Every city, I suppose, has its history of activism—even
Memphis, whose history of activism was for many years dominated by the 1968
sanitation workers’ strike and is only now being explored in its rightful complexity.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Ida B. Wells, for instance, was a largely
unknown figure, and had it not been for the rise of area studies in the
American academy over the past forty years, Wells might still be largely
unknown. Even so, I doubt very much that most Memphians today know who she was.
One Memphian who did
was a fellow named Coby Smith. A graduate of Manassas High School, Smith in
1963 was one of the first African Americans to be admitted to Southwestern
(today, Rhodes) College. He left Memphis in 1966 for Atlanta, where he became
involved in—and eventually frustrated with—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC). He returned to Memphis in 1967 with a “more radical
disposition” and immediately founded, along with another Memphian named Charles
Cabbage, who had also spent time in Atlanta, two activist organizations, the
Black Organizing Project and the Invaders. In a 2010 interview, Coby Smith said
of the young black activists in Memphis in the late 1960s that they worked in
“the spirit of Ida B. Wells.”
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Black Organizing
Project and the Invaders was that both were Black Power organizations. That
Black Power had made its way from the urban megalopolises of the Northeast, the
Midwest, and California to Memphis will come as a surprise to many—as it did to
Martin Luther King Jr., who blamed an unexpected “Black Power element” for
creating disorder in a march he led in Memphis about a week before his death.
We learn about Coby Smith and Charles Cabbage in a 2015 book
titled Black Power in the Bluff City:
African American Youth and Student Activism in Memphis, 1965–1975, by
Shirletta J. Kinchen, a professor of Pan-African Studies at the University of
Louisville and a graduate of the PhD program in history at the University of
Memphis. As Professor Kinchen demonstrates in her impressive study, the work of
Smith and Cabbage and of the Black Power movement in Memphis challenges the view
of the city in the late 1960s and early 1970s as an “NAACP town.”
As did Black Power more generally, the Black Organizing
Project wanted complete self-determination for the city’s black residents. The
platform of the project demanded “community control over education, finances,
politics, and land ownership.” As Charles Cabbage explained, the Black
Organizing Project aimed to “stimulate in young blacks a sense of black
identity, black pride, and black consciousness, to create in the blacks an
independent spirit, to cease to be dependent upon and influenced by the white
race.” That Professor Kinchen’s source for that quotation is an FBI memo is no
accident. The FBI began watching the Black Organizing Project soon after it was
founded. In addition, the Memphis Police Department set up a special unit to
monitor the organization.
Black Power was able to gain a foothold in Memphis because
the city’s black establishment and older generation had been unwilling or
unable to make room for the young. At the time, many blacks in their late teens
and early twenties found the approach of older figures such as Maxine Smith and
Benjamin Hooks—both of whom occupy prominent places in the city’s postwar
history—too incremental and mild-mannered. Young activists such as Smith and
Cabbage refused to treat even Martin Luther King Jr. with the customary reverence.
If Dr. King wanted to lead a march in Memphis, Coby Smith said, he needed to adapt
and adjust to the particular needs and concerns of the city’s residents—needs
and concerns that may be too urgent for the Atlanta preacher’s nonviolent ethic.
“This is Memphis,” Smith said in reaction to the botched march led by Dr. King the
week before his death. “The city belongs to people here.”
Smith and Cabbage, and Black Power generally, did not
succeed—at least, not to the degree that activists such as Smith and Cabbage
envisioned. In my view, the problem that stymied Smith and Cabbage at every
turn was the same problem that stymies nearly all would-be revolutionaries:
they had to act through or in tandem with existing institutions—the law, the NAACP,
the War on Poverty, local churches, LeMoyne College, Owen Junior
College, Memphis State University—and existing institutions are almost by
definition too conservative to tolerate sudden and drastic change.
Nevertheless, as Professor Kinchen maintains, Black Power,
despite being a comparatively “fringe” movement in Memphis, had an effect. In
giving young black Memphians “a malleable and adaptive philosophy that
traversed different sectors of life in the city,” it paved the way “for an
increasingly radical Memphis after 1968 when even moderate organizations, such
as the local branch of the NAACP, began to evoke the spirit of the Black Power
movement.”
