America Behind the Color Line (23 page)

The fact that Dr. King’s life ended here makes Memphis—makes what happened to race relations in Memphis—even more important. I look at how Dr. King lost his life, and I guess it’s only a bit of an irony that he died coming to fight for the rights of a garbageman, a garbage collector. But he did. And I think therein lies the significance of the struggle for justice and freedom. Certainly Memphians are mindful of that.

Cynics today would say, well, not much has changed in the South; you’ve got a few black people in positions of power, but things aren’t fundamentally different. That is definitely a misconception. Things have changed dramatically in the South. I’ve had the distinction of living through the times when we could not drink at a water fountain, when we could not go to the library on a certain day, when we could not go to a movie, and when we couldn’t eat at a restaurant. So for anyone to say that the South has not changed, then they’re fooling themselves. If you go from Memphis to Birmingham to Montgomery to Atlanta, you see cities where minorities are on the move, where minorities are in leadership positions, and to say that things haven’t changed, certainly you would have to be living with blinders on.

The Memphis police force today is highly diverse. We probably have about fifty-fifty whites and blacks. I’m the chief of police. Two deputy chiefs who work under my command are African American. Precincts throughout the city are equally divided between black and white. When I came on the job, there were no women in police work. Now we have women in leadership positions in the police department. You cannot find an area within the Memphis Police Department where minorities or blacks are not represented.

We’ve come a ways in recent history, because historically in the South, the law was used to enforce discrimination against blacks. The sheriffs and the police were the ones who enforced the Jim Crow laws. These laws were made unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment way back in the 1860s, but they were still being enforced in the South past the middle of the twentieth century. The sheriff or the police could go in and they could arrest, they could take away rights, and it was sanctioned. This is just the way it was. It was the system’s way of oppressing, and that’s the reason why police officers were to be feared. You never knew what would happen if you encountered a police officer at night while you were driving down a lonely road. It always struck fear in you if you were pulled over, simply because the police were the arm of government but you couldn’t trust them. They were the foot soldiers of racism.

I remember very well when we started the Afro-American Police Association in 1973. The first words that came out of the then director’s mouth were that anyone who tries to start any type of association here is liable to be looking for another job. That was intimidation in itself. Everyone who had attempted to form something like an association of black officers prior to that time had always been fired or lost their job some way or other.

Around 1973, we filed an action with the courts concerning discrimination. Around 1978, finally the federal government agreed that there had been discrimination in the Memphis Police Department and a consent decree was entered by the city. It took them five years to admit what I could observe in five seconds. It was very frustrating because we knew that discrimination existed, but still there had to be an acknowledgment from the system saying, yes, this is happening. Once that happened, we felt that we were beginning to turn the corner.

Why we won, or what made us different—what made us succeed when so many others had failed—I would like to think had a lot to do with the ability to stay clean, to stay fair, and the help of prayers, the assistance of the priest. Somebody somewhere had to be watching over me. I know that, because there was no way that I could have done what I did without prayers, without help from something that’s out of this world. Many who had traveled that road before didn’t make it.

But it wasn’t over with the consent decree. The government was watching and saying, you’ve got to do it this way, and still there was resistance. We were fighting. And the fight is not over. It’s not over even now, and not even with me sitting where I am. You can’t say the fight is ever over. But I’ve always felt that justice will prevail, whether I’m here or not. There will be someone else to pick up where we’ve left off and carry on.

Obviously, racism doesn’t exist today in the same way that it did in 1968, but it does persist. If you look at, say, city government, it can take the form of discriminatory awarding of contracts or hiring for services. A lot of times it may be on an individual level, say in pockets within the police department. Certainly if I have an officer out on the streets now who does racist things, who may be guilty of profiling, it doesn’t reflect my philosophy; it doesn’t reflect the philosophy of the Memphis Police Department. We can’t deny that racism exists in some of our members. But I think for the most part they do a pretty good job now of controlling themselves. We have to leave personal biases at home. You can’t bring them to work. We go on record as saying that if we find we have people in our ranks who are abusing people simply because of the color of their skin or their religious beliefs or things like that, then certainly we’re going to do something about it.

When school busing was introduced, the whites began to move out of the city schools and into the suburban areas. But our neighborhoods, for the most part, are integrated, and we have record numbers of whites moving back to the downtown area, which has been revitalized. Whites are beginning to move back to the inner city and downtown in many American urban regions, and Memphis is no different; in fact, downtown Memphis is predominantly white now. Some areas in the city as a whole are predominantly black or predominantly white, but I don’t think you face what you encountered in the 1960s, when you could not move into certain areas regardless of your economic status. Now we have blacks and whites and Hispanics and others living together here.

Back in the 1960s, interracial dating was the last taboo of segregation. But if you come to Memphis now, you’ll see interracial couples, not only dating but married. You’ll see interracial families. An interracial couple walking down the street would not get the stares they would have gotten back in the 1960s. There’s hardly a neighborhood in the city of Memphis right now where you won’t see interracial couples.

I don’t subscribe to the philosophy that the black community was better off when all the black people lived together, with their own doctors and lawyers and maids and janitors. I lived through that era and personally, I don’t like to think there are places in my city or my country where I can’t go simply because of the color of my skin. Thirty years ago, there were places in the city of Memphis where you could not go. Now we’re free to move about. Some of the conditions that exist in the city right now leave a little bit to be desired, simply because there’s a violent element in our society, a lot of blacks killing blacks. We didn’t see as much of that thirty or thirty-five years ago as we see right now. But I certainly wouldn’t want to turn back the hands of the clock and return to the days of Jim Crow.

The response to diversity in the police department has been very good. There was a time when the citizens of Memphis viewed the police as an occupying force. But now we have citizens who actually call in demanding, and I mean literally demanding, that they have police in their communities in the form of what we call our community action centers in the many precincts that are spread throughout the community. We can’t keep up with the demand for police now. That is a big change. When I was growing up, the police were a nightmare. They were the enemy. They were people you were vulnerable around.

I like to say that now, instead of running away from the police, the community runs to them and actually embraces the police. They take ownership. They say, these are our police officers. Hardly a crime occurs in the city of Memphis for which we don’t get a call from a citizen wanting to help out. We have precincts where citizens meet on a regular basis, hold community meetings. They come in and they actually prepare meals for our police officers. So it’s quite different now.

The city of Memphis itself has a population of around 650,000. In the metropolitan area, the population is closer to a million. In the Memphis Police Department, we have about two thousand commissioned police officers who actually carry the badge, and then we have another thousand civilians, for a total force of around three thousand. About half of them are minority people.

We have integrated the police force by neighborhood. We don’t have all black officers in a black neighborhood, for instance. That practice changed some time ago. Police officers now are assigned to neighborhoods regardless of the color or makeup of the neighborhood. So black officers work in predominantly white neighborhoods and vice versa. Color has no effect on the assignment.

We do sensitivity training in the police force, not just for white officers but for all officers, because it’s not just a white problem. There are many officers of color who need sensitivity training to a certain extent. It’s a two-way street. Yes, you are asking whites to understand blacks. But blacks must learn to identify with different cultures within our society and to be sensitive to people who may differ from us as well.

Black officers also need to be sensitive to black people. In the wake of the many changes that have occurred in this city, a black officer may be a little harder on a black person than a white officer might be. So we don’t miss an opportunity to expose all of our officers to sensitivity training.

Our downtown precinct covers the entire downtown entertainment district. It’s really almost like a mini–police department because we’ve got a precinct commander and a number of commanding officers. It’s a fully pledged place. Some of our officers downtown ride horses, some ride motorcycles, some do bike patrol, which lets them interact with the citizens or tourists. So we have a lot of community policing going on. It’s like a community precinct.

Over the next five to ten years, I think, Memphis will become even more of a major player in the world. We’ve seen a proliferation of growth here. Businesses are relocating here; professional sports franchises are moving to town. Memphis is centrally located. This is Middle America. You can get to any point in America very quickly from Memphis and the mid-South area. So I think Memphis is poised for substantial growth. We have a good climate and great restaurants. You’ve got the Isaac Hayes and the B.B. King Blues Club and Rendezvous, Cozy Corner, and all kinds of clubs and restaurants featuring food from all over the world. And we have Beale Street.

Up till the 1960s, blacks were confined mainly to the Beale Street neighborhood. All the black businesses—the black lawyers, doctors, and other professionals—used to live and work and play on Beale Street. The blues and soul music America is famous for started here in Memphis, mainly on Beale Street.

In 1899, at a time when blacks in Memphis had no parks or cultural centers, Robert Reed Church, Sr., the South’s first black millionaire, opened up a park with an auditorium for blacks on a six-acre site here. The auditorium was later torn down, but Robert Church Park is now part of the Beale Street Historic District. Booker T. Washington spoke there, and President Teddy Roosevelt, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers and W.C. Handy and others performed there.

Beale Street is now world-famous. But when it was predominantly black, Beale Street was to Memphis as Harlem is to New York. I think Rufus Thomas once said that if you were a white man and you came to Beale Street on a Saturday night, you would never want to be white again. I guess that was his way of saying that Beale Street was a mecca for blacks. Now it’s an entertainment and music and cultural mecca for the world. The city of Memphis renamed a strip along Beale Street after Rufus Thomas, who was almost synonymous with Memphis culture and music.

I like to think that what we’ve done is capitalized on some of our more famous citizens. Rock and roll was born here in Memphis. This is the birthplace and home of Elvis Presley, who based his own style to a great extent on the black musicians he listened to as a young boy. We’ve got the new Rock ’n’ Soul Museum opening up in the Beale Street entertainment district. Sam Phillips’ Sun Studio, where Elvis cut his first records and Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and so many others recorded, is right here. The home of W.C. Handy, father of the blues, is on Beale Street. B.B. King was right here, and Stax Records.

We now have the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis as well. In 1982, the Lorraine Motel was foreclosed. People didn’t want to do business there in the years following the assassination of Dr. King. The Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Foundation wanted to preserve the motel and eventually bought the property. Now the museum sits on four acres of land, right where the Lorraine Motel once stood. The National Civil Rights Museum is probably one of the best contributions ever made to our community and the world. It not only keeps alive what it used to be like here in Memphis, but also what’s being done here and all over the world for civil and human rights. Schoolchildren visit it regularly. It says to people who come here, the terrible treatment of blacks is something that happened in America, something we wouldn’t want to see happen again. We don’t want to go back there. And we are grateful that people are more sensitive now than they’ve been, probably, at any time during our history.

Memphis has lived through catastrophes and survived to be better. We’ve survived the worst scourge of racism and become a better people. In the nineteenth century, Memphis survived another kind of plague. In 1872 and 1878, when the yellow fever epidemic hit the city, more than 5,000 people died, and more than 25,000 ran from the city trying to save their lives. Lots more were in camps used as shelters. Most of the city leaders succumbed to the fever. For a while, blacks got hired as police officers simply because no one else was able to police the city. And I think we had blacks in City Hall. But as soon as the epidemic ended, they all lost their jobs. So the history of the black police officer actually began in the 1800s rather than in the middle of the twentieth century.