You Must Be from the North: Southern White Women in the Memphis Civil Rights Movement

Chapter 5 “LITTLE OLD LADIES WITH TENNIS SHOES”: The Relationship Between White Women and Racial Reform in a Post-King Memphis

87 Chapter 5 “Little Old Ladies with Tennis Shoes” The Relationship Between White Women and Racial Reform in a Post-King Memphis The Memphis chapter of the Panel of American Women (Panel), Concerned Women of Memphis (CWM), New Attitude-Memphis Encounter (NAME), and the Fund for Needy Schoolchildren (Fund) were the central organizations of Memphis’s white female activist community in the aftermath of King’s assassination and the resolution of the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike. Many of their programs operated in concert at various times, and the groups shared personnel, tactics, and meeting space on occasion. Membership within these organizations often overlapped , yet their focuses varied from 1968 to 1971. The majority of Panel members identified as full-time housewives and mothers. The Memphis Panel seemed to be yet another example of the traditional, supposedly apolitical reform efforts that characterized this generation of Memphis’s white activists. The “safe” endeavor of assisting impoverished children and enlightening the next generation of young people posed no threat to Memphis’s racial hierarchy or conservative political structure.1 Yet these organizations did just that. The seemingly benign intentions of the Panel, CWM, the Fund, and NAME led to concrete civil rights activism for many of their participants. The first organization that resulted from this coalition of reformers became the Rearing Children of Goodwill (RCG). Sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ), RCG launched its program of weekly workshops on 28 February 1968, at the height of tensions White Women and Racial Reform in a Post-King Memphis 88 between the city government, national civil rights and labor leaders, and sanitation workers. The first workshop’s title, “We Can’t Afford Another Generation of Hate,” revealed the group’s chief goal: to eliminate the cycle of racism by changing the mindset of its members’ own children. Attendees believed the racial climate that precipitated the sanitation strike and King’s death, coupled with the racial segregation that continued to be the hallmark of the Memphis city school system and local neighborhoods, inevitably would transfer over to their children’s generation. As wives and mothers, these women considered the education of their children to be the first—and in many women’s opinions, the most—important step in eliminating the gulf between black and white Memphians.2 Meeting at the Evergreen Presbyterian Church, with representatives from the NCCJ, Catholic Council on Human Relations, and the AntiDefamation League of B’nai B’rith, organizers designed a workshop that focused primarily on discussion. Joan Beifuss, chairperson of the RCG during the strike, modeled RCG on a Chicago meeting she had attended that sought solutions for successful, peaceful integration. She selected both African American and white speakers to facilitate discussion in an attempt to illuminate what “influenced” the children in these separate communities.3 Beifuss selected the three speakers at this first workshop, Paul Schwartz, Robert Vidulich, and Justin Adler, specifically for their credentials . Schwartz, director of the Memphis Jewish Community Center, asked the seventy-five attendees to encourage their children to continually question their environment, from the activities on the playground to the war in Vietnam. Schwartz contended that teaching a child to question everything within the first five years of life instilled that positive habit within her/him, thus creating independent, sophisticated thinkers who never accepted society’s rigid boundaries of right/wrong, black/ white. Vidulich and Adler, chair of the University of Memphis’s psychology department and practicing psychiatrist, respectively, gave clinical definitions of prejudice prior to Schwartz’s featured speech. All speakers agreed that mothers needed to train their children in this fashion, since “institutions” ranging from school to churches worked to discourage children’s questions incessantly.4 The RCG workshops stood behind their “children-friendly” nature by offering child care providers for children aged five and younger. The White Women and Racial Reform in a Post-King Memphis 89 attendees who took advantage of the service paid a fee for the child care. Organizers planned lecture series that would span a five-week period and take place in four different neighborhood churches throughout the city. Each individual series featured a wide range of topics, from civil rights to the role of religion in Memphis’s black and white communities. While discussion was the RCG’s primary activity, members also launched other endeavors aimed at relaxing racial tensions in Memphis. Members received a great amount of training from various...