Memphis, Tennessee

• 1. Introduction

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  Memphis sits on a high bluff above the Mississippi River, a city that has been fought over, flooded out, burned, mourned, and rebuilt more times than most places can count. In 1541, Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto became the first European to encounter the people living here. Nearly five centuries later, Memphis is home to 633,104 residents, the largest city proper on the entire length of the Mississippi River. It is the world's busiest cargo airport and the global hub of FedEx. It is the place where Elvis Presley cut his first record, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his final speech, and where a yellow fever epidemic in 1878 killed so many people that the city temporarily lost its charter and ceased to exist as a legal entity. How did one city become all of these things at once? The answers run through the bluffs, the river, the cotton, and the blood.

• 2. The Bluff and Its Claimants

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  Before Memphis had a name, the Chickasaw people controlled the high ground above the river. Their ancestors in the Mississippian culture had built large earthwork ceremonial and burial mounds across the region in the first millennium A.D. The Chickasaw inherited that territory and held it into the era of European exploration.

  The bluff was strategically obvious to any power that wanted to control movement through the continent's interior. Historian J. D. L. Holmes, writing in Hudson's Four Centuries of Southern Indians in 2007, described the site as one of three points through which European powers could check American expansion beyond the Appalachians. In 1795, Spanish Governor-General Francisco Luis Hector de Carondelet sent his lieutenant, Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, to negotiate with the Chickasaw for permission to build a fort. The result was Fort San Fernando De Las Barrancas, built with the consent of a pro-Spanish Chickasaw faction despite opposition from a pro-American faction and from American settlers nearby.

  The fort did not last long. The Treaty of San Lorenzo in 1795, implemented in March 1797, gave the United States the right to navigate the Mississippi River and control over the Yazoo Strip north of the thirty-first parallel. Spain dismantled Fort San Fernando, shipping its lumber and iron south to Arkansas. Captain Isaac Guion arrived with an American force on the 20th of July 1797, to claim the land. By then the Spanish were already gone. The ruins of the fort went unnoticed two decades later when three American founders laid out a city on the same ground.

• 3. Founded on Cotton and Conflict

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  John Overton, James Winchester, and Andrew Jackson founded the city of Memphis on the 22nd of May 1819, less than five months after Congress ratified the Treaty of Tuscaloosa, in which the Chickasaw Nation ceded their territory in western Tennessee to the United States. The founders named it after the ancient capital of Egypt on the Nile River. The city was formally incorporated on the 19th of December 1826.

  From the beginning, African Americans formed a large share of the population. Before emancipation, most Black residents were enslaved, used as forced labor along the river and on cotton plantations in the Mississippi Delta. Cotton defined the city's economy and its place in the Antebellum South.

  Immigration changed the population rapidly. Irish Americans, driven in part by the Great Famine, made up 9.9% of the population in 1850. By 1860 that figure had risen to 23.2%, and the total population had reached 22,623.

  Tennessee seceded from the Union in June 1861. Memphis briefly served as a Confederate stronghold before Union ironclad gunboats captured it in the naval Battle of Memphis on the 6th of June 1862. The city spent the rest of the war under Union occupation. The Union Army's presence drew thousands of enslaved people who had escaped from surrounding plantations. The Army set up contraband camps to house them. Memphis's Black population rose from 3,000 in 1860 to nearly 20,000 by 1865, with most settling south of the city limits.

• 4. Riots, Fever, and Collapse

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  The rapid population shifts after the Civil War created explosive tension. In early May 1866, white mobs made up of police officers, firemen, and mostly ethnic Irish Americans attacked Black neighborhoods in what became known as the Memphis Riots. Over three days, 46 Black residents were killed, 75 were wounded, and 100 were injured. Nearly 100 houses were destroyed, along with churches and schools in South Memphis. Two white men were killed. The riots caused lasting damage: many Black residents permanently fled the city, and the Black population fell to about 15,000 by 1870, representing 37.4% of a total population of 40,226.

  Historian Barrington Walker argued that the Irish rioters were asserting social and political dominance over newly freed Black residents, not primarily driven by economic competition, since the Irish had by then secured better jobs. Congress responded to the Memphis riots and a similar outbreak in New Orleans by passing the Reconstruction Act and the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

  Worse was coming. The city in the 1870s had no waterworks and no sewage system, relying entirely on river water and rain cisterns. It had already survived two yellow fever outbreaks, cholera, and malaria before 1878. Kate Bionda, the owner of an Italian snack house, died of fever on the 13th of August 1878. The Board of Health officially recorded hers as the first yellow fever case on August 14. Within days, more than 25,000 residents fled on the same trains and steamboats that had brought them to the city. Memphis, which had held a July population of 47,000, was reduced to 19,000 by September. Of those, 17,000 had yellow fever. The only people remaining were the poor who could not afford to leave: German and Irish immigrant workers and African Americans.

  More than 5,000 deaths were recorded between July 26 and the 27th of November 1878. A killing frost on October 28 finally ended the outbreak. The epidemic left financial losses the Board of Health estimated at nearly $200 million and bankrupted the city. The state legislature revoked Memphis's charter and reclassified it as a Taxing District, a status it held from 1879 to 1893. Memphis had been the second-largest city in the South before the epidemic; afterward, nearly its entire middle and upper class had vanished.

• 5. Boss Crump and the Machine

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  From the 1910s through roughly 1950, Memphis politics ran through a single man: E. H. "Boss" Crump. Crump worked with middle-class progressive reformers to build up the police and fire departments. He reorganized city government for efficiency, expanded public schools, and developed an extensive park system as part of the national City Beautiful movement. He also routinely called on off-duty police officers and firemen to work on his behalf on election day.

  Most Southern progressives of the era were hostile to Black political participation. Crump was not entirely, though his motives were transactional. He worked with prominent Black politician Robert Church Jr. until 1940. He raised funds from white businessmen to pay the poll taxes that allowed Black residents to vote, which kept Black voters in his coalition.

  Crump's reach extended well beyond city hall. He served briefly in Congress and was an early supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidential campaign in 1932. President Roosevelt in turn gave Crump control of patronage in Memphis and across Tennessee. The massive Tennessee Valley Authority project, which brought electricity and economic development to the region, was part of what came back to the state through that relationship.

  Crump also secured a state law in 1911 establishing a small commission to manage the city. That commission form of government lasted until 1967. During those decades the city installed a new sewer system, upgraded sanitation to prevent another epidemic, and developed an artesian well water supply discovered in the 1880s. The system handled business efficiently but tended to serve wealthier residents over poorer neighborhoods.

• 6. Civil Rights and Assassination

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  By 1960, Memphis had a large African American population that had been subject to state-mandated segregation and decades of disenfranchisement. A student sit-in at the Central Library and the Cossitt Reference Library in March 1960, followed by a lawsuit from civil rights activist Jesse Turner, led Memphis Public Libraries to desegregate in October 1960. By December 1960, the Memphis Zoo and the Brooks Art Museum had followed. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which opened in February 1962, became the first fully integrated children's hospital in the South.

  In 1968, Black sanitation workers went on strike for living wages and better working conditions, marching through the city to build public support. Martin Luther King Jr., leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, came to Memphis to stand with the workers. King stayed at the Lorraine Motel. On the 3rd of April 1968, he delivered his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech at Mason Temple, a building named after Charles Harrison Mason, founder of the Church of God in Christ, the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States. King was assassinated by James Earl Ray the following day on the 4th of April 1968.

  Riots erupted in the city after news of King's murder spread. The governor ordered Tennessee National Guardsmen into Memphis within hours. The violence accelerated a suburban migration that was already underway. The 1970 census recorded Memphis as 60.8% white and 38.9% Black. Court-ordered busing in 1973 to desegregate public schools prompted further departures: roughly 40,000 of the school system's 71,000 white students left the public system within four years. Today the Lorraine Motel is the site of the National Civil Rights Museum, a Smithsonian affiliate.

• 7. Sound City

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  Sam Phillips opened Sun Studio in 1950, and the recordings made there changed the shape of American music. Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison all made their first recordings at Sun and were discovered by Phillips. W. C. Handy, known as the Father of the Blues, also recorded there. Beale Street, a national historical landmark, anchored the development of Memphis blues, particularly after World War II as electric guitars replaced the acoustic sound from the Mississippi Delta.

  Stax Records created a distinct soul sound in the 1960s, grittier and more horn-driven than the Motown style from Detroit. Booker T. and the M.G.'s served as the backing band for most of Stax's classic recordings, accompanying Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, and Wilson Pickett among others. That sound found a new audience in the 1980s through the Blues Brothers film, in which many of the original musicians appeared as themselves.

  Memphis's musical lineage runs through genres that shaped American popular culture broadly. Artists who began their careers in Memphis include Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, Isaac Hayes, Al Green, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Bobby Whitlock. In the 1970s, the city developed a power pop scene built around acts including Big Star and Alex Chilton. Memphis rap became mainstream in the 2000s through artists including Three 6 Mafia, Juicy J, Young Dolph, Yo Gotti, GloRilla, and Moneybagg Yo. The Metropolitan Opera of New York made its first tour to Memphis in 1906.

• 8. Logistics Capital

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  Memphis handles more air cargo than any other airport in the world. Memphis International Airport surpassed Hong Kong International Airport in 2021 to claim that rank. FedEx, the company that made Memphis its global air hub, is the city's largest employer. The Port of Memphis is the fifth-busiest inland water port in the United States.

  The geography that drew indigenous peoples and Spanish colonial forces to the Chickasaw Bluffs is the same geography that made Memphis a freight hub. The city sits at the intersection of Interstate 40 and Interstate 55, is served by five major freight railroads, and straddles the Mississippi River at a point where barge traffic moves north and south through the continental interior.

  At the time of the most recent ranking, Memphis was home to three Fortune 500 companies: FedEx at number 63, International Paper at number 107, and AutoZone at number 306. A third interstate, I-69, was under construction, and a fourth, I-22, had been newly designated. The Memphis aquifer, located 350 to 1,100 feet underground, is estimated by Memphis Light, Gas and Water to contain more than 100 trillion U.S. gallons of water. A proposed oil pipeline, the Byhalia Pipeline backed by Plains All American Pipeline and Valero Energy, was cancelled in July 2021 after sustained opposition from community organizations concerned about potential contamination of that aquifer.