When I moved to Memphis in 1988, I took a position as a warehouse clerk. My Mississippi-born supervisor was a “polite” racist: She’d lower her voice to a whisper when she said the words “Black people.” It was my earliest lesson in how white supremacy perpetuated itself with good manners.
Today, both Yankees like me and Memphians who’ve embraced multicultural values must grapple with such irksome mores, but because they’re often only whispered, those grappling can feel isolated. That’s why Shelley E. Moore’s new memoir, Through a Blue-Eyed Lens: Reflections, Snapshots, Pinholes in Black and White Memphis 1962-1972 (Alchemy Media), is so valuable.
Moore, a white woman raised in Wyoming, Georgia, and Kansas before landing in Memphis at age 8, provides the perfect outsider’s perspective on such mores during the height of the Civil Rights movement. She fearlessly delves into matters of racial relations, as the book zeroes in on them as its central theme. After turning 18, she went on to life adventures elsewhere, but, as she writes, “I have no intention of detailing those decades.” Rather, she’s leaned in to the need to confront her formative years here, equal parts enlightening, troubling, and traumatizing. As such, the volume is a rare social history of a city in turmoil, as experienced by a teenager.
It’s a little-explored window into the city’s official history as well: The author’s father, Jerry Moore, came to here to serve as senior city planner, ultimately becoming the city’s chief administrative officer under Mayor Henry Loeb in 1968. As Moore writes, “I, and many others, have questioned how Jerry reconciled working directly under a man who was an avowed segregationist and obstructionist.” While he doesn’t have much of a voice in this work, Jerry and his wife Sonya hover in the background as “liberally progressive people” who set the tone for their children’s worldview, often at odds with the assumptions of white Memphis.
The resulting culture shock runs the gamut from innocent confusion to outrage to sheer terror. At first, Moore notices the egregious commonalities of segregation — “No White People Allowed in Zoo Today” — but finer details make racial politics more vivid as she matures. When a teenaged Moore naively applies to work as a house cleaner, she’s told, “We only hire Colored maids.”
Significantly, Moore saw the desegregation of schools as it happened. She writes it was “poorly executed,” and the Memphis School Board was “not invested in the process.” But her experience of it went deeper, as she began dating Dwain, a fellow eighth-grader at Bellevue Junior High School who happened to be Black. Even as she learned new dance moves to Stax 45s, she writes, “I was effectively and immediately ditched by my closest white girlfriends. Almost overnight, I became a pariah.”
From there, Moore’s clash with the city’s most reactionary elements only worsened. The story’s bolstered with passages penned by her mother, siblings, classmates, and Dwain himself, the son of a respected Black clergyman. Letters she wrote and received in those years are inserted into the narrative, lending multiple perspectives. All of these voices confirm that, even then, Moore and her family were part of a larger progressive community. But that only made the violence of the era more impactful.
One day after Moore’s mother, siblings, and family friends attended Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s appearance at Mason Temple, and even as Dwain’s family prepared a meal for King in their home that night, he was assassinated. With Mayor Loeb unreachable by phone, it was Moore’s father who personally found him and told him the news.
It was Jerry Moore who represented the city in negotiations with the sanitation workers that King had come to champion. Yet that’s almost an afterthought in this profoundly personal story of privilege mixed with personal risk. Even her father’s clout could not prevent death threats from the White Citizens’ Council, triggered by her interracial dating. Having thus had her feet held to the fire, readers will sympathize with her desire to simply leave when she came of age. We’re lucky she’s come back now, decades later, to confront the demons of racism that still haunt her, and all of us.