"O, MEMPHIS"

 “O, MEMPHIS”

I was born in the Methodist Hospital in Memphis.  Even that many years ago, Memphis was the capital of three territories:  eastern Arkansas where I lived, north Mississippi where all my forebears are from, and western Tennessee where Caroline’s dad grew up.  Though I lived in Arkansas, Memphis was the city to which all the small town people in the three territories related, including me and my family.  My mother’s brother, Bud Armour, lived in Memphis before he and his family moved to Chicago – part of the Great Migration in a different way. My mother’s other closest relative, Bernice Armour, lived in Memphis, and we often went up to see “BB,” as she was called. As a kid, Memphis had a magical, urban quality to it – I loved going there.

I went to college in Memphis at what was then Southwestern at Memphis, now Rhodes College.  I had just ended working my shift in the college library in the spring of 1968, when I heard that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot and killed not far away at the Lorraine Motel, where he was headquartered to organize a second march in support of the sanitation workers there.

When I heard that Tyre Nichols had been beaten and killed by police officers in Memphis, I was not greatly surprised, but I felt a tug at my heart for my relationship to Memphis.  I was reminded of Jesus’ words in Matthew 23 on the outskirts of Jerusalem, as he got ready to enter that city: “ O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

I’m not Jesus, and Memphis is not Jerusalem, but I had some of this same sense for Memphis when I heard about the police murder of Tyre Nichols.  I’m not sure why that feeling of affection had not left me, but it was there.  I haven’t been back to Memphis much since my mother died in Arkansas in 2004.  Memphis has a horrible history of white supremacist murders of Black people.  It led the white, Southern defense of neo-slavery in 1866 with the “Memphis Massacre,” in which white people killed at least 46 Black people and burned homes and churches and businesses to the ground.  On The Curve, in 1892, white people murdered Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and William Stewart - all because they dared to open a Black grocery store in a Black neighborhood.  

    One of Tom Moss’s friends, Ida B. Wells, wrote the truth about his lynching, and her newspaper offices were burned in response.  A price was put on her head, and she became an exile, not returning South again for 30 years.  She came then to investigate one of the worst mass murders of African-Americans in American history – it happened in my home county of Phillips County in the Elaine Massacre. She rarely returned to Memphis after she left in 1892.  

    One of the great American prophets, Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed there in 1968.  Many others have been lynched or run out of Memphis.  Still, it hurt my heart that my “home” city of Memphis was the site of such police brutality on a Black man.  And, yes, I know that it is a horrible and yet standard practice in Memphis and around the country for Black men to be targeted in this way.  

    I’m reading a fascinating book now about the white resistance to powers that would seek to curtail the white ability to dominate and brutalize people classified as “non-white.”  In this book, “Freedom’s Dominion” by Jefferson Cowie, the obstacle to white domination is federal power.  As the subtitle says, it is “a saga of white resistance to federal power,” and Cowie has so far done an impressive job of tying the slaughter and removal of Indigenous People with the slaughter and enslavement of African-American people.  The killing of Tyre Nichols reminds us that this powerful white supremacy is not only internalized by those classified as “white,” but also by those classified as “Black.”  In fact, white supremacy works best when those classified as “colored,” come to believe that it is true.  It is why Ron DiSantis opposes the teaching of Black History in Florida – to do so would be to shed light on the fact that the white supremacist narrative is not true at all.

    “O Memphis” – a lament about the continuing power of white supremacy. It is  a clarion call for us to continue to work so that a different narrative can take hold, a narrative that proclaims that the system of race is a lie, that white supremacy is a lie, even as its power continues to grow.  A narrative that proclaims that we are siblings after all, that humanity is not a hierarchy of races but rather a family of those who are made in God’s image, each of us and all of us.