After the Poor People’s Campaign faded, Memphis tenant organizers carried the torch. Where did the movement go?

In August of 1965, four federal housing officials boarded a plane and flew from Atlanta to Memphis. Their task was to investigate a set of complaints made by Cornelia Crenshaw, a Black woman who’d managed local public housing projects for 27 years before quitting her job. 

Crenshaw claimed that the Memphis Housing Authority refused to pay workers fairly and discriminated against Black tenants. Her far-reaching work to reform MHA and Memphis Light Gas & Water Division — and her commitment to advocating for the working poor — sealed her reputation as the “mother of civil rights” here. 

MHA’s “small city of apartments” had been reshaping the landscape for decades. Starting with the Housing Act of 1949, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development committed to a comprehensive urban renewal policy. In major cities across the country, the federal government funded development programs that cleared blighted land and slums to replace them with affordable housing.

MHA became the central agency for urban renewal and “slum clearance” in Memphis. It planned each renewal area, acquired land through sales or eminent domain and oversaw the construction of townhomes, high rises, repaved streets, sewer pipes and power lines. 

But for many Black citizens, urban renewal — and the “new homes, new businesses, new life” it promised — were a lose-lose situation. 

In working-class Black neighborhoods like Douglass and Riverview-Kansas, residents often fought to get noticed at all. Neighborhood associations and informal resident groups pooled resources or sought nonprofits to fill crucial gaps in social services and infrastructure. For the thousands of families on MHA’s waiting list, public housing often felt like a necessary alternative to a racist, exploitative private market.

But urban renewal also meant destroying huge swaths of older buildings, forcing many people to give up their homes and businesses and relocate from their lifelong neighborhoods. Longtime residents frequently charged that their voices were excluded from plans to improve their neighborhoods, plans supposedly carried out on their behalf.

MHA projects were frequently sold to the public as cutting-edge. But they were notorious for poor living conditions and harsh (sometimes illegal) tenant policies; to many tenants, public housing was no better than the slums torn down to build them. Mary Miller, a resident of the Parkway-Airways project and vice president of its Tenants Association, told reporters as much in 1971: “You go up to the [MHA] board and they tell you you’re living like kings and queens, but I feel like I’m living where I was. It’s no different.” 

These conditions pushed housing issues to the forefront of civil rights work in the late 1960s, netting mainstream liberals, progressives and radicals alike. They became even more important in the weeks and months after the 1968 Sanitation Workers’ Strike and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination when Black organizers and activists were struggling to figure out where Memphis’ political energy could go next. 

Out of that moment, a militant renters movement bloomed among the apartments and projects south of Downtown Memphis. Over the next 10 years, Black tenants and community organizers mobilized around demands for safe, sanitary living conditions, access to social services and fair representation in policymaking. 

But by 1980, the key groups and leaders of this movement had moved on, and the energy for tenant organizing had turned quiet. Although some local groups have returned to renters issues in the past decade  —  like Mid-South Peace & Justice Center, the Greater Memphis Housing Justice Project and Memphis Tenants Union  —  the city’s first tenant movement stands out as a unique moment in Memphis history.

Tenants fought for their demands through various legal and illegal tactics, including lawsuits, pickets, rent strikes and squatting. Their campaigns became a focal point for other political struggles, as well: around policing and direct democracy, welfare reform and urban displacement. Housing justice shined a light on the broader forces that made inequality a part of daily life in Memphis — and gave many residents an outlet to finally push back.

Mr. Fanion finds his path

In the midst of the “long, hot summer” of 1967, one filled with urban uprisings, county commissioners wanted to create an outlet for working-class Black citizens to feel heard — and hopefully, reduce the risk of a “race riot” in the Memphis area. The Commission hired Gerald “Jerry” Fanion as Shelby County’s first director of community relations.

Fanion attended Booker T. Washington High School and LeMoyne-Owen College before spending more than a decade as a mail handler with the U.S. Postal Service. His leadership in the Mail Handlers Union and involvement with local chapters of the NAACP and ACLU bolstered his reputation as deeply committed to social justice. Combined with his long record of public service, these connections piqued the interest of the commission.

They paid him a $500 monthly salary and a car allowance; a multiracial committee of citizens was established to support his work. As director, Fanion traveled the county to hear civilians’ grievances and help them navigate government bureaucracy to solve their problems. 

Once the strike began, Fanion became a liaison between civil rights leaders and the county government, offering day-to-day support to national organizers who passed through the city. For example, Fanion once recalled a night when he visited the Rivermont Hotel Downtown to bring King a pack of Kent cigarettes. 

Where many public officials felt pressure to stay even-handed, Fanion was an outspoken advocate for the strikers. He frequently joined the picket line, was arrested and maced with civilian protesters and sat in the crowd next to King as he delivered his final speech at Mason Temple. 

The same week the strike ended, Fanion announced he would be leaving county government for a new position at the Tennessee Council on Human Relations, a statewide nonprofit “that investigated discrimination, police brutality, and issues affecting minority communities.” Free of his government obligations, Fanion could more fully realize his calling as an ally of regular people who were building social justice campaigns from the ground up. As Fanion said in 2003, “I never served in the armed forces, but I served in the greatest community movement that has ever been in Memphis.”

King’s assassination left the city awash in anger and grief. But for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, it also left unfinished business: King’s ambitious plan for a Poor People’s Campaign, where thousands of civilians and activists would descend on Washington to amplify demands for economic justice.

On May 2, 1968, the SCLC held a rally at the Lorraine Motel, where Coretta Scott King and Rev. Ralph Abernathy addressed a crowd of over a thousand. A mule-drawn wagon led hundreds of marchers down South Main before they took buses to the small town of Marks, Mississippi. From there, the caravan stopped in a number of Southern towns on its way to Washington, where a makeshift shantytown was coming together on the National Mall. For more than a month, “Resurrection City” was home to a massive group of protesters until organizers’ permits expired — and at some point during this time, Fanion went to visit. 

Plagued by bad weather, limited resources and police interference, the shantytown was seen by many as a failure. But Fanion saw an opportunity to try the model in Memphis. In late June — days after Washington police cleared out “Resurrection City” — Fanion requested a meeting with Mayor Henry Loeb to pitch his idea for “Hope City”: a temporary camp made of plywood, built to hold around 200 protesters on a vacant lot close to City Hall. 

Fanion claimed the smaller scale would make “Hope City” easier to manage. Memphis officials cited building codes and health department standards and said the lot he’d hoped to use was slated for redevelopment. So Fanion returned to his superiors at the Tennessee Council on Human Relations to discuss ideas for another campaign that could use nonviolent mass protest to galvanize Memphis’ working poor. 

Within the next month, he found his new project: organizing tenants to withhold rent payments from their exploitative landlords.

Justin A. Davis is a freelance journalist, music critic and former grassroots organizer. He’s covered politics, pop culture and history for outlets like Scalawag magazine, Waging Nonviolence, Post-Trash and Science for the People. He lives in Memphis. 

To share this history, Davis used these resources for research:

Harland Bartholomew & Associates, “Land Use Plan for the Kansas Street Urban Renewal Area” (1972)

The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service

The Commercial Appeal Archives

Jet Magazine Archives

Caitlin Lee and Clark Randall, “Inside the St. Louis Rent Strike of 1969,” Belt Magazine (2019)

Memphis Housing Authority Annual Reports

Memphis Housing Authority, Memphis Housing: Quarter Century of Progress (circa 1960)

The Memphis Press-Scimitar Archives

Akira Drake Rodriguez, “Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing” (2021)

John I. Stewart, Jr., “Racial Discrimination in Public Housing: Rights and Remedies,” The University of Chicago Law Review (1974)

University of Memphis Libraries & Rhodes College Digital Archive, Sanitation Strike Tapes (1968-1973)

 

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