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On March 28, 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. directed a march of thousands of African-American protesters down Beale Street, one of the major commercial thoroughfares in Memphis, Tennessee. King's plane had landed late that morning, and the crowd was already on the verge of conflict with the police when he and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) took their places at the head of the march. The marchers were demonstrating their support for 1300 striking sanitation workers, many of whom wore placards that proclaimed, "I Am a Man." As the throng advanced down Beale Street, some of the younger strike supporters ripped the protest signs off the the wooden sticks that they carried. These young men, none of whom were sanitation workers, used the sticks to smash glass storefronts on both sides of the street. Looting led to violent police retaliation. Troopers lobbed tear gas into groups of protesters and sprayed mace at demonstrators unlucky enough to be in range. High above the fray in City Hall, Mayor Henry Loeb sat in his office, confident that the strike was illegal, and that law and order would be maintained in Memphis.1
This march was the latest engagement in a fight that had raged in Memphis since the days of slavery-a conflict over African-American freedoms and civil rights. In one sense, the "I Am a Man" slogan worn by the sanitation workers represented a demand for recognition of their dignity and humanity. This demand caught white Memphians by surprise, because they had always prided themselves as being "progressive" on racial issues. Token integration had quietly replaced public segregation in Memphis by the mid-1960s, but in the 1967 mayoral elections, segregationist candidate Henry Loeb rode a wave of white backlash against racial "moderation" into office. Loeb took his election as a mandate to maintain law and order (i.e. the racial status quo). The mayor still referred to black Memphians as "his Negroes" when he spoke to the press, and observers characterized his vision of race relations as reminiscent of a "plantation mentality."2 Strike leaders focused much of their rhetoric on Loeb's paternalism and denial of the strikers' manhood. In this interpretation of the "I Am a Man" slogan, the calls for manhood were also calls...