Friday, September 11, 2026

Scarlett's Media

Memphis Black News & Community Voice

scarletts-media.com

■ Community Education

A Quarter Century in the Shadow of War: Memphis, the Authorization for Use of Military Force, and the Responders Left Behind

Twenty-five years after September 11, the legal architecture created in three days still governs American war powers, while the federal program caring for Tennessee's own search-and-rescue team faces a 30 percent staffing shortage.

By Shawnee Calhoun | Scarlett's Media

September 11, 2026 | Memphis, TN

[Insert Photo 1: Holley, Powell, Steward, Kuhn]

From left: Joe Holley, Tom Powell, Fred Steward, and Don Kuhn stand before the memorial wreath and New York Fire Department plaque during the 25th anniversary commemoration at the Fire Museum of Memphis on Friday, September 11, 2026. | Credit: Shawnee Calhoun / Scarlett's Media

I was sitting in my high school criminal justice class watching breaking news coverage when the second plane struck the South Tower. The room went silent. Every adult in the building stopped moving. The world outside that classroom fractured in real time. We did not know what kind of country we would step into when the bell rang.

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That classroom memory is widely shared across Tennessee. The Pew Research Center published survey data on September 3, 2026, showing that 83 percent of adults born before 2001 recall exactly where they were that morning. That figure rises to 93 percent among those who were 10 years of age or older.

Rachel Crowell was a high school senior in Giles County that morning. Crowell now teaches in Sumner County Schools. Crowell described her experience in a public retrospective discussion.

"Pulaski, Tennessee. 12th grade, Mr. Sutton’s History class," Crowell recalled. "Someone said a plane flew into a building. I thought they were joking and shrugged it off as nonsense. A very short time later, someone made it clear that it was not a joke. We ended up in the cafeteria watching a live news broadcast. Sure enough, one of the Twin Towers in New York was burning. We then watched in horror as another plane hit the other tower. Live."

Crowell waited for her brother after football practice with the radio playing unbroken coverage. Crowell returned home to watch President George W. Bush address the nation that night. A high school student named Brown, interviewed years later by the education publication Chalkbeat, reported an identical turning point. Brown noted that the second plane eliminated all doubt that the country was under organized attack.

The Day Memphis Absorbed the Skies

Memphis felt the blow within minutes. Federal regulators grounded all commercial aviation at 10:15 a.m. Central time. Forty inbound commercial aircraft were within 100 miles of Shelby County when the national ground stop took effect. Memphis International Airport and Indianapolis International Airport took the heaviest diverted flight traffic in the entire country. Thousands of displaced travelers remained stranded in local terminals for days.

The Memphis Flyer documented a downtown gripped by quiet confusion. False reports circulated that the Clifford Davis Federal Building was being evacuated. Vintage trolley cars stood idle near City Hall. The skies went dead quiet. But Memphians moved quickly toward civic relief. By 10:30 a.m., roughly 40 residents were queued up on Madison Avenue outside the Lifeblood blood center. Donor Jimmy Nelson told reporters the entire scene felt like a waking dream.

Memphis sent personnel directly into the wreckage. Tennessee Task Force 1 is an urban search-and-rescue team sponsored by Memphis Fire Services and integrated into the Federal Emergency Management Agency national system since June 30, 1992. The unit can deploy 80 certified members within four hours. Memphis Fire Services mobilized Tennessee Task Force 1 on September 11, 2001, dispatching the unit directly to the Pentagon crash site in Arlington, Virginia. The unit earned a Federal Emergency Management Agency Unit Citation for its rapid deployment and technical search operations.

[Insert Photo 2: The Bell Rang, And We Answered Brick Relief]

The memorial courtyard at the Fire Museum of Memphis on Adams Avenue features the brick bas-relief, "The Bell Rang, And We Answered," and the In Memoriam wall honoring fallen first responders. | Credit: Shawnee Calhoun / Scarlett's Media

The attacks reshaped Memphis corporate governance as well. FedEx lobbied the Tennessee General Assembly in early 2002 for statutory authority to operate a private police force, arguing the carrier required protections similar to historic railroad security. Then-state senator Steve Cohen introduced the bill. The Tennessee General Assembly passed the measure in July 2002, legally establishing the FedEx Air Carrier Police Department.

“We watched in horror as another plane hit the other tower. Live. Those moments began to blur... knowing our world would never be the same again.”

— Rachel Crowell, Tennessee Educator

The War Powers Contrast: 2001 Versus 2026

The lasting national transformation centered on war powers. Congress passed the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force on September 14, 2001, just three days after the towers fell. The House of Representatives passed the resolution by a vote of 420 to 1. Representative Barbara Lee cast the sole dissenting vote. The United States Senate passed the measure 98 to 0. That 60-word statute remains the primary domestic legal authority for overseas counterterrorism missions a quarter century later.

The current conflict with Iran stands in stark operational contrast. Joint United States and Israeli military strikes commenced February 28, 2026, under Operation Epic Fury, resulting in the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and senior Iranian military officials. President Donald Trump transmitted a War Powers Resolution notification letter to Congress on March 2, 2026. But the president never requested a statutory authorization from lawmakers.

Congress did not grant one. The United States Senate defeated a War Powers Resolution seeking to halt hostilities on March 4, 2026, by a vote of 47 to 53. The House of Representatives defeated an identical measure the following day. Lawmakers instead approved a nonbinding measure declaring Iran a leading state sponsor of terrorism by a margin of 372 to 53, with all opposition coming from Democratic members. Senate Majority Leader John Thune argued the executive branch possessed independent constitutional authority under Article II to order the strikes.

Constitutional critics dispute that interpretation. Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution grants the war-declaring authority solely to the legislative branch. Legal scholars at Just Security argue Operation Epic Fury lacked constitutional legitimacy from its inception. Senator Tim Kaine argued the strikes were unauthorized because Iran had not launched an armed attack against the United States homeland.

Federal courts have never settled the dispute. The judiciary consistently treats military authorizations as political questions reserved for the executive and legislative branches. Congress has not declared war against any sovereign nation since the Second World War. Practice has varied across decades. Presidents requested explicit statutory authorizations for Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2002. But administrations deployed military forces without advance congressional consent during the 1999 Kosovo intervention, the 2011 Libya intervention, and the 2020 strike on Qasem Soleimani.

The statutory deadline for the Iran campaign arrived in late April 2026. The War Powers Resolution requires the president to terminate unauthorized operations within 60 days. In a formal letter delivered May 1, 2026, White House counsel asserted the 60-day clock paused because direct hostilities ceased under an April 7 ceasefire. Some naval interdiction operations continued. A legislative proposal to authorize the campaign, House Joint Resolution 176, expired without action on July 30, 2026.

The World Trade Center Health Program: Memphis Responders and the Staffing Crisis

The human toll of September 11 remains an ongoing medical reality in Memphis. The World Trade Center Health Program is managed by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The program covers first responders and survivors exposed to toxins at the World Trade Center, the crash site in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon site in Arlington, Virginia.

Tennessee Task Force 1 members deployed to the Pentagon are fully eligible for this federal medical monitoring and treatment. Eligibility applies to any emergency responder, police officer, recovery contractor, military member, or volunteer who conducted search, rescue, debris cleanup, or demolition operations at the Pentagon between September 11, 2001, and November 19, 2001. Congress further widened enrollment eligibility under the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024. The program has no enrollment expiration date and is funded through the year 2090.

Eligible responders across Shelby County must navigate a strict bureaucratic enrollment process. Responders may submit documentation online or by physical paper mail. Responders must attach detailed service records proving their specific deployment location, operational dates, and certified work hours. Online applicants must print, physically sign, and upload a paper signature form. The online portal does not allow applicants to save and resume unfinished submissions.

Enrolled responders living outside the New York area receive specialized care through the federal Nationwide Provider Network. The network maintains no single clinic and contracts with certified local physicians across all 50 states. The program operates separately from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, an agency run by the Department of Justice that covers economic loss and physical harm for Pentagon responders deployed through May 30, 2002.

Long-term congressional financing is secure, but administrative processing has stalled. Congress appropriated long-term funding through 2040 inside a broad federal spending measure enacted in February 2026, averting an immediate three-billion-dollar budgetary shortfall. But money has not solved severe bureaucratic shortages.

A bipartisan congressional letter delivered March 19, 2026, to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. revealed that the program employs just 84 full-time personnel against an authorized total of 120 staff members. That deficit leaves roughly 30 percent of authorized administrative positions vacant. The program serves an active patient caseload of approximately 140,000 sick responders and survivors.

The program workforce declined sharply following layoffs, terminations, and voluntary buyouts throughout 2025, shedding more than 20 percent of its specialized personnel. First responders submitting new claims for toxic exposure and certified cancers now face processing delays of twelve months or longer.

Federal employment vacancies are listed through the federal civil service portal at USAJOBS, with current health job listings mirrored on the official National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health career portal. Certain medical positions have previously been recruited through the Office of Personnel Management under Direct Hire Authority. But congressional investigators continue to seek clarity on whether those 36 vacant program positions are actively listed, or whether they remain frozen due to agency staffing reassignments.

Community & Classroom Reading

Towers Falling

By Coretta Scott King Honor Author Jewell Parker Rhodes

How do you teach history that a whole new generation never saw? A powerful, essential middle-grade novel exploring community, family healing, and how September 11 connects us all.

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Twenty-five years later, the domestic legacy of that autumn morning is measured in contradictions. A national legislature that required only 72 hours to yield broad war-making discretion now struggles to staff the administrative desks responsible for caring for the firefighters who answered the call.

📌 September 11 Responder Care & Legislative Records

World Trade Center Health Program — Federal medical monitoring and treatment enrollment for Pentagon, Shanksville, and New York responders (Toll-Free: 1-888-982-4748).
Nationwide Provider Network — Out-of-area clinical network serving Tennessee Task Force 1 and national responders (Call Center: 1-800-416-2898).
September 11th Victim Compensation Fund — United States Department of Justice financial compensation for physical injury or illness.
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health Careers — Federal job listings and direct-hire employment opportunities.

📰 Related From Scarlett's Media

Editor's Note

Reporting for this reflection piece draws on contemporaneous coverage from the Memphis Flyer, archival deployment citations for Tennessee Task Force 1, Tennessee General Assembly legislative history for Public Chapter 850 (2002), federal statutory records under Public Law 107-40, and the bipartisan congressional oversight inquiry delivered March 19, 2026, to the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

Serving Memphis' Black community through independent journalism, education, and outreach.

Thursday, September 10, 2026

Honoring Lives By Continuing Their Dreams

Scarlett's Media

Memphis Black News & Community Voice

Feature Spotlight

The Life That Comes After

Families who lose someone to suicide are left holding a question no one can answer. Some of them build something in its place.

By Shawnee Calhoun

September 10, 2026 | Memphis

Illustration of four pairs of hands of different ages and skin tones arranging framed photographs, a flowered church fan, work gloves and a potted marigold on a gold-draped table, with the Memphis skyline and the Hernando de Soto Bridge behind them at dusk.

What gets set out on the table: photographs, a church fan, a pair of work gloves, a marigold. The objects that carry a person forward are rarely the expensive ones. Illustration generated with Gemini AI; concept and direction by Shawnee Calhoun.

The Memphis Crisis Center started with one young man.

He was under the care of a local doctor. He lived with recurring hallucinations. He looked for a support system that could hold him. He did not find one. He died by suicide.

That was 1970. A group of doctors and community stakeholders decided that his death should not have happened. Among them were Dr. Richard Farmer, a psychiatrist and chief of psychiatry at the old John Gaston Hospital, and Dr. Allen Battle, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. They opened the first 24-hour volunteer-powered hotline in Memphis and named it the Suicide Prevention Service.

The name changed before long. Volunteers noticed the calls covered a far wider range of crises than suicide alone, so the agency became the Suicide and Crisis Intervention Service. The hotline had no building at first. Volunteers answered it out of their own homes. It later moved through several locations, including the psychiatric ward at the old City of Memphis Hospital and the music department at Rhodes College. Today it is the Memphis Crisis Center, and it has been answering this city for 56 years.

Most Memphians who call do not know that history. But the phone rings on a desk that exists because one young man could not find help in time. His name is not in the public record. His absence built something anyway.

That is one way to understand a memorial.

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The question that does not close

People who lose someone to suicide carry a particular weight. Researchers have documented it. A 2022 study in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being found that suicide grief differs from other bereavement in measurable ways. Survivors report higher levels of rejection, shame, stigma and blame. Survivors are also more likely to conceal how their person died.

Then there is the question itself. The same researchers describe the unending “why?” as the thing that sets this loss apart from every other kind.

The second question is quieter. What if I had noticed sooner? What if I had called? Researchers file those questions under guilt, blame and responsibility. They are among the domains specific to suicide loss, and they are the domains that broader grief studies tend to miss.

Neither question has an answer. But the research points somewhere useful. A study of 420 adults bereaved by suicide, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that the need for emotional support runs through the entire social network of a person who dies. Most of that need stays hidden. The authors concluded that support has to be offered directly by family, friends and professionals, and offered again later, because a grieving person may not feel ready the first time.

That finding is an instruction for the rest of us. Ask once. Then ask again in March.

What families build

Illustration of a Memphis community garden at dusk. Neighbors hang lit, framed portraits along a brick memory wall. A grandmother and a young girl plant a sapling in the foreground. At right, a woman hands an envelope to a teenager in a graduation cap and stole. String lights overhead, the Hernando de Soto Bridge and the skyline behind.

A memory wall, a garden, a scholarship handed across a folding table. Three of the ways families answer a loss by building something that outlasts it. Illustration generated with Gemini AI; concept and direction by Shawnee Calhoun.

Clark and Connie Flatt lost their 16-year-old son, Jason, on July 16, 1997. They founded the Jason Foundation that October, less than three months later.

Clark Flatt has explained what drove him. The family had attended every PTA meeting, PTO meeting and church seminar available to parents. They had sat through sessions on drugs, on alcohol, on bullying. In Jason's 16 years, Flatt said, no one ever offered a seminar on youth suicide.

So he built one. Then he went further. Tennessee became the first state in the country to pass the Jason Flatt Act in 2001, requiring suicide prevention training for teachers. Roughly 20 states have since followed. A father identified the exact gap that failed his son, and a father closed it.

Alison Malmon was a college student when her older brother died by suicide in 2000. She founded Active Minds in 2003 to put mental health conversations in the hands of students themselves. The organization now has more than 600 chapters.

Jordan and Lisa Tabor started a nonprofit called Rain Will Bring Flowers 15 days after their son Owen died. Fifteen days. The organization brings mental health education to Louisiana students, and it funds a four-year endowed scholarship in Owen's name for graduating seniors entering behavioral health. Two students received it this year.

“We just could not let our son's tragedy go to waste.”

Jordan Tabor, to WAFB

Lisa Tabor asked for something simpler, too. She asked people to tell Owen's story to their own children, so those children would know that other kids struggle and that they are not struggling alone.

Brad and April Hunstable lost their son Hayden days before his 13th birthday. They started Hayden's Corner to help parents navigate mental health with their kids. Jonny Boucher founded Hope For The Day in Chicago in 2011 after losing 16 people, including his boss and mentor. The Alliance of Hope maintains an online memorial wall for one reason: so survivors can say their person's name in public.

None of these families set out to run an organization. Each of them looked at the specific thing that failed their person, and each of them went at that thing directly.

Memphis, and the room on Colonial

Not every family builds a foundation. Most do not. Most are looking for a room.

There is one on the third Saturday of every month at White Station Church of Christ on Colonial Road. It runs from 10:30 a.m. to noon. There is no cost and no registration. Everyone in that room has lost someone to suicide.

Compassionate Friends meets monthly for families grieving the death of a child, grandchild or sibling of any age and any cause. The Kemmons Wilson Family Center for Good Grief runs groups led by trained professionals, including groups for children and teens.

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention holds its Memphis Mid-South Out of the Darkness Walk each fall. Families walk under their person's name. Coworkers and neighbors walk beside them. AFSP describes the walks as a place where people find the courage to speak about their own connection to suicide, often for the first time.

This matters locally in a way the numbers make plain. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in September 2025 that age-adjusted suicide rates among Black Americans rose 25.2% between 2018 and 2023. Rates among white Americans fell 3.1% over the same period. Among Black people ages 10 to 24, the rate rose 29.4%. Among Black people ages 25 to 44, it rose 29.2%. Memphis is not a bystander to that trend.

What is left

A person who dies by suicide does not become the manner of their death. Jason Flatt was an A-B student, an athlete and, by his father's description, a social butterfly. Owen Tabor was the kind of kid his parents believed was fine. Somebody in this city was a barber, a deacon, a night-shift nurse, a daughter with a specific laugh.

Their families are still here. So are their coworkers, their exes, their friends who were not family and did not get a call. All of them are carrying a question that will not close.

But the Memphis Crisis Center has been answering phones since 1970 because of one of them. That is the part worth holding onto. The people we lose keep doing work in this world. They do it through us.

Emotional Pain Reduction CBT Workbook — Structured exercises for the days between support group meetings, when the grief is still there and the room is not.

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Community Resources

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988, 24 hours a day.
Memphis Crisis Center — 901-274-7477 (901-CRISIS7), free and confidential, 24 hours a day.
Suicide loss support group — third Saturday monthly, 10:30 a.m. to noon, White Station Church of Christ, 1106 Colonial Road. No cost, no registration.
Compassionate Friends — monthly support for families grieving a child, grandchild or sibling.
Kemmons Wilson Family Center for Good Grief — professionally led grief groups, including groups for children and teens.
AFSP Memphis Mid-South Out of the Darkness Walk — annual community walk.

Editor's Note

This article was reported from published sources, each linked in the text. No family in this story was interviewed directly for this piece. If you have lost someone in Memphis and want their name and their life in the record, Scarlett's Media wants to hear from you. — Shawnee Calhoun, Editor-in-Chief, Scarlett's Media.

Serving Memphis' Black community through independent journalism, education, and outreach.

Monday, September 7, 2026

What Labor Day Owes Black Memphis

Scarlett's Media

Memphis Black News & Community Voice

scarletts-media.com

■ Opinion & Editorial

What Labor Day Owes Black Memphis

They built the holiday they were written out of — from the Pullman porters barred from the 1894 strike to the sanitation workers who died for a union in 1968

By Shawnee Calhoun | Scarlett's Media

September 7, 2026 | Memphis, TN

Split-panel illustration: at left, President Grover Cleveland signs the Labor Day bill into law in 1894; at right, Memphis sanitation workers march in 1968 holding I AM A MAN placards.

A split-panel illustration contrasting two moments 74 years apart. At left, a president signs the bill making Labor Day a federal holiday on June 28, 1894 — two days into the Pullman boycott, and six days before he sent federal troops to break it. At right, Memphis sanitation workers march in 1968 for union recognition, safety measures and a living wage. Illustration generated with Gemini AI; concept and direction by Shawnee Calhoun.

For a lot of us, Labor Day means the park. Overton. Glenview. Coolers and folding chairs and somebody's uncle guarding the grill. It's one of the few days parents get a whole afternoon with their kids and everybody else's kids. It's rest that was earned.

It's also a holiday with a history most people never learned. That history runs straight through Black Memphis.

A holiday signed while the strike was still being broken

Labor Day became a federal holiday on June 28, 1894, two days after the Pullman boycott began.

Workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company outside Chicago had walked off the job. The company laid off 2,200 workers and cut the wages of those who remained by a quarter to a half. It refused to lower rents in the company town where it made its workers live. At the same time, the company was sitting on a surplus of about $4 million and still paying dividends to its shareholders.

The American Railway Union, led by Eugene V. Debs, backed the strikers by refusing to handle any train carrying a Pullman car. A quarter of a million railroad workers struck in support. President Grover Cleveland signed the Labor Day bill two days into that boycott.

Six days after he signed it, he sent the Army into Chicago. More than 14,000 armed federal troops, marshals and police were deployed across 27 states. Some 34 people were shot dead, dozens more were wounded and hundreds were jailed. The strike was broken in under five months.

So the country gave labor a holiday first, then sent soldiers to break the strike that was still going on.

Who the porters were, and why they couldn't join

Here's the part that gets left out. The Pullman Palace Car Company was, at its height, the largest private employer of Black workers in America.

A Pullman porter worked the sleeping cars on overnight passenger trains. He carried luggage, made up berths, shined shoes, served food and looked after passengers through the night, frequently 400 hours a month with no overtime. After the Civil War, George Pullman recruited formerly enslaved men for the job specifically. He was selling white passengers the experience of being personally attended to. Those passengers called porters “George,” after Pullman himself, rather than learning their names.

Porters did work comparable to conductors, but were paid and ranked well below them. Porters had no path to promotion or seniority, and much of what they earned came from tips. Their income depended on whether a white passenger felt generous that night.

When the American Railway Union struck in 1894, its constitution barred Black members. The company's roughly 2,000 porters couldn't walk out with the union, couldn't picket and couldn't bargain through it. When the trains stopped, they lost income anyway.

They had reason to stay quiet, too. Between 1900 and 1925, porters tried to organize repeatedly. The company crushed every attempt through firings, blacklisting and threats.

So they built their own, in secret. On Aug. 25, 1925, about 500 porters met in a Harlem hall and formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. They elected A. Philip Randolph president for a practical reason. Randolph didn't work for Pullman, so the company couldn't fire him.

Pullman fought back for 12 years. The company planted spies in union meetings and fired hundreds of workers connected to the Brotherhood. It pushed a company-run “Employee Representation Plan” as a substitute. In 1932, it imposed a retaliatory $5 pay cut. It refused to recognize the union even after Congress passed the Railway Labor Act.

Pullman signed in 1937. It was the first contract between a major American corporation and a Black-led union. That's the load-bearing wall of Labor Day, not a footnote to it.

From the porters to the Mall to Memphis

Randolph didn't stop there, and the line from what he built runs to Memphis.

In January 1941, the country was arming for war and Black workers were shut out of defense plants. Randolph called for a mass march on Washington. He named it the March on Washington for Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense, and organized to bring as many as 100,000 Black Americans to the Lincoln Memorial.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Randolph and NAACP head Walter White on June 18 and asked him to call it off. Randolph said he would, on one condition: an executive order. On June 25, 1941, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802. It banned racial discrimination in defense industries and the federal government, and created the Fair Employment Practices Committee to monitor hiring. It was the first major federal action on racial inequality since Reconstruction.

But Roosevelt gave up less than that sounds like. The order barred discrimination in hiring and left segregation alone. Randolph had also asked him to desegregate the military, and he refused. President Harry Truman did that seven years later.

Randolph revived the march in 1962 and brought in the major civil rights organizations. He handed the organizing to his protégé Bayard Rustin. On Aug. 28, 1963, roughly a quarter of a million people came to Washington for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Jobs came first in the name both times, in 1941 and again in 1963. The man who conceived both marches was a labor organizer before he was anything else. He'd learned on the sleeping cars that a right you can't earn a living under isn't a right yet.

Five years later that argument arrived in Memphis, in the back of a garbage truck.

Now bring it home

Memphis has its own chapter, and the country knows it by four words on a picket sign.

On Feb. 1, 1968, sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker were crushed to death by a malfunctioning compactor on a city garbage truck. They were doing a job Black men in Memphis took because it was frequently the only job available to them. They earned roughly $1.60 to $1.90 an hour, with drivers at the top of that scale. Full-time workers qualified for food stamps. The city gave them no uniforms, so men walked home in their own clothes, covered in what they'd hauled.

Eleven days later, roughly 1,300 workers walked off. They wanted union recognition, higher wages, safety measures, overtime, sick leave and pay for the rainy days the city sent them home without it.

Historian Michael K. Honey has documented how sanitation work in that era sat somewhere between the plantation economy and the modern city. Historian Jason Sokol notes that in 1960s Memphis, 86% of Black men worked low-paid manual jobs.

The signs didn't say “Raise our wages.” They said I AM A MAN.

The strike ran 64 days. Larry Payne, 16, was killed by police during a march. The Rev. James Lawson called the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and asked him to come. King delivered “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” at Mason Temple on April 3 and was assassinated the next day. The strike ended April 16. The city recognized the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1733 and raised wages.

Memphis didn't just participate in labor history. Memphis is where the argument over whether Black work counts as work got settled, at the cost of several men's lives.

The stereotype, and the women it was built on

The stereotype of Black people being lazy, after centuries of forced unpaid labor in this country, is an enigma unto itself.

And it isn't just a pop-culture staple. In Black homes it worked as a harsh warning, and the warning got passed down by women. Grandmothers who worked as maids came home and raised their daughters and granddaughters to be housekeepers. In many homes sitting was a luxury to be earned. Girls were taught that keeping a man meant cooking and keeping a clean house. That kind of child rearing did a number on the mental health of the next two generations of young women and girls.

The federal record explains why those grandmothers held on so tightly.

When Congress passed the Social Security Act in 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, domestic workers were excluded by name. No minimum wage. No overtime. No old-age benefits. No unemployment insurance. Southern lawmakers demanded those carve-outs, and everyone understood at the time what they were for.

By 1930, roughly two-thirds of employed Black women in America worked as domestic servants. Roughly 90% of Black working women got no benefit at all from the New Deal laws that created a minimum wage, maximum hours, the right to organize and help for the unemployed and elderly. Domestic workers weren't covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act until 1974.

So when a Black woman cleaning a white family's house in the 1950s had no sick days, that wasn't her employer being harsh. That was federal law. There was no floor under her. If she got sick she lost the day, and if she lost enough days she lost the job. That's why she so often brought a daughter of working age along with her, or in place of her.

“She didn’t have a maid. She was the maid, and she was raising a daughter to survive the same arrangement.”

— Shawnee Calhoun, Editor-in-Chief, Scarlett's Media

What the next generations did with it

From the 1940s through the mid-1980s, young Black mothers stepped back from traditional motherhood in numbers, and grandparents raised the children. That story gets told across this city in households with no connection to one another. The women handing off were daughters of women who'd been worked past exhaustion. The grandparents taking those children on were the same generation that had been pushed hardest.

What happened next is documented.

Those grandchildren, the millennials, went into business for themselves in large numbers. Part of the reason was to get away from the stress and disrespect that came with service work.

Black women are now the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the country. Between 2024 and 2025, Black women-owned employer businesses grew 13%, while women-owned businesses overall grew 4.4%, according to Wells Fargo's Impact of Women Businesses report. From 2014 to 2019, the number of businesses owned by Black women grew 50%, the highest rate of any group of women.

Researchers are direct about what drives it. High rates of Black women's entrepreneurship reflect, in part, a lack of opportunity in the traditional workforce. Many start businesses to survive rather than to chase an opening in the market. Black women are also more likely than any other group to fund those businesses themselves, because the capital doesn't come.

That same generation moved away from finding their identity in physically intensive labor, and became the first in many families to sit down with a therapist. American Psychiatric Association figures show 35% of millennials have received mental health treatment, compared with 26% of Generation X, 22% of baby boomers and 15% of the Silent Generation.

Where Memphis stands

Unemployment in the Memphis metro was 4.8% in June, essentially flat from a year earlier. That number sounds fine. It hides the thing that matters.

The metro's average weekly wage was $1,359 in the last quarter of 2025, against a national average of $1,569. Memphis workers earn about 87 cents for every dollar the average American worker earns. This is a city whose defining industry is moving the country's freight.

Now look inside that.

In Shelby County, median household income for Black households is $47,180. For non-Hispanic white households it's $94,971. Black households here earn 50 cents for every dollar white households earn. Inside the city limits the gap narrows, but only because white income falls with it: $42,269 against $75,485, or 56 cents on the dollar.

Poverty runs the same way. In Shelby County, 25% of Black residents live in poverty against 8% of white residents. In the city it's 27.9% against 10.8%. Among children it's worse: 39.5% of Black children countywide, 42.7% inside the city.

Those figures come from the 2025 Memphis Poverty Fact Sheet, produced annually by Dr. Elena Delavega of the University of Memphis School of Social Work and Dr. Gregory M. Blumenthal, using 2024 American Community Survey estimates.

Two more findings from that report belong in any honest Labor Day story about this city.

First, the direction. Poverty fell nationally from 2023 to 2024, but rose here. It rose in Memphis, in Shelby County and across the metro, overall and for children and for every minority group. The authors write that Memphis poverty looks structural rather than cyclical, and that it's out of step with the rest of the country.

Second, the causes they name. A labor market built on low-wage warehouse work. No adequate public transportation. Out-of-town firms buying up Memphis housing and renting it back at inflated prices. And a wage floor that hasn't moved in 16 years. Tennessee has no state minimum wage and takes the federal $7.25, unchanged since 2009. The minimum anchors the wages above it, so that freeze holds down what Memphians earn well past the bottom of the scale.

The Memphis metro now ranks second in overall poverty among the country’s largest metro areas, behind only Fresno, California, and first in child poverty. The city ranks second among large American cities in both, behind only Detroit.

What's being unwound right now

In January 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14173. It revoked Executive Order 11246, the 1965 order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson that required federal contractors to maintain integrated workplaces.

On Feb. 15, 2025, the General Services Administration told civil agencies to stop including clause 52.222-21 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, “Prohibition of Segregated Facilities,” in new contracts. That clause had required contractors to certify they didn't maintain segregated restrooms, dining areas, drinking fountains, waiting rooms or transportation. NPR reported the change on March 18, 2025.

Segregation is still illegal. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies to every company holding a federal contract. A GSA spokesperson said contractors remain subject to civil rights law and called the clause duplicative. What came out was the explicit contractual prohibition, not the ban underneath it.

Legal scholars didn't shrug it off. Melissa Murray, a constitutional law professor at New York University, told NPR the change is symbolic, but that the symbolism is meaningful. Excluding those provisions from what the government requires of its contractors, she said, speaks volumes.

What improvement requires

A wage floor that has moved this century. Tennessee has no state minimum and takes the federal $7.25, frozen since 2009. Delavega and Blumenthal identify that anchor as one reason Memphis wages stay low across the board. The sanitation workers won recognition in 1968, and somebody should ask what that contract is worth now.

Ownership, not just employment. Black women are starting businesses faster than anyone in the country, and paying for them out of pocket because lenders and investors won't. That gap is where the policy work is.

Union strength. Tennessee is a right-to-work state, and that carries a cost. It ought to be named out loud in the city where the labor movement's most famous strike happened.

And the public payroll. Government has been one of the few sectors where Black workers reliably found stable middle-class wages. It's the sector currently being cut.

The point

The cookout isn't the problem, and neither is rest. Black Memphians have earned a day off more thoroughly than almost anyone in this country.

The problem is a holiday that honors labor while the labor movement it commemorates wrote Black workers out of its own constitution. The problem is a federal government that built a safety net and left Black women standing outside it for 36 years. The problem is a city that turned all of that into a national reckoning, then went back to paying Black households 50 cents on the dollar.

Randolph spent 22 years threatening a march to make this country say in writing that Black people could work. Sixty years after he finally marched, the government is taking the writing back out.

Two men died in the back of a garbage truck to make this city admit what its workers were. The least the rest of us can do on a Monday in September is say their names.

Echol Cole. Robert Walker.

 Sources & Further Reading

2025 Memphis Poverty Fact Sheet — Dr. Elena Delavega and Dr. Gregory M. Blumenthal, University of Memphis
U.S. Department of Labor Hall of Honor — Workers of the Memphis Sanitation Strike
National Civil Rights Museum — Lorraine Motel, 450 Mulberry St., Memphis
AFSCME Local 1733 — the union Memphis sanitation workers won in 1968
NPR — reporting on the removal of the federal segregated-facilities clause