United States: the white minority of Memphis, between heavy legacies and small revolutions
A fresco near the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was killed and which adjoins the Memphis Civil Rights Museum.
RFI / Carlotta Morteo
Text by: Carlotta Morteo Follow
6 min
When we think of Memphis, Tennessee, we obviously think of the incredible musical heritage.
But in this southern United States, it is the slave past that weighs heavily.
RFI went to meet residents of the city's white minority, who are working to put the pieces back together.
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From our special correspondent in Memphis,
From
blues
, soul and rock and roll as we do not hear anywhere else ... You know you've arrived in Memphis turning the radio.
“
Look, to the right of the Avenue, behind the wall, is Chickasaw Garden, an exclusively white neighborhood of extremely wealthy people.
It's fenced, secure, and just across the street is the East School high school which takes in children whose parents are among the poorest in town.
Allie Preston, in her thirties, an executive in a major hotel chain, takes me on a tour of the city in her SUV.
“From one street to another, you can go very quickly from a safe district to a dangerous district, from opulent houses to slums, from a white district to a black district.
We don't mix too much, everyone gets together with those who are like them, ”she describes.
A visible urban heritage which dates from the time of segregation, but which hides a real evolution of mentalities.
Shame of the past
Allie's husband, Preston Battle, is a young lawyer who could have gone to work in a bigger metropolis and made a lot more money, if he wasn't so committed to his town's development.
"
Memphis has a lot of scars and we have not finished repairing the wounds of history,
" he said.
Within his Church, he is very involved in charity operations, clothing collection and food aid, which he regularly distributes in poor areas of the city.
His ancestors, like most white elites from here, owned slaves, and many in this millennial generation are well aware and ashamed of that past.
His grandfather was the first to transmit a certain sense of responsibility to him: he was none other than the judge in charge of the trial of James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King, who was shot in Memphis in 1968.
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One of his high school friends, Erim Sarinoglu, also became a lawyer but chose a specialty that is generally not very popular: public defendant.
He works for the county and is assigned ex officio to those who cannot afford a private lawyer.
“
My clients are predominantly African Americans,” he
says.
Many are arrested for drug trafficking, cannabis, cocaine, or aggravated theft.
The minimum sentences in Tennessee are very harsh, around four years at a minimum.
You might as well say that when you start your adult life in prison for crimes that do not kill anyone, leaving your girlfriend alone with the baby, rent to pay, etc., it is a spiral of precariousness and violence that works for families and neighborhoods.
Very committed, Erim denounces a judicial culture that is all the more repressive because it is political.
The majority of judges are Republicans and are encouraged by their constituents to condemn very harshly.
Erim will therefore run in the next elections for a judge's post in order to "
change things
" from within.
Stick the pieces back
“
In my generation, we fully recognize this past of systemic oppression of whites on blacks.
And we do everything to try to put the pieces back together
, ”said Marshall Bartlett, 30, one of Preston's best friends.
He is an organic pig farmer in Cuomo, a very rural place which, like Memphis, is predominantly African-American.
Here, for two centuries, their ancestors cultivated cotton on behalf of the white owners of the plantations.
Marshall has taken over the family farm and employs around ten people.
“
After George Floyd died, we had a meeting, and it was clear that my black employees were particularly keen on our company supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.
So we put a banner at the entrance to the farm and we made a statement on our social networks,
”he explains.
Within white conservative families, "
it got people talking
" he smiles.
But whatever.
His father was already a trailblazer for the region: a soybean producer, he had refused to work with Monsanto and preferred to pay wages rather than machines to secure local jobs.
“
The spirit of community and sharing that he has succeeded in rooting in this place torn apart by racial inequalities, that is priceless.
I had to take up the torch,
”he emphasizes.
Old demons and new guard
But how many parents in southern white families are so progressive?
Allie often argues with her parents over political issues now.
“
They've always been conservative, but I don't understand how they can defend Trump.
Sometimes in private they criticize his personality but never will they do so publicly.
And then what worries me is that I see people at work who allow themselves to say implausible things because the president says them too.
The toads are out of the pond and I think we will hear them croaking for a long time, whatever happens on November 3,
”she regrets.
This year, like most of these young progressives in Memphis, she will vote in the local election for Torrey Harris.
He won the Democratic primary to run for the Tennessee House of Representatives and his profile is unheard of: 29-year-old African-American social worker, he is openly gay and he opposes John De Berry, who represented the district in the Chamber for 25 years (under the Democratic banner), and which therefore finds itself forced to compete for his re-election as an independent.
A sign that times are changing, even in the dampness of the deep South that we sometimes tend to caricature.
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