Civil disobedience at No Kings illuminates a long pattern of repression by police

Like the two previous local iterations of the national day of action, March 28’s No Kings event offered speakers, music and food packaged in a way that felt like a festival and was permitted by the city. 

But this time, Memphis is six months into the White House’s Memphis Safe Task Force experiment. Just a few days earlier, on March 23, Donald Trump visited Memphis to brag about what he described as the success of the task force while also conflating, confabulating and offering false statements. 

From a stage at Robert R. Church Park, organizers announced a short march as the day’s final activity. Protestors marched down Beale Street to Second Street, where they turned to return to the park. About 500 multiracial, multigenerational Memphians, about half the amount that came to the rally, made their way on the less-than-a-mile route.

Suddenly, they faced a phalanx of Memphis Police Department patrol cars attempting to cut the protest short by ordering people to the sidewalk. 

Officers started walking through the crowd carrying tear gas launchers across their chests, pepper spray and riot batons in their grips. One police officer, a young Black man, wore a thin blue line Three Percenter patch on his uniform. The crowd moved past police peacefully, making their way past the burned beams holding up the remains of Clayborn Temple. 

At the back of the march, safety marshals walked in a human chain between protestors and a line of officers and patrol cars blasting sirens. Police officers snatched up marshals and detained them. 

1968 all over again

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s final march before he was killed was 58 years ago on the same date. He spent his last weeks organizing in Memphis in support of the struggle of the 1300 striking sanitation workers who walked off the job because of low wages and inhumane conditions.

Then, Clayborn Temple was an A.M.E. church with a Black congregation that served as the headquarters for the sanitation strike. King and his allies led a peaceful protest thousands-strong, arm-in-arm, departing from the church and down what was then called Linden Avenue (it would be renamed MLK, Jr. Ave. in 2012) to Memphis City Hall. 

The protest took a turn when people toward the back started taunting Memphis police officers and allegedly breaking storefront windows. Police responded by attacking marchers on the street. 

Many of those marching retreated to Clayborn Temple for safety, but police followed them there. They launched tear gas canisters into the sanctuary and clubbed people laying on the ground gasping for air. Larry Payne, a 17-year-old who was in the march, was followed and killed outside his mother’s home by police officers suspecting him of stealing a television. 

Mayor Henry Loeb, Memphis’ “intransigent white mayor” at the time, responded to the catastrophe by calling thousands of National Guard troops to Memphis to restore order. He claimed that the unauthorized protest escalated into a riot, causing property damage in downtown Memphis. He asked a federal judge to issue an injunction forbidding any further acts of civil disobedience. 

The headline written by Kay Pittman Black, of the Memphis Press-Scimitar, above a next-day story about what happened, screamed: “It began like a carnival and ended like a horror show.”

‘This was intimidation’

Lucci Chambless couldn’t march with the protest. She broke two bones in her leg in February while helping to clear a pathway of ice for some older neighbors struggling to get out of their homes after the winter storm. But she wanted to join the more than 1,000 people gathered at Robert R. Church Park. 

Chambless stood at the intersection, filming what was happening and tried to move slowly on her injured leg. She watched a woman walk out of the road and toward the park, then get tackled from behind. Shortly after, she felt the shove of a police officer commanding her to clear the road. 

“I made sure that he understood that I have a broken leg and that there are too many people in front of me for me to really run back into the park,” she said. 

“I told him to stop shoving me, and he said, ‘That’s it, you’re going to jail.’ I was surrounded by four or five guys with guns who were pulling me in different directions,” she said. “My hands were handcuffed before I even knew that they had control of them. And even though my hands were already in handcuffs, they continued to scream at me to give them my hands.”

People were detained, many were pepper-sprayed and ultimately three were arrested. 

“Let’s be clear, this was not crowd control,” Jessica Miller, an organizer with Indivisible, said during a press conference following the initial Monday morning court hearings of those arrested. “This was not public safety; this was intimidation. And what we experienced on Saturday, while unacceptable, is not new. For many of us, this was shocking. For our Black and brown neighbors, it was familiar.” 

MPD issued an official statement on Monday that only addressed the fact that the protest was unpermitted. Four officers have been put on administrative leave, but they haven’t been identified. 

Andrea Morales is the visuals director for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Email her at  andrea.morales@mlk50.com

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