Rowdy Memphis

On October 16, 1954, E. H. Crump, the political boss of Memphis and a force in Southern politics for nearly half a century, died at his home in Memphis. He left a place known as "America's Cleanest City," "America's Quietest City," the capital of Mississippi, and the safest city in the South. To Crump's critics, Memphis was also known as America's least democratic city. Crump's brand of order was already breaking down at the time of his death. That year the U.S. Supreme Court desegregated public schools in Brown v. Board of Education and Elvis Presley cut his first record at Sun Studio in Memphis. The next 50 years in Memphis would belong to the children and lawyers who fulfilled the promise of desegregation, rebels and gamblers, brawlers and killers, hard-nosed politicians and prosecutors, suburban and downtown developers, business visionaries, and the activists who stopped an interstate highway. This is their story.

John Branston grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan and graduated from the University of Michigan. He has worked as a reporter in Tennessee and Mississippi for 25 years and writes regularly for The Memphis Flyer. He and his family live in Midtown, Memphis.