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by John Branston
A reporter's look at the people and events that made Memphis what it is.
On October 16, 1954, E. H. Crump, the political boss of Memphis and a force in Southern politics for nearly half a century, died at his home in Memphis. He left a place known as "America's Cleanest City," the capital of Mississippi, and the safest city in the South. To Crump's critics, Memphis was also known as America's least democratic city. Crump's brand of order was already breaking down at the time of his death. That year the U.S. Supreme Court desegregated public schools in Brown v. Board of Education and Elvis Presley cut his first record at Sun Studio in Memphis. The next 50 years in Memphis would belong to the children and lawyers who fulfilled the promise of desegregation, rebels and gamblers, brawlers and killers, hard-nosed politicians and prosecutors, suburban and downtown developers, business visionaries, and the activists who stopped an interstate highway. This is their story.
"Reporters like to call their work the first rough draft of history. Sometimes it is best left told that way-atomistic, anarchic, raw, and in morsels that stimulate our appetities- at least that's so in Memphis. We, who have been told by Faulkner that our past is not dead and not even past, are living our history now in bits so discrete as to
be incomprehensible. Our tales play out before the watchful eye of John Branston, who, for one reason or another, is a simple seeker of truths."
-- Henry Turley, Jr.
"John Branston has been writing this book for 20-plus years. He came South, found love and work, and then stayed around. He didn't just parachute in for the story whenever news erupted and the region became hot. These amazing stories somehow were written with a reporter's detachment and a resident's heart."
- Rheta Grimsley Johnson
282pp, softcover. |
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