Restoring the Soul of Blues City

I descended from the moving truck and looked about my new apartment complex in Memphis, Tennessee, waving to the caravan of friends who had traveled up the road with me to help. I was a Gulf Coast Mississippi girl coming to the city for graduate school, hoping to make my mark in Black Studies. My father worried I was going too far inland and told me to keep tabs on home. “Just don’t get too far away,” he said. And as if to warn me not to lose my roots, he added, “Stay close to the water.” But Mississippi dirt had already given way to Memphis grit. 

I chose this apartment complex because of its access to the walking trail adjacent to Medal of Honor Park Lake, the 24-hour security, and the close proximity to work and graduate school.  

I saw my new neighbors pause, a curiosity in their shuffle as they walked towards us, slowly stirring the dust. They stood around us staring quietly, and then a volley of queries and comments flew at me: what was I going to school for; what high school did I go to; what church would I join; could they borrow the moving truck; did I like Memphis; why wasn’t I living in Midtown. I didn’t know if I belonged or if I’d wandered into a dystopian diaspora. It seemed a curious introduction to Memphis because I, a complete stranger, looked like hope. 

Over time, our apartment complex lost its security team, witnessed two unit fires due to poor electrical work, was embattled by a rental theft ring, and jilted by a string of burglaries—ultimately leading me out within a year. But the ability to move out was not equally distributed. I quickly learned why many others stayed. Having nowhere else to go, they had to figure out the best way to manage without resources or investment in their community. 

This is the grit and grind of Memphis—a city that promotes resilient individualism through the pestle of survival—crushing and pounding through Black life; nothing like the mountaintop Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned in his final speech here in April 1968. There’s something to be said about the suffering of my people further up the Mississippi River—a thriving people disconnected from the waters and bridges of my home. Isolated on a river’s bluff, any insinuation of change for Black people was met by violence, disinvestment and political undermining.

To sing the blues is to embody the voices of the suffering. Memphis celebrates the blues yet can’t rectify the generational indoctrination of suffering upon the souls of Black folks. It’s as if the lashes and bites from Jim Crow’s hellhounds keep time, while distant howls haunt the melodies. 

I have forever been changed by my Memphis experience. It’s one thing to ascertain the hell and high water Black folks went through from the Middle Passage to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but to witness Black people corralled in divested communities for decades, bidded out to corporations for the lowest wages without taxation, painfully extends the metaphor of slavery that has been allowed to fester and swell in Memphis’s soul. 

A logistics hub, Memphis distributes a myriad of goods from billion-dollar corporations often sitting on the corners of blighted communities and littered roadways with groove tracks from 18 wheelers. For Black Memphians, this hub has constructed an intergenerational economic infrastructure built around low-wage jobs—the same insufferable template established at the violent conclusion of the sanitation strikes of 1968. Strikers chanted “I AM A MAN,” but in the end those men remained at similar pay and are excluded from city retirement to this day. 

Only in the last three years—more than 50 years after Dr. King’s speech at Mason Temple—has Memphis’s City Council attempted to rectify the retirement exclusion by offering all living sanitation workers who participated in the strike a one-time grant of $70,000 as deferred restitution. It was an imperfect solution born of the systemic bones of Jim Crow that unseated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and exempted this city from embracing the Civil Rights Movement from theory to actualized practice. The pathway to equity fell to the ground with one shot of an assassin's bullet and bled out, baring its soul to the world.

The first African American mayor and superintendent of Memphis, Dr. Willie Herenton, considers himself “a poor Black boy from the other side of the tracks” in South Memphis. With nearly 30 years of reform on his embattled public record, the 80-year-old former city leader still looms across the city’s political landscape. The long and lissome 6’6” frame stretched in relaxed measure before me, and I mused at his ease as a man who has earned his leisure on  the margins of Memphis politics. His autobiography is underway and the reflections on his legacy intersect with the history of the city’s racially violent past. The smattering of white hairs along Herenton’s brow rise and fall as he recalls his political awakening during the 1968 sanitation strikes and the Black Monday protests.

“We didn’t really have a lot of Black economic empowerment back then,” he says with clarity.

“I don’t know what it was about me that always resisted the imposition of white privilege,” he adds, “especially since there was so much fear of retaliation. It was hard to find Black men who would resist the social order of the day.”

Dr. Herenton always considered Memphis the “last bastion of resistance” to any federal legislation that ended segregation in all of its forms. 

For hours, he reflected on the violence and the terror of living through the 1960s civil rights revolution in the city, at times bucking his eyes into a forward stare—a trauma too great to shutter. He recalled the chaos that erupted during marches and protests, and a heightened awareness of the hate spewing from the white racist body politic like acid to the roots of Memphis’s soul.

According to Herenton, nothing would ever grow here if the power structure “loved their hatred [for Blacks] more than they did improving their own economic condition,” particularly among poor whites indicted by policies and practices suppressing both job growth and education reform.

He says he remembers thinking, “What would be my role in addressing segregation and the plight of my people in Memphis?” 

Herenton leans back into his chair, the weight of the question filling the space around him. 

“It was the plight of the sanitation workers that brought Memphis into the limelight in the civil rights struggle. That’s what brought King here, in fact. Had we not had the sanitation strike that ignited a wave of protest… I don’t know if Memphis would have made any progress.”

Fifty-three years later, can we say that there has been any progress at all? Herenton believes property ownership is key to progress, but says the inability of Black people to create generational wealth has eroded communities corralled by train tracks. 

“I don’t see any progress. They have devalued property in South Memphis and [white investors] bought up the land and stopped investing in it. It’s so blatant [what they are doing] and I know about a market driven economy. How is it that I buy a $70,000 house and one street over, white people can live there, the value triples?”

The solution? It’s about fighting “the barrier of property appraisals and real estate discrimination” and focusing on a deeper valuation of our communities and people within them by creating our own systems of opportunity and change. For Dr. Herenton, the existential dilemma of racism has jaded white leadership and investors who manipulate a system design that extends the opportunity gap for every generation of Black people in this city.

“What more do you want from us? We played by your rules. We got an education. We know your social etiquettes and graces. You got all the power, all the wealth. What did we do to them to not like Black people?

I practiced rugged individualism all my life. It builds character, but why am I [and other Black people] still treated differently? White people are still in denial. You can show them all the data but then they want to blame the victims.”

Over the last 50 years, Memphis has placed the burden of disinvestment on “Black on Black” crime and failing schools, a narrative that led to entire zip codes being left out of redevelopment opportunities, a reshuffling of impoverished populations into the margins of the city and creating an economic underbelly of folks employed in distribution warehouses and hubs. The closing of public housing disbursed the city’s impoverished into communities like Whitehaven, Hickory Hill, Orange Mound and Frayser. It created a disinvestment cycle for these neighborhoods to bear the inequitable brunt of poverty, tucked away and eventually forgotten. The city opens its pockets to employers operating warehouses that have left its Black and increasingly Brown workforce crushed, miscarried and starved in communities without access to grocery stores, and trapped in neighborhoods without adequate public transportation.

Economic development is not novel for Eric Robertson, who says Memphis has to “call it like they see it.” As the president of Community Lift, an economic and community development intermediary housed in historic South Memphis, he understands how people-powered, -focused and -centered his organization must be. Its primary aim is to guide opportunities for investment and strategic uplift to “disinvested, resource-poor Black and Brown neighborhoods,” once controversially referred to as “distressed communities.”

He says Community Lift “understands squarely” who they exist to serve in these resource-poor communities because they recognize “there are lives that exist in these neighborhoods.” His organization’s philosophy centers around change being an outgrowth of people who are seen and valued.  

Community Lift works to guide investment and resources into neighborhoods void of such investment over the past 40 years, or as Robertson starkly describes it, communities with “no jobs being created, no services being provided and no quality of life.” The organization’s approach includes “cross-sector involvement” with grassroots groups, grass-top community development corporations, civic groups, city government, and philanthropic and corporate investors. Getting all stakeholders involved requires an equitable and antiracist approach within a civic dynamic that has subjugated the growth and empowerment of Black people for generations. Since 2017, Community Lift’s CDC Capacity Fund has provided $1.1 million to community development corporations, an investment to empower community advocates to fulfill their mission-driven work in under-resourced Black communities.

According to Robertson, Memphis is in peril. Civic and private-sector investors regularly prove their indifference to entire communities that don’t have the ability or means to invest in themselves. The result becomes the cross for future generations to bear.

“Indifference is a hell of a thing [once] you understand the definition,” he says. “Indifference means, ‘I don’t even think about you. You’re not even on my mind.’”

He continues: “When Westwood [and Whitehaven] are not on your mind...or if you never even think about the needs of the people of South Memphis...then you can let [them] sit there, ignored, for 40 years. The challenge is to get these neighborhoods on the minds of [City decision-makers] in a way that they [come to] value them and reallocate resources differently in a way to bring about some equity and change.”

What does the future hold for communities like Whitehaven and the rest of the “Blues City”?  

It may have taken 302 years since Memphis’s founding, but city leaders and stakeholders have laid out its next shot to save the soul of the city. It comes in the form of Memphis 3.0—a comprehensive municipal plan to nurture, accelerate and sustain development and opportunity in 14 designated districts that form the basis of a strategic plan to empower the city from its urban core to the margins. Some community members fear it’s a blueprint to eventually price them out and redevelop the area at the exclusion of the established culture. Recently, calls for a “moral budget” show how a slight increase in property appraisal rates could generate over $100 million in revenue that could be invested in education, transit and mental health.

But is it enough to make city leadership reckon with its racist forefathers? According to Robertson, that will take Memphis losing its respectability as a Blues City and recuperating the soul of the matter: equitably investing in Black people, Black communities, and Black culture. That’s what gives meaning to this city. There is no soul if you don’t invest in the culture that invented the genre. There is no soul when bids for communities come with the lowest investment.

“[I’m afraid that] 100 years after King’s assassination, we’ll still be asking the question about whether Memphis can be an example for the country on how we fight poverty here in King’s beloved community,” Robertson says.