Urban renewal hits the Riverview-Kansas neighborhood, and a group of residents hit back

This is part two of a 10-part series on the first tenant movement in Memphis. Read part 1 here.

The idea of withholding rent payments wasn’t exactly new to Memphis. 

Earlier that summer, a Black Presbyterian minister named Ezekiel Bell had discussed a so-called “rent strike” with the Memphis NAACP. But no one had identified the right place for that kind of action to happen. It was Gerald “Jerry” Fanion, Shelby County’s first director of community relations, who would find the perfect group of tenants — working-class Memphians who were already organizing, protesting and ready to escalate.

Fanion headed to South Memphis’ Riverview-Kansas neighborhood, a part of the city first annexed at the turn of the 20th century. Along its narrow, uneven streets, wood frame houses and crowded apartment complexes intermingled with warehouses, junkyards and the noise of passing trains and highway traffic. In 1964, city planners first proposed the idea to make the neighborhood’s northern half into an urban renewal project. The project sat in limbo for years as Memphis Housing Authority parlayed with residents, local politicians and federal officials from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In areas slated for urban renewal, city government adopted a policy to stop inspecting homes for code violations. An official with the city’s Department of Housing Improvement, J.W. Parker, told reporters that “it’s foolish to force a man to improve his property when urban renewal is about to come and grab it.” 

So, people who lived within the Kansas Street Urban Renewal Area were left in a sort of “no man’s land” for code enforcement until their apartments and homes were replaced — whenever that would be. This meant their landlords had no real pressure to keep their apartments livable. 

Perhaps no one felt that more intensely than a group of families who lived near the corner of Texas Street and East McLemore Avenue. In June 1968, these residents formed a tenant association to pressure the city to fix their homes. The group’s president was Elizabeth Hayes, a Black woman in her late 30s who rented a two-room apartment at 1161 Texas. 

For decades, local housing projects had tenant associations that handled complaints, regularly met with administrators and managed project amenities like playgrounds and daycares. But those groups also depended on MHA for their funding and legal authority. The Texas-East McLemore Tenants Association was maybe the first organization of its kind in Memphis: an independent group of tenants organizing in privately owned buildings. 

In their first action, Hayes and the other tenants sent a letter to their landlords, Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb, the city’s Health Department and two city council members. The letter listed 12 specific code violations that had gone unaddressed, from “leaking roofs, faulty and exposed electric wiring, and rodents” to buildings that “[lacked] hot water or bathtubs.” However, Parker wouldn’t agree to inspect the homes thoroughly — only to “see if the plaster is falling down or something like that.” 

In the meantime, the city’s urban renewal program repaired more than a dozen streets surrounding the tenants’ homes, claiming it was a more pressing concern in the neighborhood. With local government refusing to take their concerns seriously, they needed a new approach. 

It’s unclear how Fanion and the tenants got connected. But once they did, Fanion offered to advise them on their fight, bringing the resources of the Tennessee Council on Human Relations with him. As the rent strike idea developed, the tenants narrowed their focus to one specific property owner: a white man named Thomas Bicknell Moore, who owned 48 housing units in the Kansas Street neighborhood. 

Not only had Moore refused to repair a number of his properties, but he’d notified residents that their rent would increase by $5 a month, starting in August. If the tenants withheld their rent payments, the Human Relations Council offered to hold the payments in escrow until Moore brought their homes up to code. 

In early August 1968, the tenants sent word of their strike to Moore and their rental management company, Van Court. Fanion told the press it would continue “until Memphis does what is necessary to bring these places up to a decent housing standard.” In response, Moore claimed that fixing up his units was “economically unfeasible.” Although he tried to downplay the strike as much as possible, deferring most questions to Van Court, the announcement was enough for the whole city to start taking notice.

Word of the tenants’ escalation quickly spread to city government. Within a week, five housing inspectors fanned out along Texas and East McLemore for the first time in more than five years. What they saw were homes without working water and gas, homes with peeling wallpaper and worn-down appliances: trademark signs of neglect. Hayes followed them around as they took notes of the code violations they saw. After visiting a woman with a broken toilet and no bathtub — who was “burning wood in her stove” for heat — all inspector Cornell Wolfe could say was, “I’ve seen some sights this morning.” 

Three days later, a small group of tenants drove to Moore’s East Memphis home with signs, pacing up and down his small piece of Cherry Road for hours. Moore then claimed that he was already making repairs, albeit slowly: “I don’t know what else I can do.”

Summer faded into fall. Moore backed off from his planned rent hike, but his repairs were small and slow — so the strike went on. By October, Hayes had accumulated three months of unpaid rent ($75 total). It was at this point that Moore decided to call her bluff: He filed an eviction lawsuit against her in Chancery Court. With Fanion’s help, Hayes retained a lawyer named Otis Higgs and the two quickly countersued. 

Did Hayes have the legal right to withhold her rent until Moore brought her home up to code? The stakes of the suit were clear: not only was Hayes at risk of losing her home, but the strike’s legitimacy in the public eye rested on the court’s decision. 

Moore’s lawyer, Harry Wellford, argued that the case was a matter for City Court, not Chancery Court. He also called it a form of “rent control” that would unfairly restrict landlords’ ability to charge their preferred rent.  

Higgs, on the other hand, focused on how Moore was neglecting the housing code. As he name-dropped Frank Holloman, Memphis’ police commissioner at the time, he asked why the city’s landlords should be allowed to break the law while only their tenants face the consequences. 

But it was Hayes’ testimony that was the most revealing. On the stand, she spoke of a leaking roof and collapsed porch, holes in her kitchen floor where “rats, bugs and mosquitoes come in.” She claimed she bathed, washed dishes and did laundry in her kitchen sink — which only ran cold water. “All I want,” Hayes told the judge, “is for the landlord to fix my place up to where it’s fit to live.” 

After a month-long back-and-forth, Moore and Hayes agreed to a settlement in Hayes’ favor. The two would drop their suits against each other, and Hayes would be allowed to keep withholding her rent until her home passed another inspection. Her payments, in turn, would be transferred from the Human Relations Council to the court clerk’s office. 

This settlement was a pivotal moment for housing issues in the city and state: the first time a Tennessee court allowed a tenant to legally withhold rent for housing repairs. In the next year, tenants began to organize groups at other privately owned complexes — like the Springdale Arms Tenant Association and the South Main Tenant Organization — suing their landlords and offering their rent to the courts. 

For a brief time in Memphis history, it felt like low-income tenants could use rent strikes to take the reins in the city’s long housing crisis.

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)

---

This story is brought to you byMLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit newsroom focused on poverty, power and policy in Memphis. Support independent journalism by making a tax-deductible donation today. MLK50 is also supported by these generous donors.

Got a story idea, a tip or feedback? Send an email to info@mlk50.com.