Basic Information
Name: Henry Loeb III
Nickname: Hank the Stank
Born: December 9th, 1920
Died: September 8th, 1992
Nationality: American
Hometown: No place seems to want to take credit
WORK & EDUCATION
Occupation: Navy sailor, politician, farm equipment dealer, ornery cuss
Education: Brown University
FAMILY & FRIENDS
Parents: William Loeb; presumably there was also a woman involved
Siblings: William L. Loeb
Spouse(s): William W. Loeb (just kidding: Mary Gregg Loeb)
Children: William M. Loeb. Nope, kidding again: Henry Gregg Loeb, Thomas Calhoun Loeb, Elizabeth Loeb MacKenzie
Friends: segregationists, trash-eating vermin (to be clear, these are two separate items)
Foes: MLK; Memphis city council; the Memphis Commercial Appeal (a local paper, which Loeb claimed he could "smell on his doorstep") (source); Lyndon Johnson (who forced strike negotiations after MLK's death); decency, humility, history (because)
Analysis
If anyone in this story deserves to be introduced with the Imperial March, it's Henry Loeb III. Granted, he wasn't known for flowing capes, being a rackety mouth-breather, or indulging in spontaneous long-distance choking, although that garbage did reek. Also, (spoiler alert) he definitely wasn't MLK's father. But he was backed by a whole bunch of white people and tried to put down a rebellion. So.
You can think of him as our villain…for now.
Papa Loeb
Somewhat better known than his cousin Ear Loeb, Henry Loeb was mayor of Memphis during the sanitation workers' strike and was more or less solely responsible for perpetuating it. Boo, hiss.
Mayor Loeb reportedly prized his "strong conservative fiscal record." His political supporters—almost exclusively white, for reasons we'll discuss in a moment—claimed that his "actions [during the strike] were based on concern for the city tax dollar and not any racial motivation" (source).
Uh-huh.
Even if we take that claim at face value, well, let's think about it: Mayor Loeb seems to have thought it would be efficient to pay the sanitation workers so little that they had to rely on government assistance. Since both the Memphis city budget and that government assistance were paid for by tax dollars, it's not entirely clear whose money he was trying to save, or for what purpose. We wonder.
Plus, there's reason to believe Loeb wasn't thinking in primarily practical terms. He took a paternalistic view of the striking Black sanitation workers, which means he treated their strike like a tantrum. In his mind, the workers were confused children who didn't know what was best for themselves and it was his job to make them behave.
Earlier in his career, Loeb had run for mayor on the platform of "white unity." (They just put it right out there back in the day.) White unity meant he urged whites to vote against any candidate supported by Black people, who would then have zero representation in local government.
Stay classy, Mayor Loeb.
One Strike and You're Out
So that's how Loeb got elected, and you can see why the sanitation workers were fighting an uplandfill battle. They probably would have been anyway, given Loeb's dislike of labor negotiations: he called the strike "illegal." But race was a big factor here, no question. In fact, after the strike began, Loeb hired some strikebreakers, gave them a police escort, and restarted trash collection in—got any guesses?—white neighborhoods.
These types are nothing if not consistent, areweright?
Mayor Loeb definitely thought he was right. He told the striking sanitation workers he'd meet some of their demands, but he refused to put anything in writing. Hot tip, kiddos: that's a huge red flag.
Basically, the offer stunk like garbage, which the sanitation workers had had plenty of. The Memphis city council tried to come to an actual legal agreement with the strikers, but Mayor Loeb put his foot down and vetoed the whole shebang. Everyone had to do things his way or he wasn't playing.
…Who's the child, again?
And so the strike went on and on and MLK got involved and then got re-involved and then got killed, which some people sort of blamed Mayor Loeb for. You can decide what you think about that.
Brash or Trash?
So: was Mayor Loeb a Bad Guy in any straightforward sense?
To answer that question, we have to decide if we respect people who never back down, even if we think their ideas are an enormous rank pile of bat dung.
In a retrospective editorial about the Loeb administration, the Memphis Commercial Appeal noted Loeb's "apparent inability to tolerate differences with his own opinion," describing him as "a man without doubts who did what he believed was right for the city. We all have to respect him for that" (source).
Do we, though?
If you think about it, "a man without doubts who did what he believed was right" describes a whole lot of civil rights leaders, too—people we now think were capital-R Right. Whereas segregationists like Loeb were Wrong—"on the wrong side of history," we sometimes say. But there are always little hiccups in history that challenge sweeping judgments. Fred Davis, a Black councilman who served under Loeb, said that "Mayor Loeb and I got along very well. We didn't always agree [,] but one thing you could be assured of [was] that he would shoot as straight as an arrow" (source).
We guess it's good to at least be clear about where your opponent stands. If Fred Davis could admire this quality in a generally racist politician, can we? Should we?
We're never going to admire the Wrong people anywhere near as much as the Right ones. Still, is standing up for what you believe in an inherently admirable quality? Is it unfair to judge people from the past based on what we know now? Or does someone like Mayor Loeb seem so incredibly wrong that he had no excuse for not knowing better?
Twilight on Farm Planet Arkansas
After the Memphis sanitation strike and Dr. K's assassination, Henry Loeb III decided he'd had just about enough of public life. Instead of seeking reelection, he moved to his farm in Arkansas, where he owned a farm equipment dealership.
Because, little-known fact, AT-ATs make excellent tractors.