Byrne’s efforts for Frayser set example for city
We hear a lot about up-and-coming 20- 30- and 40-somethings who are using their professional skills and their free time to make the lives of the city’s less fortunate better.
It is not unusual for their efforts to emerge from the nonprofit entities that promote networking and community service. Their efforts are a blessing for the community.
And then there are individuals, professional and nonprofessional, who just feel a strong urge to get involved — to make a difference.
Dr. William L. Byrne fits into that category — a man of science and medicine who felt called to help Frayser, a once-prosperous part of Memphis that is a neighborhood on the edge of a precipice because of blight, foreclosures, job loss, street gangs and crime.
As The Commercial Appeal’s David Waters said in his column published Tuesday, Frayser residents knew Dr. Byrne “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 died last week from complications due to a stroke. He was 89.
Dr. Byrne retired from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in 1989, a couple of years before he began working in Frayser. Before he began working at UT in 1968, he was a biomedical researcher at Duke University.
He never lived in Frayser, but began his volunteer service there in the early 1990s to mentor children and teenagers.
His voluntarism took off from there, starting or helping to start a host of organizations aimed at making Frayser and the lives of its residents better.
Those organizations include the Tennessee Mentorship, a nonprofit that matches young men with older male role models and provides stipends for job training and community service; the Frayser Community Association, the Frayser Community Development Corp., the Frayser Interfaith Association, and the Frayser Police Joint Agency.
He hosted a community Thanksgiving dinner every year at Ed Rice Community Center, and planted trees at the Interstate 40 exit at Watkins.
He did all this and more because he cared, and that caring made a difference.
It inspired others working to prevent Frayser from falling over the precipice to work harder and not give up.
The societal ills that keep Frayser on that unstable ledge also are eroding or have eroded the foundations of other neighborhoods inside the interstate loop.
Memphis and Shelby County governments, the Greater Memphis Chamber, the Economic Development Growth Engine of Memphis and Shelby County, the community’s philanthropic foundations and scores of other organizations finally have realized that it will take a collaborative effort to rejuvenate these areas.
That effort includes finding the financial resources to make the kind of investments that can help bring these neighborhoods back.
The voluntarism by people like Dr. William L. Byrne is just as important. The time he donated, and the time others continue to donate to work at ground zero in distressed neighborhoods carries a lot of weight.
It shows residents that someone really cares, and provides stronger motivation for others to step up their game in making their neighborhoods better places.