Editor’s Note: As part of our 50th anniversary, we asked writers to reflect on a half-century of Memphis history, but through a specific cultural lens. What follows is Jon W. Sparks on politics, business, and economics. You can find the entire package in our April 2026 print edition. Not a subscriber? Start one, and we'll send you a copy of the special issue.
FEBRUARY 1980
In hindsight, 1976 — the year Memphis Magazine launched — looks almost auspicious. It was a moment of transition, and not just because an upstart magazine entered the fray. We asked three longtime experts to comment on how the city has made its mark in business and politics since then. They’ve been part of Memphis for decades, working in journalism and in the political spheres.
Tom Jones is the principal of Smart City Consulting, an urban expert, and worked as a reporter at the Memphis Press-Scimitar back in the day. Susan Adler Thorp is a consultant who was also a reporter at the Press-Scimitar as well as a political columnist for The Commercial Appeal. Otis Sanford is an author, columnist, professor, and political commentator, who was a journalist at several newspapers, including a stint as managing editor of The Commercial Appeal. He wrote From Boss Crump to King Willie: How Race Changed Memphis Politics, and his new book, Newsman: The Road from Route 2, Box 9, comes out in June.
As veteran journalists often are, the three share something of the sardonic in their world views. As Jones put it: “In 1976, the decline of Memphis had ended. Unfortunately, it was because it hit rock bottom.”
Susan Adler Thorp says that from a business and economic development perspective, the banks in Memphis in those earlier days were locked into the cotton industry mentality, and unwilling to lend money to entrepreneurs. “They had to go to New York or other cities to borrow money.”
It wasn’t just a punch line — he followed with examples: “The Peabody was closed, the Chamber was going bankrupt.” Beale Street was deserted. Thorp chimes in: “Mud Island was supposed to cost $23 million and it wound up costing $62 million.” Plenty of low points came about after the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Downtown businesses were fleeing. Time magazine infamously described us as a “decaying backwater river town.” In other words: rock bottom.
But 1976 also saw stirrings of revival. Jones says, “Leadership Memphis got formed. The Center City Commission got formed. Memphis Magazine got formed. Memphis in May got formed.” Beale Street was coming back to life. And Federal Express was absolutely, positively making an impact.
The business climate in the area was both reacting to population and politics, while also advancing its own version of the city’s potential.
Thorp says that from a business and economic development perspective, the banks in Memphis in those earlier days were locked into the cotton industry mentality, and unwilling to lend money to entrepreneurs. “They had to go to New York or other cities to borrow money,” she says. But change was afoot. She noted that the Memphis Business Journal (originally called Mid-South Business) was started by Ward Archer Sr. in 1979. “And you had the rise of that group of Fred Smith, Mike Rose, Ron Terry, Pitt Hyde, and Avron Fogelman,” she says. “They got together and said, ‘We’re going to move the city forward.’”
Thorp also says that in 1979, “We had the Memphis Jobs Conference that came from Governor Lamar Alexander.” The conference rebranded the city’s economic focus as a global distribution center. And Jones adds that in 1981, Ron Terry organized a similar conference with additional emphasis on tourism and agriculture. The vision of business in Memphis was coalescing to build on strengths such as Agricenter International and Graceland.
JANUARY 1981
But, Jones points out, those were lower-skill, lower-wage industries. While the city took control of the economy and did smart things that took advantage of its strengths, “it didn’t make the transition like other cities to knowledge-based jobs. And so incomes here stayed depressed compared to other cities.”
Other changes were going on that presaged how the city would evolve. Sanford notes that Harold Ford was elected to Congress in 1974, firmly establishing the Ford family political machine. “He was the first African-American elected to Congress in the state of Tennessee,” Sanford says, “so that was a watershed moment.”
At the time, Wyeth Chandler was mayor of Memphis, but Ford was on the ascendant, and more Black politicians were getting elected to Tennessee’s General Assembly even as the Ford machine was a center of political dominance in Memphis.
Crucial to what was going on in the region was the population shift after the murder of Dr. King. Sanford says, “Memphis got hollowed out at that point. Mostly white people wouldn’t live in the city, so it was an exodus to the suburbs. What used to be agricultural fields are now residence developments out there.” That move went in all directions, but particularly east and south into Mississippi. “Memphis was still predominantly white until the 1990 census,” Sanford says, “and in that census for the first time, the Black population outnumbered the white population. Not by a lot, but by just enough.”
The Mayors
OCTOBER 1995
Thorp says that, in her view, “Memphis has never had really strong political leadership. I came on the scene covering City Hall when Wyeth Chandler was mayor. If I look back at all the mayors in the last 50 years, he probably ranks as one of the smartest, if not the smartest. He was a skilled lawyer.” Sanford says Chandler never got an appreciable number of votes from Black residents, “but it still was enough because he got almost every white vote in town. And back then, the white population still was dominant.”
Dick Hackett was elected after Chandler resigned in 1982 to take a judgeship. “Hackett didn’t have the intellectual swagger that Chandler had,” Thorp says. “He was the kind of mayor that fixed a lot of potholes and he carried the suitcases. I remember when he got off the plane with the International Paper executives, when they came to town, he was carrying their luggage for them. And then there’s Willie Herenton, elected in 1991, who I think was really the first time we had a mayor who said, ‘I’m going to run this thing.’”
Jones says, “For the first eight years Herenton was a great mayor, but then he got to be a caricature of himself. He told people to leave Memphis if they didn’t like it, and they did.”
But Thorp believes that “Willie was the first one who really forged partnerships with the business community. He’s the one who relaxed a lot of the zoning rules and would work with businesses that wanted to develop downtown. That was a positive thing.”
“Willie Herenton wasn’t uncomfortable in board rooms. He had been on the Holiday Inns board, and First Tennessee. He wasn’t reticent about telling people what he thought, but he knew how to push the dominoes and get what he wanted.”
— Tom Jones
Sanford notes that Herenton was always visible in the community and never shied from controversy: “In 1978, he became the superintendent of Memphis City Schools, and that was a very contentious thing.” He was not the first choice of the school board but the community reacted strongly against a white out-of-town candidate. “Herenton was superintendent for quite a while, and there were some scandals there, but he weathered them all. And then in 1991, he ran against an incumbent Dick Hackett for city mayor. And once he got Harold Ford’s support, whether it was reluctant or not, he was on his way.”
Herenton and Ford had, Sanford says, a strained relationship. “But they respected each other’s political power. Herenton never got in the way of Ford’s congressional work and Harold never got in the way of the mayoral stuff.”
When asked who was the most dominant political figure of the past 50 years, whether you liked them or not, all three agreed that it’s Willie Herenton.
JANUARY 2012
Thorp says, “I think it leans really more towards the good. His attitude was, ‘I’m not going to mess with your nonsense — this is what’s right for the city, and this is what I’m going to do.’ And he did it, especially in those first eight years. And then he got bored. I think he got tired of being mayor.”
Jones says, “Willie wasn’t uncomfortable in board rooms. He had been on the Holiday Inns board, and First Tennessee. He wasn’t reticent about telling people what he thought, but he knew how to push the dominoes and get what he wanted. I thought he really kind of got it for the first eight years, before he became the worst part of himself.”
As Sanford notes: “When Herenton was the mayor, people in the business community understood he was a political force, so they did everything they could to work with him. He could be egotistical, but he was probably one of the best politicians that the city has had because he knew how to navigate in every area.”
Sanford says Herenton could go into the most impoverished community in the city and talk their language. “But then he could also go to board meetings and have a discussion and get them on board with what he was trying to do, because he supported downtown development. He was the catalyst to bring the Grizzlies here and build FedExForum when some people in the community didn’t want that done. He may have stayed maybe one term too long, but in terms of his impact over that period of time, you can’t overestimate how important he was.”
One of the other important politicians was Bill Morris, who was sheriff when Dr. King was killed and later won several terms as Shelby County mayor. Sanford says he came along when “we really were in dire straits from a city-county perspective. When he got elected in 1978, he had a string of election wins. He had a powerful political influence in this community. And he was well liked by everyone.”
After Herenton came A C Wharton, who had served as Shelby County mayor from 2002 to 2009. As Jones notes, “On both sides of the street, in those 50 years, you had the longest-serving Memphis mayor and you had the longest-serving county mayor, and both generated term limits after they left. In fact, 1976 was the year that voters elected to change county government and elect a mayor.”
SEPTEMBER 1985
Thorp points out that politics was long impacted by press coverage, which changed in 1983 when the Memphis Press-Scimitar shut down. “With all due respect to my former employer, The Commercial Appeal got lazy with nobody to compete with, and that made a big difference in what government did — because nobody was watching.”
In the last decade, Memphis has brought in a new generation of leaders. Sanford says, “In 2015, the relatively young city councilman Jim Strickland ran a fairly masterful campaign focusing on crime. It was at that time that people started to say that we weren’t doing a good job fighting crime. We’ve always had crime problems in Memphis — even Boss Crump got criticized for that. But Strickland played on the issue very well, and Wharton didn’t have an answer for that.”
Strickland won that year with most of the white vote and an appreciable amount of the Black vote. And he did so again in 2019, even with Herenton giving it another try.
In 2023, with Strickland term limited, there were 17 candidates going for the job. Paul Young was the beneficiary of that crowded contest in which he won with only 28 percent of those voting. The city stopped having runoffs in 1991 and ranked-choice voting isn’t an option, but Young had the advantage of strong support from the business community.
Taking Care of Business
APRIL 2013
Frederick W. Smith had faith that his Federal Express delivery service would succeed, but there weren’t a whole lot of other believers in the early 1970s. But the year before Memphis Magazine came into being, the company that would become FedEx installed its first iconic purple-and-orange drop-box. That same year, 1975, was when the company reached profitability.
Another significant event was when International Paper moved its operational headquarters to Memphis in 1987. “It was a huge deal, and Dick Hackett did that,” Thorp says. “He gets the credit as the city mayor, because it fell under his watch.”
Jones adds, “Hackett and Morris,” referring to county Mayor Bill Morris. “Morris was the one that sold it. Dick never had the ability to be warm enough to sell something — he was too busy counting the paperclips. He and Morris were an interesting team though, because they would play off each other.” Then in 2005, IP moved its global headquarters to Memphis when Herenton was city mayor and Wharton was county mayor.
Thorp points out that grocery wholesaler Malone and Hyde, under J.R. “Pitt” Hyde’s leadership, was here and it spun off AutoZone. And, as Jones notes, that auto-supply company has been a money-maker, especially during times like Covid when people were working on their own cars. “And I’ll bet you even today it’s going up,” Thorp says, “because people can’t afford a new car.”
Thorp notes the history of local banks in the past 50 years. “We had three major headquartered banks here: Union Planters, First Tennessee [now First Horizon], and National Bank of Commerce. When you lose the headquarters of a bank, it’s a big hit to a community because the banks were not only lending money here, but they were big supporters of nonprofits and community events. All we have right now is First Horizon, and last year we almost lost it. We do have some strong community banks, small banks, but those big banks, they’re really critical.”
In addition, Thorp says, “Morgan Keegan was a real player in the growth of wealth. And First Tennessee was probably one of the top bond houses in the country.”
The Greater Memphis Chamber has figured into how the city has developed as well and is positioned to influence where it goes from here. More than just a merchants’ association, it has focused on economic development. In 1983, the city lost two big manufacturers, Firestone and International Harvester. The Chamber has since sought to cultivate the city’s persona as America’s Distribution Center. Now, under the leadership of Ted Townsend, it’s pushing advanced manufacturing and technology in its Digital Delta initiative, which was happening even before xAI built its supercomputer in 2024.
The future of Memphis, at least in the near term, is likely to be shaped by the collaboration between the business and political communities. Prior to becoming mayor, Paul Young led the Downtown Memphis Commission and has collaborated closely with the Greater Memphis Chamber — Townsend served on his mayoral transition team. The arrival of xAI has brought controversy to the region, but the powers that be see it as crucial to what comes next in Memphis and the Mid-South.
