Can South Memphis residents build their own economy?
Residents aim to reclaim neglected neighborhoods
Last year, residents of Prospect Park won their battle to stop a businessman from building a gas station on land where it wasn’t meant to be.
But what’s exhausting is that such battles often arise from the notion that people in poor neighborhoods like South Memphis are unworthy of living in areas that don’t carry risks of pollution, or crime, or other detriments which enrich others at the cost of dehumanizing them.
Yet residents like Cassandra Dixon, who led demonstrations to stop the gas station from being built, are challenging that notion. And Anasa Troutman, executive director of Historic Clayborn Temple, is gearing up to help people like them.
Not by helping them organize protests, but by helping them organize their economics.
For the past two years, Troutman and others have been working to bring restorative economics to South Memphis. Restorative economics is a strategy that helps people reclaim neglected neighborhoods through, among other things, pooling their money, their resources, and their political power to start food cooperatives and to buy land to use in the way they see fit.
“As I was traveling around the country to raise money for the building (Clayborn Temple) I had the great fortune of meeting people who were doing work around building new economies, and sustainable communities in Black communities all over the country,” Troutman said.
“So, I’m like, ‘This is what we need in Memphis, some of these models to revive the work and bring the people back into the conversation.’”
In other words, such conversations could help residents like Dixon get the jump on someone’s plans to build a gas station or convenience store where it’s unneeded by pooling their money, or by going through other channels, to buy that land for something else.
“We wish it was some way that we could make this a green space for the community,” said Dixon. “We would like to see if we could do a community garden, where we could grow different plants and vegetables. That would be wonderful.”
It would also fill a need; Black people are three times as likely to live in neighborhoods with a dearth of green spaces than white people.
To help Memphians learn how restorative economics works, Clayborn Temple will host a live, virtual event on April 5th featuring experts who have been successful in that area. One of the speakers, for example, is Erin Dale Byrd, who helped found Fertile Ground, a food cooperative in southeast Raleigh, N.C.
The community began the cooperative when major supermarkets shunned their area. Other experts in restorative economics have led residents in initiatives to purchase vacant land in their neighborhoods for uses that benefit them – and that they control.
Troutman said that one of the reasons she believes restorative economics can work in Memphis is because the city has its own icon for this: Robert Reed Church.
When Church, one of the nation’s first Black millionaires, bought a bond for $1,000 in 1893 to purchase Memphis’ charter after the city relinquished it in the wake of the yellow fever epidemic, he saved the city.
Church also opened the city’s first Black-owned bank, built a park and playground for Black Memphians, and used his wealth to generally expand access and opportunity for Black people.
“I was inspired by the story of Robert Church,” Troutman said. “The Memphis that Robert Church built is the Memphis we dream about right now as if it’s not possible. But it already existed…
“Memphis, to me, is ground zero for healing (race and class) in America.”
This is an opportune moment for Memphis to build, or rather rebuild, a model for restorative economics.
First of all, South Memphis is spawning activists who are taking charge of that community’s destiny; one which doesn’t include more gas stations and certainly not that Byhalia oil pipeline that could potentially leak oil into their drinking water.
They are no longer allowing their community to be regarded as an afterthought by businesses and industries that want to exploit what they see as their powerlessness.
Yet to get to a place of sustainability and ultimately, prosperity, it’s also clear that South Memphis must have a strategy that directs them on how to get to that place; a place where, for example, they no longer have to entice a supermarket chain to set up shop in a food desert because they’ve built their own food cooperative.
“One of the reasons why I stayed in Memphis to do this work (restorative economics) is because I realized that if we have to wait on the people who have power and access to capital to understand what they need to do to help, as we’re doing that now… they won’t ever understand,” said Troutman, who came here from Atlanta.
“We’re more than willing for them to participate, but we have to be able to do it without them.”
Or, in the case of Prospect Park, to stop outsiders from continuing to do things to them, not with them.
Thrive – the restorative economics seminar – is at 4:30 p.m. April 5th on Zoom. To register for free, go to https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tjytdyhpjwthtfzls2pnxsbbfj--51fzigf.
You can reach Commercial Appeal columnist Tonyaa Weathersbee at 901-568-3281, tonyaa.weathersbee@commercialappeal.com or follow her on Twitter @tonyaajw.