Reimagining a Southern City: Peeling Back and Pushing Beyond Layers of History in the Memphis Education Market

• In Event: Education Policies, Market-Based Discourses, and the Black Radical Imagination: Why Envisioning Matters for Race, Place, and Justice

Abstract

The first paper, “Re-Imagining a Southern City: Peeling Back and Pushing Beyond Layers of History in the Memphis Education Market,” examines the role that charter schools play in city transformation as they shape processes of white in-migration and displacement of communities of color (Hankins, 2007; Lipman, 2013; Pearman & Swain, 2014; Buras, 2015; Mann et al., 2020). This study draws linkages between the historical role of school policy in shaping post-World War II segregated landscapes (Lassiter, 2012; Erickson, 2016) and the present-day role of charters in ongoing processes of metropolitan transformation by examining the spatial and political dynamics of Memphis, Tennessee, a majority Black city following the post-Katrina model of state takeover and charter growth (Anderson & Dixson, 2016; Author et al., 2023). Despite efforts by elites to symbolically construct Memphis as a “hub” for education reform, as part of a larger city branding and recruitment initiative, findings reflect ongoing uneven development that maintains the stasis of the segregated city and county.

More specifically, this paper provides an in-depth analysis of a politically significant education site, a revitalized Sears, Roebuck and Company building and surrounding Black neighborhoods, which demonstrates the continuity of Black schooling organized around capital’s interest at the nexus of race and space. Utilizing palimpsestic time (Alexander, 2005), an analytic and methodological approach that reframes history as layered, rather than linear, the author makes visible reworkings and continuities across different political economic transformations. This includes drawing from archival news sources and government reports; interviews; documents (policy reports, philanthropy 990s); and observations.

Findings demonstrate how rather than merely school reform, charters and the attendant network of market-based organizations work in tandem at the nexus of development and political economy. As a historic building revitalized during the peak of the Great Recession, the building’s new occupants include the co-location of local philanthropies and a well-funded network of reform organizations, a spatial reflection of the continuity of white philanthropy over Black education (Anderson, 1988; Scott, 2009). While the building illuminates networked power’s disproportionate influence over public education and the city, this study’s contribution is tracing how Black representation within these networks reshaped the implementation of national reform agendas locally. By shifting the vantage point to surrounding neighborhoods, the author traces radical traditions of Black educational epistemologies yoked to spatial imaginaries, including the legacy of Black labor movements. This finding is grounded in a Black geographies perspective (McKittrick & Woods, 2007), which views Black spaces as more than sites of disinvestment, but spaces of encounter (McKittrick, 2011). Despite capital flight and disinvestment, this scholar surfaces alternative visions for Black education and the future of the city, which pushed beyond the discursive and material bounds of neoliberal logics.

Author

• Rachel E. Williams, University of Wisconsin - Madison