the Press-Scimitar saw the riot as evidence that King’s rhetoric no longer resonated with young black “hotheads” and militants.

It wasn’t just King who irritated the newspapers. The Press-Scimitar called on local black ministers to end their daily marches Downtown, saying the clergymen had “made their point, over and over” with protests that served only to “keep racial relations sore.”

If assassin James Earl Ray needed any help in finding King, the local media provided it. The April 4 editions of the CA and Press-Scimitar mentioned that the civil rights leader was staying at the Lorraine Motel, with the afternoon paper attributing King’s selection of the business to the fact it was black owned.

During his visit a week earlier, King had been escorted by police officers to the white-owned Holiday Inn-Rivermont for reasons of expedience and security after the riot broke out. He drew criticism for lodging at one of the city’s nicest hotels, including a reference in a front-page CA article to his “$29-a-night room.”

In the sobering aftermath of King's assassination, the newspapers offered rewards for information leading to the killer's arrest and called for a resolution to the strike. The CA also dropped "Hambone."

In the decades since, The Press-Scimitar closed while The CA made progress, however haltingly, in its efforts to cover a majority-black city fairly and with sensitivity. During 2017, the paper named its first African-American executive editor, Mark Russell, and hired its first minority top executive, President Mike Jung.

Echoes of the past persist, however. During the past two years the paper's editors have acknowledged missteps regarding a headline about a racially motivated shooting of police officers in Dallas and about a photo accompanying a story on a high school graduation brawl that showed a black woman who was not involved in the melee.

Reach Tom Charlier at thomas.charlier@commercialappeal.com or 901-529-2572 and on Twitter at @thomasrcharlier.