Memphis: Miraculous, Magnificent, and Messy—Building Freedom from the Ground up in the Bluff City

In January of 2023, police officers in Memphis, Tennessee, brutally murdered Tyre Nichols during a pretextual traffic stop. The events that proceeded from this unnecessary and fatal encounter followed a similar pattern to previous moments: the bottomless rage and despair of a family and a community; activists convening to respond; city and law enforcement officials circling wagons, scrambling to create an “official” rendering of the incident, and asking for “calm”; political triangulation; the arrival of national media; mass-based protests. The Nichols murder became the latest real-time scenario that illuminated all of the perils and prospects of the movement encompassed in the #BlackLivesMatter moment.

This paper will grapple with the continuities and discontinuities regarding the struggle for Black Freedom that can be gleaned from an exploration of the freedom struggle in Memphis. Events there revealed more than simply the recurring theme of police brutality, Black death and rage, and mass-based movement. Memphis also reminds us—in a powerful way—of the messy complexity of movement making. The strategy, the wins, the losses, the coalition-building effort, the stuff of movement work is often lost in the breezy stories constructed about Black Freedom that reduce the calculus of social change to the simple arithmetic of marching, chants, and confrontation. The Black folks who sprung to action in the wake of Nichols’ murder represent a powerful corrective to simplistic thinking about the construction of a new world. This paper will contend with the long struggle for freedom – anchored in the work of activists in previous decades – and how that work is being made manifest in the midst of fresh challenges to the life and safety of Black folks in the Bluff City.