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Culturally, Memphis is deep south. Accents, culture, and way of life don't really match the rest of Tennessee.
It's interesting that Nashville has most of the HBCUs despite Memphis being the Deep South city and only having LeMoyne-Owen College which isn't even all that well-known.
It's interesting that Nashville has most of the HBCUs despite Memphis being the Deep South city and only having LeMoyne-Owen College which isn't even all that well-known.
It's simple Memphis is not an educational city, Nashville is one of the top educational cities in the South, not just for black colleges, but PWI as well. The Nashville area also has Vanderbilt, Belmont, Lipscomb, and MTSU in Murfreesboro.
It's simple Memphis is not an educational city, Nashville is one of the top educational cities in the South, not just for black colleges, but PWI as well. The Nashville area also has Vanderbilt, Belmont, Lipscomb, and MTSU in Murfreesboro.
Memphis's collection of colleges and universities are more or less about what you'd expect for a city its size. It's just interesting that given its historically large Black population, it's not home to a sizable HBCU. I can name tons of towns and cities of all sizes that have at least one HBCU larger/more prominent than LeMoyne-Owen.
The decision about where to establish or relocate colleges/universities can be driven by politics and money just as much as anything else. That's probably the most likely reason.
It's the defacto capital of the Delta. Many of the people that populate Memphis families came from the Mississippi Delta.
I know that and been in both places. It's not that belongs to Greenville. Memphis is a distinct category outside of the delta. Plus families came from other parts of TN , AR, KY, & international too.
I know that and been in both places. It's not that belongs to Greenville. Memphis is a distinct category outside of the delta. Plus families came from other parts of TN , AR, KY, & international too.
I don't really agree Memphis has never been a huge attractor of transplants outside of the Delta of Mississippi. Yes Greenville is probably the true capital but it's not a major city by any means. That's why I said Memphis is a defacto capital.
There's a website called Mississippi Obscura which is dedicated to profiling and promoting Mississippi and its various regions. The entry entitled "Where Delta Blues Met the World" focuses on Memphis and here are some relevant excerpts:
Quote:
There is most certainly a border that separates Memphis from Mississippi. I’m not denying that. Memphis without a doubt belongs to Tennessee. Yet, I hold no reservations linking the Bluff City to this page. You see, borders are drawn by governments. 200 years ago, men sat down around a map and drew lines along rivers and mountains—sometimes indistinguishable marks of latitude and longitude...
Just stepping across the Tennessee line, however, puts you in Memphis, and just a shot across the river puts you in Arkansas. But if we were to erase political lines and draw cultural borders, the country would look quite different. Like over in Monroe and Shreveport... Honestly, without laughing, tell me they are more “Louisiana” than they are “South Arkansas...” I’ll wait. But in the case of Mississippi and Memphis, it’d make a lot of sense to draw a line, starting at the Mississippi River in Vicksburg, arching around to Bentonia and Yazoo City, traveling north, almost adjacent to I-55, and hooking around the southwest corner of Tennessee to the river again. Within those borders you’d have the Mississippi Delta, a region far more distinct than just about any other, “The Most Southern Place on Earth...” Here, all roads, even 49 lead to Highway 61, like a nervous system to a spine, and Highway 61 takes you directly to the Delta’s Capital city... Memphis.
Again, it’s not that Memphis belongs in Mississippi, but if this page is ever going to post anything on the Delta, just about every topic leads to Memphis; and just about any topic regarding Memphis, more often than not, has its roots firmly planted in the rich soil of the flatlands to its south. The Bluff City and the Mississippi Delta are inseparable, and quite often indistinguishable...
As the city grew [shortly after its founding], its economy centered mostly around two commodities: Cotton from the Mississippi Delta and slaves bound for the Mississippi Delta. The Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee sides of the river will ultimately make the credits as well, but the farmland to the south played the biggest role in this town’s early growth...
But Memphis was growing in general. From 1900-1950, Memphis would go from 100,000 citizens to nearly 400,000. Again, this was due in large part to the Mississippi Delta. As the mechanization of farming progressed, rural residents moved in seeking industrial jobs...
In all, however, there’s just a mood in Memphis, which ties it in with the Mississippi Delta. A single people who either choose city life or country life, but breath the same Delta air. We’ve always had an influential bond with the Bluff City, and they in turn...
But it’s all one people up here. Remove state lines and begin in Jackson, MS. Travel up 49 to Yazoo City and into Belzoni. Stop for some catfish before heading north to Cleveland. There you can grab some BBQ before swinging by the Grammy museum. Then hit the road to Clarksdale. Tear into some tamales and go have a drink at Morgan Freeman’s Ground Zero Blues Club. From there take 61 to Memphis.
The attitude never changes. In Memphis, you find the same BBQ, the same tamales, the same catfish, and you hear the same blues... It’s just that everything you experienced along the way through the Mississippi Delta, well, here it met the city.
But believe me, it didn’t change. Just as Memphis had done with Delta timber and cotton before, she took the soul of the Delta blues juke joint and shipped it out for the rest of the world to enjoy.
No, Memphis is not in Mississippi; one wouldn’t expect to find it on a site devoted to the Magnolia State. But regardless of its political borders, Memphis is nothing like Nashville, Chattanooga, or Knoxville. Memphis history and culture is intricately woven into that of the Mississippi Delta. And for that reason, it most certainly belongs on Mississippi Obscura.
Famous author the late David Cohn was a native of Greenville, MS. This is how his well-known essay entitled, "Where I was Born and Raised: The Delta Land" begins:
Quote:
The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg. The Peabody is the Paris Ritz, the Cairo Shepheard’s, the London Savoy of this section. If you stand near its fountain in the middle of the lobby, where ducks waddle and turtles drowse, ultimately you will see everybody who is anybody in the Delta and many who are on the make.
Memphis is the metropolis of the Delta. It is its financial, social, and cultural capital. Many of its citizens grew wealthy by lending money at exorbitant rates of interest to Delta planters. When a gentleman of the old school needed a loan he did not quibble about the cost, especially if there had been a disastrous stud-poker game the night before. Other Memphians founded their dynasties in lumber. They leaped from cypress to Cezanne in one generation. Some of them brought fortunes to Memphis from Arkansas. They had lived on land which “wasn’t fitten fur a houn’dawg.” But oil spouted underneath their feet. On the whole, however, Memphis draws its sustenance from its im*mense surrounding territory, and the Delta is one of its richest tributary provinces.
Culturally, Memphis is to the Delta what Paris is to Toulouse. One day I wandered into a bookshop there. I asked for a book by William Faulkner. The clerk, a fragilely lovely woman of the old régime, flew into a rage. “That man!” she said. “He ought to be run out of the country, writing about the South the way he does.” I retreated rapidly to my second line of defense. “Have you anything by Thomas Wolfe? Isn’t he one of your famous Southern writers?” “Well, he might be, but we don’t approve of him, either.” Finding that both my authors were on the Index, and that I had been mistaken for an upstart Yankee, I browsed among the shelves for a while, quietly licking my wounds. Then I asked delicately whether books were not at least a minor passion of the people of Memphis. “No, people don’t read many books here. Do you live in town?” I regretted profoundly that I did not. “Then,” she said, in a sudden burst of confidence, “I’ll tell you the truth. We don’t have any real culture in Memphis. We have culturine. You know, like oleo*margarine. Looks like butter but isn’t.”
That may or may not be true. There are many cultures in the world composed of many things ranging from sauces to sym*phonies. I do know that Memphis has beaten biscuit, rambler roses, and luscious lawns. To Delta citizens in search of light it glows with the beauty of the honey-colored pile of the Erech*theum seen at sunrise from a high Athenian hill. Here they all come in good time to see the occasional flesh-and-blood actors who appear upon its stage, to hear the rare symphony orchestra that straggles down from the north like a lone lost wild duck, and to dance to the music of some radio band advertising the virtues of a genteel purgative.
Here, too, come the business men of the Delta to make loans, sell cotton, buy merchandise, and attend conventions. For a day or two the lobby of the Peabody is filled with ice-cream men and their ice-cream wives. They suddenly melt into noth*ingness and are succeeded by ant-exterminators bent upon destroying the termite, which, like the politician, is blind but destructive. Then the undertakers appear. They discuss em*balining by day. By night they dance delicate dances macabre with their necrophilic ladies under the scared and disapproving eyes of the Negro waiters. Finally they vanish into the outer darkness from which they came, giving way to hay-and-feed men who year long have cherished harlequins in their hearts now to be released in this place of bright carnival. Month after month come the conventions. The banners of business adorn the railings of the mezzanine, songs and resounding speeches come like the roar of the distant sea to lesser citizens as they sit at lunch or dinner in the hotel dining-rooms, and town competes with town for the honor of entertaining the carbonated-beverages men next year. During these periods the panoplied life of the sixteenth century guilds is created anew. The lobby glows briefly with the glory of the vanished Cloth Hall of Ypres.
The Delta, however, loves life as well as art and profits, and in Memphis the stern business man shows the world his other soul-side. Here he meets his inamorata, come up from his home town to sit for a little while together under a mango tree and lose the noisy sentient world. Here he goes in search of frail women, human, all too human, who live in houses with shades perpetually drawn, or he stumbles perhaps with a sudden gasp of delight upon some peripatetic beauty strolling sloe-eyed and lost in the soft darkness of the hotel mezzanine. Sin, a hydra-headed monster at home, becomes in Memphis a white dove cooing in the shade of tall cathedral columns.
Women of the Delta pass transiently through the lobby of the Peabody as they go to buy clothes or to get a permanent wave. A trip of two hundred miles is but a pilgrim’s tribute to loveliness. Or sometimes they track culture to its lair in the recesses of a metropolitan woman’s club where the nineteenth century in Europe is taken up intact at three o’clock and set down in fragments among the tea things at four.
Here the young men and young women of the Delta stop between trains en route to schools and colleges. Everybody in the area is whole-heartedly for what is vaguely called “educa*tion,” but the reasons for it are always a little dim. For a while they fill the lobby with their laughter, and suddenly, like migra*tory birds, are gone, to come again at Christmas and in June.
All in all, at one time or another, everybody passes this way, and here one begins to glimpse the civilization of the Delta and to bruise his perceptions on the jagged points of its paradoxes.
I've also seen Greenville referenced as the capital of the Delta, many times in a literary context. But when you see prominent people from Greenville referencing Memphis as the Delta's unofficial capital, including Southern historian Shelby Foote, you know there's something to it besides slick marketing.
Famous author the late David Cohn was a native of Greenville, MS. This is how his well-known essay entitled, "Where I was Born and Raised: The Delta Land" begins:
Quote:
The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis
Love this description.
I've even heard a couple of people I know from Mississippi jokingly refer to Memphis as "Memphis, Mississippi" as a way to lay claim to the city. Wonder if anyone else ever heard this...
I don't really agree Memphis has never been a huge attractor of transplants outside of the Delta of Mississippi. Yes Greenville is probably the true capital but it's not a major city by any means. That's why I said Memphis is a defacto capital.
In addition to Anglo-American migrants, Irish and German immigrants contributed to the population rise.
The Irish arrived first, refugees from English oppression and successive famines following the potato blight. Displaced and largely illiterate farmers with few marketable skills, the Irish provided the labor for cutting roads, erecting buildings, and constructing railroads, levees, and canals. Irish crews also manned the area’s trains and boats, and handled their cargoes. They entered politics enthusiastically and filled municipal jobs, especially fire and police ranks.
Germans came for reasons similar to those of the Irish, though after the revolutions of 1848, political motives dominated. Generally more urban and propertied than the Irish, Germans found a niche in the city’s retail, commercial, and small industries sectors. They guarded their ethnic traditions more closely than the Irish and furnished many of the city’s artists, musicians, and teachers. ( source: TN encyclopedia).
A large Jewish community of 9,000, most of whom are Ashkenazi Jews with Central and Eastern European ancestry. (Wikipedia).
I've even heard a couple of people I know from Mississippi jokingly refer to Memphis as "Memphis, Mississippi" as a way to lay claim to the city. Wonder if anyone else ever heard this...
Nope. Coincidentally, there was a village called Memphis in Mississippi. It was annex by Walls ( yes that's the place name) which is located under Memphis (TN) & is known as " Where the delta meets the bluff".
It's A Trip How the Core of New Orleans feels like 4 times bigger than the Core of Memphis, Yet When we talk Metropolitan Area, Metro Memphis (outside the core) feels like 3 times Bigger than Metro New Orleans..I believe Paradox would be the right word
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