Henry Loeb Born: 1923 Died: 1992

Many people are remembered for their worst mistake or greatest accomplishment.  Call it bravery or bull-headedness Henry Loeb III will always be remembered for being the mayor of Memphis during  the Memphis Sanitation Workers strike which ended in the death of Martin Luther King Jr.

Henry Loeb was born into Memphis business, money and community involvement.  The Loeb family entered the Memphis business-world in 1887 when Henry Loeb, Sr. opened a store for hat-making and tailoring.  His customers talked him into laundering the shirts he sold.  Very soon the laundries were Loeb's primary concern.

When Henry Sr. died his son William took over the compay, but only lived five more years.  William's early death put the business in the hands of his sons Bill Jr. and Henry Loeb III.  When the two sons were able to truly take over the business they clashed heads often.  Ultimately Bill bought out Henry's share of the business.  From that point on Henry became the politician and Bill became sole head of the Loeb holdings (now called Loeb Enterprises).

Henry was a natural as a politician.  He had a stable home life with his wife Mary (a former Cotton Carnival Queen) and was so rigorously honest that it drove some of his friends to distraction.  He loved to shake hands and was charming to a fault.  Loeb was elected mayor in both 1960 and 1968.  During his first term he resigned in order to help with the family business.  His second term began in 1968 and overshadowed anything he ever did before or since.

One month after Loeb was sworn in two sanitation workers were killed by their own garbage truck while they tried to eat their lunch out of the rain.  This tragedy moved already unsatisfied sanitation workers to call for better pay and work rules.  One rule contributing to the two deaths was that workers wdid not get paid while rain was falling.  The workers would go off the clock and often wait around to see if the rain would let up.  The two dead sanitation workers were trying to wait out the rain.

During the months of January and February the new, city-council form of government was trying to understand its role.  Outside of City Hall the heat was mounting and pressures building.  The sanitation workers engaged AFSCME union leadership to come to Memphis and help organize a strike.  The strike began on February 12, 1968.

Loeb stood 6' 4" tall and seemed to fancy himself a John Wayne type [This is not meant to be a negative attribute.  Given Mayor Loeb's time in history it is easy to consider that his stances on various issues required a degree of courage that is separate from the overall wisdom of those decisions].  True to that image he tried to force the union back to work by using substitute workers, threatening to fire every member of the member, etc.  The few garbage trucks that did roll were escorted by police cars.  Loeb declared throughout the strike that a municipal worker has no right to strike.  For that reason he felt he had no authority to negotiate with a union of municipal employees.

Well intentioned or not, Loeb stuck firm to his guns and even turned down help from the President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson.  Publicly the city council backed the mayor, but that support was tenuous.  Ned Cook, Memphis industrialist and lifetime friend of Henry Loeb's ecouraged him to back down.  That never happened.

The unrest continued to grow.  On March 28 the State of Tennessee approved a curfew for Memphians.  Loeb was willing to talk to anyone, but he would never abandon the issue of the strike's legality.  As the strike lengthened so did the national coverage.  The National Guard was activated.  Announcements went out that Nobel Prize winner Martin Luther King Jr. would be traveling to Memphis soon to champion the cause of the striking workers.

Throughout all of this and various other offers from the state and other labor unions to help mediate, Loeb stood firm in saying that the strike was illegal.  He would not deal with striking workers.

On April 3rd Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Memphis.  The next day King was shot and killed while he stood on the balcony outside of his hotel room.  This lit of fuse on violent protest in Memphis.  Finally, fed up with Mayor Loeb's intransigence President Johnson instructs Undersecretary of Labor James Reynolds to take charge of mediation to settle the strike.

On April 16, 1968 the strike was settled.  By that time there had been major damage done to the City of Memphis in terms of reputation and destruction of property.

Henry Loeb retired to Forrest City, Arkansas after finishing his term as mayor.  He died in 1992.  To those that knew him he had a charm that seemed magical.  For students of history now and forever he will be known as the man who would not compromise and was proud of it.