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High tensions in city mirrors rest of country

By: Clint Cooper
(Contact)

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Barbara Kelley

Rozelle Bender said her house may as well have had a revolving door in 1968.

“We had people there all the time,” she said.

Such meetings, said Mrs. Bender, whose husband, A.L. “Chunk” Bender, was Chattanooga’s vice mayor, were emblematic of the year.

The year, which Newsweek claimed in a November cover story was “the year that made us who we are,” saw the assassinations of civil-rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, unrest from opposition to the Vietnam War and a bruising presidential election between Republican Richard M. Nixon, a former vice president, and Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey, the sitting vice president.

Locally, a downtown riot erupted the day of Dr. King’s funeral, racial desegregation of schools picked up speed, Chattanooga’s mayor announced he was stepping down and the University of Chattanooga heard rumblings of a possible rival from another four-year school.

“Those were really troubling times,” said Mrs. Bender, 91.

GENERAL UNREST

The riot that broke out on the day of Dr. King’s funeral was an offshoot of a prayer vigil at Warner Park, said Randy Stargin, 58, then a senior at Riverside High School.

“There were silent moments of prayer,” he said. “A few folks got up to speak. We were supposed to be going back to school.”

Most students did go back, said Mr. Stargin, who is retired from the Chattanooga Fire Department. Some students who didn’t, together with some nonstudents, broke out windows downtown and looted several businesses.

“I came to get everything I need,” an unidentified rioter told a Chattanooga Times reporter.

“I haven’t been able to find decent housing just because I’m a Negro,” John McKinley, pastor of the Eighth Street Seventh-day Adventist Church, told the newspaper reporter.

“We want equality, not the white man’s house, women or stores,” James O. Zellander, a teenager, told the Times.

In the end, 22 arrests were made.

Mayor Ralph Kelley, who would step down before the end of the year to become a federal referee in bankruptcy, tried to quell tensions in a service of rededication before an audience of 1,500 people at the Tivoli Theatre.

“(Dr. King) preached one people and one nation,” he said. ... “He was willing to die for (his dream). Are we willing to live for it?”

Mrs. Bender said the mayor and members of the then-City Commission tried their best to make sure the violence in Chattanooga was held to a minimum throughout the 1960s.

She said her husband offered to open their home to any group at any time.

“Day or night, it didn’t matter,” she said. “Everybody was concerned. They were just trying to work this thing out.”

On some occasions when tensions were highest, in 1968, and in 1969, when Mr. Bender became mayor on Jan. 2, he went directly into black-owned businesses on Ninth Street (now M.L. King Blvd.) to talk to people he knew, Mrs. Bender said.

“They called him,” she said. “He wanted to talk to everybody and go in every business. He said, ‘I’m going where my friends are.’”

Mrs. Bender said she was somewhat afraid for her husband’s safety, but he never was.

“It did bother me,” she said, “but I never let on how upset I was. It never bothered Chunk. He wanted to do the best he could to settle things down. He grew up here, and he really loved the city of Chattanooga.”

Ruth White Thomas, a Riverside High School senior that year and now a Chattanooga minister, said she felt an obligation to use the deaths of Dr. King and Sen. Kennedy to make a difference in her own life.

“I remember the pain and sufferings of those whose lives had been impacted by two great men, specifically, the loss to mankind of two individuals who believed that all men were created equal,” she said. “I was a young mother with no one to turn to, and realizing that these natural men suffered for their personal convictions encouraged me to fight for my life and the life of my young baby.

“In other words,” said Ms. Thomas, “I knew I had to make it and not resort to social services because they, specifically Dr. King, gave their lives for me to fulfill destiny.”

UTC CONCEIVED

The higher education scene in Chattanooga also was changing in 1968.

Early in the year, University of Tennessee President Andrew Holt said the school was looking seriously into building a four-year public university in the Scenic City.

“We’re going to put just as good a campus in Chattanooga as we have in Knoxville,” he said, adding that such a plan would including matching UT’s curriculum and enrollment levels.

Chuck Cantrell, assistant vice chancellor of university relations for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, said the convergence of three ideas occurred that year.

No public institute served higher education needs in the city, the University of Chattanooga was beginning to have financial problems and the historically black Chattanooga City College wanted to move from a two-year to a four-year school, he said.

“When the University of Tennessee announced it was going to open a campus,” Mr. Cantrell said, “the UC trustees realized (if that happened) they would be hard pressed to survive. They wouldn’t be able to compete neck and neck. Pretty quickly, a conversation turned to how we could work together.”

The merger occurred in 1969.

TURBULENT ELECTION

The spring assassinations, the decision of President Lyndon Johnson not to run for re-election, the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the riots at the August Democratic National Convention made the fall presidential race particularly volatile.

Vice President Humphrey’s wife, Muriel, campaigned in Chattanooga on Sept. 20, and Mr. Nixon spoke before 10,000 people at Memorial Auditorium and in front of it on McCallie Avenue on Sept. 27.

“I have been welcomed everywhere I’ve been,” Nixon said, “but never like this. Something has happened.”

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