MEMPHIS THEN AND NOW
MLK’s death set off an upheaval, on the streets and in the city’s soul
MEMPHIS – In the days after Martin Luther King Jr. was felled by an assassin’s bullet, Henry Turley looked out from the top floor of Memphis’ tallest building and watched his city burn, one neighborhood at a time.
The smoke billowing from fires set by rioters in areas to the north, east and south of downtown “was all over the place,” said Turley, now a prominent developer who in 1968 was an executive with a real estate firm.
Fifty years after King’s assassination in Memphis, the fires and smoke are gone, but echoes of that fatal shot still reverberate throughout the city.
Although white flight and suburbanization had begun long before 1968, the upheaval caused by the sanitation strike and assassination that year accelerated the abandonment of downtown and the central core of Memphis.
A city that had once seemed poised to rival Atlanta and other fast-growing metropolises in the South sustained a lasting blow to its image.
The Memphis of today is markedly poorer than the bustling manufacturing and banking hub it was in 1968. Median family income, in inflation-adjusted dollars, has dropped nearly 20%, and the nine-county Memphis region has the highest poverty rate of any metro area in the nation with at least 1 million residents.
Although Memphis’ population has increased about 5% to nearly 656,000 since 1968, nearly all the growth came through annexation as the city stretched its boundaries to retain fleeing residents. Demographically, the city flipped from being 61% white to nearly
two-thirds black.
Memphis is more integrated today than it was a half-century ago. Of the 117 Census tracts that existed across the city 50 years ago, 92 had populations that were at least 90% white or 90% black. Today, that’s true of just a little more than one-third of Census tracts in Memphis.
Schools, however, remain highly segregated and a flash point in the area’s racial divide. Court-ordered busing beginning in the early 1970s led to a white exodus from Memphis City Schools, and after the predominantly black city system surrendered its charter seven years ago and merged with Shelby County Schools, the mostly white suburban municipalities formed their own systems.
Despite the ascension of African Americans into positions of power — including the previous two mayors and current police chief and school superintendent — black residents lag far behind economically, with a median household income only 55% that of white households.
Downtown ‘just evaporated’
In neighborhoods across the city, change came unevenly but inexorably.
Nowhere did it occur more rapidly than downtown, where storefronts had been shattered and where armored halftracks and bayonet-wielding National Guard troops patrolled during the strike and after King’s murder at the Lorraine Motel, just a block off Main Street.
Coupled with the development of shopping and office centers in burgeoning new residential areas and the failure of plans to build an east-west expressway to downtown, the events of 1968 precipitated a mad rush out of the central business district.
“Things just evaporated,” says Shelby County historian Jimmy Ogle.
In 1973, the famed Peabody Hotel closed, followed a few years later by the Orpheum Theatre, and after that the Lorraine. Such was the state of the downtown real estate market that between 1975 and 1982, those three iconic properties were purchased for a combined total of less than $1 million.
On Beale Street, the historic heart of blues music and African-American cul- ture, business activity had withered by the early 1960s. In the years after King’s assassination, previously planned urban renewal initiatives demolished entire blocks, leaving a lonely stretch of mostly boarded-up structures.
By 1979, downtown was home to more jail inmates than permanent residents, Ogle says.
But the downward trajectory of downtown began to reverse in the 1980s. Beale Street was redeveloped into a thriving entertainment district, one of the anchors of the city’s $3.2 billion tourism and convention industry, and the reopened Peabody has regained some of its past glamour. New high-end apartment and residential projects eventually attracted about 20,000 people to live in the downtown area. The Lorraine was transformed into the National Civil Rights Museum, which drew a record 300,000 visitors in 2017.
Like downtown, other neighborhoods across the city have experienced ups and downs of their own since 1968.
‘Jobs all went away’
Fifty years ago, the community of Frayser was a prosperous, mostly bluecollar community on Memphis’ northern edge that grew during the postwar boom of the 1950s and ’60s. It was home to more than 40,000 people, about 98% of them white.
Two nearby factories — International Harvester and Firestone — were the major employers.
But in the early 1980s, both factories shut down.
As a result, Frayser was hit hardest by what local economist David Ciscel calls “the complete transformation of the Memphis economy” from one that’s manufacturing-based to one that relies heavily on services, logistics and health care.
“If you were a high-school-educated white male (in the 1960s), there were a lot of not only high-quality manufacturing jobs but union jobs,” says Ciscel, professor emeritus at the University of Memphis.
“Those jobs all went away.”
As a result, longtime residents such as Janet Allen, 83, have seen Frayser descend from being one of Memphis’ most prosperous areas to one plagued by blight and poverty.
In her Census tract, income levels are less than half what they were 50 years ago, and the median home value has fallen 40%.
Allen, who is white and moved with her husband to Frayser about five years after King’s assassination, lives in a Census tract that was more than 99% white in 1970 but now is 89.2% black.
“I could call on any of these neighbors at any time, and they would do anything for me,” she said.
“I think we sort of blame poor Martin King for something we did. ... The trend was set.” Developer Henry Turley