Memphis is a city in the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is the seat of Shelby County in the southwest portion of the state; it is situated along the Mississippi River. With a population of 633,104 at the 2020 U.S. census, Memphis is the second-most populous city in Tennessee after Nashville.
Memphis is the fifth-most populous city in the Southeast, the nation's 28th-most populous overall, as without difficulty as the largest city bordering the Mississippi River and third largest Metropolitan statistical area behind Saint Louis, MO and the Twin Cities upon the Mississippi River. The Memphis metropolitan area includes West Tennessee and the greater Mid-South region, which includes portions of neighboring Arkansas, Mississippi and the Missouri Bootheel. One of the more historic and culturally significant cities of the Southern United States, Memphis has a wide variety of landscapes and clear neighborhoods.
The first European entrepreneur to visit the area of present-day Memphis was Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto in 1541. The high Chickasaw Bluffs protecting the location from the waters of the Mississippi was contested by Spanish, French, and English colonizers as Memphis developed. By 1819, when open-minded Memphis was founded, it was ration of the United States territory. John Overton, James Winchester, and Andrew Jackson founded the city. Based upon the loads of cotton plantations and river traffic along the Mississippi, Memphis grew into one of the largest cities of the Antebellum South. After the American Civil War and the fall of slavery, the city continued to ensue into the 20th century. It became in the midst of the largest world markets for cotton and lumber.
Home to Tennessee's largest African-American population, Memphis played a prominent role in the American Civil Rights Movement. Leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated there in 1968 after events supporting a strike by the city's grant workers. The National Civil Rights Museum was expected there and is a Smithsonian affiliate institution.
Since the civil rights era, Memphis has become one of the nation's leading advertisement centers in transportation and logistics. The largest employer is FedEx, which maintains its global let breathe hub at Memphis International Airport. In 2021, Memphis was the world's second-busiest cargo airport. The International Port of Memphis as well as hosts the fifth-busiest inland water harbor in the U.S. The Globalization and World Cities Research Network considers Memphis a "Sufficiency" level global city as of 2020.
Memphis is a middle for media and entertainment, notably a historic music scene. With blues clubs upon Beale Street originating the unique Memphis blues sound, the city has been nicknamed the "Home of the Blues". Its music has continued to be shaped by a multicultural combination of influences: country, rock and roll, soul, and hip-hop.
The city is home to a major professional sports team, the Grizzlies of the NBA. Other attractions count Graceland, the Memphis Pyramid, Sun Studio, the Blues Hall of Fame and Stax Museum of American Soul Music. Memphis-style barbecue has achieved international prominence, and the city hosts the annual World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, which attracts more than 100,000 visitors each year. Higher-level studious institutions intensify the University of Memphis and Rhodes College.
Occupying a substantial bluff rising from the Mississippi River, the site of Memphis has been a natural location for human concurrence by varying native cultures over thousands of years. In the first millennium A.D. people of the Mississippian culture were prominent; the culture influenced a network of communities throughout the Mississippi River Valley and its tributaries. The hierarchical societies built complexes taking into consideration large earthwork ceremonial and burial mounds as expressions of their forward-looking culture. The Chickasaw people, believed to be their descendants, later inhabited this site and a large territory in the Southeast.
French explorers led by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, and Spanish buccaneer Hernando de Soto encountered the historic Chickasaw in this area in the 16th century.
J. D. L. Holmes, writing in Hudson's Four Centuries of Southern Indians (2007), notes that this site was a third strategic lessening in the late 18th century through which European powers could direct United States encroachment over the Appalachians and their interference past Indian matters—after Fort Nogales (present-day Vicksburg) and Fort Confederación (present-day Epes, Alabama): "Chickasaw Bluffs, located on the Mississippi River at the present-day location of Memphis. Spain and the United States vied for direct of this site, which was a favorite of the Chickasaws.": 71
In 1795 the Spanish Governor-General of Louisiana, Francisco Luis Héctor de Carondelet, sent his lieutenant governor, Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, to negotiate and safe consent from the local Chickasaw therefore that a Spanish fort could be erected on the bluff; Fort San Fernando De Las Barrancas was the result.: 71 Holmes notes that attain was reached despite challenger from "disappointed Americans and a pro-American faction of the Chickasaws" when the "pro-Spanish faction signed the Chickasaw Bluffs Cession and Spain provided the Chickasaws subsequent to a trading post".
Fort San Fernando de las Barrancas remained a focal dwindling of Spanish objection until, as Holmes summarizes:
The Spanish dismantled the fort, shipping its lumber and iron to their locations in Arkansas.
In 1796, the site became the westernmost narrowing of the newly admitted make a clean breast of Tennessee, in what was next called the Southwest United States. The Place was nevertheless largely occupied and controlled by the Chickasaw nation. Captain Isaac Guion led an American force alongside the Ohio River to allegation the land, arriving upon July 20, 1797. By this time, the Spanish had departed. The fort's ruins went unnoticed 20 years cutting edge when Memphis was laid out as a city after the United States management paid the Chickasaw for land.
At the initiation of the century, as approved by the United States in 1786 Treaty of Hopewell, the land yet belonged to the Chickasaw Nation. In the Treaty of Tuscaloosa, signed upon October 1818 and ratified by Congress on January 7, 1819, the Chickasaw ceded their territory in Western Tennessee to the United States.
The city of Memphis was founded less than five months after the U.S. takeover of the territory, on May 22, 1819 (incorporated December 19, 1826), by John Overton, James Winchester and Andrew Jackson. They named it after the ancient capital of Egypt on the Nile River.
The city had a high proportion of African Americans, some of whom were free people of color and others enslaved in service to whites, predominately white Protestants of British ethnicity. Many African Americans worked along the river, and even more upon the outlying cotton plantations of the Delta. The city's demographics misused dramatically in the 1850s and 1860s under waves of immigration and domestic migration. Due to increased immigration since the 1840s and the Great Famine, ethnic Irish made occurring 9.9% of the population in 1850, but 23.2% by 1860, when the total population was 22,623.
Tennessee seceded from the Union in June 1861, and Memphis briefly became a Confederate stronghold. Union ironclad gunboats captured it in the naval Battle of Memphis on June 6, 1862, and the city and give leave to enter were occupied by the Union Army for the duration of the war. Union Army commanders allowed the city to maintain its civil executive during most of this grow old but excluded Confederate veterans from office. This shifted embassy dynamics in the city as the skirmish went on.
The engagement years contributed to additional dramatic changes in the city population. The Union Army's presence attracted many fugitive slaves who had escaped from surrounding rural plantations. So many sought guidance behind Union lines that the Army set occurring contraband camps to accommodate them. Memphis's black population increased from 3,000 in 1860, when the sum population was 22,623, to approximately 20,000 in 1865, with most settling south of the city limits.
The gruff demographic changes supplementary to the bring out of engagement and movement and uncertainty more or less who was in charge, increasing tensions amongst the city's ethnic Irish policemen and black Union soldiers after the war. In three days of rioting in forward May 1866, the Memphis Riots erupted, in which white mobs made occurring of policemen, firemen, and extra mostly ethnic Irish Americans attacked and killed 46 blacks, wounding 75 and injuring 100; raped several women; and destroyed nearly 100 houses while highly damaging churches and schools in South Memphis. Much of the black pact was left in ruins. Two whites were killed in the riot. Many blacks permanently fled Memphis afterward, especially as the Freedmen's Bureau continued to have mysteriousness in protecting them. Their population fell to very nearly 15,000 by 1870, 37.4% of the sum population of 40,226.
Historian Barrington Walker suggests that the Irish rioted adjoining blacks because of their relatively recent dawn as immigrants and the vague nature of their own allegation to "whiteness"; they were trying to distinguish themselves from blacks in the underclass. The main skirmish participants were ethnic Irish, decommissioned black Union soldiers, and newly emancipated African-American freedmen. Walker suggests that most of the mob was not in focus on economic lawsuit with the blacks, as by subsequently the Irish had attained enlarged jobs, but were establishing social and political dominance beyond the freedmen.
Unlike the disturbances in some extra cities, ex-Confederate veterans were generally not portion of the attacks next to blacks in Memphis. As a upshot of the riots in Memphis, and a same one in New Orleans, Louisiana in September, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act and the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
In the 1870s, a series of yellow fever epidemics devastated Memphis, with the illness carried by river passengers traveling by ships along the waterways. During the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878, more than 5,000 people were listed in the recognized register of deaths surrounded by July 26 and November 27. The Big majority died of yellow fever, making the epidemic in the city of 40,000 one of the most traumatic and severe in urban U.S. history. Within four days of the Memphis Board of Health's announcement of a yellowish-brown fever outbreak, 20,000 residents fled the city. The ensuing panic left the poverty-stricken, the in action classes, and the African-American community at the most risk from the epidemic. Those who remained relied upon volunteers from religious and physician organizations to tend to the sick. By the grow less of the year, more than 5,000 were declared dead in Memphis. The New Orleans health board listed "not less than 4,600" dead. The Mississippi Valley recorded 120,000 cases of yellow fever, with 20,000 deaths. The $15 million in losses caused by the epidemic bankrupted Memphis, and as a result, its charter was revoked by the give access legislature.
By 1870, Memphis's population of 40,000 was something like double that of Nashville and Atlanta, and it was the second-largest city in the South after New Orleans. Its population continued to ensue after 1870, even subsequent to the Panic of 1873 hit the US hard, particularly in the South. The Panic of 1873 resulted in expanding Memphis's underclasses amongst the poverty and misfortune it wrought, giving further credence to Memphis as a rough, shiftless city. Leading in the works to the outbreak in 1878, it had suffered two orange fever epidemics, cholera, and malaria, giving it a reputation as sickly and filthy. It was unheard of for a city taking into account a population as large as Memphis's not to have any waterworks; the city nevertheless relied for supplies entirely upon collecting water from the river and rain cisterns, and had no showing off to remove sewage. The immersion of a blister population, especially of belittle and enthusiastic classes, and abysmal health and sanitary conditions made Memphis ripe for a omnipresent epidemic.
Kate Bionda, an owner of an Italian "snack house", died of a fever upon August 13, 1878. Hers was officially reported by the Board of Health, on August 14, as the first warfare of ocher fever in the city. A massive startle ensued. The thesame trains and steamboats that had brought thousands into Memphis, in five days carried away greater than 25,000 refugees, more than half of the city's population. On August 23, the Board of Health finally declared a orange fever epidemic in Memphis, and the city collapsed, hemorrhaging its population. In July of that year, the city had a population of 47,000; by September, 19,000 remained, and 17,000 of them had yellow fever. The lonely people left in the city were the belittle classes, such as German and Irish immigrant workers and African Americans. None had the means to break out the city, as did the middle and upper-class whites of Memphis, and so they were subjected to a city of death.
Immediately in imitation of the Board of Health's declaration, a Citizen's Relief Committee was formed by Charles G. Fisher. It organized the city into refugee camps. The committee's main priority was to remove the poor from the city and turn away from them in refugee camps. The Howard Association, formed specifically for orangey fever epidemics in New Orleans and Memphis, organized nurses and doctors in Memphis and throughout the country. They stayed at the Peabody Hotel, the deserted hotel to save its doors door during the epidemic. From there they were assigned to their respective districts. Physicians of the epidemic reported seeing as many as 100 to 150 patients daily.
The Episcopal Community of St. Mary at St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral played an important role during the epidemic in caring for the subjugate classes. Already supporting a girls' school and church orphanage, the Sisters of St. Mary next sought to meet the expense of care for the Canfield Asylum, a home for black children. Each day, they alternated caring for the orphans at St. Mary's, delivering children to the Canfield Asylum, and taking soup and medicine on home calls to patients. Between September 9 and October 4, Sister Constance and three new nuns fell victim to the epidemic and died. They complex became known as the Martyrs of Memphis.
At long last, on October 28, a killing frost struck. The city sent out word to Memphians scattered everything over the country to the fore home. Though ocher fever cases were recorded in the pages of Elmwood Cemetery's burial tape as late as February 29, 1874, the epidemic seemed quieted. The Board of Health acknowledged the epidemic at an grow less after it had caused on culmination of 20,000 deaths and financial losses of nearly $200 million. On November 27, a general citizen's meeting was called at the Greenlaw Opera House to meet the expense of thanks to those who had stayed behind to serve, of whom many had died. Over the bordering year property tax revenues collapsed, and the city could not make payments on its municipal debts. As a result, Memphis temporarily lost its city charter and was reclassified by the give leave to enter legislature as a Taxing District from 1878 to 1893. But a supplementary era of sanitation was developed in the city, a new municipal government in 1879 helped form the first regional health organization, and during the 1880s Memphis led the nation in sanitary reform and improvements.
Perhaps the most significant effect of yellow fever on Memphis was in demographic changes. Nearly everything of Memphis's upper and middle classes vanished, depriving the city of its general leadership and class structure that dictated undistinguished life, similar to that in supplementary large Southern cities, such as New Orleans, Charleston, South Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. In Memphis, the poorer whites and blacks fundamentally made up the city and played the greatest role in rebuilding it. The epidemic had resulted in Memphis brute a less cosmopolitan place, with an economy that served the cotton trade and a population drawn increasingly from poor white and black Southerners.
The 1890 election was strongly contested, resulting in white opponents of the D. P. Hadden faction energetic to deprive them of votes by disenfranchising blacks. The let pass had enacted several laws, including the requirement of poll taxes, that made it more hard for them to register to vote and served to disenfranchise many blacks. Although political party factions in the forward-looking sometimes paid poll taxes to enable blacks to vote, African Americans floating their last positions upon the city council in this election and were goaded out of the police force. (They did not recover the feat to exercise the franchise until after the passage of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s.) Historian L. B. Wrenn suggests the heightened political hostility of the Democratic contest and amalgamated social tensions contributed to a white mob lynching three black grocers in Memphis in 1892.: 124, 131
Journalist Ida B. Wells of Memphis investigated the lynchings, as one of the men killed was a buddy of hers. She demonstrated that these and extra lynchings were more often due to economic and social competition than any criminal offenses by black men. Her findings were considered as a result controversial and aroused as a result much assault that she was annoyed to fake away from the city. But she continued to probe and publicize the abuses of lynching.: 131
Businessmen were ablaze to enlargement the city population after the losses of 1878–79, and supported the annexation of other areas; this play-act was passed in 1890 back the census. The annexation feint was finally ascribed by the disclose legislature through a compromise achieved with real estate magnates, and the Place annexed was slightly smaller than first proposed.: 126
In 1893 the city was rechartered with home rule, which restored its capability to execute taxes. The disclose legislature conventional a cap rate. Although the commission organization was retained and greater than before to five commissioners, Democratic politicians regained control from the event elite. The commission form of organization was believed functioning in getting things done, but because all positions were elected at-large, requiring them to get majority votes, this practice reduced representation by candidates representing significant minority embassy interests.
In terms of its economy, Memphis developed as the world's largest spot cotton publicize and the world's largest hardwood lumber market, both commodity products of the Mississippi Delta. Into the 1950s, it was afterward the world's largest mule market. These animals were yet used extensively for agriculture. Attracting workers from Southern rural areas as skillfully as supplementary European immigrants, from 1900 to 1950 the city increased approximately fourfold in population, from 102,350 to 396,000 residents.
Racist swear continued into the 20th century, with four lynchings in the midst of 1900 and the lynching of Thomas Williams in 1928.
The Ford Motor Company built cars in Memphis from 1913 until 1958/59.
A Firestone Tire and Rubber Company tree-plant made tires in North Memphis from 1936 to 1982. The tree-plant made 100 million tires.
A Tennessee Powder Company built an explosives powder reforest to make TNT and gunpowder on a 6,000-acre site in Millington in 1940. The plant was built to make smokeless gunpowder for the British forces in World War II. In May 1941, DuPont (1802–2017) took higher than the plant, changed the broadcast to the Chickasaw Ordnance Works, and made powder for the US Army. There were 8,000 employees. The plant was dismantled after the proceedings in 1946.
From the 1910s to the 1950s, Memphis was a place of machine politics under the processing of E. H. "Boss" Crump. He gained a state bill in 1911 to establish a little commission to manage the city. The city retained a form of commission direction until 1967 and patronage flourished below Crump. Per the publisher's summary of L.B. Wrenn's laboratory analysis of the period, "This centralization of political power in a little commission aided the efficient transaction of municipal business, but the public policies that resulted from it tended to lead upper-class Memphians even though neglecting the less rich residents and neighborhoods."[page needed] The city installed a lawless sewer system and upgraded sanitation and drainage to prevent different epidemic. Pure water from an artesian without difficulty was discovered in the 1880s, securing the city's water supply. The commissioners developed an extensive network of parks and public works as share of the national City pretty movement, but did not incite heavy industry, which might have provided substantial employment for the working-class population. The nonappearance of representation in city supervision resulted in the poor and minorities swine underrepresented. The majority controlled the election of everything the at-large positions.
Memphis did not become a house rule city until 1963, although the divulge legislature had amended the constitution in 1953 to provide home rule for cities and counties. Before that, the city had to get state bills endorsed in order to modify its charter and other policies and programs. Since 1963, it can amend the charter by popular give enthusiastic cheers to of the electorate.: 194
During the 1960s, the city was at the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, as its large African-American population had been affected by let in segregation practices and disenfranchisement in the at the forefront 20th century. African-American residents drew from the civil rights pursuit to supplement their lives. In 1968, the Memphis sanitation strike began for blooming wages and better in force conditions; the workers were overwhelmingly African American. They marched to get public preparedness and retain for their plight: the difficulty of their work, and the struggles to Keep families subsequently their low pay. Their hope for better pay had been met like resistance by the city government.
Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, known for his leadership in the non-violent movement, came to lend his retain to the workers' cause. King stayed at the Lorraine Motel in the city, and was assassinated by James Earl Ray on April 4, 1968, the daylight after giving his I've Been to the Mountaintop speech at the Mason Temple.
After learning of King's murder, many African Americans in the city rioted, looting and destroying businesses and new facilities, some by arson. The overseer ordered Tennessee National Guardsmen into the city within hours, where small, roving bands of rioters continued to be active. Fearing the violence, more of the middle-class began to leave the city for the suburbs.
In 1970, the Census Bureau reported Memphis's population as 60.8% white and 38.9% black. Suburbanization was attracting wealthier residents to newer housing outdoor the city. After the riots and court-ordered busing in 1973 to reach desegregation of public schools, "about 40,000 of the system's 71,000 white students relinquish the system in four years." Today, the city has a majority African-American population.
Memphis is competently known for its cultural contributions to the identity of the American South. Many Famous musicians grew stirring in and in description to Memphis and moved to Chicago and new areas from the Mississippi Delta, carrying their music once them to influence supplementary cities and listeners higher than radio airwaves.[full hint needed]
Former and current Memphis residents intensify musicians Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Muddy Waters, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Robert Johnson, W. C. Handy, Bobby Whitlock, B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Isaac Hayes, Booker T. Jones, Eric Gales, Al Green, Alex Chilton, Justin Timberlake, Three 6 Mafia, the Sylvers, Jay Reatard, Zach Myers, and Aretha Franklin.
The International Harvester Company manufacturing forest opened in 1947 and closed in 1985. The forest made cotton harvesting equipment and Farm Tillage equipment. It next had 1,000 employees.
CBI Nuclear Company operated in Memphis for higher than 20 years. Chicago Bridge & Iron Company, CBI, and General Electric built large nuclear reactor pressure vessels and further large structures in Memphis.
On December 23, 1988, a tanker truck hauling liquefied propane crashed at the I-40/I-240 different in Midtown and exploded, starting complex vehicle and structural fires. Nine people were killed and ten were injured. It was one of Tennessee's deadliest motor vehicle accidents and eventually led to the reconstruction of the oscillate where it occurred.
Schering-Plough Corporation became defunct in 2009. It is now a supplementary of Merck & Co. Abe Plough founded Plough, Incorporated in Memphis in 1908. In 1971, the Schering Corporation merged in the same way as Plough, Inc.
On June 2, 2021, the remains of Confederate General and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest were removed from a Memphis park.
On January 7, 2023, after a routine traffic stop, five African American police officers brutally emphasis a 29-year-old African American man, Tyre Nichols. Nichols died from his injuries in the hospital three days later. Officer body cam footage and local surveillance cameras captured the altercations, which were described as "heinous" and showed "a sum lack of regard for human life", according to Memphis police chief Cerelyn "CJ" Davis. The officers were ablaze and charged afterward second-degree murder, aggravated kidnapping, and supplementary crimes. The relatively unexpected dismissal and warfare of the offending officers were approvingly perceived by Nichols's family, and Davis called it a "blueprint" for complex incidents of police brutality nationwide. The incident with resulted in the disbanding of the city's "SCORPION" unit, which had been mandated later directly combating the most violent crimes in the city. All the officers charged taking into consideration involvement in Nichols's death were members of the unit.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total Place of 324.0 square miles (839.2 km), of which 315.1 square miles (816.0 km2) is land and 9.0 square miles (23.2 km), or 2.76%, is water.
Downtown Memphis rises from a bluff along the Mississippi River. The city and metro Place spread out through suburbanization, and encompass southwest Tennessee, northern Mississippi, and eastern Arkansas. Several large parks were founded in the city in the to the lead 20th century, notably Overton Park in Midtown and the 4,500-acre (18 km) Shelby Farms. The city is a national transportation hub and Mississippi River crossing for Interstate 40, (east-west), Interstate 55 (north-south), barge traffic, Memphis International Airport (FedEx's "SuperHub" facility) and numerous freight railroads that advance the city.
The Memphis Riverfront stretches along the Mississippi River from the Meeman-Shelby Forest State Park in the north, to the T. O. Fuller State Park in the south. The River Walk is a park system that connects downtown Memphis from Mississippi River Greenbelt Park in the north, to Tom Lee Park in the south.
In recent years, the city has arranged to deannex some of its territory. It has in imitation of through a three-phase process to deannex five areas within the city limits, returning them to unincorporated Shelby County. The first phase of deannexation occurred on January 1, 2020, when the Eads and River Bottoms areas returned to county jurisdiction. As a result, the Shelby County Sheriff is responsible for patrolling these former parts of Memphis. The first phase of the deannexation process condensed the city's size by 5% and its population by 0.03%.
Shelby County is located beyond four natural aquifers, one of which is ascribed as the "Memphis Sand Aquifer" or helpfully as the "Memphis Aquifer". Located 350 to 1,100 feet (110 to 340 m) underground, this artesian water source is considered soft and estimated by Memphis Light, Gas and Water to contain more than 100 trillion US gallons (380 km) of water.
Memphis has a humid subtropical climate (Köppen Cfa, Trewartha Cf), with four determined seasons, and is located in USDA Plant Hardiness Zone 8a in downtown, cooling to 7b for much of the surrounding region. Winter weather comes alternately from the upper Great Plains and the Gulf of Mexico, which can help to drastic swings in temperature. Summer weather may come from Texas (very hot and humid) or the Gulf (hot and utterly humid). July has a daily average temperature of 82.8 °F (28.2 °C), with high levels of humidity due to moisture encroaching from the Gulf of Mexico. Afternoon and evening thunderstorms are frequent during summer, but usually brief, lasting no longer than an hour. Early autumn is warmly drier and mild, but can be hot until late October. Late autumn is rainy and cooler; precipitation peaks over in November and December. Winters are serene to chilly, with a January daily average temperature of 42.1 °F (5.6 °C). Snow occurs sporadically in winter, with an average seasonal snowfall of 2.7 inches (6.9 cm). Ice storms and deadening rain pose a greater danger, as they can often pull tree limbs down on power lines and make driving hazardous. Severe thunderstorms can occur at any get older of the year while mainly during the spring months. Large hail, strong winds, flooding, and frequent lightning can accompany these storms. Some storms spawn tornadoes.
The lowest temperature ever recorded in Memphis was −13 °F (−25 °C) on December 24, 1963, and the highest temperature ever was 108 °F (42 °C) on July 13, 1980. Over the course of a year, there is an average of 4.4 days of highs under freezing, 6.9 nights of lows below 20 °F (−7 °C), 43 nights of lows below freezing, 64 days of highs above 90 °F (32 °C), and 2.1 days of highs above 100 °F (38 °C).
Memphis temperatures dropped to -4 F during the 1985 North American cold wave and during the December 1989 United States chilly wave.
Annual precipitation is high (54.94 inches [1,400 mm]) and relatively evenly distributed throughout the year. Average monthly rainfall is especially high in March through May, and December, while August and September are relatively drier.
For historical population data, see: History of Memphis, Tennessee. According to the 2020 United States Census, the racial composition of the city of Memphis was:
As of the 2010 United States Census, there were 652,078 people and 245,836 households in the city. The population density was 2,327.4 people per sq mi (898.6/km). There were 271,552 housing units at an average density of 972.2 per square mile (375.4/km2). The racial makeup of the city was 63.33% African American, 29.39% White, 1.46% Asian American, 1.57% Native American, 0.04% Pacific Islander, 1.45% from further races, and 1.04% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 6.49% of the population.
The median allowance for a household in the city was $32,285, and the median pension for a family was $37,767. Males had a median allowance of $31,236 versus $25,183 for females. The per capita income for the city was $17,838. About 17.2% of families and 20.6% of the population were below the poverty line, including 30.1% of those under age 18, and 15.4% of those age 65 or over. In 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau ranked the Memphis area as the poorest large metro area in the country. Dr. Jeff Wallace of the University of Memphis noted that the problem was similar to decades of segregation in presidency and schools. He said that it was a low-cost job market, but additional places in the world could have enough money cheaper labor, and the workforce was undereducated for today's challenges.
The Memphis Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), the 42nd largest in the United States, has a 2010 population of 1,316,100 and includes the Tennessee counties of Shelby, Tipton and Fayette; as without difficulty as the northern Mississippi counties of DeSoto, Marshall, Tate, and Tunica; and Crittenden County, Arkansas, all allowance of the Mississippi Delta.
The total metropolitan Place has a cutting edge proportion of whites and a forward-thinking per capita income than the population in the city. The 2010 census shows that the Memphis metro area is close to a majority-minority population:
In a reverse trend of the Great Migration, numerous African Americans and further minorities have moved into DeSoto County, and blacks have followed suburban trends, moving into the suburbs of Shelby County.
An 1870 map of Memphis shows religious buildings of the Baptist, Catholic, Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational, and supplementary Christian denominations, and a Jewish congregation. In 2009, places of worship exist for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims.
The international headquarters of the Church of God in Christ, the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States, is located in Memphis. Its Mason Temple was named after the denomination's founder, Charles Harrison Mason. This field is where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his noted "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech in April 1968, the night before he was assassinated at his motel. The National Civil Rights Museum, located in Memphis at the Lorraine Motel and other buildings, has an annual ceremony at Mason's Temple of Deliverance where it honors people later than Freedom Awards.
Bellevue Baptist Church is a Southern Baptist megachurch in Memphis that was founded in 1903. Its current membership is just about 30,000. For many years, it was led by Adrian Rogers, a three-term president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Other notable and/or large churches in Memphis put in Second Presbyterian Church (EPC), Highpoint Church (SBC), Hope Presbyterian Church (EPC), Evergreen Presbyterian Church (PCUSA), Colonial Park United Methodist Church, Christ United Methodist Church, Idlewild Presbyterian Church (PCUSA), GraceLife Pentecostal Church (UPCI), First Baptist Broad, Temple of Deliverance, Calvary Episcopal Church, the Church of the River (First Unitarian Church of Memphis), First Congregational Church (UCC) and Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church.
Memphis is home to two cathedrals. The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception is the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Memphis, and St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral is the chair of the Episcopal Diocese of West Tennessee.
Memphis is house to Temple Israel, a Reform synagogue that has nearly 7,000 members, making it one of the largest Reform synagogues in the country. Baron Hirsch Synagogue is the largest Orthodox shul in the United States. Jewish residents were allocation of the city since the Civil War, but more Jewish immigrants came from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and into the future 20th centuries.
Memphis is home to an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Muslims of various cultures and ethnicities.
A number of seminaries are located in Memphis and the metropolitan area. Memphis is house to Memphis Theological Seminary and Harding School of Theology. Suburban Cordova is home to Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary.
In the 21st century, Memphis has struggled to abbreviate crime. In 2007, it ranked as the second-most risky city by the Morgan Quitno rankings. In 2004, violent crime in Memphis reached a decade folder low. The next year, it was ranked the fourth-most risky city behind a population of 500,000 or forward-looking in the U.S. Crime increased over in the first half of 2006. By 2014, Memphis crime had substantially decreased, bringing the city's ranking stirring to eleventh in violent crime. Nationally, cities follow similar trends, and crime numbers tend to be cyclical. Nationally, other moderate-sized cities were also burden large rises in crime, although crime in the largest cities continued to stop or increased much less.[better source needed]
In the first half of 2006, robbery of businesses increased 52.5%, robbery of individuals increased 28.5%, and homicides increased 18% over the thesame period of 2005. The Memphis Police Department responded like the inauguration of Operation Blue C.R.U.S.H. (Crime Reduction Using Statistical History), which targets crime hotspots and repeat offenders.
Memphis curtains 2005 like 154 murders, and 2006 ended next 160; in 2007 there were 164 murders, 2008 had 138, and 2009 had 132. Violent crimes dropped from 12,939 in 2008 to 12,047. Robbery dropped from 4,788 in 2008 to 4,137 in 2009. Aggravated violence dropped 53,870 in 2008 to 47,158 in 2009 (FBI's UCR). In 2006 and 2007, the Memphis metropolitan area ranked second-most risky in the nation among cities past a population higher than 500,000. In 2006, the Memphis metropolitan area ranked number one in violent crimes for major cities regarding the U.S., according to the FBI's annual crime rankings, whereas it had ranked second in 2005.
Between 2006 and 2008, the crime rate fell by 16%, while the first half of 2009 wise saying a narrowing in serious crime of exceeding 10% from 2008. The Memphis Police Department's use of the FBI National Incident-Based Reporting System, a more detailed method of reporting crimes than what is used in many further major cities, has been cited as a defense for Memphis's frequent appearance on lists of most risky U.S. cities. Homicide statistics released by the city in more recent years show another dramatic rise in murders in Memphis. There were 140 homicides in the city in 2014 and 161 in 2015. In 2016, police officials recorded 228 murders, a 63% increase since 2014. According to Michael Rallings, the director of the Memphis Police Department, investigations sure that one third of the murder victims in 2016 had been working in gang activity.
The city's central geographic location has aided its matter development. On the Mississippi River and intersected by five major freight railroads and two Interstate Highways, I-40 and I-55, Memphis is capably positioned for commerce in the transportation and shipping industry. Its right of entry by water was key to its initial development, with steamboats plying the Mississippi river. Railroad construction strengthened its membership to other markets to the east and west.
Since the second half of the 20th century, highways and interstates have played major roles as transportation corridors. A third interstate, I-69, is under construction, and a fourth, I-22, has recently been designated from the former High Priority Corridor X. River barges are unloaded onto trucks and trains. The city is house to Memphis International Airport, the world's busiest cargo airport, surpassing Hong Kong International Airport in 2021. Memphis serves as a primary hub for FedEx Express shipping.
As of 2014, Memphis was the home of three Fortune 500 companies: FedEx (no. 63), International Paper (no. 107), and AutoZone (no. 306).
Other major corporations based in Memphis attach Allenberg Cotton, American Residential Services (also known as ARS/Rescue Rooter); Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz; Cargill Cotton, City Gear, First Horizon National Corporation, Fred's, GTx, Lenny's Sub Shop, Mid-America Apartments, Perkins Restaurant and Bakery, ServiceMaster, True Temper Sports, Varsity Brands, and Verso Paper. Corporations in the same way as major operations based in Memphis append Gibson guitars (based in Nashville), and Smith & Nephew.
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis along with has a branch in Memphis.
The entertainment and film industries have discovered Memphis in recent years. Several major motion pictures, most of which were recruited and assisted by the Memphis & Shelby County Film and Television Commission, have been filmed in Memphis, including Making the Grade (1984), Elvis and Me (1988), Great Balls of Fire! (1988), Heart of Dixie (1989), Mystery Train (1989), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Trespass (1992), The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag (1992), The Firm (1993), The Delta (1996), The People Vs. Larry Flynt (1996), The Rainmaker (1997), Cast Away (2000), 21 Grams (2002), A Painted House (2002), Hustle & Flow (2005), Forty Shades of Blue (2005), Walk the Line (2005), Black Snake Moan (2007), Nothing But the Truth (2008), Soul Men (2008), and The Grace Card (2011). The Blind Side (2009) was set in Memphis but filmed in Atlanta. The 1992 television movie Memphis, starring Memphis original Cybill Shepherd, who in addition to served as organization producer and writer, was also filmed in Memphis.
One of the largest celebrations of the city is Memphis in May. The month-long series of actions promotes Memphis's line and outreach of its people far higher than the city's borders. The four main activities are the Beale Street Music Festival, International Week, The World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, and the Great River Run. The World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest is the largest pork barbecue-cooking contest in the world.
In April, downtown Memphis celebrates "Africa in April Cultural Awareness Festival", or simply Africa in April. The festival was intended to celebrate the arts, history, culture, and diversity of the African diaspora. Africa in April is a three-day festival in the same way as vendors' markets, fashion showcases, blues showcases, and an international diversity parade.
During late May-early June, Memphis is house to the Memphis Italian Festival at Marquette Park. The 2019 festival will be its 30th and has hosted musical acts, local artisans, and Italian cooking competitions. It after that presents chef demonstrations, the Coors Light Competitive Bocce Tournament, the Galtelli Cup Recreational Bocce Tournament, a volleyball tournament, and pizza tossing demonstrations. This festival was started by Holy Rosary School and Parish and began inside the School parking lot in 1989. The Memphis Italian Festival is run something like completely by former and current Holy Rosary School and Church members and begins in the same way as a 5K run each year.
Carnival Memphis, formerly known as the Memphis Cotton Carnival, is an annual series of parties and festivities in June that salutes various aspects of Memphis and its industries. An annual King and Queen of Carnival are secretly agreed to reign exceeding Carnival activities. From 1935 to 1982, the African-American community staged the Cotton Makers Jubilee; it has merged in imitation of Carnival Memphis.
A publicize and arts festival, the Cooper-Young Festival, is held annually in September in the Cooper-Young district of Midtown Memphis. The thing draws artists from anything over North America and includes local music, art sales, contests, and displays.
Memphis sponsors several film festivals: the Indie Memphis Film Festival, Outflix, and the Memphis International Film and Music Festival. The Indie Memphis Film Festival is in its 14th year and was held April 27–28, 2013. Recognized by MovieMaker Magazine as one of 25 "Coolest Film Festivals" (2009) and one of 25 "Festivals Worth the Entry Fee" (2011), Indie Memphis offers Memphis year-round independent film programming, including the Global Lens international film series, IM Student Shorts student films, and an external concert film series at the historic Levitt Shell. The Outflix Film Festival, also in its 15th year, was held September 7–13, 2013. Outflix features a full week of LGBT cinema, including unexpected films, features, and documentaries. The Memphis International Film and Music Festival is held in April; it is in its 11th year and takes place at Malco's Ridgeway Four.
Mid-South Pride is Tennessee's second-largest LGBT narcissism event.
On the weekend past Thanksgiving, the Memphis International Jazz Festival is held in the South Main Historic Arts District in Downtown Memphis. This festival promotes the important role Memphis has played in shaping Jazz nationally and internationally. Acts such as George Coleman, Herman Green, Kirk Whalum and Marvin Stamm all come out of the rich musical line in Memphis.
Formerly titled the W. C. Handy Awards, the International Blues Awards are presented by the Blues Foundation (headquartered in Memphis) for Blues music achievement. Weeklong playing competitions are held, as competently as an awards banquet including a night of take action and celebration.
Memphis is the home of founders and pioneers of various American music genres, including Memphis soul, Memphis blues, gospel, rock n' roll, rockabilly, Memphis rap, Buck, crunk, and "sharecropper" country music (in contrast to the "rhinestone" country solid historically allied with Nashville).
Many musicians, including Aretha Franklin, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Booker T. & the M.G.'s, Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Shawn Lane, Al Green, Bobby Whitlock, Rance Allen, Percy Sledge, Solomon Burke, William Bell, Sam & Dave and B.B. King, got their start in Memphis in the 1950s and 1960s.
Beale Street is a national historical landmark, and shows the impact Memphis has had on American blues, particularly after World War II as electric guitars took precedence over the native acoustic sound from the Mississippi Delta. Sam Phillips's Sun Studio yet stands, and is right of entry for tours. Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison anything made their first recordings there, and were "discovered" by Phillips. Many great blues artists recorded there, such as W. C. Handy, the "Father of the Blues."
Stax Records created a timeless 1960s soul music sound, much grittier and horn-based than the better-known Motown from Detroit. Booker T. and the M.G.s were the label's encouragement band for most of the eternal hits that came from Stax, by Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, and many more. The hermetic was revisited in the 1980s in the Blues Brothers movie, in which many of the musicians starred as themselves.
Memphis is also noted for its influence upon the capacity pop musical genre in the 1970s. Notable bands and musicians include gigantic Star, Chris Bell, Alex Chilton, Tommy Hoehn, The Scruffs, and Prix.
Several notable singers are from the Memphis area, including Justin Timberlake, K. Michelle, Kirk Whalum, Ruth Welting, Kid Memphis, Kallen Esperian, Julien Baker, and Andrew VanWyngarden. The Metropolitan Opera of New York had its first tour in Memphis in 1906; in the 1990s it settled to tour abandoned larger cities. Metropolitan Opera performances are now market in HD at local movie theaters across the country.
Memphis is house to Memphis-style barbecue, which is one of four predominant regional styles of barbecue in the United States. Memphis-style barbecue has become well known due to the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest held each May, which has been listed in Guinness World Records as the largest pork barbecue contest in the world.
In complement to barbecue, the cuisine of Memphis is as well as defined by:
Notable Memphis restaurants include:
In addition to the Brooks Museum and Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis plays host to two burgeoning visual art areas, one city-sanctioned, and the further organically formed.
The South Main Arts District is an arts neighborhood in south downtown. Over the once 20 years, the Place has morphed from a derelict brothel and juke joint neighborhood to a gentrified, well-lit Place sponsoring "Trolley Night", when arts patrons stroll all along the street to see fire spinners, DJs playing in tummy of clubs, specialty shops and galleries. Not far away from South Main Arts district is Medicine Factory, an artist-run organization.
Another developing arts district in Memphis is Broad Avenue. This east–west avenue is undergoing neighborhood revitalization from the influx of craft and visual artists taking up dwelling and studios in the area. An art professor from Rhodes College holds little openings on the first floor of his house for local students and professional artists. Odessa, another art space upon Broad Avenue, hosts student art shows and local electronic music. Other gallery spaces spring occurring for semi-annual artwalks.
Memphis afterward has non-commercial visual arts organizations and spaces, including local painter Pinkney Herbert's Marshall Arts gallery, on Marshall Avenue near Sun Studios, another arts neighborhood characterized by affordable rent.
Well-known writers from Memphis intensify Shelby Foote, the noted Civil War historian. Novelist John Grisham grew stirring in approachable DeSoto County, Mississippi, and sets many of his books in Memphis.
Many works of fiction and literature are set in Memphis. These include The Reivers by William Faulkner (1962), September, September by Shelby Foote (1977); Peter Taylor's The Old Forest and Other Stories (1985), and his Pulitzer Prize-winning A Summons to Memphis (1986); The Firm (1991) and The Client (1993), both by John Grisham; Memphis Afternoons: a Memoir by James Conaway (1993), Plague of Dreamers by Steve Stern (1997); Cassina Gambrel Was Missing by William Watkins (1999); The Guardian by Beecher Smith (1999), "We are Billion-Year-Old Carbon" by Corey Mesler (2005), The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, and The Architect by James Williamson (2007).
Memphis as a Location for Several Films
A diversity of films were filmed following Memphis as a location, ranging from The Firm (1993) with Tom Cruise to Cast Away (2000) to Walk the Line (2005) with Joaquin Phoenix portraying Johnny Cash.
Other Memphis attractions swell the Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium, FedExForum, and Mississippi riverboat day cruises.
The Memphis National Cemetery is a United States National Cemetery located in northeastern Memphis.
Historic Elmwood Cemetery is one of the oldest rural garden cemeteries in the South, and contains the Carlisle S. Page Arboretum. Memorial Park Cemetery is noted for its sculptures by Mexican player Dionicio Rodriguez.
Elvis Presley was originally buried in Forest Hill Cemetery, the resting place of his sponsorship band's bassist, Bill Black. After an attempted grave robbing, Elvis's body was moved and reinterred at the grounds of Graceland.
The Memphis Grizzlies of the National Basketball Association is the solitary team from one of the "big four" major sports leagues in Memphis. The Memphis Redbirds of the Triple-A East are a Minor League Baseball affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals.
Memphis 901 FC is a professional soccer team that plays in the USL Championship separation and plays their house matches at AutoZone Park
The University of Memphis learned basketball team, the Memphis Tigers, has a mighty following in the city due to a records of competitive success. The Tigers have competed in three NCAA Final Fours (1973, 1985, 2008), with the latter two appearances swine vacated. The current coach of the Memphis Tigers is Penny Hardaway. Memphis is house to Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium, the site of University of Memphis football, the Liberty Bowl and the Southern Heritage Classic.
The annual St. Jude Classic, a regular share of the PGA Tour, is then held in the city. Each February the city hosts the Regions Morgan Keegan Championships and the Cellular South Cup, which are men's ATP World Tour 500 series and WTA events, respectively.
Memphis has a significant history in gain wrestling. Jerry "The King" Lawler and Jimmy "The Mouth of the South" Hart are in the midst of the sport's most well-known figures who came out of the city. Sputnik Monroe, a wrestler of the 1950s, like Lawler, promoted racial integration in the city. Ric Flair in addition to noted Memphis as his birthplace.
In the 1970s and upfront 1980s, the former WFL franchise Memphis Southmen / Memphis Grizzlies sued the NFL in an try to be in style as an development franchise. In 1993, the Memphis Hound Dogs was a proposed NFL spread that was passed greater than in favor of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Carolina Panthers. The Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium plus served as the temporary home of the former Tennessee Oilers (now the Titans) while the city of Nashville worked out stadium issues.
The city is afterward the site of Memphis International Raceway, which held NASCAR actions from 1998 to 2009, when Dover Motorsports closed it. In 2011 it reopened below different ownership. It no longer holds NASCAR races, but the Arca Menards Series returned to the track in 2020.
Major Memphis parks put in W.C. Handy Park, Tom Lee Park, Audubon Park, Overton Park including the Old Forest Arboretum, the Lichterman Nature Center (a birds learning center), the Memphis Botanic Garden, and Jesse H Turner Park.
Shelby Farms park, located at the eastern edge of the city, is one of the largest urban parks in the United States.
Beginning in 1963, Memphis adopted a mayor-council form of government, with 13 City Council members, six elected at-large from throughout the city and seven elected from geographic districts. Following passageway of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, civil rights activists challenged the at-large electoral system in court because it made it more hard for the minority to elect candidates of their choice; at-large voting favored candidates who could command a majority across the city. In 1995, the city adopted a other plan. The 13 Council positions are elected from nine geographic districts: seven are single-member districts and two elect three members each.
Jim Strickland, a Democrat, is the city's mayor, elected on October 8, 2015. He is a former Memphis city councilman.
Since the late 20th century, regional discussions have recurred on the concept of consolidating unincorporated Shelby County and Memphis into a metropolitan government, as Nashville-Davidson County did in 1963. Consolidation was a referendum item upon the 2010 ballots in both the city of Memphis and Shelby County, under the state performance for dual-voting upon such measures. The referendum was controversial in both jurisdictions. Black leaders, including then-Shelby County Commissioner Joe Ford and national civil rights leader Al Sharpton, opposed the consolidation. According to the plaintiffs' expert, Marcus Pohlmann, these leaders "tried to approach that referendum into a civil rights issue, suggesting that for blacks to vote for consolidation was to give up hard-won civil rights victories of the past".
In October 2010 past the vote, eight Shelby County citizens had filed a act in federal court next to the give access and the Shelby County Elections Commission adjacent to the dual-voting requirement. Plaintiffs argued that total votes for the referendum should have been counted together, rather than as cut off elections. City voters narrowly supported the work for consolidation with 50.8% in favor; county voters overwhelmingly voted against the doing with 85% against. The welcome argued that taking into consideration the election decided, the dogfight should be dismissed, but the federal court disagreed.
By late 2013, in pre-trial actions, both sides were grating to disqualify the other's experts, in discussions of whether regional voting revealed racial polarization, and whether voting upon the referendum demonstrated racial bloc voting. "The experts for both sides have clashed on whether racial bloc voting is inevitable in local elections and whether that would require some nice of court remedy."
The defendants' expert, Todd Donovan, did not think that polarized voting as revealed for political candidates designed that "African-American voters and white voters have polarized interests with it comes to referendum choices on government administration, taxation, service provision and extra policy questions." He noted, "In the absence of certain political interests that create polarized blocs of referendum voters defined by race, there is no cohesive racial minority voting inclusion that can be diluted by a referendum."
In 2014, the federal district court dismissed the lawsuit, on the grounds that the referendum would have fruitless when both jurisdictions' votes were counted together. (In sum voting, 64% of voters opposed the consolidation.) In the last week of December 2014, the U.S. Sixth District Court of Appeals upheld that decision, ruling that, ""In this election, the referendum for consolidation did not pass and would not have passed though there had been no dual-majority vote requirement (with the vote counts combined)."
Before the referendum, the decision was made by the city and county to exclude public moot management and operations from the proposed consolidation. As noted below, in 2011 the Memphis city council voted to rescind its city scholarly board and consolidate past the Shelby County School System, without the collaboration or taking office of Shelby County. The city had authority for this action below Tennessee declare laws that differentiate with city and county powers.
The city is served by Shelby County Schools. On March 8, 2011, residents voted to put an end to the charter for Memphis City Schools, effectively merging it like the Shelby County School District. After issues like state be active and court challenges, the mix took effect the start of the 2013–14 scholastic year. In Shelby County, six incorporated cities voted to state separate school systems in 2013.
The Shelby County School System operates higher than 200 elementary, middle, and high schools.
The Memphis area is also house to many private, college-prep schools: Briarcrest Christian School (co-ed), Christian Brothers High School (boys), Evangelical Christian School (co-ed), First Assembly Christian School (co-ed), St. Mary's Episcopal School (girls), Hutchison School (girls), Lausanne Collegiate School (co-ed), Memphis University School (boys), Saint Benedict at Auburndale (co-ed), St. Agnes Academy (girls), Immaculate Conception Cathedral School (girls), and Elliston Baptist Academy (co-ed). Also included in this list is Memphis Harding Academy, a co-ed scholarly affiliated similar to the Churches of Christ.
Colleges and universities in the city tally up the University of Memphis, Rhodes College, Christian Brothers University, Memphis College of Art, LeMoyne–Owen College, Baptist College of Health Sciences, Memphis Theological Seminary, Harding School of Theology, Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University, Worldwide (Memphis campus), Reformed Theological Seminary (satellite campus), William R. Moore College of Technology, Southern College of Optometry, Southwest Tennessee Community College, Tennessee Technology Center at Memphis, Visible Music College, Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary, and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. Memphis with has campuses of several for-profit post-secondary institutions, including Concorde Career College, ITT Technical Institute, Vatterott College, and University of Phoenix. Remington College is a local nonprofit post-secondary institution.
The University of Tennessee College of Dentistry was founded in 1878, making it the oldest dental instructor in the South, and the third oldest public intellectual of dentistry in the United States.
The Christian Brothers High School Band is the oldest tall school band in the U.S., founded in 1872.
Nielsen Media Research currently defines Memphis and its surrounding metropolitan Place as the 51st largest American media market. Despite Memphis proper's large size, Memphis has always been a medium-sized market; the welcoming suburban and rural areas are not much larger than the city itself.
Major push television affiliate stations in the Memphis Place include, but are not limited to:
Terrestrial puff radio stations in the Memphis Place include, but are not limited to:
Memphis is the subject of numerous pop and country songs, including "The Memphis Blues" by W. C. Handy, "Memphis, Tennessee" by Chuck Berry, "Night Train to Memphis" by Roy Acuff, "Goin' to Memphis" by Paul Revere and the Raiders, "Queen of Memphis" by Confederate Railroad, "Memphis Soul Stew" by King Curtis, "Maybe It Was Memphis" by Pam Tillis, "Graceland" by Paul Simon, "Memphis Train" by Rufus Thomas, "All the Way from Memphis" by Mott the Hoople, "Wrong Side of Memphis" by Trisha Yearwood, "Stuck Inside of Mobile taking into account the Memphis Blues Again" by Bob Dylan, "Memphis Skyline" by Rufus Wainwright, "Sequestered in Memphis" by The Hold Steady and "Walking in Memphis" by Marc Cohn.
In addition, Memphis is mentioned in scores of extra songs, including "Proud Mary" by Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Honky Tonk Women" by the Rolling Stones, "Dixie Chicken" by Little Feat, "Who's Gonna Fill Their Shoes" by George Jones, "Daisy Jane" by America, "Life Is a Highway" by Tom Cochrane, "Black Velvet" by Alannah Myles, "Cities" by Talking Heads, "Crazed Country Rebel" by Hank Williams III, "Pride (In the Name of Love)" by U2, "M.E.M.P.H.I.S." by the Disco Biscuits, "New New Minglewood Blues" and "Candyman" by the Grateful Dead, "You Should Be Glad" by Widespread Panic, "Roll With Me" by 8Ball & MJG, "Someday" by Steve Earle and popularly recorded by Shawn Colvin, and many others.
More than 1,000 announcement recordings of exceeding 800 certain songs contain "Memphis" in them. The Memphis Rock N' Soul Museum maintains an ever updated list of these on their website.
Many films are set in the American city including, Black Snake Moan, The Blind Side, Cast Away, Choices: The Movie, The Client, Elvis, The Firm, Forty Shades of Blue, Great Balls of Fire!, Hustle & Flow, Kill Switch, Making the Grade, Memphis Belle, Mississippi Grind, Mystery Train, N-Secure, The Rainmaker, The Silence of the Lambs, Soul Men, and Walk the Line.
Many of those and additional films have furthermore been filmed in Memphis including, Black Snake Moan, Walk the Line, Hustle & Flow, Forty Shades of Blue, 21 Grams, A Painted House, American Saint, The Poor and Hungry, Cast Away, Woman's Story, The enormous Muddy, The Rainmaker, Finding Graceland, The People vs. Larry Flynt, The Delta, Teenage Tupelo, A Family Thing, Without Air, The Firm, The Client, The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag, Trespass, The Silence of the Lambs, Great Balls of Fire!, Elvis and Me, Mystery Train, Leningrad Cowboys Go America, Heart of Dixie, The Contemporary Gladiator, U2: Rattle and Hum, Making the Grade, The River Rat, The River, Hallelujah!, Elizabethtown, 3000 Miles to Graceland, A Face in the Crowd, Undefeated, Man upon the Moon, Nothing But the Truth, Sore Losers, Soul Men, I Was a Zombie for the F.B.I., I'm From Hollywood, The Grace Card, This is Elvis, Cookie's Fortune, Open Five, The Open Road, In the Valley of Elah, Walk Hard, My Blueberry Nights, Savage Country, and Two-Lane Blacktop.
The television series Greenleaf, Memphis Beat, Quarry and Bluff City Law are set in the city.
Literature
Many works of fiction and literature are set in Memphis. These include The Reivers by William Faulkner (1962), September, September by Shelby Foote (1977); Peter Taylor's The Old Forest and Other Stories (1985), and his Pulitzer Prize-winning A Summons to Memphis (1986); The Firm (1991) and The Client (1993), both by John Grisham; Memphis Afternoons: a Memoir by James Conaway (1993), Plague of Dreamers by Steve Stern (1997); Cassina Gambrel Was Missing by William Watkins (1999); The Guardian by Beecher Smith (1999), "We are Billion-Year-Old Carbon" by Corey Mesler (2005), The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, and The Architect by James Williamson (2007).
Interstate 40, Interstate 55, Interstate 22, Interstate 240, Interstate 269, and State Route 385 are the main expressways in the Memphis area. Interstates 40 and 55 infuriated the Mississippi River at Memphis from the confess of Arkansas. Interstate 69 is a proposed interstate that, upon completion, would attach Memphis to Canada and Mexico.
I-40 is a coast-to-coast freeway that connects Memphis to Nashville and upon to North Carolina to the east, and Little Rock, Arkansas, Oklahoma City, and the Greater Los Angeles Area to the west. I-55 connects Memphis to St. Louis and Chicago to the north, and Jackson, Mississippi and New Orleans to the south. I-240 is the inner beltway which serves areas including Downtown, Midtown, South Memphis, Memphis International Airport, East Memphis, and North Memphis. I-269 is the larger, outer interstate loop hastily serving the suburbs of Millington, Eads, Arlington, Collierville, and Hernando, Mississippi. It was completed in 2018.
Interstate 22 connects Memphis once Birmingham, Alabama, via northern Mississippi (including Tupelo) and northwestern Alabama. While technically not entering the city of Memphis proper, I-22 ends at I-269 in Byhalia, Mississippi, connecting it to the get out of of the Memphis interstate system.
Interstate 69 is proposed to follow I-55 and I-240 through the city of Memphis. Once completed, I-69 will partner Memphis taking into account Port Huron, Michigan via Indianapolis, Indiana, and Brownsville, Texas via Shreveport, Louisiana and Houston, Texas.
A supplementary spur, Interstate 555, also serves the Memphis metro Place connecting it to Jonesboro, Arkansas.
Other important federal highways even if Memphis include the east–west U.S. Route 70, U.S. Route 64, and U.S. Route 72; and the north–south U.S. Route 51 and U.S. Route 61. The former is the historic highway north to Chicago via Cairo, Illinois, while the latter almost parallels the Mississippi River for most of its course and crosses the Mississippi Delta region to the south, with the Delta along with legendary for Blues music.
Roadways
Memphis maintains 6,800 lane-miles of city roadways. The city collaborated later Google Cloud Platform and SpringML in February 2019 to exam machine learning (ML) to affix public services. A key focus is pothole identification using TensorFlow technology. Public Works personnel completed 63,000 repairs, with roughly 7,500 of those reported by citizens to 311.
The Memphis Area Transit Authority provides local transit services approaching Memphis, including the MATA Trolley line streetcar system. Intercity bus promote to the city is provided by Flixbus, Greyhound Lines, and Jefferson Lines.
A large volume of railroad freight moves through Memphis, because of its two heavy-duty Mississippi River railroad crossings, which carry several major east–west railroad freight lines, and also because of the major north–south railroad lines through Memphis which border with such major cities as Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Louisville, New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, Mobile, and Birmingham.
By the upfront 20th century, Memphis had two major passenger railroad stations, which made the city a regional hub for trains coming from the north, east, south and west. After passenger railroad support declined heavily through the middle of the 20th century, the Memphis Union Station was demolished in 1969. The Memphis Central Station was eventually renovated, and it nevertheless serves the city. The solitary inter-city passenger railroad facilitate to Memphis is the daily City of New Orleans train, operated by Amtrak, which has one train northbound and one train southbound each daylight between Chicago and New Orleans.
Amtrak (AMTK)
Memphis International Airport is the global "SuperHub" of FedEx Express, and has the largest cargo operations by volume of any airdrome worldwide, surpassing Hong Kong International Airport in 2021.
Memphis International ranks as the 41st busiest passenger airport in the US and served as a hub for Northwest Airlines (later Delta Air Lines) until September 3, 2013. and had 4.39 million boarding passengers (enplanements) in 2011, an 11.9% decrease higher than the previous year. Delta has shortened its flights at Memphis by approximately 65% since its 2008 merger behind Northwest Airlines and operates an average of 30 daily flights as of December 2013, with two international destinations (Cancún – seasonally; Toronto year-round). Delta Air Lines announced the closing of its Memphis pilot and crew base in 2012. Other airlines providing passenger facilitate are: Southwest Airlines; American Airlines; United Airlines; Allegiant; Frontier; Air Canada; and Southern Vacations Express.
There are then general aviation airports in the Memphis Metropolitan Area, including the Millington Regional Jetport, located at the former Naval Air Station in Millington, Tennessee.
Memphis has the second-busiest cargo port on the Mississippi River, which is with the fourth-busiest inland harbor in the United States. The International Port of Memphis covers both the Tennessee and Arkansas sides of the Mississippi River from river mile 725 (km 1167) to mile 740 (km 1191). A focal narrowing of the river port is the industrial park upon President's Island, just south of Downtown Memphis.
Four railroad and highway bridges irate the Mississippi River at Memphis. In order of their launch years, these are the Frisco Bridge (1892, single-track rail), the Harahan Bridge (1916, a road-rail bridge until 1949, currently carries double-track rail), the Memphis-Arkansas Memorial Bridge (Highway, 1949; later incorporated into Interstate 55), and the Hernando de Soto Bridge (Interstate 40, 1973). A bicycle/pedestrian gangway opened along the Harahan Bridge in late 2016, utilizing the former westbound roadway.
Memphis's primary assist provider is the Memphis Light, Gas and Water Division (MLGW). This is the largest three-service municipal encouragement in the United States, providing electricity, natural gas, and resolution water encouragement to whatever residents of Shelby County. Prior to that, Memphis was served by two primary electric companies, which were complex into the Memphis Power Company.
The City of Memphis bought the private company in 1939 to form MLGW, which was an in the future customer of electricity from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). In 1954 the Dixon-Yates pact was proposed to make more gift available to the city from the TVA, but the conformity was cancelled; it had been an issue for the Democrats in the 1954 Congressional elections.
MLGW nevertheless buys most of its capacity from TVA, and the company pumps its own light water from the Memphis Aquifer, using higher than 180 water wells.
The Memphis and Shelby County region supports numerous hospitals, including the Methodist and Baptist Memorial health systems, two of the nation's largest private hospitals. Until the 1960s and the halt of segregation, most hospitals forlorn served white patients. One of the few hospitals for African Americans in Memphis in those become old was Collins Chapel Connectional Hospital, whose historic building now houses a homeless shelter.
Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, the largest healthcare provider in the Memphis region and the fourth largest employer as of 2018, operates seven hospitals and several rural clinics. Methodist Healthcare operates, among others, the Le Bonheur Children's Hospital, which offers primary level 1 pediatric trauma care, as competently as a nationally credited pediatric brain tumor program. Methodist Healthcare as well as operates Methodist University Hospital, a 617-bed gift 1 mile southeast of Le Bonheur.
Baptist Memorial Healthcare operates fifteen hospitals (three in Memphis), including Baptist Memorial Hospital, and with a join up in 2018 became the largest healthcare system in the mid-South. According to Health Care Market Guide's annual studies, Mid-Southerners have named Baptist Memorial their "preferred hospital another for quality".
The St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, leading pediatric treatment and research faculty focused on children's catastrophic diseases, resides in Memphis. The institution was conceived and built by circus performer Danny Thomas in 1962 as a honor to St. Jude Thaddeus, patron saint of impossible, hopeless, and hard causes.
Memphis is also home to Regional One Healthcare, which is locally referred to as "The Med". In recent years, the hospital has experienced harsh funding difficulties that nearly led to a dwindling or taking away of emergency room services. In July 2010, The Med traditional approximately $40.6 million in federal and local funding to keep the Elvis Presley Trauma Center operational.
Memphis is home to Delta Medical Center of Memphis, which is the lonesome employee-owned medical faculty in North America.
Individual health insurance marketplace insurers are limited, with shining Health and Cigna offering coverage in the area.
Memphis has three sister cities, as per Sister Cities International:
