Unfinished Business

This book—Zandria F. Robinson’s This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-soul South—has pinned me to the wall. Before reading it, I often wondered if African Americans who were born and raised in the South thought of themselves as Southerners. Why would they want to identify with a region with a history of enslaving and oppressing black people? And now as I write, I wonder why I’ve never asked. Ah, yes. Well. Like I said, this book has pinned me to the wall.   

I now know the answer. And how black Southerners have made the South their own is the subject of Professor Robinson’s impressive and ambitious book. Although the word Memphis does not appear in the title, This Ain’t Chicago, which was published in 2014 by the University of North Carolina Press and is part of its New Directions in Southern Studies series, is grounded in the Memphis experience. Professor Robinson, a born-and-bred Memphian herself and a sociologist at Rhodes College, takes stock of interviews she conducted with black Memphians—as well as of music and especially television programs and film—to “explore how region intersects with other axes of identity and difference in the black South.”

Professor Robinson conducted the field work for the book while she was a PhD student at Northwestern University, in Chicago. The main title comes from the responses of her interview subjects when she presented them with consent forms on Northwestern letterhead. “This ain’t Chicago,” they would say upon seeing the stationery—by which they meant that the black experience in the South was distinct from that in Chicago and other parts of the country.

That response—that assertion of a unique Southern black experience—is at the heart of the book. Region is the key element. As Professor Robinson explains, the South as a place, once a central focus of sociological studies, fell out of favor after World War II, as scholars became more interested in problems that could be treated as national or global in scope. Nevertheless, it is regional identity that black Southerners—or more properly, young black Southerners—have recently added, or reintroduced, to the mix of race, gender, and class that forms and informs their identities. Many black Southerners who came of age during the 1950s and 1960s—that is, before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.—disowned the South, representing as it did for them racism, violence, and oppression. It’s the millennials and the hip-hop generation who “boldly and defiantly claim a regional identity as a distinction, a significant nuance to their racial identities.” As a 32-year-old waitress and returning college student interviewed by Professor Robinson put it, “We just do things better down here.” It would be hard to imagine that same waitress saying the same thing fifty years ago—which is exactly the point.

That Memphis does not appear in the title is deliberate: Professor Robinson intends her study to comment on and illuminate black life in the South generally. Yet Memphis is the ideal place to center her study, she says. The Bluff City “sits at the physical, temporal, and epistemological intersection of rural and urban, soul and post-soul, and civil rights and post–civil rights.” Because of that, Memphis stands in for “a conversation with the varied instantiations of the South, past and present.” I will return to this at the end of my review.

Post-soul and post–civil rights here have multifaceted meanings. In part, they are temporal markers, referring to a period that comes after the 1960s and 1970s—“after the heyday of Al Green, Stax Records, and Mavis Staples.” In part, they have to do with the paradoxes—and here Professor Robinson references the cultural critic Nelson George and the popular culture scholar Mark Anthony Neal—that characterize black life in the twenty-first century: “Mass incarceration, wealth stagnation, and the entrenchment of HIV co-occur with unprecedented educational attainment, skyrocketing wealth for a small but expanding blue-chip elite, and the first African American president.” They also have to do, as alluded to above, with the relationship of black Southerners to the past. Whereas previous generations wanted to escape and even erase the past, the generations who have come of age after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. reclaim the past and use it to create twenty-first-century identities, taking the cultural and historical materials of life in the South—its symbols, its food, its history, its famous sons and daughters—and combining them in creative, fluid, and sometimes transgressive ways.

But perhaps the most important concept in Professor Robinson’s analysis is what she calls country cosmopolitan. In essence, country cosmopolitan refers to a mix of the rural and the urban—much like the author’s presentation of Memphis itself. It is a “best-of-both-worlds blackness” that “blends rural values and urban sensibilities to navigate—and sometimes sanitize—the post–civil rights South.” It combines ironic performances of behaviors that blacks were once terrorized into performing—saying “yes, sir” to a white man—with new and decidedly non-ironic behaviors, such as staring directly at whites in a restaurant without speaking. (Is that really a thing?) What’s more, country cosmopolitan functions differently for different groups. Ordinary black Southerners—the Memphians interviewed in the book—use it to “maintain and strengthen the boundaries of authentic racial and regional identities”; black Southern cultural elites like Tyler Perry and the rap duo OutKast use it to “give voice to a distinctively Southern black experience”; and corporations like McDonald’s and Popeye’s use country cosmopolitan to “build an African American consumer base and foster a regional seal of approval.”

Although This Ain’t Chicago originates in Memphis, Professor Robinson is careful to situate her subject in the South as a whole. As she points out, while the popular media trade on the idea of the South as a unique place, the region is “evolving into something much like other American spaces: it is characterized by urban and suburban sprawl, is home to many new immigrants, and faces challenges managing the needs of economically and politically diverse populations.” The South remains very much an intentional construct, be it of the Southern hip-hop artists who insist on being taken seriously by their East Coast counterparts, the forty-four-year-old media professional who bristles at outsiders who “think we slow, backwards, [and] always at church,” or the director of a nonprofit organization who sees herself as a “Southern belle” and understands how being from the South makes men “want” her. As Professor Robinson writes, “The South is a strategic accomplishment, both in popular media and in people’s everyday lives. Black and white folks, the cultural elite acting on their behalf, and corporations are all interested in accomplishing a particular version of the region that suits their specific ends.”

This Ain’t Chicago will bother white Southerners who believe it’s their birthright to control how the South is historicized, represented, and interpreted. As the book amply demonstrates, young black Southerners have been engaged in creating their own South, with its own history, its own symbols, its own culture. And I think that that gets to the crux of the recent furor and hand-wringing over Confederate symbols such as the Confederate flag. Whether the Confederate flag represents “heritage, not hate” is in some ways beside the point; what is really at issue for many whites who defend the flag is their authority to dictate its meaning—whatever that meaning may be—and by extension, the meaning of the South and what it means to be Southern.

In closing, I want to return to the claim that Memphis is the ideal place to sample the identity work of young black Southerners. As someone who grew up in Memphis and visits the city often, I think I understand what Professor Robinson means when she says that Memphis “sits at the physical, temporal, and epistemological intersection of rural and urban, soul and post-soul, and civil rights and post–civil rights.” This means that the city—unlike, say, an Atlanta or a Charlotte—drags its past into its present, that Memphis has a usable present and a usable past, that Memphis, while being a twenty-first-century city that has a majority black population and a majority black leadership, retains significant elements of the rural, the Old South, the Jim Crow South. As a young woman from Jackson, Mississippi, who moved to Memphis to attend college said, Memphis is dogged by “unfinished business.” The lives of the majority of black residents are still shaped by the legacy of white supremacy and white oppression—although white supremacy and white oppression are no longer sanctioned by law and although, legally and in theory, black residents have access to education, employment, and credit. Black lives (and white lives too) are also shaped by the rural inheritance that might be the city’s most enduring, and crippling, legacy. Memphis is a city of landlordism, of sharecroppers and tenant farmers—not literally anymore, but a hat-in-hand, working-class mentality pervades the city to this day. Whether my characterization of Memphis is accurate, and whether Memphis is unique in those respects, are open questions. I invite my fellow Memphians to respond.

Extra, Extra

It’s no secret that the newspaper industry is rapidly changing, in troubling ways. Memphis’s remaining daily, the Commercial Appeal, was purchased by Gannett in 2016 and just last month was reorganized—with a considerable layoff of staff—into a Tennessee “network” involving the Commercial Appeal and the dailies in Nashville and Knoxville. The executive editor of the Commercial Appeal, Louis Graham, who has been with the paper for thirty-eight years, announced in a letter that the “historic” changes “position each news organization, working collectively, to support a continued, aggressive expansion of digital content.” The message was essentially addition by subtraction and consolidation: yes, we are becoming smaller, and yes we are now part of a statewide consortium, but we will nevertheless bring you all the news you care to read and maintain an “intense” local focus.

It’s little consolation, but Thomas Harrison Baker’s marvelous 1971 history of the Commercial Appeal reminds us that the newspaper industry has always been rapidly changing. In the early days of Memphis, before the Civil War, it was not uncommon for newspapers to be founded and then cease operations only a short time later. The Commercial Appeal—which began life as the Weekly Appeal—was founded in 1841 to replace a failed newspaper, the Western World and Memphis Banner of the Constitution—which was founded to replace the Gazette, which was founded to replace the Memphis Advocate and Western District Intelligencer, Memphis’s first newspaper. All of those newspapers were organs of the Democratic Party, and the last three were founded, and foundered, between 1827 and 1840. 

Another period of frequent change occurred during the Great Depression, when ownership of the Commercial Appeal (its name starting in 1894) changed hands no fewer than four times. In 1927, the paper was purchased by a new publishing company called Memphis Commercial Appeal, Inc., which was led by the publisher of the Nashville Tennessean, a man named Luke Lea. In fact, Lea soon acquired ownership of no fewer than four Tennessee newspapers: in addition to the Nashville Tennessean and the Commercial Appeal, he owned the Knoxville Journal and another Memphis paper, the Evening Appeal. The depression brought down Lea’s empire, and in 1931 the Commercial Appeal became the property of the Minnesota and Ontario Paper Company. But that company became a victim of hard economic times too, and in 1933 the Commercial Appeal was purchased by James Hammond Jr., who, since 1932, had been the publisher of William Randolph Hearst’s Detroit Times. Then, in 1936, the paper was sold yet again, this time to the Scripps-Howard organization. Scripps-Howard and its successor organization, the Journal Media Group, owned the Commercial Appeal until 2016, when it was sold to Gannett.

Change in the form of mergers is nothing new either. As early as 1847, the Daily Appeal absorbed another Memphis paper and Democratic organ, the Monitor. In 1890, the Appeal (long since a daily) joined forces with the Avalanche to form a single paper, the Appeal-Avalanche. Then, in 1894, an upstart newspaper in the city, the Commercial, purchased the Appeal-Avalanche, and thus the Commercial Appeal was born.

Readers should be reminded as well that, after 1936, Scripps-Howard owned not just the Commercial Appeal but the city’s major afternoon daily, the Press-Scimitar, which itself was the product of a merger, between the News-Scimitar and the Press, ten years before.

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The newspaper that last month underwent a “historic” reorganization was founded by a newcomer to Memphis, Henry Van Pelt, who quickly decided that the young city needed a local organ for the Democratic Party.  It began as a weekly. Each edition of the new paper—known as the Weekly Appeal until 1847, when it became a daily and changed its name to the Appeal—contained four pages; each page contained seven columns and measured twenty-four inches wide and thirty-seven inches long. A subscription was $3 a year—roughly the equivalent, I would estimate, of $125 today. (As a point of comparison, a yearly print subscription to the Commercial Appeal today is just under $240.) In its first few decades, the Appeal obtained most of its news from “exchanges,” that is, newspapers from other cities. The exchanges were supplemented with news from two additional sources: the telegraph and “correspondence,” letters from professional journalists and especially local residents.

Quite remarkably, the newspaper survived. Not even the Civil War put it out of business, although it did put it out of Memphis, first to Grenada and then to Jackson, Mississippi, then to Atlanta, then to Montgomery, Alabama, then back into Georgia, finding itself at war’s end with some of its supplies and equipment in Columbus and the rest in Macon—all the while publishing new editions as regularly as it could. Its staff returned to Memphis in the summer of 1865, and the paper kept going, its editors announcing that the outcome of the war had been decided—and accepted: “We recognize and abide by the logical sequence of the late, unhappy Civil War in the destruction, now and forever, of the institution of African slavery,” the paper announced in its edition of November 5, 1865.

The paper survived as well the yellow fever epidemic of 1878—even though many of its employees did not. Indeed, almost half of the staff of forty-one died, and most of the others fell ill. One staff member who managed to not only survive but to carry on the work of the newspaper to an extent nearly impossible to believe was the editor, John McLeod Keating, who, in fifty to seventy items a day, chronicled life in Memphis during the epidemic. Keating, perhaps not incidentally, published in 1888 a three-volume history of the city.

By the early 1880s, the Appeal was trumpeting the promise of the “New South,” a South committed to progress and prosperity, “not weeping over the past” and “not chanting jeremiads over times that are gone,” but “full of renewed vigor abandoning old sloth, and gone-by apathy.”

In 1894, the Appeal was purchased by a new Memphis paper, the Commercial, and the two merged to become the Commercial Appeal. At the time, one of the major national issues was silver. The economy was still reeling from the Panic of 1893, and silver miners and struggling farmers in the West and South clamored for the government to put more money in circulation by allowing the free coinage of silver. The issue sharply divided the ownership of the new paper and eventually caused the editor, Edward Ward Carmack, to resign.

In 1908, the paper brought back a former managing editor, C. P. J. (Charles Patrick Joseph) Mooney, to be the editor. Mooney would run the Commercial Appeal for the next eighteen years, turning it into very much his own. Rather than focusing on the workings of national political parties, Mooney directed the paper to devote more space to local issues—agriculture, especially crop diversification; commercial development; and the mayoralty of E. H. Crump, whom Mooney mistrusted. He also stressed that the paper’s first duty was to report the news objectively and accurately; he agonized over the slightest error, and he urged his reporters to relate events to local points of reference.

Mooney died in 1926, and then followed the ten years of changing ownership during the depression, ending with the purchase of the Commercial Appeal in 1936 by Scripps-Howard, a purchase that was, in retrospect, the beginning of a long period of relative stability.

Aside from a brief epilogue, Baker’s account ends in 1941, with the one hundredth anniversary of the newspaper, an occasion marked by the publication of a special edition of no fewer than 328 pages. (Let that sink in.) One can reasonably wonder if the Commercial Appeal will still exist when the calendar turns to 2041, in what would be the newspaper’s bicentennial.

***

Baker tells the history of the Commercial Appeal mainly through the newspaper’s editorials. What did the paper have to say about the major issues of the day? I’ll deal with three of them here: prohibition, agriculture, and race.

The Commercial Appeal generally opposed prohibition and, once prohibition was the law of the land, favored its repeal. Its basic position was that morality cannot be legislated. Rather than ban alcohol, society should regulate it: temperance, not prohibition, was the practical course to take. After Tennessee instituted statewide prohibition in 1909, the Commercial Appeal argued that the law should be followed—not because the paper had had a change of heart, which it had not, but because, as the editors wrote in December of that year, “the way to secure the repeal of a bad law is to enforce it.” For a brief period, Mooney did change his position, less out of opposition to alcohol per se and more out of opposition to the lawless behavior it seemed to cause. Yet by the early 1930s, the paper was again squarely in favor of repeal.

Agriculture became a focus of the paper when Mooney became editor, in 1908. The new editor urged farmers in the Mid-South to stop relying on cotton and to diversify instead. Mooney was especially bothered by the fact that the South did not grow and raise its own food. The price of cotton was never enough to cover the costs of importing corn, pork, and other foodstuffs from the North, and “no section of our country can be truly prosperous that buys its food for man and beast,” the editors wrote in October 1909. In 1934, the paper began what Baker calls “the newspaper’s most successful continuing promotion”: the Plant to Prosper contest. The contest gave cash awards to farmers who best used their land for purposes other than cotton. At its peak, in the late 1940s, one hundred thousand people, black and white, were participating every year. The contest lasted until 1965 and was, Baker writes, “undoubtedly the newspaper’s most effective contribution to Mid-South agriculture.”

The paper’s position on race on the whole upheld white supremacy. Quite surprisingly, in 1851 there was in Memphis a Sunday school for blacks. (Baker provides no details about the school.) The Appeal found this outrageous, a “direct blow at [slavery] itself, as well as at the peace and security of Southern society,” read an editorial in August of that year. During the Civil War, the paper found it “revolting” that the Union army enlisted blacks—“men of low instincts, and whose brutal passions are easily aroused,” as the editors wrote in 1863—to fight against the South. After the war, during the enthusiasm for the New South, the Appeal accepted that blacks could vote but was dumbfounded by their support for Republican candidates. By the early twentieth century, the paper seemed intent on maintaining a social order that had whites on top, calling the assertion in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” a “platitudinous absurdity.” In 1933, the editors offered, in reference to the Scottsboro rape case, that “the preservation of racial purity is a much more vital need than the preservation of racial equality.”

Of a piece with race was lynching, on which the paper’s position shifted over the years. Lynching, the editors said in 1900, was sometimes justified, sometimes not. Yet by 1913, Mooney was stating his unqualified opposition to the practice—though maintaining that blacks and whites would never be equal. It is quite possible, Baker suggests, that the paper knew of plans to lynch a black man in the spring of 1917 yet did nothing to stop it, other than offering a “brief and general condemnation of mob action.” Four years later, and for reasons Baker does not investigate, the paper became concerned about the increased activities of the Ku Klux Klan and began running articles opposing the organization and lynching. The articles, along with cartoons by J. P. Alley, won for the paper a Pulitzer Prize, in 1923. In the late 1930s, the paper opposed a federal anti-lynching law while maintaining its opposition to lynching itself.

***

During the entire thirty years they lived in Memphis, my parents subscribed to the Commercial Appeal. They read it at the kitchen table every morning. My mother read the paper backwards, starting from the last page of a section and working her way to the first.

I read the paper too—if reading the sports section counts as reading the paper. Perhaps my favorite time with the paper came on Sundays in the fall of 1981. I would take the sports section to the Danver’s on Sycamore View, and there over an all-I-could-eat breakfast, I’d read about Herschel Walker and the college football games from the day before.

I appeared in the paper once. It was the summer of 1973, and I was attending a day camp at Gaisman Park. I was playing chess with a friend when an athlete from Memphis State University dropped by. A reporter took our picture; it ran in the paper the next day.