Memphis race relations – Memphis Flyer

I can see your little beady eyes through the blinds, neighbor. I was minding my own business, walking down the street and listening to my podcast — ironically, the episode is about the complexity of gentrification, the fact that there aren’t always clear-cut reasons for why urban displacement happens the way it does outside of those forces we already know are at play.

Why are you watching me so closely? Is it because my body and my skin make me a walking violation of the unspoken rules here? Are you worried that I’m going to rob you? Don’t. You don’t have anything I want. I love my life. I don’t want to have what you have or be a part of you or drive your car or eat your food. And I’m certainly not going to jeopardize my future over you and your insecurities.

But I’m irritated. Despite my innate status as a habitual line-stepper, I do follow the rules. Obsessively, even. I have created my own internal taxonomy of the unwritten rules, research spearheaded by my decades of necessary study of how you move through the world and the hateful current you leave in your wake. I clean up my trash; I leash my dogs; I don’t make too much noise. I am loud sometimes sure, but that’s just how I am sometimes. You’ll be all right. I hold the door and smile and stand up straight and don’t walk toward you too fast and jingle my keys or cough when it’s dark outside so that you know I’m coming and don’t accidentally call the police to have me arrested for the crime of breathing too close to where you’ve decided you want to be. All of this in 2017, a time when I’m more than justified in cursing you out for slights old and new. But I’m trying to be nice, stupid me.

And what’s really screwed up is that I don’t have time to worry about you. I have to worry about my city being the “bankruptcy capital of the U.S.” I have to worry about the Tennessee Historical Commission blocking us from removing the honorable racist general and his horse from our public parks. I have to wonder how my little brother is getting home from work and whether or not my dog can go another week without a bath and whether I’ve wasted $30 because I didn’t freeze the three pounds of catfish still sitting on the bottom shelf of my refrigerator. I have to worry about whether or not Amazon or “public improvement projects” or any number of contentious developments are going to once again extract labor and time and pain from poor people here and use it to pad their pockets. I have a lot of worries, you see.

You’d think that black neighborhoods were cesspools of savagery, with broken-down cars and untended yards and robberies — all reasons why they deserve to be kept in disinvestment purgatory. But the folks in my previous neighborhood were calm and kind. They let my dogs run in their yard and pulled my trash can to the street if I forgot and let me borrow their jumper cables. They gave me spare change when I needed it and brought me back bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos from the corner store even when I didn’t ask them to. The way they looked at the space that we shared included me, saw me and my family for what I was in truth, not for what I represented based on their silly biases and lack of empathy.

You’re not good at sharing, which is what you’re supposed to do in spaces like this. You’re not good at sharing because you’ve been centered in everything since the beginning of this grand experiment, and this centering, all this attention paid to you is so deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness and in our operation that you feel truly justified in the disgusting ways that you behave toward me in this space that we’ve both paid for access to. I don’t have room to be a bad neighbor, which sucks, because if I could I’d invite my thuggish rapper friends over and I’d pay them to jump up and down and spit fire verses over those dank beats y’all like to play in your Prius. But this would be in the middle of our shared street, and all of the other black people over here would dance around the glow of my rapper friends’ gold chains like it was a bonfire and we were casting a dark magic spell to banish you from our space.

But I’m not a bad neighbor, so I won’t do that. Instead I’ll continue to find joy in being better than you and making you so uncomfortable that you’d rather disappear than chance a meeting with me in the hallway. Oh, and my address has finally been confirmed on NextDoor.com, so be careful, because I’m lurking. The next time you make a frantic post about how scared you are because there are strange black men walking down the street like crazed gorillas, I’m gonna spam your posts with that picture where somebody photoshopped buttholes over Donald Trump’s eyeballs and mouth. In the meantime, I’m going to get to work on having my rapper friends come over to our part of town. It’s gonna take us a while to get this dark magic spell cast, and I want to make sure it’s done just right.
Troy L. Wiggins is a Memphis writer whose work has appeared in the Memphis Noir anthology, Make Memphis, and The Memphis Flyer.

Between the two giant pillars of Edward Hull Crump, the white Mississippian who established an enduring political dominion over Memphis in the early 20th century, and Willie Herenton, the five-times-elected black mayor whose seeming invincibility concluded that century, lies a tumultuous story worth telling.

And Otis Sanford, the former managing editor of The Commercial Appeal and now holder of the Hardin Chair of Excellence in Economic/Managerial Journalism at the University of Memphis, tells it with accuracy and grace in From Boss Crump to King Willie: How Race Changed Memphis Politics, hot off the University of Tennessee Press.

In a way unusual for a work of history, this book reads like a novel — its facts accounted for both in concise summaries of events and circumstances and in key moments that are rendered as scenes.

Among the latter is an account of how a chance encounter in 1991 between then Congressman Harold Ford and the Rev. Ralph White at a Union Avenue video store resulted in White’s church, Bloomfield Baptist Church, becoming the venue for Ford’s long-postponed “summit meeting” to determine the identity of a consensus black candidate for mayor.

Sanford follows up that revelation with choice reportage of the upstairs meeting at the church involving Ford, Herenton, and disappointed contender Otis Higgs while an auditorium of Herenton supporters, whose energetic wall-to-wall presence had basically called the congressman’s hand, waited impatiently in the church auditorium to hear Ford’s inevitable anointment of Herenton as the people’s choice.

Sanford’s book is a textbook case of how to handle the black-and-white realities of Memphis’ political evolution with appropriate shadings of gray. His narrative concludes before the lengthy period, after Herenton’s ascension to power, of the often grim public and private struggles for preeminence between the African-American mayor and the African-American congressman stemming from the implicit rivalry of these two monumental egos.

But that feud, after all, belongs to a different historical era, post-1991, which has been intermittently post-racial. Consider the overwhelming white support for A C Wharton, an African American, first as Shelby County mayor and, in 2009, as Herenton’s immediate successor as Memphis mayor, or Steve Cohen’s serial victories over black opponents in a 9th Congressional District that is at least two-thirds African American in population, and the comfortable win of Jim Strickland, another white, in 2015 over Wharton in a city whose increasingly black complexion is unmistakable.

Consider the consistent ability of white Republican candidates to prevail over black Democrats in all the Shelby County elections that have taken place in the 21st century, a period when the county at large, like the city, has had a majority-black electorate.

From the standpoint of Sanford’s narrative, such anomalies might be regarded as signals of a modus vivendi between the two dominant races, of a political balance of sorts that required both the deconstruction of white supremacy and the liberation and triumph of an erstwhile black underclass. A viable new order may somehow have been achieved, though undeniable inequalities of various sorts persist and just plain differences endure.

Sanford’s story is one of transformation — from an urban landscape under the domination of Crump, a de facto plantation boss whose quasi-benevolent attitude toward a black population enabled both his own immediate power and the stirrings of that population’s own ultimate abilities and ambitions.

The giant-sized convulsions that belong to the intermediate stages of this saga — the strikes and assassinations and political showdowns — are not overlooked. They are covered in satisfying detail, as are the more nuanced encounters between winners and losers in the chess games of our political history.

Sanford, whose astonishing objectivity as reporter and analyst continues to be featured in his weekly columns in the Sunday CA, knows not heroes and villains. His characters, both black and white, are presented with all the roundness and complex motivations they owned as real live people.