0:00 [SPEAKER_00]: See pretty browns in beautiful gowns. 0:06 [SPEAKER_00]: You see tailor males and hand me down. 0:12 [SPEAKER_00]: You meet on a smith and pick pocket skill. 0:19 [SPEAKER_00]: You find that business never closes till somebody gets killed. 0:25 [SPEAKER_00]: If Bill Street could talk, 0:29 [SPEAKER_00]: If Bill Street could talk, Married man would have to take their beds in war. 0:38 [SPEAKER_00]: Except one or two, who never drink rules, and the blind man on the corner, who sings the Bill Street 0:51 [SPEAKER_01]: Those are a few lines from a song called Beel Street Blues. 0:56 [SPEAKER_01]: The most famous performance of that song came from Louis Armstrong, and it was written by a man named W.C. 1:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Handy, who called himself the father of the Blues. 1:07 [SPEAKER_01]: Bill Street, of course, runs through Memphis, Tennessee, where Andy lived when he wrote most of his music. 1:13 [SPEAKER_01]: The views were cultural phenomenon in the early 1900s that changed American music forever, and touched many other musical genres. 1:23 [SPEAKER_02]: So much of American culture evolved from here, particularly music in the 20th century from WC handy through the 1930s and the Jug bands and which is a mixture of country music and African American blues music to Elvis and so on. 1:43 [SPEAKER_02]: That's the voice of Winged Audi. 1:46 [SPEAKER_02]: My name is Wayne Dowdy. 1:47 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm the senior manager of the Memphis Public Libraries History Department and the author of eight books on Memphis History. 1:55 [SPEAKER_01]: I visited with Wayne, a respected Memphis historian to talk about his hometown. 2:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Wayne described a city founded on independence and creativity with proud residents, but the most famous moment in Memphis history is also the worst moment in Memphis history. 2:12 [SPEAKER_01]: And you know exactly what event I'm talking about, even if you forgotten that it happened in Memphis. 2:19 [SPEAKER_01]: In 1968, a strike by Black sanitation workers attracted the attention of Martin Luther King Jr. who came to the city to offer his help and was assassinated on the balcony of his hotel six days later. 2:34 [SPEAKER_02]: There are two moments in Memphis history where the city changed dramatically. 2:40 [SPEAKER_02]: He was going in one direction, this event took place and it went in another. 2:44 [SPEAKER_02]: The first was the 1878. 2:46 [SPEAKER_02]: Yellow fever epidemic, 5,000 mimpians are killed, thousands more flee the city and never return. 2:53 [SPEAKER_02]: Population shifts to a more rural population, rural white population, still a very large African-American population. 3:01 [SPEAKER_02]: And it changes the direction of the city the second. 3:05 [SPEAKER_02]: major event is the sanitation strike of 1968 and Dr. King's murder. 3:12 [SPEAKER_02]: The there is the Memphis before 1968 and then there is the Memphis after 1968 and they're not the same place. 3:20 [SPEAKER_01]: Memphis was founded in 1819 on the banks of the Mississippi River. 3:25 [SPEAKER_01]: It started as a small town full of men who worked on the river in a few African slaves. 3:30 [SPEAKER_01]: Though their situations were very different, these two groups of people shared the belief that each person should be able to decide for himself or herself how to live. 3:41 [SPEAKER_01]: For the white river workers, that meant small government, for the slaves, that meant taking control of their own destinies. 3:49 [SPEAKER_02]: And then you have the African-American population. 3:54 [SPEAKER_02]: who even during slavery was not willing to accept their condition. 4:01 [SPEAKER_02]: They did everything they could to fight against their, against slavery. 4:05 [SPEAKER_02]: One of the most interesting examples, there was a slave named Thomas Blan, who lived in Memphis, and Thomas, like most slaves, could not read or write, but his owner hired 4:20 [SPEAKER_02]: a couple of slave plasterers to do some work at their house. 4:25 [SPEAKER_02]: And he noticed that one of them was writing things down on a slip of paper. 4:29 [SPEAKER_02]: And so he asked him, certainly, could you teach me to read and write? 4:33 [SPEAKER_02]: And he said, yes, I can, come by my house. 4:37 [SPEAKER_02]: He was a skilled slave this plasterer was who lived in his own property. 4:42 [SPEAKER_02]: He was paid wages, a portion of his wages went to his owner the rest he kept. 4:51 [SPEAKER_02]: So once he felt comfortable with that, he forged a pass with his owner signature saying that he could be hired out to anyone for as long as the job required. 5:05 [SPEAKER_02]: And so he went to the waterfront, went on board a steamboat, handed the note to hand the pass to the pilot of the boat and he hired him. 5:16 [SPEAKER_02]: couple of days later he's in Ohio and he keeps on going and he goes to all the way to Canada. 5:22 [SPEAKER_02]: and when he's in Canada, he writes a letter to his owner and says, guess what, I'm in Canada, and you'll never see me again. 5:31 [SPEAKER_02]: And so Thomas plans experience gives you an idea of how enslaved Memphians viewed their status, which is to say, they're gonna do whatever they can to achieve freedom, and they will go to great lengths to do so. 5:46 [SPEAKER_01]: Soon after Blantic'scape, the southern states seceded, leading to Civil War, Memphis was caught in a struggle that lasted beyond the surrender and apimatics. 5:57 [SPEAKER_01]: In an 1866 incident, known as the Memphis Massacre, White Mimfians went into Black parts of town, killing and robbing anyone they saw. 6:08 [SPEAKER_01]: The spree lasted three days, a total of 45 Black Mimfians, 6:13 [SPEAKER_02]: But out of that horror comes this cooperation, it's by no means equal cooperation. 6:21 [SPEAKER_02]: But there is a dialogue, there is communication between the white and black communities that means that Memphis evolves in a different way. 6:33 [SPEAKER_01]: This dialogue catapulted Memphis to the forefront of the civil rights movement. 6:38 [SPEAKER_01]: In fact, Memphis had its own version of Rosa Parks 50 years earlier. 6:46 [SPEAKER_02]: Mary Morrison in 1905 was a domestic worker. 6:52 [SPEAKER_02]: And she got on board a streetcar and she sat down in a seat and which happened to be the white section of the streetcar. 7:01 [SPEAKER_02]: She was told by the driver, you gotta go to the back of a streetcar. 7:07 [SPEAKER_02]: She refused. 7:08 [SPEAKER_02]: She was arrested and after her arrest, 7:13 [SPEAKER_02]: There was a mass-meeting held of African Americans. 7:17 [SPEAKER_02]: They raised several thousand dollars for her legal defense. 7:22 [SPEAKER_02]: And with two very well-known and successful black attorneys, such as Sia Settle and Benjamin Booth, they took the case all the way to the Tennessee Supreme Court. 7:34 [SPEAKER_02]: They lost, but they established a foundation of using the law to attack segregation. 7:43 [SPEAKER_01]: The law was a powerful tool for black minfians and their allies because unlike most southern cities, black men have the same voting rights as white men. 7:54 [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, the Tennessee Constitution that is written after the Civil War specifically says that all males may all adult males have the right to vote. 8:04 [SPEAKER_02]: And that is never fully stripped from African-Americans in Tennessee, 8:09 [SPEAKER_01]: This meant that aspiring politicians had to consider the interests of the Black Population. 8:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Black Mifians were elected to public office in the 1870s and 80s, earlier than the vast majority of southern towns. 8:23 [SPEAKER_01]: The whole thing created what Wayne calls, unequal cooperation in the city, where Black Mifians helped some political leverage, but not enough to overcome the rampient racism of many white neighbors. 8:37 [SPEAKER_02]: So, I think the important thing is that there are unlike many places, there is dialogue between whites and blacks here, not just on a sort of a street level where you might speak to depending on where you work, you might be at your white, you may have black employees and you talk to them and you have a relationship. 8:58 [SPEAKER_02]: or someone you may have a domestic servant who works in your house, but also you would know them politically. 9:04 [SPEAKER_02]: If you were involved in local politics, if you voted, you probably stand in line behind an African-American who's standing in line to vote. 9:11 [SPEAKER_02]: And so African Americans use that leverage to improve their situation. 9:16 [SPEAKER_02]: They are able to achieve some, not a quality, but certainly something closer to a quality that you would see in other places. 9:26 [SPEAKER_02]: Still, of course, subject to violence, still subject to discrimination. 9:31 [SPEAKER_02]: It was by no means a racial utopia. 9:34 [SPEAKER_01]: over several decades, that unequal cooperation caused friction, and eventually the system broke down. 9:41 [SPEAKER_01]: In February 1968, two black sanitation workers named Echo Cole, and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a faulty trash compactor, while sheltering from the rain, the overwhelming majority of sanitation workers were black. 9:57 [SPEAKER_01]: The sanitation union decided to strike to demand higher wages, over time pay, and basic safety measures. 10:04 [SPEAKER_01]: Mayor Henry Lobbe refused to concede anything, or even to negotiate. 10:10 [SPEAKER_02]: Now in 1968, of course, that's an anomaly in Memphis history. 10:14 [SPEAKER_02]: The fact that Mayor Henry Lowe would not negotiate with striking sanitation workers was actually not the Memphis way would have been to discuss this thing to have worked out some sort of compromise. 10:27 [SPEAKER_02]: The sanitation workers wouldn't have got everything they wanted, but the white establishment would have compromised, would have given in on some things, 10:41 [SPEAKER_01]: a month into the strike, tensions and garbage mounted, low but declared martial law, implemented a 7pm curfew, and brought in 4,000 National Guardsmen. 10:52 [SPEAKER_01]: Martin Luther King Jr. came to Memphis to speak at a rally in support of the strikers. 10:57 [SPEAKER_01]: On April 3, he gave his famous I've been to the mountain top speech. 11:02 [SPEAKER_01]: The next day at 601 pm, King was shot and killed by James Earl Ray while standing on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel. 11:13 [SPEAKER_02]: So there was that white felt that the strike and Dr. King's killing solid Memphis's name, and in many ways it did. 11:27 [SPEAKER_02]: The city was 11:30 [SPEAKER_02]: The perception of most amphience, particularly white amphience, was that Memphis was unfairly blamed for Dr. King's death. 11:40 [SPEAKER_02]: Of course, you can argue that Dr. King wouldn't have needed to come here in the first place if they hadn't treated the sanitation workers with some equity and worked with them. 11:54 [SPEAKER_02]: so you can then draw the connection that, yes, he sort of was killed because he was here. 12:00 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean Memphis deserves some blame for this because Memphis didn't settle that strike when they should have. 12:07 [SPEAKER_01]: The outside perception of Memphis took a nose dive, which had a major economic impact. 12:17 [SPEAKER_02]: The city is described by Tom Magazine as a decaying river town, which is a phrase that haunts the city for decades afterward. 12:26 [SPEAKER_02]: Northern industry, which had looked to Memphis and then in the 1970s, looked to Memphis for we had international harvester here, for motor, RCA. 12:37 [SPEAKER_02]: We had some major industrial concerns in Memphis, but after Dr. King's death, 12:45 [SPEAKER_02]: no one wanted to come here. 12:46 [SPEAKER_02]: They were afraid of the racial turmoil, and then culturally the city becomes a place where people don't want to come, people want to avoid it. 13:01 [SPEAKER_02]: The New York Times and the early 70s describes a Memphis as a place that never wants to change. 13:07 [SPEAKER_02]: The South 13:10 [SPEAKER_02]: In the 1970s sort of rebranded itself as what they called the Sun Belt, because it was labor costs were less, you had better weather, and so there's so a lot of southern cities and states began to attract northern industry in a way they never had before. 13:29 [SPEAKER_02]: While Memphis is totally left out of that, in fact, the Wall Street Journal calls Memphis the Sun Belt's dark spot. 13:37 [SPEAKER_02]: And in that continuous for decades, that doesn't last simply through the 1970s. 13:43 [SPEAKER_02]: It lasts through the rest of the 20th century. 13:47 [SPEAKER_02]: And Memphis emerges. 13:48 [SPEAKER_02]: Memphis has developed an inferiority complex. 13:52 [SPEAKER_02]: Chip on its shoulder. 13:54 [SPEAKER_02]: We can look at all this rich history and certainly rich culture of music in particular. 14:00 [SPEAKER_02]: But nobody pays any attention to Memphis. 14:03 [SPEAKER_02]: Is how Memphis see it. 14:05 [SPEAKER_02]: and so there is anything that is proposed to be done in Memphis in the 1970s, 1980s, the average of Memphis in on the street would say that will never work because Memphis just can't do anything right and it was very common for people to view the city that way and that we were in many ways our own worst enemy because we weren't nobody was proud to be from here. 14:35 [SPEAKER_01]: You've heard this saying that time heals all wounds, and while Dr. King's death is a scar that will never disappear, it has become a part of Memphis's story. 14:45 [SPEAKER_01]: Memphis has had to reckon with the tragedy of King's death without forgetting it, a willingness to leverage its pain into new growth has turned Memphis into a determined place. 14:55 [SPEAKER_01]: The Memphis that Wayne describes now is similar to the one he described at its founding. 15:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Now there's a fiery fighting spirit that differentiates Memphis from its rivals. 15:07 [SPEAKER_02]: And there is a natural rivalry between Memphis and Nashville. 15:12 [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, I'd say we hate each other, which is, I think, 15:17 [SPEAKER_02]: even more exacerbated now, because Nashville's view of development and growth is the opposite of Memphis. 15:29 [SPEAKER_02]: Nashville is building new skyscrapers, not to say that we aren't too, but most of our growth has been in adaptive reuse. 15:40 [SPEAKER_02]: We've been taking old buildings and creating something new out of them. 15:47 [SPEAKER_02]: the in the crosstown neighborhood what a crosstown concourse that was the largest sears catalog center in the country. 16:01 [SPEAKER_02]: Sears in robot being most people bought things from sears from catalogs so the orders would come to Memphis they'd be filled and they'd be shipped out sort of like what Amazon does now. 16:11 [SPEAKER_02]: and it was a major built in the 1920s, a sears closed it in the major part over the 1970s and then 1980s the building was completely left empty. 16:25 [SPEAKER_02]: So group of investors, instead of tearing down, it's a massive structure and instead of tearing it down, they renovated it. 16:36 [SPEAKER_02]: And now it has restaurants, shops, a concert venue, a radio station, a major music archive is there as well. 16:48 [SPEAKER_02]: and this is creativity. 16:50 [SPEAKER_02]: This is seeing something that isn't and making it. 16:55 [SPEAKER_01]: That creativity has made Memphis the perfect tone for dreamers, creatives, and independent thinkers. 17:02 [SPEAKER_01]: One of the best illustrations of that is Pigly Wiggly. 17:06 [SPEAKER_01]: Pigly Wiggly is a grocery store chain, founded in Memphis by a man named Clarence Saunders, and it was the first self-serve grocery store in America. 17:16 [SPEAKER_02]: So I think the city is deeply creative in everything that it does because 17:25 [SPEAKER_02]: Our culture is a culture of independence, a culture of, we don't really care what other people think of. 17:33 [SPEAKER_02]: We do on some level, but on the other way, we're going to do it our own way, and when Memphis has finally, we're finally accepted that we are different, that we're not Atlanta, for example. 17:47 [SPEAKER_02]: We never will be Atlanta, we are Memphis, and accepting that 17:52 [SPEAKER_02]: has made us a much stronger and a more vibrant place because you can feel the creativity as it seeps up from the cracks of the sidewalks in the streets because and Memphis is a major creativity in the sense of entrepreneurship. 18:08 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean the first self-service grocery store in the United States was created here. 18:14 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, the way we shop for groceries today, you walk in, you find your products, you put it in a basket, you walk up and you check out. 18:24 [SPEAKER_02]: Well groceries grocery shopping at the beginning of the 20th century. 18:29 [SPEAKER_02]: little over a hundred years ago was far different. 18:32 [SPEAKER_02]: It was much more of a general store kind of atmosphere where you went in, you had to find a clerk, you said, okay, I need a pound of salt. 18:39 [SPEAKER_02]: I need two pounds of bacon. 18:41 [SPEAKER_02]: I need this. 18:41 [SPEAKER_02]: They would go retrieve the products and bring it to you. 18:44 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, you didn't know what the salt was. 18:47 [SPEAKER_02]: It was salt. 18:48 [SPEAKER_02]: You didn't know what brand it was. 18:50 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, pigly wiggly, which is the name of the grocery store, and it was chosen by the man who founded it, Clarence Saunders, because it would be instantly recognizable, but you hear it once, you'll never forget it. 19:04 [SPEAKER_02]: And so instead, he put all the products out on the floor, and people would then bring their products to the checkout stand, which that simply did not exist before Clarence Saunders. 19:18 [SPEAKER_02]: And not only did it revolutionize the way you shopped, it also revolutionized America in the sense of brand loyalty. 19:29 [SPEAKER_02]: So you're going to say, okay, I don't want, I want Morton salt. 19:31 [SPEAKER_02]: I don't want this salt. 19:33 [SPEAKER_02]: And so you would choose which brand you like, which we still do today, right? 19:38 [SPEAKER_02]: And so Memphis is creative in so many ways that and I think it would be difficult to find a more creative tale. 19:47 [SPEAKER_02]: And if you look, if you wrote a business plan and said I'm going to call my business big pigly wiggly and then you went to a bank and they would laugh you out of the bank. 19:57 [SPEAKER_02]: So that's crazy, but seeing Memphis that's really not crazy. 20:01 [SPEAKER_02]: Something that's unique, different, creative is far more accepted here. 20:05 [SPEAKER_02]: You might not get, you might not always get a lot of help, but no one will stop you from chasing your dream here, doesn't matter how strange it might be. 20:16 [SPEAKER_02]: and Mimfians will applaud you for your creativity and for your strangeness. 20:22 [SPEAKER_02]: There are no barriers here. 20:24 [SPEAKER_02]: There is no aristocracy here. 20:26 [SPEAKER_02]: There is no, there are some people who think they are, but Mimfians has such a thin layer of wealth and influence that Mimfians don't play that game. 20:40 [SPEAKER_02]: Mimfians are not interested in a social register. 20:42 [SPEAKER_02]: Mimfians will 20:46 [SPEAKER_02]: how we view the world. 20:48 [SPEAKER_02]: We value people who do something, who create something, it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be the greatest thing in the world, but we appreciate people's work here and maybe that's unique as well. 21:03 [SPEAKER_02]: There was a president at Rhodes College who he's retired since then, but he told, 21:09 [SPEAKER_02]: He had been a president of a college in Nashville before he came to Memphis. 21:13 [SPEAKER_02]: And he said, when Nashville, I knew I discovered who were the five or six people you had to talk to in order to get anything done. 21:20 [SPEAKER_02]: The whoever was the richest and the most powerful. 21:23 [SPEAKER_02]: He comes to Memphis and finds, there's nobody to talk to. 21:26 [SPEAKER_02]: You just do it. 21:28 [SPEAKER_02]: You don't have to ask anybody permission. 21:30 [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, people look at you strange if you went around and said, well, I want to do this. 21:34 [SPEAKER_02]: They're like, well, what's stopping you? 21:36 [SPEAKER_02]: We're not talking about raising money. 21:37 [SPEAKER_02]: We're talking about just a decision to do something. 21:41 [SPEAKER_02]: And that's Memphis. 21:43 [SPEAKER_02]: You just do it. 21:45 [SPEAKER_02]: And there's going to be people in the neighborhoods who are going to want to help. 21:49 [SPEAKER_02]: Memphis is a very grassroots place. 21:51 [SPEAKER_02]: It's a very neighborhood oriented place. 21:54 [SPEAKER_02]: And Memphis are very proud of the neighborhoods in which they live. 21:59 [SPEAKER_02]: And the majority of them, 22:01 [SPEAKER_02]: are very actively involved in trying to improve those neighborhoods. 22:05 [SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes they don't get very far because they don't, they don't get the powers that be behind their efforts all the time. 22:12 [SPEAKER_02]: So again, it's no utopia, but it, but that neighborhood focus, that creativity, that demand to be heard, which membranes are constantly yelling at the top of their lungs, saying, look at my neighborhood, this is awful. 22:27 [SPEAKER_02]: And when we want this, we need that. 22:31 [SPEAKER_02]: And Memphis had never been shy about. 22:33 [SPEAKER_02]: Memphis had never been afraid to fight City Hall. 22:36 [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, in many ways, the history of the city is one big fight with City Hall, one way or the other. 22:42 [SPEAKER_02]: Either to be recognized or for things to change, or for things to be better. 22:48 [SPEAKER_01]: The creativity, independence, and lack of bureaucracy, found in Memphis, has me wandering, but the next invention or work of art will be that comes out of the singular city in southwestern Tennessee. 23:02 [SPEAKER_01]: In the past, one of the most well-known artistic movements was the one centered in Sun Studio, on Union Street, in the heart of downtown. 23:11 [SPEAKER_01]: In the next episode, I'll sit down with the head engineer at Sun. 23:15 [SPEAKER_00]: in a place known as the birthplace of rock and roll. 23:40 [SPEAKER_00]: And with pocket skill, you'll find that business never closes till somebody gets killed. 23:49 [SPEAKER_00]: If Bill Street could talk, if Bill Street could talk, 24:09 [SPEAKER_00]: and the blind man on the corner.
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