The Spirit of Memphis

The text refers an emotional outpouring at a rally Dr. King held in support of the striking Memphis sanitation workers the month before his assassination on April 4^th, 1968, as the “spirit of Memphis,” meaning a demonstration of the resolve of a people to change its conditions.

What conditions? In February of 1968, the Kerner Commission, created by LBJ to try to understand why the urban riots of the 1960s happened and what could be done to prevent them, issued its report. Instead of blaming the “riffraffs in the ghettos,” the report was an indictment of white America. The Commission found that “what white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it."

This spirit of Memphis, this resolve of a people to change its conditions, is to me the great contribution of Dr. King to advancing social justice. The first week of April 1968 I drove through Memphis as a newly commissioned 22-year old Air Force 2nd lieutenant. I would love to say that I had worked for civil rights, or that I had opposed the war into which I was heading. But I didn’t. I did not see the injustice in my experience; I did not see the fallacies in this war to contain communism. But after 1968, after the oppressed continued to demonstrate their resolve to change their conditions, the world changed. More and more people, not just the previously enlightened, began to question traditional authority and see the need for change. Of course, any change has been incremental. And still too many don’t see the need for change. But as long as there is the spirit of Memphis, in the words of the immortal Sam Cooke,

It's been a long time, a long time coming

But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will.