Sometimes Herman Morris Jr. finds it hard to believe that 20 years have passed since he walked into the expansive offices of the city’s public utility company, carrying briefcases for lawyers who had sued to get better jobs for African-Americans.
Morris was a law student working at the city’s only integrated law firm. At the time, most of the utility’s black workers, like those at other companies in Memphis, were trapped in low-paying jobs.
“If you were black, you were a laborer, in maintenance or on the janitorial staff,” said Morris. “Or, if you had a really good job, maybe you worked in the field as a laborer, digging ditches.”
Because of the lawsuit, those limitations no longer hold true at Memphis Light, Gas & Water Co., which Morris now ranks as the city’s most integrated firm. He speaks from a position of authority: He’s the company’s general counsel, with a staff of five attorneys.
“I recall vividly coming into this very building, carrying briefcases of lawyers representing the firm in that lawsuit,” said Morris, 45, who became general counsel in 1989 after a decade in private practice. “Who would have ever thought that, not much more than 15 years after I walked in the door for the lawsuit, I’d walk in the door as the chief legal officer?”
Once it would have been unthinkable in this city for a black man to advance so far, to supervise whites and to have an immense office with Oriental rugs and a desk adorned with souvenirs from plush resorts. That was true even at the height of the civil rights movement, when the city endured its darkest days, and hopes of progress were dim.
Rising from the banks of the Mississippi River, Memphis was the Old South, built on cotton and other agricultural riches that were structured around the premise that blacks who worked the land were inferior.
The plantation mentality persisted after blacks left the farms for the cities, to Memphis and beyond. In the 1960s, when blacks who moved here for opportunity began demanding it, the city’s white power brokers made clear they would not budge.
Setting the stage for an event that devastated a generation, city leaders took a hard-line position with striking black sanitation workers who demanded improved working conditions. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who came to town to support the striking workers, was assassinated at a Memphis motel on April 4, 1968.
The slaying still haunts Memphis. Residents, both black and white, mention the murder as if it occurred last year, and many see it as a reminder that the city’s progress can be undone in an instant.
“I think we’ve made tremendous strides,” said Morris. “But I do think we have a lot of work to do. The pressures are there. The need is there to continue the effort.”
From the boardroom to City Hall, African-Americans are in high-ranking positions. Memphis elected its first black mayor in 1991 and, four years later, he won re-election with 74 percent of the vote. Blacks also are in the majority on the city council and the school board.
Neighborhoods also have changed. Beale Street, for example, once was about the only area in the city where blacks could get a nice meal and listen to music. Today, blues clubs and barbecue restaurants are a tourist mecca, a strip where whites and blacks mingle into the early morning hours.
Despite the advances that helped integrate the corporate offices and social scene, life for many blacks in Memphis is no better. Today 40 percent of African-Americans live below the poverty line, compared with 8 percent of whites. Only 12 percent of blacks have professional careers, while 68 percent are in service positions.
Many tie the economic conditions of blacks to racism, and insist that lives won’t improve until the city comes to grips with its painful legacies, particularly King’s assassination and the lingering effects of Jim Crow.
King’s killing and generations of racist social structures still affect attitudes and influence debate in Memphis, where the issue of race remains paramount. Politicians and residents, white and black, invoke race when discussing everything from the plight of the poor to the Olympic games.
In that sense, Memphis provides a window on difficult issues that other cities, where race often is discussed in code, are grappling to solve. The sense of urgency has increased as the searing images of burning black churches in the South refocus the nation’s attention on the region a generation after the civil rights era.
“I think race is a factor in every community across the United States. But in Memphis, it is not below the surface. It’s at surface level,” said Jim Foreman, executive director of the National Conference, a race-relations organization. “That’s the most common complaint about Memphis: Everything revolves around race. People wear it on their sleeve.”
But Foreman said that sensitivity to race is good because people confront the issue head-on. Only by talking frankly about race can the city come together to solve its problems, he added.
“We’re involved in a changing South,” said Mayor W.W. Herenton, 54, who was the city’s first black school superintendent before he became its first black mayor. “There are emerging white leaders who clearly understand our destinies are tied together, that Memphis cannot make progress unless it works together to achieve unity between the races.”
Many believe the influx of poor blacks from the Mississippi Delta has contributed to the problems the city is struggling to overcome. Memphis, flanked by the poverty of Mississippi to the south and Arkansas to the west, was a beacon for poor, uneducated blacks who came to get jobs that proved largely nonexistent.
“What we have here is a lot of people who tried to escape the poverty in Mississippi and Arkansas and came to the next biggest city to get a job,” Foreman said. “They wound up living in housing projects, on the lowest level of the socio-economic rung.”
Those differences went unattended for years, but now politicians and white business leaders are paying attention, largely because of the changing political structure and sheer business necessity.
Today, the message for racial harmony often is couched in terms of economics–not for the poor blacks but for the wealthy white businesses. The Memphis Race Relations & Diversity Institute, for example, works with businesses to convince firms that discrimination hurts their pocketbooks.
The group uses statistics to demonstrate that blacks would contribute $9 billion to the economy if their per-capita income were on par with whites, and it offers seminars and diversity training for employees in middle management.
“We say to them this is a bottom line issue: If you don’t want to pay attention to this for what they say are the right reasons, then it is a business imperative,” said Linda Bailey, the white program director.
Others encourage blacks to form their own businesses. Memphis has twice as many churches as black-owned businesses, according to the Black Business Association. Black leaders say that’s because blacks historically haven’t had the opportunities or role models that whites have. And those who try to become entrepreneurs often fail. In Memphis, black-owned businesses go under three times more often than those owned by whites.
There are successes, such as Donald Crump, a former school teacher with a flair for the restaurant business. Crump was moonlighting as a restaurant manager when his boss told him he couldn’t take a few days off to attend a friend’s graduation from the FBI Academy. That’s when he decided to make the move and go into business himself.
With loans from friends and family, he came up with $10,000 to open the first Crumpy’s Restaurant, in a strip mall in predominantly black southeast Memphis. He recalls that on opening day he borrowed his mother’s credit card to buy silverware, only to find none of the outlets took plastic. When he got to the `M’s’ in the phone book, he found a business that agreed to sell on credit.
Five years and countless 100-hour work weeks later, he has six restaurants, specializing in hot wings that are the talk of city.
“We’re on our way,” said Crump, 40, a personable man who radiates quiet confidence. “We’re going to franchise these things. That’s our goal now: We’re looking at the big picture.”
But there are too few successes like Crump, who says he fields two to three calls a week from people seeking advice on starting their own businesses. Many of the callers are surprised at the commitment–financial and personal–that such an endeavor takes. Others, he said, are afraid to take the risk.
Some blacks say the black community must take part of the blame because residents often shun black-owned businesses for those owned by whites.
“We think white water is always better than black water, even though it’s the same ice,” said Darvin Sanders of the Black Business Association. “We grew up feeling inferior.”
The Black Business Association offers seminars to encourage minorities to go into business or to help them learn about getting government contracts, but mostly white women attend, Sanders said.
“The biggest challenge in Memphis is turning political empowerment into economic empowerment,” said Herenton, a tall, lanky man who retains the confidence and determination of the Golden Gloves champion fighter he was in his youth. “Memphis will not be a thriving city until this new majority’s economic condition improves.”
Much of the political progress for blacks has come about only within the last decade. Herenton became school superintendent, for example, only after blacks protested the appointment of a white man from Grosse Point, Mich. The candidate backed out after black marchers met him at the airport with signs that said, “Go back to Michigan.”
In Herenton’s first campaign for mayor, he got 2 percent of the white vote. Last year, after working closely with the business community, he was re-elected in a landslide, with 50 percent of the white vote.
Race remains a volatile issue on the Shelby County Board of Commissioners, which has seven whites and six blacks. The county is about 55 percent white, while Memphis is about 55 percent black.
The debates often break down along racial lines, as seen in a recent fight over whether Memphis residents could vote in a county school board election. Whites who opposed allowing city residents to vote were called racist.
“We claim we’re representing one community, but really, there are two communities, a white community and a black community,” said Cleo Kirk, 57, a black dentist who serves on the commission. “It’s been that way, and I don’t see it changing.”
Kirk’s face still bears a scar from a knife that a white gas station attendant threw at him in the 1960s, when his brother drank out of a water fountain for whites in a small town outside Memphis.
Though it’s a different world now, he says he still sees whites who believe they’re superior to blacks, genetically and historically. While Memphis residents frequently discuss race, he says, the debates aren’t always frank. Even on the commission, he said, white members cater to stereotypes about blacks to get support, and blacks do the same.
“We have to have politicians who could care less about getting re-elected,” he said. “If you’re black, to get re-elected all you do is constantly bash white folk, and if you’re white, you just got to focus on things that show you don’t care a doggone thing about black folk.”
Some white politicians make a similar point, but say blacks now are more likely to blatantly manipulate race to find favor, just as whites did in the 1970s when they buried school buses here to show their opposition to court-ordered desegregation.
“By and large, today, white political figures are less apt to play the race card in overt ways,” said Bill Gibbons, a white county commissioner who will resign in November to become the county’s district attorney. “The shoe’s on the other foot a bit because now black politicians are willing to more overtly play the race card.”
Black residents see it differently. They say they still encounter racism everyday, as well as remnants of the old thinking that led to the sanitation strike three decades ago.
“Is racism alive and well? It is. Sometimes it’s just a little more difficult to gauge because it’s more subtle,” said Johnnie R. Turner, executive secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP. “It’s not like white water fountains and black water fountains, and that makes it more difficult to fight–because it’s less obvious.”
But in all this–the economics and the politics–many whites say blacks are too quick to see racism. This is the drawback to the city’s obsession with race: Many whites just don’t want to hear it anymore, particularly those who weren’t around during the struggles of the 1960s and don’t see themselves as prejudiced.
“I walk around knowing they blame my generation, though I had nothing to do with it,” said Marty Ballard, 29, a district manager for Pepsi Cola Bottling Co. “To be honest, I get tired of hearing it. It’s got to be a point where it’s over, we can be done with it.”
