With the holidays in the rearview mirror, most of us take a ho-hum attitude toward the month of January. The weather is generally dreary; not much of consequence happens on the social scene. The days are still short, and many of us just stick to our knitting, literally and figuratively.
Indeed, the two biggest “events” Memphis commemorates in January are the birthdays of two individuals whose names will be forever connected with this city, perhaps more than any others. Ironically, neither man was born in Memphis. Tragically, both died here, one before his fortieth birthday and the other just two years after, long before their respective work was done.
Elvis Aron Presley was born on January 8, 1935, in a two-room shotgun shack in East Tupelo. His parents were dirt-poor, as were tens of thousands of Mississippians in 1935, in the depths of the Depression, when the country’s unemployment rate was over 20 percent. (Elvis later would joke that the house he was born in could easily fit into his living room at Graceland.) The Presley family struggled to survive in Tupelo, until 1948, when, seeking greener pastures, they decided to move to a larger city. They might have chosen Birmingham or Jackson, but instead went up Highway 78 to Memphis, where a post-World War II boom was well under way. The rest, as they say, is history.
Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in somewhat better economic circumstances, his namesake father being a prominent Atlanta pastor and NAACP leader, active in the nascent civil-rights movement. The son, of course, grew up to become the definitive national leader of that movement during the 1950s and 1960s, a man who brought Gandhi’s tactic of nonviolent civil disobedience into American politics, becoming the community activist most directly responsible for passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act in 1964.
Dr. King visited Memphis numerous times during those decades, usually staying at the Lorraine Motel. He was due to stay there on March 22, 1968, to lead a march on behalf of the city’s sanitation workers. But in a cruel twist of fate, Mother Nature that day dumped 18 inches of snow on Memphis — the twentieth-century record snowfall — forcing march organizers to postpone King’s visit, rescheduling his appearance for the following week.
On the day of the great Memphis blizzard, James Earl Ray was in Selma, Alabama, en route to Atlanta. “No doubt Ray was intent on tracking down King somewhere,” says Hampton Sides, author of Hellhound on His Trail. “But it may well not have been in Memphis, had the sanitation-workers’ march not been rescheduled.” Eleven days later, knowing that King would be in Memphis, Ray retraced his steps, got a room in a boarding house on South Main, and the rest, as they say, is history.
King and Elvis apparently never met, but the latter was devastated by the news of King’s assassination, recording a song called “If I Can Dream,” and singing it as the grand finale of his NBC television “comeback” concert in June of 1968. “I’m never going to sing another song I don’t believe in,” said Presley at the time.
And so here we are today, exactly 50 years after the King assassination, with another half a century of history having accumulated. Despite the fact that Memphis’ earlier moves toward integration had gone more smoothly than in most of the urban South, our city will forever be remembered for that 1968 tragedy. Those of us, black and white, who have been here for most of these 50 years, know only too well how difficult the stigma of that event has been for Memphis, economically, politically, and spiritually.
I prefer to think, however, that the past is prologue, not a prison. Ours is an entirely different city than it was in 1968, mostly for the better. And this company is delighted to play a significant role in the MLK50 initiative, in coordination with the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel.
As always, Memphis magazine will continue to strive, as it has since 1976, to inform, entertain, and enlighten the entire Memphis community. Now more than ever, quality journalism is essential to our civic well-being. As Dr. King might say, all of us at Memphis are well aware of how we must all embrace “the fierce urgency of now.”
Kenneth Neill
editor/publisher