Dr. Byrne stood up for Frayser for 25 years
Everyone in Frayser — young and old, black and white, have-got and havenot — called him Dr. Byrne.
It wasn’t because of his advanced medical degrees or his decades of biomedical and neurological teaching and research.
Dr. Bill Byrne retired from the University of Tennessee’s Health Science Center in 1989, a couple of years before he began working in Frayser.
Frayser didn’t know Dr. Byrne as a man of science and medicine.
It knew him as a man of his works and his word, a resolute, at times obstinate man whose single-minded dedication helped to hold fraying Frayser together for the past 25 years.
“He talked about y’all all the time,” Tracy Moore, his granddaughter, told a group of Frayser livers and lovers who gathered Sunday afternoon at Arkwings Foundation to celebrate Dr. Byrne’s life and work.
“He loved y’all. He loved Frayser, and we know how much you loved him.”
Dr. William L. Byrne died last week from complications due to a stroke. He was 89. Sunday’s celebration was held at the Fran Byrne Memorial Rose Garden, named for Dr. Byrne’s late wife. She died in 2014. They were married for 67 years.
Dr. Byrne never lived in Frayser, but Frayser lived in him. He drove from his home in Pocahontas, Tennessee to Frayser — a 170mile round-trip — two or three times a week for the past 25 years.
“It’s crazy, I know,” he told me several years ago. “Frayser has become a part of me. I can’t explain it.”
Explain it? He barely had time to think about it.
He first came to Frayser in the early 1990s to mentor children and teenagers.
He founded Tennessee Mentorship, a nonprofit that matches young men with older male role models and provides stipends for job training and community service.
“When I first met Dr. Byrne in third grade, he told me I looked too small to rake leaves and cut grass,” Jonathan Ward, now in his 20s, said Sunday. “He wasn’t much bigger than me then, but he showed me it’s not how big you are outside; it’s how big you are inside.”
Over the years, short Dr. Byrne became one of the biggest men in Frayser.
He started, or helped to start, the Frayser Community Association, the Frayser Community Development Corp., the Frayser Interfaith Association and the Frayser Police Joint Agency.
“I wouldn’t be in this neighborhood, if not for Dr. Byrne,” said Steve Lockwood, executive director of the Frayser CDC for the past 14 years. “He always pushed us to do more and do better. It worked because that’s what we saw him doing.”
When Dr. Byrne wasn’t building community organizations, he was building community.
He hosted a community Thanksgiving dinner every year at Ed Rice Community Center. He planted trees (check the Interstate 40 exit at Watkins).
He cleaned up, kept up and spruced up (with a memorial garden) the onceforgotten potter’s field in Frayser Park. He worked with the city to develop the “10 Common Code Violations” brochure, now used citywide.
“City services, such as police, sanitation, code enforcement and parks services have targeted Frayser because of his efforts,” read a
2012 City Council resolution that turned a part of James Road into Dr. William Byrne Avenue. The sign was placed in front of Arkwings.
“Service is the rent we pay for the space we occupy in this world,” John McCall, Arkwings founder who taught with Dr. Byrne at UT, said Sunday, quoting an old aphorism. “If anyone was paid up, it was Dr. Byrne.”
Every week, Dr. Byrne filled his trunk with books and brought them to the community center.
Stephanie Love, a member of the Shelby County Board of Education, told the group Sunday about the first time she met Dr. Byrne.
“I saw this old man bringing a load of books to Ed Rice,” she said. “I said, ‘Sir, do you need help?’ He said, ‘I don’t need help, I just need you to move. I need to get these books to kids who need them.’ ”
Dr. Byrne kept Frayser moving. You either joined him or got out of his way. Nearly everyone joined him.
Sunday’s celebration was a rare sight in Memphis — 27 black folks and 27 white folks gathered for a common purpose.
“He brought everyone together by outworking them,” said Vinessa Brown, co-founder of Lifeline to Success ministry, and, like Dr. Byrne, a graduate of Stanford University. “He outworked me. He outworked youth. Now, my job is to outwork what he did for Frayser.”
Before Dr. Byrne started working at UT in 1968, he was a biomedical researcher at Duke University.
“I’d get up every morning saying I’m going to cure cancer today,” Dr. Byrne told me several years ago. “When I worked at UT, I’d get up every morning thinking about how I was going to repair the human brain. Now I get up every morning thinking that I’m going to save Frayser. It’s just the way I think.”
He didn’t cure cancer or brain disease. He also didn’t save Frayser. Or maybe he did. Who knows what might have happened to Frayser if Dr. Byrne hadn’t been there every week for the past 25 years.
At Sunday’s gathering, Pastor Mike Ellis, founder of Impact Ministries in Frayser, read from Isaiah 6.
“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’ ” Ellis read.
“That was Dr. Byrne. Frayser needed someone to come here and assist everyone else. Dr. Byrne said, ‘Here I am. I’ll go.’ ”
Dr. Byrne kept going until he was gone.