Ku Klux Klan members on the Memphis Courthouse steps. The black community suffers some of the most crushing poverty in the United States.
Most neighborhoods remain segregated.
Parks and monuments to Confederate generals, soldiers, and slave dealers still dot the city. The scary thing is that, in nearby rural Mississippi and Arkansas, Memphis is seen as a hot-bed of liberalism. Although the Klan has been absent in recent years, one of its founders in the years after the Civil War was native son Nathan Bedford Forrest. Because of this, the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis, and continuing racism, many activists felt it was important for a large crowd, both white and black, to come out against the Ku Klux Klan, which planned to bus in bigots from Indiana, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. From the beginning the police acted in a provocative manner.