Benjamin Meadows-Ingram

Boss on Deck

The Notorious BMI: Ain't always pretty, but it's always real.

King

Posted 01/15/2007 at 9:56 PM | Comment?

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I gotta write today – it’s only right. See, I’m from Memphis, a sleepy city on the banks of the Mississippi that has had a surprising, subtle influence over the nation in which we live today. Talk to people who know me, and they’ll tell you that I won’t shut up about the damn place. But how can I? We all know what it’s like to be from somewhere and to rep that city like it’s the only thing that mattered, sometimes more than life itself – folks get killed over repping sets all too often, as you and I both know. Well, down in Memphis we can claim all sorts of –ish. Some of it is completely bananas (the town was built on cotton money – New York and Chicago banks did business in the M as the white stuff was weighed, traded and then sent upstream, the Confederacy posted up heavy in town, and Nathan Bedford Forest – known Confederate leader and first Grand Wizard of the KKK still has a statue in a public park in the middle of town – WTF?!?!?). And some of it completely integral in everything that we do here (and chances are that you’re about). The legacy of black music in Memphis, hell pop music in general, stretches back so far that there are few American-born tunes tracking today that can’t trace at least one or two notes back to the Bluff City.

But it was the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., while he was staying at the Lorraine Motel supporting a city-wide sanitation worker strike in 1968 that shattered the city’s shaky stability and set race relations aflame.

Even today, damn near everyone in town will tell you that nothing’s been the same since James Earl Ray pulled the trigger. Even folks like myself who weren’t even on our parents’ minds, much less kicking away in mom’s belly, when the shit hit the fan will agree. Today, Memphis is a society built on a foundation of underlying distrust. In terms of day-to-day interaction between the races (and here I mean black and white – the M is one of the most almost exclusively bi-racial towns I’ve ever seen), I can’t think of another city allowing, hell necessitating, more face-to-face time between folks. And yet, the amount of true social mixing between the populations is damn near nil. Folks work together, do business together, acknowledge each other and all that, but hardly ever become friends. You ask me, it’s a tragedy, especially since so much of the distrust is founded on economic inequality. Nothing gets folks riled up like watching one side of the population succeed while the other struggles simply to make it. Then no one likes anyone. That said, time continues to march on. And at some point, somehow, you figure something’s gotta break. Right? Of course, how it breaks, and what that would even look like is beyond me. All the more reason to take the day to honor the legacy of a true leader. No matter your thoughts on MLK, he was walking a road. And if I’ve learned anything in my time it’s that sometimes simply having someone show you how to take that first step is more important than the shape of the journey to come.