When Black power doesn’t keep the lights on

This is part six of a 10-part series on the first tenant movement in Memphis. Read part 5 here.

The Invaders — that youthful, much-maligned organization that played a pivotal role in supporting the sanitation workers’ strike — are usually the start and end of discussions of Memphis’ radical history. 

But when looking back at how Black radicals organized within the city’s housing projects and “slum dwellings” — and against them, too — there’s a story that goes far beyond the strike into the 1970s, when “Black power” fractured across neighborhood borders, competing strategies and new organizations.

Memphis’ first
tenant movement

If you never knew there was a militant response from Black folks fighting for their lives in Memphis slums and projects, think again. Read the whole series here.

Memphis’ Black Power movement frequently took ideas from other parts of the country, adjusting them through the experiences of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. It also had a complicated relationship with the liberal mainstream and progressive outskirts of local activism. Sometimes, everyone was on the same page — or at least worked alongside each other. 

But Black radicals’ shared commitment to anti-capitalism, anti-police sentiments and armed self-defense made them an easy scapegoat for the broader movement’s flaws and failures.

The Black United Front steps forward

Back in 1967 — a year before Memphis saw its first rent strike — the term came up briefly in local news, when two young anti-poverty workers were accused of joining the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a controversial civil rights group led by Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture). Coby Smith and Charles Cabbage were wide-eyed strategists with a keen interest in what issues would galvanize Memphis’ Black working class. As field workers for a War on Poverty program called MAP-South, the two surveyed South Memphis’ poorest blocks, talking with residents about their rights as tenants and other basic needs. 

As they were questioned about their political views, Cabbage told his superiors they’d discussed organizing Black tenants to withhold their rent payments. The implication that a public agency would get involved in this kind of protest shook the room, but Cabbage held his ground: “If this is the only way a slumlord can be made to improve his property, then a poverty agency should direct itself to that.

“I am a part of the Black poverty community,” Cabbage added. “I work seven hours for MAP-South, but I live in poverty 24 hours a day.” This controversy was one of the catalyzing moments for the group that would become the Invaders that would gain the attention of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the FBI alike. 

The sanitation workers strike came and went. Invaders were blamed for causing violence and chaos. The most famous man willing to hear them out was assassinated hours after meeting with them at the Lorraine Motel. 

In the year after King’s death, the Invaders organization began to crumble. Through the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO campaign, a network of local police, federal agents, informants and journalists worked to dismantle the group from the inside and out. Within a year, over 30 people with real or suspected Invaders ties had been arrested or convicted, including major players like Cabbage and John B. Smith. 

But this was far from the end of Black Power in Memphis. From the Invaders’ final gasps, new Black Power initiatives sprung up, hoping to reach a new base of people through slightly different approaches.

There was the Black United Front, for instance, a proposed “coalition between militants and non-militants” around shared issues of Black liberation. On Aug. 19, 1968, Minister Suhkara Yahweh announced the effort during a community forum at Clayborn Temple. As an organizer with the Invaders’ Downtown contingent (back when people knew him as Lance “Sweet Willie Wine” Watson), Yahweh soon got involved in debates over the city’s urban renewal program, which was transforming neighborhoods across Memphis’ western half to build new housing projects — like Beale St. and the Medical District. But it was South Memphis that ended up being his most important target.

An informal rift within the Invaders had concentrated much of their membership in the area. But afterward, Memphis Housing Authority created the conditions for South Memphis to become a center of Black working-class resistance. Throughout the late 1960s, MHA was busy laying the groundwork for two urban renewal projects around LeMoyne-Owen College and Riverview-Kansas: a massive effort to redevelop hundreds of acres from the ground up. As the city moved closer and closer to officially starting the project, South Memphis residents used a number of tactics to resist and redirect the urban renewal process. 

In 1968, tenant Elizabeth Hayes and community organizer Gerald Fanion organized and won the city’s first rent strike. And in 1970, when Riverview-Kansas residents found out that their urban renewal project required a citizen advisory committee, they formed their own without the city’s approval and fought to keep homes from getting torn down. 

Nevertheless, MHA moved forward with new developments — as organizers like Yahweh called for renters and homeowners to have a real say in their neighborhood’s future.

Despite its initial goal of uniting radicals and liberals, the Front didn’t always get along with national groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that were strategizing on how best to move the city toward racial and economic justice. And members of the Front were eventually caught up in arrests and media controversies, including Yahweh and Front director Roy Turk. 

In the end, the Black United Front was only active for a couple of years, a blip in Memphis’ vast civil rights landscape.

Justin A. Davis is a freelance journalist, music critic and former grassroots organizer. He’s covered politics, pop culture and history for outlets like Scalawag magazine, Waging Nonviolence, Post-Trash and Science for the People. He lives in Memphis. 

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