A central part of Memphis’ bicentennial celebration should be about celebrating its heritage as an African American city.

We don’t just mean that in the sense that African Americans are 62% of today’s population.  Rather, we mean it in a historically accurate way: Memphis at its core has always been an African American city – its music, its food, its culture, its character.

While we think of the modern era as being the time of a minority majority, Memphis actually had as many African Americans as Caucasians in its earliest years – in 1840, Memphis had 7,605 Caucasian residents, 7,040 slaves, and 76 “free colored” – and has had a significant African American population throughout its history.  In 1900, almost half of Memphis population was African American and declined to 39% by 1970 as a result of the Great Migration.

It’s a reality that we have glossed over when we tell the city’s history, but it is nonetheless true, and the bicentennial celebration will hopefully have a balanced message that pays tribute to this fact.

It’s not easy of course.

The Bicentennial Narrative

For much of that history, African Americans have been exploited economically with a low-wage, low-skill economy that benefitted from the presence of a persistent underclass and politically – once African Americans moved from property to voters – when they were intimidated by political bosses whose retribution for “forgetting your place” could be devastating and unforgiving in the Jim Crow days when the message was punctuated by more than 30 lynchings (with the last recorded one in 1939).

As our hero, Ida B. Wells, wrote: “That (the Memphis lynchings) is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was – an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized.”

To put it simply, it’s a bicentennial narrative that requires nuanced dexterity to tell honestly and in a way in which every Memphian can understand its significance and see that regardless of their race how it is part of everyone’s history.

Perhaps, what the bicentennial can do best is to reflect on the qualities that have defined Memphis as it overcame challenges to survive past its first decades, that inspired leaps of creativity, both artistic and entrepreneurial, and that drives us today as we feel momentum in the face of concentrated poverty and African American median incomes that are half of Caucasian incomes.

These core civic qualities were defined over the two centuries by the presence of African Americans who despite third world conditions found creative ways to survive and to fundamentally shape the city in which they lived.   As John Seely Brown, former director and chief scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, said: “There are no more creative and entrepreneurial people than people in poverty.  Every day is an exercise in entrepreneurship to survive.”

Economic Distress

Despite the reduction in the poverty rate suggested by the estimates of the latest Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, there are still about 180,000 Memphians living in poverty, and nothing that has happened in the past 20 years seems to improve those numbers.

It’s no wonder that the Economic Innovation Group’s Distressed Cities Index places Memphis as #9 among large cities and the MSA at #3 in the most distressed metros list.  In Memphis, 65.7% of residents live in distressed zip codes and 14.4% live in prosperous zip codes.  In the region, 40.9% of the population lives in distressed zip codes and the MSA ranks #86 in percentage of population with bachelor’s degrees.  (The Index is based on the poverty rate, housing vacancy, adults not working, median income ratio, change in employment, and change in business establishments.)

“Memphis combines economic distress with spatial inequality to the most severe degree,” wrote EIG.  We’ve been writing for 13 years about the devastating impact of economic segregation and more recently, how between 1970-2010, the number of census tracts of high poverty climbed from 47 to 78, an increase of 87%.  The fact that despite this dramatic increase, the population in these census tracts only climbed 11% is testament to the way that so many of these neighborhoods have hollowed out, increasing the blight and deterioration that complicate their revival.

We don’t want to belabor the point, because there are many key economic indicators that magnify the fact that Memphis is lagging when compared to cities it once outperformed and that the problems are regional in nature.

Phase Two: Economic Justice

We continue to labor under the idea that any job is a good job, and we suspect that although we have a high level of employment right now, the jobs continue to be weighted in lower paying industries.  In addition, there are many in part-time jobs in warehouses and distribution where they are released before companies are required to provide benefits and then rehired after the prescribed period of time as part-time employees, beginning the cycle of exploitation all over again.  It is not unusual for these companies to have received tax freezes.

The end product, as University of Memphis economist emeritus David Ciscel has said, is full employment economic lethargy.  We recommend reading the commentary in the July -September 2016 issue & of Poverty Race that he wrote with Michael Honey, historian and author of Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign.

They wrote: “Some praise the Memphis economy as diversified, but it remains highly dependent on a transshipment economy with an erratic demand for workers.  FedEx, one of the largest logistics and package delivery companies in the world, is the city’s largest employer.  This places Memphis firmly in the realm of the modern global economy, but one that retains a company town employment structure. This dependence on transshipment keeps Memphis stuck with an old economy in the midst of what looks like a modern logistics and technology revolution. And the burden of its racial history continues to weigh heavily on its economic progress.”

As they point out, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in Memphis, called his campaign for economic justice “phase two” of the civil rights movement.  “Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality,” he said.

That struggle continues and it’s why the bicentennial is so important.  It is a moment in time when we reflect and celebrate, but more importantly, it has to be a time to consider what we want Memphis to be in its third century.

Equity and Opportunity

As for us, we are convinced what the next century has to be.  It has to be the century when Memphis becomes a city known for equity and opportunity.  That said, the same should apply to the county and the MSA.

Yes, the current realities are daunting, but the single greatest economic development strategy for Memphis and Shelby County is equity – closing the income gap between African Americans and Caucasians, which remains at roughly the same ratio that it was 50 years ago with whites’ median incomes twice that of African Americans.

Fifty years ago, African Americans like Dr. King called for economic equality, and they were told that the ticket into the economic mainstream was more education.  From 1968, the trend line is dramatic as the percentage of African American’s with high school degrees increased about tenfold and the trend line for bachelor’s degrees roughly parallels Caucasians.

Only 8.1% of African Americans had white collar jobs in 1950, and in 2016, that had climbed to 52.5%.  And yet, the gap between median incomes between the races remains the same, indicating the inability of African Americans to break through the mobility wall to hold a percentage of supervisory and managerial jobs commensurate with their percentage of the population.

Until our community – Memphis, Shelby County, and MSA – operates on all cylinders by closing the income gap and getting more African Americans into the economic mainstream, it will continue to lag with the result that we become less and less competitive in the knowledge economy, the innovation economy, the technology economy, or whatever you prefer to call  the current economy, because whatever you call it, economic prosperity and success are fueled by high-skill workers and college-educated workers.

The $22 Billion Opportunity

Let us repeat: closing the income gap between races is the single greatest economic opportunity for the Memphis region.  Success would increase the regional GDP by more than $22 billion, an increase of roughly 30%.

Yes, the economic inequities in this community can be discouraging and demoralizing, but the cost of doing more of the same results in Memphis staying at the bottom of the rankings in the economic indicators that matter most.  But if Memphis can begin making progress in closing the gap, it can produce immediate, significant impacts.

Setting a plan to do precisely that should be a priority for the bicentennial, which should be a vehicle for setting a course for the future by setting the boldest priority of all, one that would transform and reboot our economy.  After all, just moving to the middle of the rankings would supercharge our economy.

To develop the kind of ambitious plan we need can’t be like the current economic development planning in which the usual suspects from EDGE, local government, and Chamber get together to tweak the current system when what is needed is in truth a complete overhaul.

What’s the Definition of Insanity?

No, to close the equity gap, we have to do more than to expect the same people who created the current system to create a different one that can deliver more equitable, more competitive results.  Rather, we need to inject new intellectual capital and new thinking into this discussion with national disruptive innovators, urbanists, economists, and think tanks.

Here, we are often guilty of keeping the circle too small, regularly convening vested interests, beneficiaries of the current low-skill economy, and developers, but never academic resources and scholars whose research and insights could inform a more serious plan of action.  It’s like we want to give the appearance of doing something without doing too much to shake up a system that persistently has the same list of winners and losers.

The next century does not have to simply be an extension of the present, but change depends on our courage to tackle the lost human capital and lost economic benefit that comes from accepting benignly the fact that about 30 percent of Memphians cannot be rescued from lives of concentrated poverty in neighborhoods where it is a birthright.

In that way, our impatience with the way things are is the first step on the path toward third century Memphis.

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Read: Making The Most of the Memphis Bicentennial, Part 1

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