Memphis Magazine, April 2019
Kudos on your outstanding April issue opening the Memphis Bicentennial Year. Your cover photo of Main Street in 1951 is especially splendid and evocative. It brought back bittersweet memories. Because by 1971, it had largely all vanished.
For all the deserved celebration of Memphis’ 200th birthday, as well as its more recent accomplishments since the 1970s mercifully passed, it must be remembered that the Bluff City has endured four catastrophes that tested its people mightily. For Faulkner was right when he wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The first catastrophe was the horrific Memphis Massacre of 1866, days of slaughter that received widespread national attention. It would prove to be prologue to the disaster that would become 1968.
Second, of course, was the yellow fever epidemics of the 1870s, when Memphis lost its growing European immigrant population and even its city charter, thereby assuring that St. Louis would become the dominant and cosmopolitan metropolis on the Mississippi.
Third came the Great Flood of 1927. That was the one relatively recoverable catastrophe for it was simply nature striking back, and the federal government responded by finally deciding it had to tame all that water rolling down to the sea.
And then we arrive at the city’s fourth, disastrous catastrophe — the mayoralty of Henry Loeb during much of the 1960s and the early 1970s. Loeb’s bull-headed racism led ultimately to the death not only of the American prophet drawn to the city by the manifest injustice of Loeb’s treatment of his sanitation workers, but Loeb’s governing doctrine of white supremacy also ensured that Atlanta and Charlotte and Nashville would leap ahead of Memphis in the coming decades of American, and Southern, prosperity.
Mayor Loeb also accomplished another dark feat — the driving away of much of the city’s young creative class in the decade following 1968. I know. I witnessed it firsthand. We loved Memphis but despaired over what its leader had done to wreck it so thoroughly. And so, many of us in those years went off to colleges, never to return to stay for good in the city we loved.
The fact that Henry Loeb had once belonged to Temple Israel (he converted to Christianity during the 1960s), where I was president of its Junior Congregation, was particularly galling. For he had learned nothing from his Jewish heritage. He attended an Ivy League university, but learned nothing from that as well.
Yet while Mayor Loeb’s views on white supremacy resonated with many, there were many white Memphians appalled by those views. And they, working with fellow black citizens, began the slow but steady efforts to heal the city and turn its future into a decidedly new direction. Those who stayed and persevered are the real heroes here. And they would be joined by new arrivals to the city who saw great social and cultural and development opportunities.
There have been ups and downs, but Memphis in the twenty-first century has emerged in a far better place. The great poverty that remains, a legacy of the lost opportunity of the 1960s and ’70s, is still the thorniest problem. Then again, the city’s rich and fascinating heritage — its culture and its history — coupled with its sheer physical beauty overlooking America’s grandest river, surpasses anything offered by the likes of an Atlanta or Charlotte or Nashville.
For at the end of the day, when the sun is setting over that great river, reflecting back upon the scrappiness that defines Memphis, this city remains a place to love. How else to explain it being called out in more than a thousand songs?
— Gus Bauman, Silver Spring, Maryland
