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| 45 B lack men, not servile, but focused and hard-working, attended to me in the morning after my arrival in Memphis. Following a gruesome night in my hotel bed, fighting pillows and ghouls, the dawn came through, bright and restorative. Downstairs, twenty-one-year-old Rodney, chunky and talkative, who worked both the “Trolley Stop” bar and the “Magnolia Grille” restaurant, refreshed my coffee cup. “Did you see that game last night, Mister? Miami gonna whip Detroit tonight too!” He was referring to the semifinal championship NBA basketball game between the Detroit Pistons and the Miami Heat. “Man, the Shaq, he was all over Richard Hamilton. The Shaq, he everything.” Rodney, who calls himself “The Analyst,” was raving about Miami’s renowned Shaquille O’Neal, truly one of the finest athletes in the 4. Memphis Voices 46| CHAPTER FOUR world and much more of an icon to young black men today than, say, any given living civil rights leader. “But nobody was ever better than Michael Jordan,” I offered. “Michael the greatest,” said the Analyst. “But he ain’t nothing without Scottie.” Rodney was right—Michael Jordan, a legend, would not have been the stratospheric success that he was with the invincible Chicago Bulls of the 1990s without the constant aerodynamic assistance of forward Scott Pippen. “Well, you’re too young to have seen some of the guys I saw, Rodney. I saw the Big O and Wilt the Stilt,” referring to Oscar Robertson of my hometown (and now extinct) Cincinnati Royals and the incomparable Wilt Chamberlain of the San Francisco (now Golden State) Warriors, who once scored 100 points in a single game, and was also famed for having scored with literally thousands of women. “The Big O was awesome, no question. But he had his best years with Milwaukee.” Rodney was also correct there. He proceeded to unfurl a verbal scoreboard of facts and opinions about the National Football League, boxing, and major league baseball. His focus was on personalities: Hoopster LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers, boxer James “Lights Out” Toney, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, Pittsburgh Steelers running back Jerome “The Bus” Bettis, and again and again, “Shaq.” Clifton and I used to have these kinds of discussions in the Woodward hallways, and he, too, preferred the African American basketball legends to those of the other sports. By the time the Cincinnati Reds of professional baseball, my team and my sport, became the historic “Big Red Machine” in 1970, we had completed high school and Clifton had vanished from everything but my memory. “What about MLK, Rodney?” “I read all about MLK. Come back and talk to me tonight.” I made sure that I would. At the front door of the hotel, two valets—young, heavyset Bobby, and an ancient but vital, sinewy man named Elmo—greeted me and had my car MEMPHIS VOICES| 47 retrieved. I asked Elmo if he was there in Memphis in 1968. “Oh, yes I was, sir. Remember it well.” We also agreed to talk that night, after he finished his shift. The sun, a reluctant ball, had broken through the gray cloud cover, and downtown was at a midmorning business bustle. At the Peabody Hotel, a Memphis landmark where the ambitious meet and the ducks take their famed red-carpet walk to and from the Grand Lobby twice daily, to the tune of John Philip Sousa’s “King Cotton March,” I sat down with Micah Greenstein, the young senior rabbi of Memphis’s flagship Temple Israel. “The trees are beautiful here,” Micah told me about Memphis. He was polished, immaculately shaven, fit, with a runner’s physique that was reined in by his quiet, pin-striped rabbinic suit. On appearance, he did not seem the type to claim an affinity with the black liturgies and the Baptist hymns. He didn’t look like somebody who would have walked leisurely through the halls of Woodward High School. But Micah’s father served as rabbi at another Temple Israel—in Dayton, just fifty miles from Cincinnati, in 1968. “It was a turbulent time,” he told me, and I smiled deferentially, not particularly requiring this well-intentioned young man to tell me that it was a turbulent time. He said, “I remember a few riots at the high school next door to the Jewish day school I attended.” I realized that there were many Woodwards on the morning of April 5, 1968—how many Cliftons walked away from white boys like...

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