Black Power

Every city, I suppose, has its history of activism—even Memphis, whose history of activism was for many years dominated by the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike and is only now being explored in its rightful complexity. It wasn’t all that long ago that Ida B. Wells, for instance, was a largely unknown figure, and had it not been for the rise of area studies in the American academy over the past forty years, Wells might still be largely unknown. Even so, I doubt very much that most Memphians today know who she was.

One Memphian who did was a fellow named Coby Smith. A graduate of Manassas High School, Smith in 1963 was one of the first African Americans to be admitted to Southwestern (today, Rhodes) College. He left Memphis in 1966 for Atlanta, where he became involved in—and eventually frustrated with—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He returned to Memphis in 1967 with a “more radical disposition” and immediately founded, along with another Memphian named Charles Cabbage, who had also spent time in Atlanta, two activist organizations, the Black Organizing Project and the Invaders. In a 2010 interview, Coby Smith said of the young black activists in Memphis in the late 1960s that they worked in “the spirit of Ida B. Wells.”

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Black Organizing Project and the Invaders was that both were Black Power organizations. That Black Power had made its way from the urban megalopolises of the Northeast, the Midwest, and California to Memphis will come as a surprise to many—as it did to Martin Luther King Jr., who blamed an unexpected “Black Power element” for creating disorder in a march he led in Memphis about a week before his death.

We learn about Coby Smith and Charles Cabbage in a 2015 book titled Black Power in the Bluff City: African American Youth and Student Activism in Memphis, 1965–1975, by Shirletta J. Kinchen, a professor of Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville and a graduate of the PhD program in history at the University of Memphis. As Professor Kinchen demonstrates in her impressive study, the work of Smith and Cabbage and of the Black Power movement in Memphis challenges the view of the city in the late 1960s and early 1970s as an “NAACP town.”

As did Black Power more generally, the Black Organizing Project wanted complete self-determination for the city’s black residents. The platform of the project demanded “community control over education, finances, politics, and land ownership.” As Charles Cabbage explained, the Black Organizing Project aimed to “stimulate in young blacks a sense of black identity, black pride, and black consciousness, to create in the blacks an independent spirit, to cease to be dependent upon and influenced by the white race.” That Professor Kinchen’s source for that quotation is an FBI memo is no accident. The FBI began watching the Black Organizing Project soon after it was founded. In addition, the Memphis Police Department set up a special unit to monitor the organization.

Black Power was able to gain a foothold in Memphis because the city’s black establishment and older generation had been unwilling or unable to make room for the young. At the time, many blacks in their late teens and early twenties found the approach of older figures such as Maxine Smith and Benjamin Hooks—both of whom occupy prominent places in the city’s postwar history—too incremental and mild-mannered. Young activists such as Smith and Cabbage refused to treat even Martin Luther King Jr. with the customary reverence. If Dr. King wanted to lead a march in Memphis, Coby Smith said, he needed to adapt and adjust to the particular needs and concerns of the city’s residents—needs and concerns that may be too urgent for the Atlanta preacher’s nonviolent ethic. “This is Memphis,” Smith said in reaction to the botched march led by Dr. King the week before his death. “The city belongs to people here.”

Smith and Cabbage, and Black Power generally, did not succeed—at least, not to the degree that activists such as Smith and Cabbage envisioned. In my view, the problem that stymied Smith and Cabbage at every turn was the same problem that stymies nearly all would-be revolutionaries: they had to act through or in tandem with existing institutions—the law, the NAACP, the War on Poverty, local churches, LeMoyne College, Owen Junior College, Memphis State University—and existing institutions are almost by definition too conservative to tolerate sudden and drastic change.

Nevertheless, as Professor Kinchen maintains, Black Power, despite being a comparatively “fringe” movement in Memphis, had an effect. In giving young black Memphians “a malleable and adaptive philosophy that traversed different sectors of life in the city,” it paved the way “for an increasingly radical Memphis after 1968 when even moderate organizations, such as the local branch of the NAACP, began to evoke the spirit of the Black Power movement.” 

Sun Records: Episode 1

Episode 1 of Sun Records, CMT’s new series about the rise of the Memphis music scene in the 1950s, opens in 1950 with a fifteen-year-old Elvis Presley sitting in a stairwell of a housing project and quietly strumming a guitar. He is listening to a radio that is playing “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” The door to his family’s apartment is open. Inside, Elvis’s father (whose name was Vernon) is grousing about his son making Cs and Ds in school and wasting time fooling around with music. Vernon has been drinking, and he is bitter about everything under the sun. “You get that boy off your teat, Gladys,” he mutters to his wife, Elvis’s mother, as he opens another beer. “He’s too old to be coddled.” Gladys is warm and supportive and tries to smooth things over. She calls Elvis “pumpkin,” kisses him on the cheek, and runs her fingers through his hair. “For God is the King of all the earth,” she tells him. “Sing praises with a song.”

Angry, unfeeling, alcoholic fathers offset by saintly, supportive, loving mothers are not the only clichés in the episode. Sam Phillips, the founder of Memphis Recording Service and the man behind Sun Records (the label), cannot get through the episode without having an affair with his secretary—and this after he dreamily tells his wife, as they sit in the car in front of the building that will become his recording studio, “This is what I was put on this earth to do. And I know you came here to help me do it.” Elvis, bored with the staid Sunday morning service in his white church, up and leaves and removes himself to a service in a black church, where the music is of course rollicking and full of spirit. How will the congregation react to the late-arriving white boy? Without skipping a beat. A lady sitting in front of him encourages him to join in on the clapping and the singing. After the service, as he cheerfully mingles with the congregation on the front steps of the church, his girlfriend’s parents drive by—Lord only knows why their route took them through that part of town—and see “that Presley boy” fraternizing with the wrong race. Affronted and scandalized, they forbid their daughter from ever seeing Elvis again.

Chad Michael Murray plays Sam Phillips; he’s superb and looks the part. In my reconceptualization of Sun Records, the show would revolve around his character only, letting other characters such as Elvis and J. R. (later known as Johnny) Cash come and go as needed—sort of like a Union Avenue–based Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I would give Sam Phillips a troublesome uncle—maybe an uncle who takes over his brother’s, Sam’s father’s, studio in Memphis after his brother mysteriously dies. Sam, determined to carry on his father’s work, opens his own studio. The uncle, along with his studio, would be a pawn in Boss Crump’s political machine. Sam Phillips would smell something rotten but get caught up in machinations beyond his ken—all the while producing some of the most important popular music in the world.

By the way, despite what CMT’s website says, the story of the birth of rock and roll is anything but “untold.” Colin Escott, one of the producers of the show, published an excellent book on the subject in 1991 titled Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll. And of course Peter Guralnick, who wrote a biography of Elvis, published in 2015 Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll. Sun Records is also the subject of a 2001 episode of the PBS series American Masters.

Orange Mound

In 1979, Charles Williams, a PhD student in anthropology at the University of Illinois, began calling on residents of Orange Mound, a black neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee. He was conducting an ethnographic study of the neighborhood and the families who lived there. Although black himself, Williams was viewed with suspicion or alarm by many elderly residents, who, at the sight of the unfamiliar young man approaching them, would leave the shade of their front porches and duck inside their un-air-conditioned homes. Williams later learned that they were afraid he had come to rob them or were afraid of becoming known as an “informant” if they talked to the outsider from Illinois who for some strange reason found their community an interesting subject for a doctoral dissertation.

We can be thankful that Charles Williams, who went on to become a professor of anthropology at the University of Memphis, persevered with his project and endured the “snubs, labels, insults, misinformation, and in some instances, down-right ostracism” directed toward him, for the result of his study is a valuable book titled African American Life and Culture in Orange Mound, published in 2013 by Lexington Books.

The land that would eventually become developed as Orange Mound was once part of the five-thousand-acre Deaderick Plantation. At the time, the plantation was five miles east of the city, and the only way to travel from the plantation to Memphis itself was along the Pontotoc Trace, which today is Lamar Avenue. In 1889, the Deaderick family sold part of its land to a real estate developer named Elzey Eugene Meacham. As Professor Williams writes, for reasons that may never become clear, Meacham developed the land into a residential community for blacks in Memphis. The community became known as Orange Mound because of the osage orange hedgerow that grew naturally on the old Deaderick Plantation.

Williams lists in helpful detail the names of many of the families and residents who lived in Orange Mound during its earliest days. The neighborhood was originally populated by pastors and school teachers, businessmen and porters, blacksmiths and carpenters. Lonnie Briscoe Jr. was well-known for selling class rings to graduating seniors; Jessie Springer was a renowned teacher at Booker T. Washington and later principal of Douglass High School. In 1931, a physician named Wheelock A. Bisson arrived in Memphis and settled in Orange Mound. Most residents, however, worked as day laborers and domestics.

As Professor Williams explains, Orange Mound can be understood only in the context of Memphis as a whole. Memphis, of course, has a long history of racial segregation, oppression, and violence, and Orange Mound survived by developing its own institutions and “accommodating” the prevailing social order, avoiding confrontation with the white ruling class. During the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike, for instance, Orange Mound “remained peaceful” with no “outward sign of protest and demonstration.”

Perhaps the most fascinating chapter of Williams’s book examines some of the “threats” that residents of Orange Mound have faced over the years. The Memphis and Charleston Railroad, which runs along Southern Avenue, brought potential environmental hazards and threatened, under the right of eminent domain, to strip homeowners of their property. In the late 1960s, Orange Mound had “one of the best public parks in the city” until the city sold it to businessmen who built on the site the Mid-South Refrigerated Warehouse Company—an indignation against which the normally quiet residents of the neighborhood rose in “great protest.” The growth of “street corner society” brought crime, harassment, and disorder. Jewish entrepreneurs were sometimes seen as exploitative; Williams discusses at length a particular merchant named Milton Evensky, who owned a grocery store in the neighborhood. Police relations are treated as well, including a 1971 case involving seventeen-year-old Elton Hayes, who was beaten to death by police officers, white and black.

Orange Mound has always been poor and remains so today. What is different, Professor Williams says, is that “the community’s legendary core values for culture, traditions, family, church, public education, hard work, ownership of property, pride in the concept of ‘community,’ self-respect, trust and appreciation of neighbors, and the alleviation of poverty have to an extent collapsed over the past several decades.” He offers as a “compelling theory” the notion that the first two or three generations of residents simply became complacent and took for granted the continued vitality of the community they had built, “failing to invest in or rebuild the community of their birth through the integration of new people with new ideas.”

Professor Williams closes his book by stating that in order to become a healthy community again, residents of Orange Mound must set aside “class stratification and provincialism” and put the needs of the community above individual interests. Home ownership must be encouraged, and residents should be given control over neighborhood institutions, especially the schools. But what’s happened to Orange Mound is what’s happened to America itself and is a manifestation of the social and economic structure we have inherited and continue to perpetuate to one degree or another. Writing in 2016 in the Chronicle of Higher Education about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, the political scientist Corey Robin says that “Coates dares whites to prove that we do not believe ourselves to be separate from black people, that we understand that we cannot escape the ramifications of the fate we have assigned to African-Americans. . . . Your actions, says Coates—the daily ease with which you tolerate the policing, incarceration, and murder of black citizens; the daily ease with which your white life goes on amid so much black death—shows that you have no desire, intention, or need to end my situation.” Or, one can add, the situation in Orange Mound.

The House of Church

How does one explain a Frederick Douglass, a Booker T. Washington, a George Washington Carver? The fact that some blacks were permitted to flourish in a society otherwise committed to racial oppression makes the oppression seem all the crueler, because it reveals how truly selective it was. I suppose a black man in the 1880s might look upon a Frederick Douglass and think, “That could be me!” But I suspect he might be equally likely to say to his white oppressors, “Why are you making my life a living hell but letting that guy off the hook?”

To the Douglasses, Washingtons, and Carvers can be added Robert Reed Church (1839–1912), a Memphis businessman and banker who became the first black millionaire in the South. Robert Church was born a slave in 1839, the son of his white owner and a mixed-race mother. In 1855, Church and his father survived the sinking of the Bulletin no. 2, and seven years later the young man had to swim for his life in the Mississippi River at Memphis, reaching the riverbank as Federal warships overpowered a Confederate flotilla. In 1865, Church opened a saloon in Memphis, despite being denied a permit. The next year, he was shot in the neck during a race riot and left for dead. Four years later, he opened a brothel in downtown Memphis, on Second and Gayoso—and thus his rise began. He acquired more property during the yellow-fever epidemic of 1878—he had the means by then to send his two children out of the city to New York City by train—and by 1885 he had made his fortune. He took his family on a European tour in 1889 and visited the world’s fair in Chicago in 1893. Around that time he received at his Memphis home Frederick Douglass himself. “A Mr. Robert R. Church owns one of the finest hotels in Memphis,” a Boston newspaper reported in 1889. “Nor is this all. In the registry of deeds his name is on the books as the lawful owner of 60 brick and wooden houses. His note is good for at least $250,000.”

Robert Church and his son, Robert Jr., are the nominal subjects of Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis, a 2015 book written by Preston Lauterbach. But this is not so much a history of the Churches as it is an on-the-ground history of the city between the 1860s and the 1930s, organized around the often rambunctious dealings—political, business, artistic—of a half dozen prominent Memphians, the Churches being the most central, and another half dozen or so lesser lights.

Much of Lauterbach’s story, which draws copiously from newspapers of the time, involves the disgraceful, the disreputable, and the dishonorable. He opens with the race riot of 1866, which, in the author’s telling, was fomented as much by the animosity between the black soldiers garrisoned at Fort Pickering and the white city police force as by the liquor that both sides liberally consumed. The riot, which made plain the unwillingness of the federal government to protect the newly freed, led blacks in Memphis to close ranks and “gravitate to their own prominent citizens,” particularly Robert Church. Over the next three hundred or so pages, Lauterbach relates the rise of the Churches and that of Beale Street, the two being of a piece. Along the way, other Memphians—Ida B. Wells, W. C. Handy, E. H. Crump, and George W. Lee being the best known—take centerstage, with the Churches disappearing from the narrative for pages at a time. That disappearing act caught this reader by surprise. The “prologue” states that the book will be about the Churches’ rise to fortune and influence. It is—but that’s only one of its subjects.

Lauterbach’s history, which was published by Norton, is as hyperlocal a one I’ve read. A plenitude of ordinary Memphians of yore slip in and out of the author’s brisk narrative. We meet policeman David Roach, who, revolted by the thought of miscegenation, invaded brothels and homes where black men and white women “knotted up” (Lauterbach’s pitch-perfect phrase); it was Roach who, in the race riot of 1866, shot Robert Church in the neck. We meet Mary Grady, who owned a dance hall. We meet police chief Ben Garrett, who, in an investigation of police misconduct, felt free to let slip that his officers were “sometimes” sober. We meet City Recorder John C. Creighton, who publicly exhorted his fellow white citizens to “kill and drive” every black from the city. We meet Jackson Goodell, a black drayman who was beaten by two policemen. We meet a C. M. Cooley, a Lavinia Goodell (Jackson’s wife), a Lucy Taylor, a Harriet Armour, a “constable” named O’Hearn, a Joe Clouston (a mulatto barber), an Adam Lock, a Rachel Hatcher, and an Austin Cotton—and all of those just in chapter 2.

A handful of characters whom I doubt appear in any other history of the city receive several pages. Three at random are James Kinnane, who ran his own entertainment district on the north side of town and who, one newspaper insinuated, directed his black clientele to support Crump’s opponent in the 1909 mayoral election; Frank Liberto, who as a teenager delivered meals to the “girls” who worked in the brothels and who later ran an inn on Beale Street; and David Park “Pappy” Hadden, a businessman and public official who in the 1870s brought Mardi Gras to the city and who, as police court judge, closed a number of brothels. Actually, I’m wrong about Hadden not appearing in any other history: he is mentioned in a 2013 history of Orange Mound by Charles Williams. But still. One can marvel at the author’s resolve to document by name a large cast of workaday Memphians who may not be historically significant but who made Memphis the rowdy and spirited place it was at the time.

Indeed, Lauterbach opens up a Memphis that sometimes sounds like the stuff of pulp fiction and film noir:

Nello Grandi and his brother Olento arrived on Beale before 1910, tall Nello becoming Big Grandi and diminutive Olento, Little Grandi. Big Grandi worked with Vigelio “Pee Wee” Maffei in one of the little legend’s saloons. This joint sat practically on the banks of the Mississippi, and here Big Grandi saw strapping Negro roustabouts with their hundred-dollar pay strolling straight down a cotton steamer gangplank right into Pee Wee’s, which promptly soaked them for every cent.

In a similar vein, of one of James Kinnane’s hired hands Lauterbach writes, “Tick Houston was a renaissance man of sorts, managing under one roof a con game, a colored vaudeville theater, and a pimp hive.”

One of the fascinating things we learn from this enjoyable book is that brothels were legal and regulated in Memphis until 1940—long after the famous Storyville area of New Orleans was shut down in 1917. In time, the brothels became concentrated around Beale Street. A tantalized William Faulkner came poking around them in the early 1920s. But when propositioned, he begged off. “No thank you, ma’am. I’m on my vacation.”

That a society committed to white supremacy made room for a Robert Church Sr. is impossible to explain. As Lauterbach writes, “In the decades following the Civil War, black men were lynched for two reasons down South: for daring to compete economically with white men and for soiling the honor of white women. Bob Church was doing both, and with tacit license and open appreciation.”

There’s virtually nothing left of the Church legacy in Memphis today, other than a small park named in honor of Robert Sr. The Churches deserve better. As Lauterbach makes clear, Robert Reed Church was devoted to Memphis and is no small reason why the city exists today. With the struggling tax district on the brink of extinction after the yellow-fever epidemic, it was Church who purchased the first bond issued to pay off the city’s old debt. As a newspaper reported, “With this example before them, capitalists of the Caucasian race could not be shy, and the whole of the bonds was placed.”

Boss Herenton

With apologies to A. Jackson, J. Winchester, and J. Overton, sometime in the twilight of the twentieth century W. W. Herenton, a black man born in Memphis, passed E. H. Crump, a white man born in Mississippi, as the most significant figure in Memphis history.

Or maybe not. I don’t know what to make of the legacy of W. W. Herenton, who, on October 3, 1991, received 122,596 votes to incumbent Dick Hackett’s 122,454—a difference of a mere 142—and thereby became the first black man elected mayor of the most racially polarized of racially polarized American cities.

The hopes among black Memphians were high by the end of that day. Many thought they were finally going to get their piece of the pie. But two things are now certain. White cronyism, which the white establishment, beginning with Boss Crump, had practiced with perfection, was simply replaced by black cronyism, and blacks are just as poor today as they were then. Memphis was not to have an enlightened government under Willie Wilbert Herenton.

In their 1996 study of that 1991 election, Racial Politics at the Crossroads: Memphis Elects Dr. W. W. Herenton (University of Tennessee Press), Marcus D. Pohlmann and Michael P. Kirby claim that the election of W. W. Herenton was of “considerable social and historical significance.” Their claim—perhaps reasonable at the time but more and more dubious in retrospect—rests on the fact that Herenton’s election was made under circumstances that differed from the usual circumstances attending the election of black mayoral candidates in other major cities. For one thing, Herenton ran against only one white candidate: there was no second white candidate to split the white vote. For another, Memphis’s only major newspaper endorsed not the black candidate but the white. Indeed, the newspaper ran a series of articles criticizing Herenton’s private life and his tenure as superintendent of the city schools.

In addition, Herenton won with virtually no white support—and it was white support that had already enabled many other cities to elect black mayors, starting in 1967 with Carl Stokes in Cleveland. By 1991, Memphis was one of only two major cities (the other being St. Louis) with a sizable black population that had not elected a black mayor.

In short, Herenton won, write Pohlmann and Kirby, without having to concede anything to the white community. To Pohlmann and Kirby, that was significant—and troubling. It meant that Memphis had reached what the authors call the point of “racial reflexivity.” When a city has come to that point, a black politician will lose the trust of black voters if he appeals to the concerns of white voters; likewise, if a white politician appeals to the concerns of black voters, he will lose the trust of white voters. The result is a thoroughly racialized politics, and the loss of trust will show itself in a lower turnout at the polls.

Pohlmann and Kirby end their book on a slightly optimistic note, suggesting that Herenton, who was reelected in 1995 and would serve as mayor until 2009, had begun to develop a “progressive” black-white governing majority.

As for Pohlmann, his assessment of Herenton’s legacy has grown only more positive over the years. In a 2009 article in the Commercial Appeal, Pohlmann, who is a professor of political science at Rhodes College, stated that Herenton was “the most significant mayor in the history of the city” and suggested that Herenton had done a lot to advance race relations in the city.

Sunday Morning Coming Down

Jennifer Ryan’s 2008 dissertation, “‘Can I Get a Witness?’ Soul and Salvation in Memphis Music,” offers a window onto the Memphis blues scene of the mid-2000s. I say blues, but I could have easily said soul or rhythm and blues or rock or even rock and roll, for as the writer discovered in her interviews, musicians play fast and loose with the terms they use to identify the genre of music that they play.

Ryan, who completed her dissertation as a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, explains that there are essentially two kinds of clubs in Memphis in which soul (or blues or R&B) music is played: “juke joints” and “tourist clubs.” For her fieldwork, she spent a lot of nights in one of each: the Blue Worm, a juke joint in Orange Mound, a black, working-class neighborhood in Memphis; and B. B. King’s, a popular tourist club on Beale Street. She reports that the songs the house bands played at both places “overlapped to a significant degree” and that many musicians played in both clubs.

Her fieldwork also involved visiting a number of black churches in Memphis, including several COGIC (Church of God in Christ) churches, and interviewing musicians who are active in the Memphis blues scene. We learn about some of the most important Memphis-based musicians playing today: saxophonist Lannie McMillan, who, in addition to playing in churches, juke joints, and Beale Street clubs, has worked as a studio musician for B. B. King, Al Green, and Aretha Franklin; Preston Shannon, a guitarist who is the front man for the B. B. King All-Stars, who perform at B. B. King’s three nights a week; Jackie Clark, a bass player with perfect pitch; and Renardo Ward, a drummer with a bachelor’s degree in music education from the University of Memphis.

The stated topic of the dissertation is the way in which present-day soul musicians in Memphis, most of whom, Ryan reports, have a religious worldview and attend and often perform in church, negotiate their faith with respect to the secular music that they play and the secular venues in which they perform. Fifty years ago, musicians played either gospel music or secular music—but usually not both, at least not without paying a price. (Ryan opens her dissertation with a story about Sam Cooke, who began his career as a gospel musician but who was shunned by the gospel community when he recorded the secular “You Send Me.”) What about today? How do musicians explain or rationalize the fact that they play at the Blue Worm or B. B. King’s on Saturday nights and at church on Sunday mornings?

Perhaps not surprisingly, each musician copes with the tension between the sacred and the secular in his own way—Lannie McMillan is perhaps representative when he says that “God’s everywhere,” in the juke joints and in the churches--and the level and degree of censure from their church communities vary. Yes, there are ministers and other church leaders and family members who refuse to step foot in nightclubs and who disapprove of those who do; but even if some of the musicians in Ryan’s study feel that “the path to secular music” has to be traveled alone, none has apparently been disowned by his church or his family. Perhaps for that reason, it is not clear to this reader just what is at stake for the musicians. How delicate is the balance between the secular and the sacred? What do they stand to lose if they mismanage it?

One thing they gain from having to manage it is a deeper personal relationship with God and an opportunity to be a light in the darkness. As Renardo Ward explains, his faith teaches him that his musical talents are not just for his benefit but for the benefit of others. God has “entrusted” them with him, “and with that entrusting of that there’s also some accountability.”

One can find many interesting details and elements in Ryan’s dissertation, including a discussion of the meaning of soul and the origins of soul music. This very secular white boy learned that black churches provide to children from an early age (sometimes as young as two) formal training in music, training that more or less follows a certain procedure. Youngsters who are learning to play an electric instrument, for instance, are not allowed to plug the instrument in “for several years,” and even then the volume is only “slowly turned up over the course of years or months as young musicians gain skill and independence.”

Given the tremendous fieldwork and research that Ryan did, it is all the more unfortunate that her advisers did not insist that she draw any grand conclusions from her study. Perhaps the last two paragraphs of her final chapter, which examines the fascinating relationship between soul music and the Sunday sermon by way of Otis Redding, Al Green, and the late J. Blackfoot, will suffice:

            Throughout my fieldwork in Memphis I found that religious musicians returned over and over to the same questions as they negotiated the role their faith should play in secular music. “What repertoires and venues are appropriate for a Christian?” “How can I be an example of a Godly person in a club?” “How do I avoid negative influences?”

            The answer for some is to embrace the secular—even carnal love—as part of God’s creation. They bring the trappings of worship to the club, but they carry along with them the meanings of worship, of sermons, and of the whoop [a preaching technique in which speech and song come together]. Religious musicians—and some of their audience—can “have church” in the most secular of places. 

Today, Jennifer Ryan is an assistant professor of music at Indiana State University, and judging from her CV she appears to be preparing her dissertation for publication as a book. I look forward to reading the book and seeing how her understanding of her complicated topic has deepened over the years.

School Days

My father moved our family from Louisiana to Memphis in the summer of 1970. At the time, Memphis was only two years’ removed from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.—and in the midst of a collective fretting over the pressure to integrate its schools.

One of my earliest memories of my new Tennessee home was the yard signs with smiley faces that read, “Happiness is walking to your neighborhood school.” I also remember the few grown-ups in my life talking in serious tones about “bussing.” The two—bussing and the signs with the smiley faces—were of course related, as I later learned. Yet at the time, they only puzzled me. There were no schools in my neighborhood (we lived in a new subdivision in an unincorporated part of the county, just south of Bartlett and east of the city limits), and what was the big deal about bussing? In Louisiana, I had ridden a bus to school everyday.

As we all know, in 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional, and thus it was only a matter of time before black children and white would be attending the same schools. In Memphis, that time was slow in coming: it was not until 1972 that a federal court under Judge Robert M. McRae ordered that the city implement a plan to desegregate the schools in earnest.

Desegregation, it was hoped, would improve the education that black students received. No school that enrolled white children would dare offer a substandard education; thus, by virtue of attending the same schools that white children attended, black children would have access to the same educational resources as whites, and the achievement gap between the two would soon disappear.

Needless to say, things did not play out that way, certainly not in Memphis. After Judge McRae’s order, many whites fled the city for the county, and of the whites who remained, many began sending their children to private schools. (As for me, I first attended Bartlett Elementary, a county school; in the mid-1970s, our part of the county was annexed by the city, so by 1976 I was attending city schools, first Raleigh-Bartlett Meadows, then Kingsbury Junior High and Kingsbury High, from which I graduated in 1983.) The result was that the Memphis City School system entered the twenty-first century with a student body that was 85 percent black—and struggling to educate its charges.

Just how much it is struggling is difficult to determine. According to the website of the Tennessee Department of Education, whose tables of data could provide more guidance in interpreting, in 2012, in the system as a whole, fifth graders and eighth graders scored an A on the writing portion of the TCAP (Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program), as did eleventh graders. At the same time, it appears that only 25% of third graders scored “proficient” or “advanced” in reading and language arts, and only 39% of high school students scored “proficient” or “advanced” in English II.

Certainly one observer who believes the system is struggling is Marcus D. Pohlmann, whose 2008 book, Opportunity Lost: Race and Poverty in the Memphis City Schools (University of Tennessee Press), seeks to understand why many students in the city’s school system perform so poorly. In particular, Pohlmann, a political scientist at Rhodes College and the author, along with Michael Kirby, of Racial Politics at the Crossroads: Memphis Elects Dr. W. W. Herenton (1996), wants to reexamine the connection between socioeconomic class and educational success, a connection that was first suggested in the mid-1960s and that, at the time, challenged the belief that desegregated schools were the solution to the problems that black students faced. It’s a connection to which Pohlmann was already committed to affirming—or so it seemed to this reader—when he began researching and writing his book. So it came as no surprise that Pohlmann concluded that it’s not the schools per se that are to blame for the poor performance of the city’s schoolchildren; rather, it’s the socioeconomic characteristics of the children that determine the degree to which they become educated and able to lead a productive life. Race and especially family income, rather than student-teacher ratios and per-pupil spending, are what principally determine a student’s educational success or failure.

He draws that conclusion after comparing the Memphis City schools with the Shelby County schools. As he documents, over the period between 1970 and the early 2000s, the city system scored slightly higher on many of the traditional “inputs” that are used to measure school quality, including expenditures per pupil and student-teacher ratios; yet over that period it was students in the county schools, not the city schools, who scored better on traditional “output” measures such as attendance, graduation rates, and reading and math proficiency. “It appears,” Pohlmann thus concludes, “that the output gaps have more to do with the academic disadvantages low-income students bring to school with them than with the quality of the educational resources available once they arrive.”

Pohlmann’s is not a rigorous study, and his investigation of the relationship between socioeconomic status and educational outcomes occupies only a single chapter of his 282-page book. But that is no matter. Despite what the author claims in his preface, the real purpose of Opportunity Lost is to make a case for reform. Indeed, the longest chapter surveys numerous educational reforms that have been proposed or implemented, not only in Memphis but nationwide, and his concluding chapter presents what Pohlmann believes are solutions to the problems besetting the Memphis City schools today. In line with the conclusion of his study, one of the reforms is to guarantee to every working parent a “reasonable income” and health and other benefits through programs modeled on any number of European ones, most specifically the Danish “Flexicurity” program, which relies on a social compact between business, labor, and the government.

Pohlmann’s central message—and it is one with which I am in full agreement—is that we adults are simply not committed to insuring that every child receives an adequate education. We may be committed to at least providing every child with an opportunity to go to school; but that is not enough. Until we recognize the many elements and circumstances that, through a complex interplay, either help or hinder a child’s progress, we are simply paying lip service to our belief in equal opportunity. Much to his credit, Pohlmann does not beat around the bush, and he is worth quoting at length:

If we are serious about finding a way to educate all children so that they truly can rise or fall on their own merits, the proposals [I have put forward here] suggest a price tag that that will be formidable. Effective education-related reforms will require significant sacrifice across society if we are to reduce poverty, provide quality education options beginning at age one, reach out to indigent caregivers, reduce class sizes, extend school days and school years, attract more of the nation’s best and brightest into the teaching profession, and effectively consolidate and decentralize school administration. As a nation, we are already spending roughly $1 trillion a year on education. We can spend that amount more wisely, but we will have to spend much more if anything resembling comprehensive reform is to be implemented.

If such a statement smacks too much of social democracy for those on the right, let me hasten to point out that “responsibility,” including the responsibility of students, is a component of Pohlmann’s reformist vision. “Children have a responsibility to do their homework, stay in school, master standard English, and stop having babies,” he writes, and fathers “need to raise the children they help produce.”

It is worth noting that at least one reform Pohlmann advances appears destined to come about. In 2011, the Memphis City Schools surrendered its charter, forcing a merger with the county system. The merger is scheduled to go into effect in 2013.