Memphis magazine, October 1981
The decade that followed James Earl Ray’s murder of Dr. Martin Luther King was certainly the gloomiest of the five that Memphis has lived through since that dark day in April 1968. In the aftermath of that year when everything went wrong, our city went through the equivalent of an economic, civic, and spiritual depression.
Businesses abandoned downtown Memphis while white flight pushed the city’s effective epicenter eastward. In 1971 The New York Times described Memphis as “a dark spot on the Sun Belt.” It was not a pretty time to call this city home.
By the middle of the 1970s, The Peabody had been shuttered, and Beale Street was abandoned. Aside from The Rendezvous, there was no downtown dining scene, and live entertainment was practically non-existent. Residents of downtown Memphis numbered in the hundreds, at best.
In these difficult times, the Memphis political issue of the day was court-enforced busing, a civil-rights initiative that became the law of the land in 1971, when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously (in a case involving Charlotte, North Carolina) that public school systems were obliged to achieve racial balance in their classrooms, even if that required the use of busing to achieve that balance.
Memphis’ busing “Plan Z” went into effect in 1973. Some Southern cities, including Charlotte, actually made progress towards school integration, with well-articulated busing plans. But what happened in Memphis over the next decade was not the integration of schools; it was the creation of an overwhelmingly black Memphis public school system that, to this day, faces many of the same problems that disadvantaged segregated schools faced over half a century ago.
Discovering how this happened is depressing, especially since the answer to that question is so simple. Over the first decade of mandatory busing, over 100,000 white Memphis families pulled their children out of public schools and placed them in private schools, or moved out of the city altogether. “With a school system that will soon be over 80 percent black,” concluded David Dawson in the October 1981 issue of this magazine, “the most egalitarian arrangement Memphis can produce is one in which all 152 schools would be 80 percent black and 20 percent white. If this is desegregation, then school buses are spaceships.” (Read Dawson’s contemporary report here.)
There were logistic screw-ups with Plan Z as well. With not enough white students left to move around, the court resorted to busing black students from one majority-black school to another, further disorienting communities across the city. Launching busing in October 1973, when students were already settled back into their neighborhood schools after summer break, was also an administrative blunder.
There were many more mistakes. I highly recommend John Branston’s exceptional 2011 overview of the subject, located here.
Branston titles his busing article “The Battering Ram,” an apt description of the unintended consequences. I have always wondered why choosing to move tens of thousands of children all around the city was our preferred course towards desegregation. Was there a better alternative? We’ll never know.
Of course, the black community wanted and deserved better educational opportunities for its children — immediately if not sooner. But those of us in the white community with kids who stayed in public schools also understood that forced busing was doomed before it started, given the overwhelming antipathy to the concept in the white community. That was the real tragedy, a tragedy whose consequences linger to this day.
I often think about the children of that era in Memphis — I have three of them — and the stresses many of them endured during those convoluted times. Not just the black children being bused hither and yon, either; the turmoil affected white-flight kids as well, some of whom found themselves dislocated, in pop-up schools, often with teachers and administrators with minimal credentials. It’s hard to imagine those schools performing at their very best. Pity we found ourselves in such a situation.
