Bluff City by Preston Lauterbach

Author:Preston Lauterbach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

As darkness fell on August 10, 1967, Ernest Withers stood on the sidewalk outside Centenary Methodist, Jim Lawson’s church. He sported a fresh haircut, a gold-plated watch, and a neat short-sleeved shirt. A camera was slung around his neck.

Inside the church, a closed meeting of MAP-South leaders deliberated whether to give Cab and Coby their jobs back.

As Withers watched, fifty bouncing, ebullient children and teenagers stormed into the church vestibule. Lawson poked his head out to see the cause of the ruckus. One of the kids told him, “We want to show our support,” for Cab and Coby.

“No one knows that better than I,” Lawson replied, but he asked the boys for quiet and shooed them back out front, where he could address everyone.

He stood on the front steps and asked the crowd, “Who hired Coby?” Practically every face in the crowd looked up to Lawson. “I did,” he said. “And I hired Cabbage, too.”

He let that sink in.

“As long as I’m in there,” he said, pointing at the crowd, “you know the battle’s being fought.” Heading back inside, he snapped, “I’ve been marching since before you even thought about it.”

The kids sat on the stairs and on windowsills. They stood around in circles talking. Police cruisers rolled by, and the officers eyed the youthful crowd.

Withers heard that Coby Smith had organized this group to protest the firings, though the support appeared spontaneous and natural.9

After an hour and a half, Lawson came back out to announce the decision: the War on Poverty Committee would give the neighborhood aides a hearing to fairly determine whether they could have their antipoverty jobs back.10

At his hearing, Cabbage admitted he’d discussed with impoverished residents the tactic of carrying out rent strikes against landlords, saying, “If this is the only way a slum landlord can be made to improve his property then a poverty agency should direct itself to that.”11

Advised that MAP-South couldn’t condone rent strikes, Cab replied that he worked only thirty hours a week for the organization but lived in poverty twenty-four hours a day.

A. W. Willis, an attorney who represented Cab and Coby, sympathized. “We need more people concerned with the ghettos,” he said. “I didn’t ask [anyone] if he was a member of SNCC, and I don’t care. I’m a member of some organizations I’m ashamed of,” he continued. “One of them is the Chamber of Commerce.” 12

Cabbage and Coby earned a hollow victory. The committee reinstated their jobs and restored their back pay, but they had been funded only as temporary work for the summer. The positions expired shortly after the ruling.

One important result of MAP-South was to inflame the reputation of the already controversial Jim Lawson. According to Agent Lawrence, “As of August 9, 1967, several of the responsible NAACP leaders in Memphis, Tennessee, felt that Rev. JAMES MORRIS LAWSON, JR., was the most dangerous Negro in Memphis as he had been the mentor of Charles Cabbage and [Smith] and had obtained for them their jobs on MAP-South.”13

The MAP-South episode also radicalized the thinking of Charles Cabbage.

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