April 13, 2008 — The evening of April 4, 1968, was typically balmy along the Tennessee River where it flows into Alabama. Budding dogwood and magnolia trees released thick sweetness into heavy spring air.
But something else was in the air that night. Grief, rage, and fear tore through Dixie like a tornado. At the other end of the state Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was dead from a white sniper’s bullet.
The rumors were frighteningly plausible. Word was out that young Negro hotheads were coming from Chattanooga to "raise hell and tear up the town." Except they weren’t called Negroes.
The town is South Pittsburg, Tennessee, located where Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia come together. Pure South Appalachia. Redneck country. "Dueling Banjos" country. White supremacy country. My country.
I was rector of historic Christ Episcopal Church. Dr. Hiram Moore was the only black physician for miles in any direction. A bright young man, his medical school education had been paid for by white businessmen. Their commendable generosity was not entirely selfless.
The few physicians in the area were overworked and their white patients often would not sit in small un-segregated waiting rooms with "nigras." The captains of industry needed their workers to stay healthy, so they grew their own physician, a win-win situation for everyone. Moore became the de-facto patriarch of the black community.
The Episcopal Church was the only denomination in town that openly welcomed people of color. There were always black Methodists and Baptists at our Christmas Eve midnight mass. A few black high school kids sometimes attended our youth group. I was trusted, and welcome in their part of town.
Moore and I were professional colleagues, personal friends, and allies in the ongoing struggle to encourage amiable relations between the races. The town was comparatively progressive in race matters, as small Southern towns went, but there was still plenty of tinder for a fire if the right match were thrown into it.
Television news reporters were still sorting out the facts of King’s murder when Moore phoned to ask me to meet him. We walked the streets together in the segregated black neighborhood.
We asked the police to stay out of the area unless they were called. What we didn’t need that night was white cops cruising the streets to be sure the natives didn’t get too restless.
People were out on porches, clustered on lawns, standing in streets, grieving and conjecturing about the local fallout from the portentous tragedy in Memphis.
As if on a Sunday stroll, we talked to them. We listened to what they said, and knew what they weren’t saying. Many held nightmare memories of the brutal treatment of the black "Scottsboro Boys" a few miles south just 30 years before.
A couple of carloads of unrecognized black teenage boys with Chattanooga license plates wheeled into the area. They stopped their vehicles, lights off, engines running, near a covey of local kids.
Moore and I sauntered in their direction. The headlights came on and moved uneventfully out of town. They clearly didn’t want to have a conversation with us.
And we never knew if our conspicuous self-appointed monitoring had anything to do with our 4,000 citizens sleeping undisturbed and waking to a bucolic, unscarred, humdrum, business-as-usual spring day, 40 years ago today.
That morning, to the group gathered at mail time on the steps of the Post Office, a prominent businessman, a pillar of his church, declared "I don’t see what all the fuss is about — it’s just another nigger killing."
Moore was president of the congregation of the Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church. He asked me to speak at the memorial service for Dr. King the following Sunday.
I don’t remember what I said. I thought I talked too long. Dr. Moore complained that the occasion called for at least a one-hour sermon, but he smiled when he said it.
Editor's note: W. Jackson "Jack" Wilson is a psychologist, an Episcopal priest, a sometime academic and a writer living in Colorado.
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