During those dark Memphis days of March and April of 1968, a handful of familiar names seemed to be ever-present — Henry Loeb, Andrew Young, Lucius Burch, and, of course, Dr. Martin Luther King. But for many years before April 1968, a handful of progressive Memphis leaders, black and white, had been quietly working behind the scenes to make this city a better place for citizens of all colors and all creeds. Among them was Rabbi James Wax (1913-1989) of Temple Israel, then as now the oldest and largest Jewish congregation in Tennessee. In this magazine’s February 1981 issue, Joan Beifuss, today best remembered for At the River I Stand, her 1990 groundbreaking book on the King assassination, profiled the senior rabbi of Temple Israel for Memphis magazine. Below is a condensed version of her story.
“Speak out in favor of human dignity for every person. Let us not hide behind legal technicalities. Let us not wrap ourselves up in slogans. Let us do the will of God for the good of the city.” — Rabbi James Wax
The Rabbi stood before the mayor that grim April morning in 1968 like some Old Testament prophet confronting an errant king. The blood of Martin Luther King was hardly dry on the Lorraine Motel balcony; he had been dead some 16 hours now. Now all eyes were on Memphis; millions of Americans were watching this confrontation between Rabbi James Wax and Mayor Henry Loeb on their television screens.
Rabbi Wax was president of the Memphis Ministers Association that year. He and his fellow clergymen had struggled mightily to solve the sanitation strike. They had relied on behind-the-scenes efforts to get the city and union together. They had failed. Now fire and smoke were rising from the hearts of cities across America. That morning, some 150 ministers, priests, and rabbis had held their own memorial service at St. Mary’s Cathedral; afterward, they marched to City Hall and crowded behind Rabbi Wax into the mayor’s office.
“Speak out in favor of human dignity for every person,” Wax told Loeb. “Let us not hide behind legal technicalities. Let us not wrap ourselves up in slogans. Let us do the will of God for the good of the city.”
Public reaction to the rabbi’s stand was mainly negative. “The hostility was very deep,” Wax would say later. But most would eventually come around. At his retirement ten years later, in 1978, many who had castigated him in the past came forward with warm wishes. “That experience confirmed [for me] that if you stand for moral principles,” he says, “in time you become vindicated. It’s the faith I’ve always had.”
A native of Missouri, Wax came to Memphis as co-rabbi of Temple Israel in 1949. He found himself somewhat “stunned” by the racial situation in those years just after World War II. One incident stuck in his mind. He was downtown on a hot summer day outside the old Peabody Hotel drugstore. A black man asked him, “Do you think I can go in there and get a glass of water?”
“I just said to him, ‘I’m afraid you can’t.’ I’ve never forgotten that,” he says. “Here was a human being who was thirsty and couldn’t get a glass of water. It just exemplified the situation.”
The “situation” was something that Wax was convinced should change. He worked closely with Temple Israel’s senior rabbi, Harry Ettelson, whom he eventually succeeded in 1954. The two Reform rabbis shared the same basic philosophy about Judaism — that religion should be related to life and concerned with the issues of the world.
By the mid-1950s, Wax was a fixture on the boards of all sorts of Memphis community associations. He worked for the mentally and physically handicapped, with the Rotary and the Masons, with history groups and welfare organizations. The rabbi’s interest in improving race relations led to his involvement with the first groups that attempted to deal with the enormous gap that divided the black and white communities in Memphis. Ironically, two separate committees were formed to study the problem — one black, the other white.
“To deal with the race question on a segregated basis seemed kind of ironic to me,” Wax says. “Here were two groups going through the motions of trying to maintain harmony without solving even the first problem.”
Not surprisingly, the first effort ended in failure. But the second attempt, launched when the Memphis Committee on Community Relations (MCCR) was formed in 1957, proved much more fruitful. In fact, this organization — now practically forgotten — was primarily responsible for the relatively painless integration of Memphis’ public facilities in the early 1960s.
Black and white Memphians served together; the MCCR’s ranks included attorney Lucius Burch, Memphis Press-Scimitar editor Edward Meeman, Urban League director J.P. McDaniel, Tri-State Bank president Jesse Turner, and clergymen like Paul Tudor Jones and James Wax. These community leaders all realized that racial integration was now just a matter of time, and were determined that Memphis would avoid the confrontations that had already occurred in Little Rock and New Orleans.
To a large extent they were successful. MCCR tried to defuse potentially dangerous situations by dealing with them quietly, quickly, and efficiently. MCCR, quite literally, kept one step ahead of the law.
Take the way that downtown Memphis restaurants were integrated. MCCR would send a delegation — all white, of course — to talk to the management of a particular restaurant to explain how integration could and should be carried out peacefully. A few blacks — usually prominent community leaders who were MCCR members — would be chosen to eat at the restaurant on a certain day. The help would be told to serve them; other than employees, no one would know they were coming until they got there. By the time the general public found out about what had happened, integration of the restaurant would be an accomplished fact.
Something similar happened when Memphis State was due to enroll its first black students in 1958. “We got word that a group from Jackson, Mississippi, was coming to stir up trouble,” says Wax. “So it was suggested to the university president that the black students be enrolled a few days early.” They were.
Progress was made on the employment front as well. “At bakery companies, for example,” says the rabbi, “blacks could carry boxes but never be salesmen. A couple of people talked with them, and they hired blacks to be salesmen.”
Integrating the banks proved considerably more difficult. Rabbi Wax tells of one bank that hired black women but put them on the second floor, out of sight; the excuse was that seeing blacks on the main floor would be too unsettling an experience for their white Mississippi customers.
By and large, however, MCCR’s efforts were successful. A key ingredient, of course, was the cooperation of the local news media, which insured that publicity was kept to a minimum. “The newspapers sat on stories,” concedes Wax. “I don’t believe in suppressing the news, but [that] made it possible for these various efforts to succeed. If all these things had been announced ahead of time, there would have been rocks thrown.”
The MCCR was not without its problems. Although they cooperated, most black community leaders were unhappy with the pace of progress. Some regarded the efforts of MCCR as token; others considered the blacks who served with the organization as little more than Uncle Toms.
But in the context of the times, MCCR’s achievements were little short of revolutionary. Nearly all public facilities were integrated in Memphis without violence; few other Southern cities could make such a claim. So unusual was Memphis’ handling of the problem that the Kennedy Administration sent observers to the city to see how such progress had been made.
Unfortunately, Memphis’ image as a city of peace evaporated late one April afternoon in 1968. Were it not for the King assassination, the efforts of Rabbi Wax and his colleagues might be recalled as often as they deserve to be.
While he has retired from active work with Temple Israel, Rabbi Wax is still a teacher, appropriately enough, at Memphis Theological Seminary. Here, in a graduate school founded by Presbyterians, he gives a course on the history and development of the Jewish religion.
The new Temple Israel, built during the Wax years and dedicated in 1976, is set among high trees and rolling land off Massey Road in East Memphis. In a sense, the new Temple is a sign of the congregation’s loyalty, of the financial success of the Jewish community in Memphis, and of the leadership of Rabbi Wax.
“I’m not great on ritual and ceremony,” he says, visiting the new complex. “If I did anything to be remembered for, I hope it’s not for this new building, but because I believed in the brotherhood of man.”
