As the morning sun peeked above the blue roof of the nearby 24-hour IHOP on Sept. 30, a somber parade of construction vehicles and county dump trucks crawled across an empty field towards the treeline.
Two painted purple stones and a sprig of fake flowers marked the entrance to the woods. Beyond them, a well-worn dirt path led to a clearing by the bank of slow-moving Fletcher Creek. A rainbow confetti of trash littered the ground, mixed with the fallen leaves. Long strips of muted green construction fabric snaked between tree trunks to create a makeshift fence around a handful of structures.
Some of the dwellings were cobbled together out of tarps and canopies and sheets, while others were recognizable as camping tents. Between them, signs of daily life were still visible: coolers, shopping carts, an empty water jug, a bicycle. Some items wouldn’t have been out of place in a suburban yard. A wicker armchair. The gate of a decorative iron fence, metal stakes driven into the hard ground. The remnants of a campfire.
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“I had a tent back there, and my stuff was in there,” said Clemon, an unhoused man who lived in this encampment near Summer Avenue for nearly a year. “I had a tent, clothes, a bookbag, personal hygiene, and stuff like that… They bulldozed everything. Didn’t nobody get nothing.”
County employees driving a backhoe and a small front-end loader entered the woods first, pulling down vines and toppling dead trees to make room for other equipment to enter. Their assignment from police: to clear out this patch of woods following a fatal shooting there in early September. The tents and personal belongings were to be treated no differently than the trash on the ground — all of it was destined for the landfill.
The encampment was home to around a dozen people, many of whom struggle with substance use disorders and mental health diagnoses. Several outreach specialists said that residents lived there, in part, because of the reliable access to drugs nearby. But the county and police officials who gathered there didn’t come bearing offers of supportive services or housing alternatives. Instead, by the time the racket of machinery filled the clearing, the encampment’s inhabitants had already gathered what they could carry and fled their former home.
‘We had a bond’
When Clemon was sent to jail for two months in early August, he didn’t realize he would never see his friend and encampment neighbor Bryan Borders III again.
Borders was a longtime resident of the clearing in the woods, with one outreach volunteer describing him as the encampment’s “unofficial mayor.” Clemon recalls him as fiercely protective of the small community and its residents.
“We had a bond, I swear. We’d get up every morning, sit around, sit outside and talk (and) eat,” he said. “He (was) watching, making sure everything’s straight, that’s just how he was. And I respect that, I do.”
On Sept. 2, Borders was fatally shot during an altercation with someone from outside the encampment, according to multiple people familiar with the incident. It was his 34th birthday.
Clemon said his mother called him in jail to tell him the news. He and several nonprofit employees who frequented the site have heard that Borders was shot while defending a woman who lived there.
The Memphis Police Department declined to make a police report on the killing available because the case is still under investigation. However, a member of the homicide division confirmed the date and location of the shooting, saying that multiple officers responded to the scene.
Borders’ killing brought police scrutiny to the encampment, which for around three years had been largely unbothered by outside authorities. The Memphis Police Department doesn’t always initiate encampment sweeps, but authorized this one due to the crime committed there. Shortly after the shooting, organizers with the harm-reduction nonprofit A Betor Way began to hear from police and county sources that the encampment was slated to be demolished.
“Whether (or not) we respect it as a brick and mortar home, to them, that’s where they had their memories,” said Ron Bobal, the group’s co-director. “When you’re told, ‘Hey, we’re about to knock your house down,’ that has a powerful emotional effect.”
Clemon was released from jail two days too late to save his belongings from the sweep. But he says that after Borders’ death, he wouldn’t have wanted to return.
“There’s memories, you know what I’m saying?” he said. “They did that to him, I wouldn’t want to sleep back there no more anyway. That would mess me up.”
Members of A Betor Way and an employee from the Hospitality Hub visited the encampment leading up to the sweep to warn residents that they would have to leave. On the morning of the demolition, only three remained — and by the time machinery arrived, they too had vacated the site.
As the equipment rolled in, one volunteer with A Betor Way retrieved the purple stones and flowers from the edge of the woods: a makeshift memorial to Bryan. His mother had asked the group to save it before officials could throw it away.
‘If you’re not ready, you’re not ready’
On its surface, the absence of residents meant that the encampment sweep proceeded without any interpersonal conflict. But Bobal and other outreach experts expressed frustration that MPD chose to displace residents without offering them much-needed services like housing or mental health care.
“Your option for (addiction) recovery is always open, and we have great partners for that,” he said. “But what about those that don’t choose to enter into recovery? There’s not been an option that’s been offered for them that I know of, and that’s what’s unsettling.”
Two street outreach experts and several more volunteers, all of whom have struggled with addiction in the past, said that forcing those with substance use disorders into a recovery setting isn’t an effective solution.
“I’m a recovering alcoholic. I know that if you’re not ready, you’re not ready,” said one outreach specialist, who asked that her name be withheld to protect her privacy. She added that resources are rarely made available to unhoused people like those displaced from the encampment.
“This is their home, and it’s sad,” she said. “Memphis, Tennessee, will spend millions on Beale Street … but we can’t find these people somewhere to go. It’s disturbing.”
The majority of them won’t go far, several outreach specialists said. Many have addictions compelling them to stay where they have reliable access to drugs.
Clemon said that his time in jail allowed him to get sober, and that he plans to stay with family in North Memphis as he begins searching for a job. But he’s a rare exception. Already, he has heard that other former residents of the encampment are resettling along the same banks of Fletcher Creek — albeit without their tents and other belongings.
“They’re just trying to survive,” he said. “I guess most of them, probably, will most likely start over.”
Natalie Wallington is the housing reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Email her at natalie.wallington@mlk50.com.
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