How Memphis has changed since MLK assassination, sanitation strike

MEMPHIS — In the days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was felled by an assassin’s bullet, Henry Turley looked out from the top floor of Memphis’ tallest building and watched his city burn, one neighborhood at a time.

The smoke billowing from fires set by rioters in areas to the north, east and south of downtown "was all over the place," said Turley, now a prominent developer who in 1968 was an executive with a real estate firm managing the 38-story 100 North Main Building.

Fifty years after King’s assassination in Memphis, the fires and smoke are gone, but echoes of that fatal shot still reverberate throughout the city.

Although white flight and suburbanization had begun long before 1968, the upheaval caused by the sanitation strike and assassination that year helped accelerate the abandonment of downtown and the central core of Memphis.

A city that had once seemed poised to rival Atlanta and other fast-growing metropolises in the South sustained a lasting blow to its image. Derogatory coverage pervaded the national media, most notably Time magazine’s dismissal of Memphis as a “Southern backwater” and “decaying Mississippi River town.”

Poorer today than in 1968

The Memphis of today is markedly poorer than the bustling manufacturing and banking hub it was in 1968. Median family income, in inflation-adjusted dollars, has dropped nearly 20 percent, and the nine-county Memphis region has the highest poverty rate of any metro area in the nation with at least 1 million residents.

Although Memphis' population has increased about 5 percent to nearly 656,000 since 1968, nearly all the growth came through annexation as the city stretched its boundaries to retain fleeing residents. Demographically, the city flipped from being 61 percent white to nearly two-thirds black.

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Memphis is more integrated today than it was a half-century ago. Of the 117 census tracts that existed across the city 50 years ago, 92 had populations that were at least 90 percent white or 90 percent black. Today, that's true of just a little over one-third of census tracts in Memphis.

Schools, however, remain highly segregated and a volatile flash point in the area's racial divide. Court-ordered busing beginning in the early 1970s led to a white exodus from Memphis City Schools, and after the predominantly black city system surrendered its charter seven years ago and merged with Shelby County Schools, the mostly white suburban municipalities formed their own systems.

Despite the ascension of African-Americans into positions of power — including the previous two mayors and current police chief and school superintendent — black residents lag far behind economically, with a median household income only 55 percent that of white households.

In neighborhoods across the city, from the Mississippi River on the west to East Memphis, change came unevenly but inexorably.

A mad rush out of downtown

Nowhere did it occur more rapidly than downtown, where storefronts had been shattered and where armored half-tracks and bayonet-wielding National Guard troops patrolled during the strike and after King's murder at the Lorraine Motel, just a block off Main Street.

Coupled with the development of shopping and office centers in burgeoning new residential areas, and the failure of plans to build an east-west expressway to downtown, the events of 1968 precipitated a mad rush out of the central business district.

"Things just evaporated," says Shelby County historian Jimmy Ogle.

In 1973, the famed Peabody Hotel closed, followed a few years later by the Orpheum Theatre, and after that, the Lorraine. Such was the state of the downtown real estate market that between 1975 and 1982, those three iconic properties were purchased for a combined total of less than $1 million.

Corporate offices fled to developments such as Ridgeway Center, launched in 1971 on the grounds of a former country club, and to Clark Tower, a 32-story building that opened in East Memphis a year later.

On Beale Street, the historic heart of blues music and African-American culture, business activity had withered by the early 1960s. In the years after King's assassination, previously planned urban renewal initiatives demolished entire blocks, leaving a lonely stretch of mostly boarded-up structures.

By 1979, downtown was home to more jail inmates than permanent residents, Ogle says.

Turley, a developer who has launched projects that helped revitalize downtown, says it's easy to blame the sanitation strike and assassination for the decline, but other factors actually had begun the process earlier.

"I think we sort of blame poor Martin King for something we did ... ," Turley says. "The trend was set."

But the downward trajectory of downtown began to reverse in the 1980s.

Beale Street was redeveloped into a thriving entertainment district, one of the anchors of the city's $3.2 billion tourism and convention industry, and the reopened Peabody has regained some of its past glamour.

New high-end apartment projects and residential projects eventually attracted some 20,000 people to live in the downtown area. The Lorraine was transformed into the National Civil Rights Museum, which drew a record 300,000 visitors in 2017.

Like downtown, other neighborhoods across the city have experienced ups and downs of their own since 1968.

Frayser hit hardest

Fifty years ago, the community of Frayser was a prosperous, mostly blue-collar community on Memphis' northern edge that grew during the postwar boom of the 1950s and '60s. It was home to more than 40,000 people, about 98 percent of them white.

Two nearby factories — International Harvester and Firestone — were the major employers. They helped provide median family incomes in 1969 of between $60,000 and $75,000 in today's dollars, according to 1970 figures for four census tracts encompassing the area.

But in the early 1980s, both factories shut down. As a result, Frayser was hit hardest by what local economist David Ciscel calls "the complete transformation of the Memphis economy" from one that's manufacturing based to one that's heavily reliant on services, logistics and health care.

"If you were a high school-educated white male (in the 1960s), there were a lot of not only high-quality manufacturing jobs, but union jobs," says Ciscel, professor emeritus at the University of Memphis.

"Those jobs all went away."

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As a result, longtime residents like Janet Allen, 83, have seen Frayser descend from being one of Memphis' most prosperous areas to one that's plagued by blight and poverty. In her census tract, income levels are less than half what they were 50 years ago, and the median home value has fallen 40 percent.

Allen, who moved with her husband to Frayser about five years after King's assassination, says her neighborhood isn't as well kept up as it used to be, a consequence of more and more homes becoming rental properties.

"They (some renters) don't keep the homes up. ... I don't know if it's because they don't have the income," she said.

Allen, who is white, lives in a census tract that was more than 99 percent white in 1970 but now is 89.2 percent black. She says neighbors get along well and are quick to help each other.

"I could call on any of these neighbors at any time, and they would do anything for me," she said.

Changes in Orange Mound

Another part of town that has been reeling from change in recent decades is Orange Mound, a community southeast of downtown on which a former plantation was developed into one of the nation's first residential areas where African-Americans could buy homes.

Fifty years ago, two census tracts encompassing the community held some 14,000 residents, about 98 percent of them African-Americans. The unemployment rate for the community was less than 6 percent, with many residents working as laborers and maids, according to census data. The median family income was nearly $30,000 in today's dollars.

Since then, the population of Orange Mound has steadily fallen as the removal of housing barriers allowed black residents to move into more affluent areas. By 2016, fewer than 5,500 people lived there, and the unemployment rate ranged from 17 to 20 percent. Median household incomes were below $20,000.

Daisy Miller, 80, has owned the Orange Mound Grill since 1973.

Miller, who began cooking there in 1959 when her uncle fired the cook for not showing up for work, says she’s seen lots of changes.

“I’ve been cooking chitterlings for 60 years now,” said Miller, whose restaurant still features that as the main offering, along with fried corn, chicken and dumplings, neck bones, pig feet and other soul food. “When I first got here and started working, all along Carnes and Park avenues, there was nothing but businesses. Out of those 60 years, I’m the only soul food business left out here.

“I did this catering thing for Martin Luther King, because he loved chitterlings. He was eating dinner at somebody’s house, and they came and got chitterlings for him."

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Charles Williams, former University of Memphis archaeologist and author of a 2013 book about Orange Mound and its history, said the community "became a palatial place for black people when they couldn’t get homes anywhere else.”

By 1979, drugs and crime had begun to erode the civic fabric of the area. "Orange Mound was residential, but more transients started moving into the community, and they overwhelmed the community to the point where blight started moving in,” Williams said.

East Memphis still affluent

One community that has seen less change than others is East Memphis, much of which remains affluent and predominantly white.

It was in this area of Memphis where the King assassination nearly cost the city one of its most esteemed scientists, Dr. Robert Webster, a New Zealand native and renowned influenza expert at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Webster moved in early 1968 into a neighborhood of homes built in the mid-1960s where median family incomes were about $85,000 in today's dollars.

Webster was working at St. Jude when the mortally wounded King was transported to the adjoining St. Joseph Hospital. Days after the assassination, he donned one of the signature "I Am A Man" placards and marched with King's widow, Coretta Scott King, to City Hall to urge a resolution to the sanitation strike.

But the assassination prompted Webster to consider leaving Memphis. Friends and family members wondered "whether I'd made the right move" to Memphis, he recalls. He left for several months for Australia, but eventually returned after deciding St. Jude was the right fit for his skills.

The census tract where Webster lives remains affluent, but it has become somewhat more integrated than the 97 percent white area it was 50 years ago. Hundreds of residents of Asian descent have moved in, leaving the area 88 percent white. Median household incomes remain around $85,000, and the median home value is $186,000.

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Webster has a sign in his front yard saying, "No matter where you are from, we're glad you're our neighbor."

"It's no longer just a white neighborhood," says Webster, now 85. "It's just as stable as it was."

Reporters Tonyaa Weathersbee and Mike Reicher contributed to this article.