MPL UNBOUND Volume I Issue I by Unbound Magazine

Funding, Governance, Collections, Archives, Education, Third Places, Relevancy, Pillars of Democracy

The Inaugural Issue

Inside the Friends of the Library sorting room

Local history: Author Lori Johnson retraces her Black roots in old Whitehaven Books! Book talk, what branches are reading, an old blockbuster revived

MPL UNBOUND (ISSN 3065-503X) is a publication of the MEMPHIS LIBRARY FOUNDATION

3030 Poplar Ave, Memphis, TN 38111

To support the Memphis Public Libraries, scan the code at right, visit memphislibraryfoundation.org/donate, or email us at: unbound@memphislibraryfoundation.org

THE MEMPHIS LIBRARY FOUNDATION IS RECOGNIZED BY THE INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE AS A PUBLIC CHARITY WITH NONPROFIT STATUS, REGISTERED AS A TAX-EXEMPT CHARITABLE ORGANIZATION IN THE STATE OF TENNESSEE.

IMAGINE MORE DONATE HERE

Using your mobile device, scan the QR code above to make a tax-deeductible donation to the Memphis Library Foundation

The city funds the cost of library operations like staff salaries & benefits, building maintenance, & security; private donors make our awardwinning library programming possible. The Memphis Library Foundation was founded in 1995 to secure private and corporate donations to fund our innovative and community-centered work at the libraries.

Above: The Memphis Periodical Index filing cabinet. Located in the Memphis Room on the 4th floor of the Benjamin L Hooks Central Library, the cabinet contains the catalog and locator cards of all the newspaper and magazine clippings available for research on the topics listed. Organized alphabetically by topic, each card displays the topic, the topic description, the publication title, the publication date, and the volume and issue number of the periodical.

MPL EVENTS

The library is so much more than books. In our Events section, check out upcoming events, with links for all.

A.I. AND THE LIBRARY

Artificial Intelligence is here. How the library is working with it, and with what kinds of guard rails.

FEATURE: THE LIBRARY

HOW THE LIBRARY WORKS

The Library. Still among the most trusted of institutions, a community anchor, a pillar of democracy. But, how does it work? And, why does it continue to ‘work’?

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

RETRACING HER WHITEHAVEN ROOTS

Lori Johnson takes readers on a personal tour of a family discovery and a dive into her Whitehaven roots.

ESSAYS

VISUALS: ALCHEMY, A DONATED BOOK

Inside the Friends of the Library sorting room; books’ journeys from donation to the Second Editions Bookstore

THE LIBRARY

Robert A. Lanier and Susan Cushman share their love and work with the Memphis Public Libraries

BOOKS

WHAT WE’RE READING

Guess what? Library staff are kinda into books, of all kinds and sizes. Here’s what some of them are reading.

OVERHEARD AT THE EDITORIAL DESK

Two editors discuss the resurfacing of Robert Caro’s landmark biography about city planner Robert Moses.

CHECKOUT: THE THIRD PLACE

If you have visited a library recently you won’t be surprised at who you will find there.

Suspended in the four-story lobby of the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, architectural artist Ed Carpenter’s spectacular “light canvasses” structure of dichroic glass reflects sunlight throughout the lobby. At times, its radiance seems to rival the brilliance of the sun itself, creating a veritable curtain of light. During the evening hours, it is lit to create a rich atmospheric effect that is as engrossing to the eye as it is during the daytime. Memphis photographer Jamie Harmon captured this image one summer evening at dusk, exclusively for MPL UNBOUND’s inaugural issue.

START HERE

LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER IMAGINE MORE

Welcome to the first-ever edition of MPL UNBOUND, a magazine dedicated to the stories, people, and vision that make the Memphis Public Libraries (MPL) pillars of imagination and transformation. At the Memphis Library Foundation, our mission is to raise awareness and funds for MPL to go far beyond basic library services, equipping the 18 local branches to respond dynamically to the evolving needs of our diverse city. In these pages, you’ll find stories that illustrate how libraries are not only places of learning but also hubs of connection, innovation, and community empowerment.

Libraries today are more essential than ever. While books and quiet reading spaces remain important for many library patrons, libraries have adapted (and continue to adapt) to the changing needs of 21st-century Memphians. From offering digital media labs and career workshops to serving as safe, inclusive spaces for people of all ages, libraries are at the heart of communitybuilding. MPL connects families to educational programs, students to the most up-to-date resources, job-seekers to critical training, and seniors to digital literacy tools. This magazine celebrates MPL’s innovative spirit and the positive ripple effects of our growth across our city. In this magazine, you’ll read about exciting new projects at MPL that are made possible by the support of donors and advocates like you. You will peruse pieces ranging from personal book reviews written by your beloved staffers to deep historical analyses drawn from information found in the MPL archives. The central story undergirding this inaugural issue highlights what our public libraries mean to Memphians. As a third place, MPL branches provide a home away from home for little kids fumbling through picture books, teenagers sneaking glances at their young loves in the stacks, the unhoused looking for a safe place to relax, the retired couple looking for new hobbies to explore, the aspiring entrepreneur exploring how to turn their passion into a careerin a word, MPL is for everyone.

As you turn each page, know that the achievements you see here are only possible because of community members who believe in the power of libraries. Whether you’re a longtime supporter or new to our mission, we invite you to explore the ways you can make a difference through the Memphis Public Libraries. Each donation, volunteer hour, or word of advocacy amplifies our libraries’ ability to serve and uplift all Memphians.

Thank you for joining us on this journey. Together, we are transforming lives, strengthening our city, and allowing future generations to imagine more for themselves and for Memphis.

~Warmest regards,

Christine Weinreich Executive Director Memphis Library Foundation

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR DEFENDERS OF WONDER

There has always been the library. My high school had a great little library - this was early-1980s California - an indoor roundhouse in the center of our humanities building, with floor-toceiling windows. The entire space was sunken a couple of steps down, like the conversation pits in 1960s & ‘70s living rooms, and just as comforting. It was often empty. Maybe a student or two, and the quiet bespectacled librarian behind the front desk. But it was well-stocked, which always surprised me, with rows of shelves lined with thousands of books waiting to be opened and read. It often felt like my own private sanctuary, a place to escape from the hustle of being a teen who didn’t quite fit into any single group. My high school resume was just enough sports and smarts for college prep, and hanging out with guys like me. We didn’t belong with the jocks or the geeks, and we weren’t the class clowns. But we loved learning, and our teachers loved us. Thus we were summarily disdained by everyone, the jocks and the geeks and the clowns alike (the smokers were somehow ok with us, go figure).

But I was happiest in the library, and the most at home, hanging out with wonderful stacks of books and occasionally sharing a few adult thoughts with the librarian. I always walked away from her thinking that she was the smartest person in the school, and yet the most invisible.

Midway through our senior year, when we were all anxious for adulthood, a ratty little freshman started crossing our path. A punk of a kid, always disheveled, and always talking smack from his bicycle, he annoyed everyone. And as we used to say, he was just asking for it.

One day we heard that a group of seniors had gone after him after school. We later learned that he had pissed off the wrong jocks, managed to evade them, and had found safety, crying and hiding, in a far corner of the library.

We felt awful. None of us knew his story, nor anything of his life at home, but we knew it couldn’t have been good. And while finding refuge in the library made perfect sense, at the time we did not see anything symbolic in an outcast being rescued by books and the librarian behind the glasses.

This September Southern writer Margaret Renkl wrote a New York Times story about librarians as superheroes, and Louisiana librarian Amanda Jones, who in recent years has been targeted by extremists for speaking in defense of diverse books. No self-proclaimed superhero, Ms. Jones says she speaks out as a “defender of wonders.”

When we imagined this magazine’s purpose, people like Ms. Jones and that poor freshman came to my mind, because the library - especially now in this new era of unknowns - still provides so much of what we love, cherish, and need. It is a reliable, free source of knowledge and hope. It is a safe, warm sanctuary for all. We hope this publication provides the same.

Mark Fleischer Chief Editor & Connect Crew Specialist

THE LIBRARY IN YOUR MAILBOX

Library supporters who give at least $25 per month or $250 annually to support the Memphis Public Libraries receive UNBOUND by mail each quarter. Scan the QR code or visit memphislibraryfoundation.org to donate today!

SUBMITTING CONTENT

Scan this code to submit content or letters to the editors FOR CONSIDERATION. Storytellers may submit works of short or feature-length nonfiction, short fiction, book reviews, poetry, photography, artwork, etc. Letters to the Editor should be 175 words or less. For more details, see page 31.

LETTER FROM THE CO-EDITOR

PIECES

OF MYSELF

The library saved my life. Spat out of university with a college degree and no job, no purpose, and not even knowing who I was, I fell into disrepair. I didn’t know what to do. So I read. Then, when the books weren’t enough, I volunteered at the library. Before I knew it, I was hired and started using my skills and passions to create programs. I tried to help those around me by sharing the skills I loved in the communities of Memphis. Even as an employee, I explored everything the library offered to its patrons, finding pieces of myself along the way. There’s nothing quite like knowing the library had acknowledged, accepted, and provided for me and people like me before I even set foot inside. I kick myself every day for not coming sooner. Which is why I came to work on UNBOUND, so that those of you who read it can find pieces of yourself reflected within its pages—so that you are brought to the library, which offers something for everyone.

Rebecca Stovall, Co-Editor & Connect Crew Specialist

LETTERS: FROM OUR EDITORIAL TEAM, WELCOME TO MPL UNBOUND

LEADING, SHARING

Welcome to UNBOUND!

I welcome the opportunity to work on this magazine. It combines two of my passions-writing and libraries. I find myself in a room with library staffers who share my enthusiasm for the library and this magazine. The people creating the stories and visuals are people like me who love both libraries and storytelling. UNBOUND showcases MPL’s response to the world we live in today. This magazine will highlight the services and activities the library branches offer. UNBOUND will expose readers to creative content that helps us enjoy life without stressing about it.

When facing stressful times and juggling feelings of despair and uncertainty, there is nothing more reassuring than the written word. In reading we find solace. UNBOUND intends to be a balm for MPL staff, supporters, and customers. Regardless of your feelings, you will discover something soothing within the pages of UNBOUND.

Reading UNBOUND will give people a view of the library as seen through the eyes of those who came to the Library system by many paths, but stayed because our love for books, libraries, and writing keeps us bound to it.

Enjoy. ~Juanita White

SUBMITTING CONTENT FOR CONSIDERATION

MPL UNBOUND accepts submissions from local, Mid-South storytellers or those with ties to Memphis and the Library. Storytellers may submit a variety of works, including book reviews, poetry, photography, and artwork. Letters to the Editor should be 175 words or less. Use the QR code on the facing page or visit memphislibrary.org. See page 31

MORE THAN BOOKS

When I first heard the idea of a library magazine, I was desperate to be involved. The library has supported me through every major stage in my life, even before I could read or talk. If you know a librarian, you’ll know that they’re hooked on the library - promoting our seed library at parties, telling family about our genealogy resources, even cornering friends to sign up for a library card. But I am continually shocked by how few people in Memphis use the library. To me, UNBOUND is a publication that can meet Memphians where they’re at, bringing the resources and essence of the library to wherever they need it. I strongly believe in equitable access to education, information, and community, and there is no better place to find it than the Memphis Public Libraries. The library is one of the only places that is truly for everyone, no matter your background. As you flip through the pages of our inaugural issue, I hope you feel the love and intention from our editorial team, our library staff, and everyone who supported this project. Thank you for reading and for loving your library. Your library loves you back.

~Emma Pennington

LEARNING & CONTRIBUTING

I have wanted to write ever since my mother, who is a retired private school teacher, put a pencil in my hand. To keep me from annoying her while she was a stay-at-home mom, she taught me how to read and write when I was 3-4 years old. Trips to the local library were much more fun than going to the fabric store or grocery store.

I guess since both of my parents read, it was obvious I wanted to read. There was never a push on Math or Sciences, so I always leaned toward English and Literature classes in high school. In fact, I have a degree in Creative Writing. I tell people I have a BA in BS. Trips to the library and actually working for MPL is still more fun than trips to the grocery store. Writing for a magazine has been something I have wanted to do for a while. I am proud to be part of the Editing and Writing team for UNBOUND. Just as I enjoy learning and contributing snippets of my life, I hope you will learn and contribute snippets of yours. Everyone has a story. What’s yours?

~Andrea Bledsoe King

OUR THIRD PLACE

DISCUSSIONS

DESIGN, COMMUNICATE

Libraries, fundamentally, are about access. Access to information, access to technology, access to experiences. Most of us spend thirteen to fourteen years attending school, maybe more if we choose, but K-12 schools are limited by time, funding, and other responsibilities. Librarians have the freedom to interact with patrons one-on-one. Instead of a fifty-minute lecture, we can bring in an expert who will demonstrate the real-life applications of what you’re learning. We help you do your taxes and fill out job applications. We teach yoga and robotics. We show you how to use your phone and how to make something on a 3D printer. Thanks to the funding we receive from the Memphis Library Foundation, our only limit is our creativity. This magazine is a natural extension of what we do: we are providing information, we are giving the citizens of Memphis a new, free experience, and we are opening a dialogue. Who are you, reader, and what would you like to see next at your neighborhood library? The librarians here won’t shush you: we’re listening.

~Sara Priddy

A SPECIAL PLACE, FOR YOU

Psychologists theorize that our earliest memories reflect aspects of ourselves, of what is important to us now. It’s fitting, then, that one of my earliest memories is of walking through a colorful forest into the brand-new Children’s Department at the brand-new Benjamin L. Hooks Library. The public library has always held a special place in my heart. As an institution, we exist to serve the public. We provide information, technology, books (of course), and a place to sit and rest your head - free of charge. A noble mission, yes? And it’s one that I’m proud to serve, especially in these uncertain times. Even so, I know that we can do more; that we can be more. That’s one of the main reasons I volunteered to work on this publication – a magazine where you can catch up on local events, get book recommendations, read stories and poems and essays by and for Memphians, and learn about what your library is doing for you. This magazine is for you, because we cannot exist without you. I hope you enjoy what we’ve put together, and I hope to read your own contributions soon. ~Marty Synk

As Style and Design Editor, my contribution to the production of MPL UNBOUND allows me to indulge one of my greatest passions: the interaction of word and image. I have a degree in art history, but more than that, I just love to look, and I will admit I’m pretty good at it. In a printed publication, good design facilitates good communication because it is nice to look at. I have been fortunate to work with all kinds of books, including many that were old, rare, handmade, or sometimes so artfully crafted as to hardly resemble a book! These experiences broadened my conceptions of what a print publication could look like, how it could function, and how good design unites words, graphics, and imagery. I am grateful to use what I’ve learned - with other talented editors and creators - on a project that reflects the vibrant culture of Memphis through the lens of the Library. There is no question that the MPL is an anchor for Memphis’ many communities, a place that brings us all together for countless reasons. The Library is a hub of informational and social exchange, and MPL Unbound will serve as a conductor of both. ~David Christie

KNOW THE LIRARY, FIND YOURSELF

Epistolary novels have always been some of my favorite books to read. Telling a story through personal letters allows a reader to get lost in the intimacy of the language, the personal thoughts that were meant for no one else to see, the anguished plea or the elusive tone. Whether a war-time missive home to a sweetheart or an angry email to a prodigal relative, letters reveal; letters are open-faced insight. This letter is no different.

UNBOUND is a love letter. A love letter to Memphis, to the libraries that sit in her neighborhoods and stand on her corners. To you, the MPL UNBOUND reader, its pages relay not only what library life is like for those of us who work here every day, but also how the library makes every life more rich and better connected. We hope by laying bare who the library is, what it does and how it works, you will know us better and find yourself in these pages and in the stacks.

~Beth Thorne

(J.Harmon)

Bookstock is the largest annual local authors festival in Memphis, with up to 60 local authors joining in for networking, author talks, local entertainment, and more. Interested authors should visit the Memphis Public Libraries website (memphispubliclibrary.org) and go to

the BookStock link to fill out the 2025 Bookstock Application form in the website. Email the form to Alexandra Farmer (Alexandra. Farmer@memphistn.gov) and copy (cc) Wang-Ying Glasgow (Wang-Ying.Glasgow@ memphistn.gov).

HOLIDAY CONCERT WITH KENNETH JACKSON INFO IN EVENTS, FACING PAGE DEC 20 FRI

Cossitt Library: 33 S. Front Street, 38103; (901) 415-2766

Cornelia Crenshaw Memorial Library: 531 Vance Avenue, 38126; (901) 415-2765

Gaston Park Library: 1040 South Third Street, 38106; (901) 415-2769

South Library: 1929 South Third Street, 38109; (901) 415-2780

Levi Library: 3676 South Third Street, 38109; (901) 415-2773

Frayser Library: 3712 Argonne Street, 38127; (901) 415-2768

Raleigh Library: 3452 Austin Peay Hwy, 38128; (901) 415-2778

Hollywood Library: 1530 North Hollywood Street, 38108; (901) 415-2772

North Library: 1192 Vollintine Avenue, 38107; (901) 415-2775

Randolph Library: 3752 Given Avenue, 38122; (901) 415-2779

Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library: 3030 Poplar Avenue, 38111; (901) 415-2700

Orange Mound Library: 843 Dallas Street, 38114; (901) 415-2761

Cherokee Library: 3300 Sharpe Avenue, 38111; (901) 743-3655

Whitehaven Library: 4120 Mill Branch Road, 38116; (901) 415-2781

The Library in Your Hands

MPL UNBOUND, a Publication of the Memphis Library Foundation

Publisher: CHRISTINE WEINREICH Executive Director of the Memphis Library Foundation (MLF)

Associate Publisher: RACHEL MATTSON Director of Development & Communications MLF

Chief Editor: MARK FLEISCHER Connect Crew Specialist

Co-Editor: REBECCA STOVALL Connect Crew Specialist

Associate Editors: ANDREA KING

EMMA PENNINGTON

SARA PRIDDY

MARTY SYNK

BETH THORNE

JUANITA WHITE

Style & Design Editor: DAVID CHRISTIE

Officer Geoffrey Redd Library: 5094 Poplar Avenue, 38117; (901) 415-2777

Parkway Village Library: 4655 Knight Arnold Road, 38118; (901) 415-2776

East Shelby Library: 7200 East Shelby Drive, 38125; (901) 415-2767

Cordova Library: 8457 Trinity Road, 38018; (901) 415-2764

Graphic Design, Layout: SERAH DELONG SerahWorks

Special Masthead, Type Design: REBECCA PHILLIPS Dribbble.com

Photographer for Inaugural Edition: JAMIE HARMON Photographer, Amurica

Operations: MOLLY PEACHER-RYAN Director of Operations & Donor Strategy MLF

Regular Contributors: WAYNE DOWDY

The Memphis & Shelby County Room

STEPHEN USERY

WYPL Program Manager, Host of Nationally-Syndicated Show BookTalk

JAMIE GRIFFIN Featured Contribution

SCAN FOR ALL MPL EVENTS

DO YOU WANT TO BECOME A US CITIZEN?

5 - 6pm • Cordova Library Ages: Adults

Prep for the Citizenship exam

Contact: Karol Hogan email: Karol.Hogan@memphistn.gov phone: 901.415.2764

THE MOVABLE COLLECTION ARTISTS SPOTLIGHT

2 - 3pm • Whitehaven Library Ages: Teens, Adults

Memphis artists whose work is on display in the Whitehaven branch will present workshops for teens and Artist Talks for all ages.

Contact: Branch p: 901.415.2781

AARP SENIOR GAME DAY 12 noon - 5:30pm • North Library Age Group: Adults

Relax with friends during an afternoon of fun and games.

Contact: Vanessa Luellen p: 901.415.2775

DECK THE HALLS: ORNAMENT PAINTING 4:30 - 5:30pm Orange Mound Library Meeting Room OM Ages: All

Get creative and personalize your own festive ornaments.

Contact: Nyale Pieh e: nyale.pieh@memphistn.gov p: 901.415.2761

POSITIVE SOLUTIONS FOR FAMILIES CLASSES TN VOICES* Every Wednesday 12 noon - 1:30pm Orange Mound Library, Room OM Ages: Teens, Adults

Positive Solutions for Families (PSF) is an evidence-informed seven-part series for parents and caregivers of young children. Participants will learn how to use positive approaches and effective techniques to improve interactions with their child(ren). These tools will promote optimal development and will address challenging behaviors.

1/15 Session 1: Making a Connection 1/22 Session 2: Keeping it Positive 1/29 Session 3: Behavior Has Meaning 2/5 Session 4: The Power of Routines 2/12 Session 5: Teach Me What to Do! 2/19 Session 6: Responding With Purpose 2/26 Session 7: Bringing it All Together

WHITEHAVEN LIBRARY ANNUAL BOYS COAT DRIVE

3:30 - 5:30pm • Whitehaven Library Meeting Room WHI Ages: 6-12, Teens

Whitehaven Library’s 4th Annual Boys Winter Coat Drive

Contact: Tanishia Jennes-Turner e: tanishia.jennes@memphistn.gov p: 901.415.2781

GATHERING PRESENTS: UNDUGU II

3 - 5pm • Levi Library

Join us for a live hip-hop music event focused on local Memphis artists. The lyrics will be clean and friendly for All ages.

Contact: Courtney Shaw e: courtney.shaw@memphistn.gov p: 901.415.2871

SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN

12 noon - 2pm • Cheroke Library Meeting Room CHE Ages: Children 0-8

Santa will visit the children of the Cherokee Library.

Contact: Kitty Baker e: kitty.baker@memphistn.gov p: 901.415.2762

Event sponsored by Friends of the Library

Event sponsored by the Memphis Library Foundation

DEC 18 WED

FREE TECH SUPPORT AT THE LIBRARY (AVAILABLE IN FOUR LANGUAGES)

2 - 3:30pm Cordova Library, Room COR Ages: Adults

Help with your phone, laptop, tablet, email, photos, videos, etc.

Contact: Gretchen Wilwayco e: gretchen.wilwayco@memphistn.gov p: 901.415.2764

‘TIS A SOULFUL SEASON: HOLIDAY CONCERT WITH KENNETH JACKSON

2 - 3pm • Orange Mound Library Meeting Room OM Ages: Adults

Enjoy the soulful music of Kenneth Jackson as he ushers in the holiday season for the Orange Mound community. A very special holiday treat!

Contact: Skyler Gambert e: skyler.gambert@memphistn.gov p: 901.415.2761

WALK A MILE AND GET A FREE BOOK!

10 - 11am • Cordova Library Outdoor Grounds Ages: Adults

We are going to walk from the library entrance, complete the walking path around the Bert Ferguson community center (approx. 1 mile), and return to the library.

Contact: Gretchen Wilwayco e: gretchen.wilwayco@memphistn.gov

Contact: Skyler Gambert e: skyler.gambert@memphistn.gov p: 901.415.2761

*REGISTRATION REQUIRED. SCAN BELOW TO REGISTER:

FREE TECH SUPPORT AT THE LIBRARY (available in four languages)

2 - 3:30pm • Cordova Library Meeting Room COR Ages: Adults, Adult-Seniors

Need help with your phone, laptop, tablet, email, photos, videos, etc.?

Come to the library for free one-on-one tech support! Staff member Gretchen speaks English, Spanish, French and Tagalog, and will be happy to help you.

Contact: Gretchen Wilwayco gretchen.wilwayco@memphistn.gov

LIBRARY LOVE IS PERMANENT

12 noon - 8pm

Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library Ages: Adults

We’re excited to announce that Library Love is Permanent is BACK, just in time for Library Lovers’ Month! Looking to get some new ink and want to support the Memphis Public Libraries? We can’t wait to see you there!

Contact: Rachel Mattson Rachel@memphislibraryfoundation.org

IN THE KNOW

Just like this new publication, the Connect Crew meets the community where they are.

Connect Crew is your local public library on wheels! Step foot on the START HERE van and find the programs, books, and resources you love, all wrapped up in a small team dedicated to expanding library walls throughout the city, and meeting our patrons where they are. You will find us delivering programs at local schools and community & retirement centers, story times at the zoo, museums, parks, and farmers markets, and setting up our mobile library at fairs, festivals, and neighborhood block parties, with library card sign-ups, free books, and more.

Upcoming programs include ongoing PorterLeath Storytimes for Pre-k every Friday (at alternating locations), and The Writer’s Block (Wednesdays 6-8pm Panera Bread in Laurelwood Shopping Center), a writing club that invites aspiring and experienced writers to gather and get past hurdles to putting words on the page.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT CONNECT CREW

RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER FROM THE CENTRAL LIBRARY, PICK UP A COPY OF MPL UNBOUND:

STATE GRANT FUNDS REPLACEMENT OF CENTRAL LIBRARY ELEVATORS & ESCALATORS

The Memphis Public Libraries were awarded a Connected Community Facilities grant for $1,584,000 as part of Tennessee’s statewide digital opportunity investments.

MPL’s staff hosts thousands of programs for all ages and learning levels each year. Central Library building upgrades, including replacing the elevators and escalators and installing a self service kiosk on each floor, will ensure that these programs

are truly accessible for those with physical limitations. State of Tennessee support will allow MPL to reach more residents in a meaningful way so that the library can teach them marketable skills designed to help them reach career and education goals and connect them to mentors, networks, and additional resources to support their success.

LIBRARY FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES STATE GRANT TO EXPAND CREATIVE ENTREPRENEURSHIP PROGRAM

The Memphis Library Foundation was awarded a two-year grant of $300,510 from the Tennessee Department of Economic & Community Development to expand the Innovator-inResidence (IIR) Program at the Cossitt and Raleigh Branch Libraries. Piloted at Cossitt with podcaster Ena Esco, the program engages entrepreneurial creatives to provide classes, workshops, individual mentoring, and a myriad other resources to citizens interested in learning their craft. In exchange, Innovators receive library space and resources to grow their business.

Interested in becoming an Innovator? Applications will be available soon. Subscribe to the Memphis Library Foundation’s new Substack newsletter below to be kept informed:

THE MEMPHIS LIBRARY FOUNDATION IS NOW ON SUBSTACK

DON’T HAVE A LIBRARY CARD YET? A Library Card opens the door to our physical and online collections including over a million items in our 18 locations and over 50,000 e-books and e-audiobooks. You can also use it to reserve one of our public access computers.

News, Info from the Memphis Public Libraries

IN MEMORIAM Inger Upchurch

The MPL family lost long-time Senior Manager of the Crenshaw and Gaston Park Branch Libraries Inger Upchurch suddenly on August 26th, 2024. Inger Upchurch was the community’s mom wherever she worked.

She will be remembered as a sweet, compassionate, loving, smart, talented, and caring person. This is a huge loss for all of the Memphis Public Libraries. All will grieve her passing. Inger was one in a million. She embodies what Memphis Public Libraries is all about through her service and dedication to the community, her spirit and her creativity.

RIGHT HERE!

MPL’s MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

SCAN ME

(MF)

(photo: J.Howard)

AI is Here. How Does a Library Handle It?

By Samara Solomon

“Is it live, or is it Memorex?”

Readers of certain ages will likely recall that tag line from Memorex and their series of television commercials in the 1970s and ‘80s, produced for its line of blank cassette tapes starting in 1974. In a long-running ad campaign, it featured a film of the great Ella Fitzgerald singing a high note that shattered a wine glass, played back from a Memorex tape, that again shattered another glass.

The slogan became an everyday catchphrase, emblematic of an era when advances in media and technology were met with wonder and excitement, and spawned a nostalgia-filled generation of home recordings and mixed tapes. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence integrating itself into our work and lives across the nation, step by incremental step becoming a component of many people’s daily lives, it is filled with unknowns that instill both excitement and fear. Now we ask, skeptically, Is it real or is it A.I.?

And the technology, its usage and its own selfinduced flaws, are advancing rapidly. Questions abound, about its use in the arts, in medicine, in advertising, by writers, and as convincing stand-ins - copies - of very real people. It already peppers what we see on social media and just about anywhere we look.

Like the cosmos, its reach and its implications seem unlimited, and new studies, discoveries, and explorations appear daily. On the flip-side, in a mind-bending twist, recent studies have even identified ways that A.I. can “de-generate,” in effect degrade and distort itself in the process of extracting and re-extracting information from its own generated images and information. As one example suggested, imagine an original drawing that is photocopied – a copy of a copy of a copy and so on – millions of times over to the point where the image eventually becomes nothing, or in one experiment, a blurry blob.

To begin addressing how it shapes and influences our lives, Memphis Public Libraries are exploring how the library is going to deal with it. An internal committee is looking into all of it: exploring tools and resources already available; looking at how other libraries, nationwide, are working with it; and, as one of our culture’s cornerstones of trust and truth, preparing to counter its potential destructive effects. The committee has separated into sub-committees to home in on each area of focus: staff training, fair use, resources, and programs frameworks.

This committee is researching the various A.I. tools that are freely available and discussing the ways A.I. has already influenced our daily lives. They are developing frameworks for staff to create programs focused on teaching the public about A.I. literacy. The committee will also be looking at developing training programs for staff to familiarize them with Artificial Intelligence,

MPL Explores AI’s Use and

Future Impact on Libraries

both for personal knowledge and to help customers.

The big question asked in this committee is how the rise of A.I. will affect libraries going forward. As an institution of knowledge, as well as a place where computers and the internet are accessed daily, A.I. will have an impact on libraries, whether we utilize it within the library walls or come across patrons who have questions on it.

A resources sub-committee is responsible for finding A.I. tools already available for public use, e.g. ChatGPT, Dall-e, Grammarly, and more. This team has looked into rask.ai, a language translating tool; Speechify, a tool to read text on a webpage for those who may struggle with concentrating on reading; and Izotope10, for audio repair.

As a purveyor of free resources for the public, the library’s focus is on the free versions of these various tools. One roadblock this committee has discovered already is that many of these tools come with fees, large and small. Most of the websites providing A.I. tools offer free versions, but they are very limited as compared to the paid versions, a reminder of the early concerns that A.I. could both exclude and exploit more vulnerable individuals of our population.

A program frameworks committee has drafted a framework for A.I. safety, part of the “A.I.” for Beginners” sessions that will focus

on how to use these tools safely. Currently, the team is trying to make the program user- friendly, especially for those seniors who may not be computer savvy.

A fair-use sub-committee is focused on the ethics of A.I. usage, especially in regard to recreating art and art images. There are a number of image creation-based Artificial Intelligence devices on the internet, some of which are being included as features on graphic design sites like Canva. Users can even change their homepage on Google to a curated image created using an A.I. system. Talks around these types of sites have brought up the fact that these A.I. image generators use art circling the internet within their database without the artist’s permission. The Fair Use committee is looking into these types of issues so staff will be prepared if they come across any ethical issues with A.I. while helping customers. An A.I. ethics program may be created in the future to teach customers about these issues as well.

So far, there are two programs already in the works at MPL focusing on teaching the basics of A.I. to the public. The Cordova Library has an “A.I. for Beginners” series. The Randolph Library has a program focused on teaching teens about A.I. tools. Please check the library calendar for future dates for both these series.

A program frameworks committee has drafted a framework for A.I. safety, part of the “A.I.” for Beginners” sessions that will focus on how to use these tools safely. Currently, the team is trying to make the program user-friendly, especially for those who may not be computer savvy.

In the future, a program based around showing teachers the basics of A.I. will be developed as well. This will focus on the concerns and questions that educators may have with A.I. use in the classroom, whether they plan to use it themselves to lesson plan, or to teach kids the Do’s and Don’ts of using A.I. to assist with homework and other course material. Patrons are encouraged to check our website to see when this program will begin.

A.I. and its usage in libraries is a topic facing libraries nationwide, with a wide-ranging scope and an unknown ceiling. As it has done for centuries of advances in technologies, the library is adapting accordingly. Following that commitment, the A.I. Committee is hard at work to position the library to be able to field any questions that these incoming changes may generate from patrons, customers, and staff alike, and to issue guidelines surrounding its use within the library’s very real walls.

This was adapted and expanded from an article in BookMark, an internal, MPL staff newsletter, with contributions from Mark Fleischer

A very real photo (J.Harmon)

MEMPHIS ROOM

LINC 2-1-1

CHILDREN’S

DELIVERY & DISTRIBUTION

CIRCULATION / CHECK-OUT

NEWSPAPERS / PERIODICALS

FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY SECOND EDITIONS BOOKSTORE

CLOUD901

What Makes the Library Work?

By the MPL UNBOUND Staff

“The

smell of a library is such a happy thing. The smell of books. It’s just joy. There’s just a joy about libraries.”

~Christine Weinreich, Executive Director of the Memphis Library Foundation

It is that quiet place you went after school, a sanctuary. It is that special book you pulled off the shelves, well-worn and well-read, or that brandnew bestseller, the one that made you fall in love with reading. It is hours upon hours of time spent in uninterrupted and wonderfully meandering thought, of leafing through book after book, studying, reading, or learning about the world. A place to dream, a place to feel safe.

“The first day I came to work, here at the Library Foundation,” said executive director Christine Weinreich, “I walked in the staff door and smelled it. The smell of a library is such a happy thing. The smell of books, actual books. It’s just joy. There’s just a joy about libraries.”

The library. The name alone may reverberate in echoes of innocence, discovery, and, yes, joy. It’s one of those words that rolls off the tongue like a lick of ice cream. Whatever your memories of your library are, they are elemental, specific, and almost primal,

activating all the senses. They hold a special place in hearts and minds; a permanence, a part of your DNA.

“I went to the library every day,” states Library Director Keenon McCloy. “And it informed a lot of things. . . . it was a safe place. It was always really comfortable to be there.”

For some, however, the library carries with it echoes of harmless dissonance: from “shh’s” out of nowhere, glares from the librarian staring down our younger selves over the wire rims of disapproving spectacles. Or worse, older generations and individuals of color may recall the library as that place of closed doors, a place of mystery and exclusion, once reserved only for those whose skin color did not resemble theirs.

Today, the public library in American life is as open as it has ever been to people of all colors, ethnicities, and income levels. It remains an active pillar of democratic access. An access that is being threatened by book challenges, privatization of library systems, and cyberattacks on library websites and infrastructure. Librarians have been personally attacked and threatened. Nationally, personal attacks and

(DIG)

threats against librarians have become increasingly commonplace, and leaders at state and local levels have threatened funding cuts. Thankfully, the Memphis Public Libraries have been fortunate to be wellsupported by our current state and local leaders, and Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett has actually increased library funding and not threatened to cut it. Nonetheless, libraries nationwide now face a host of other post-election uncertainties. It is no stretch to suggest that like our democracy, our public libraries are facing tests not seen since the McCarthy Era and perhaps beyond.

Conversely, libraries have seen a renaissance in recent years, adapting to new technologies and evolving into places that not only house and lend books, but also serve the public in a wide variety of ways. Public libraries, at this moment, are still beacons of freedom and free thought, bastions of knowledge and hope, centers for free resources, programs, and learning, and a reflection of the communities they serve. For many, the library is still the cherished third place of their youth – that place outside of work and home where one can clear the mind, escape from the daily grind, meet with a friend, do some actual reading or open up a laptop, or, enviably, to simply be.

“Growing up,” states Keenon, “I lived near PeabodyMcLean with the (former) Main library; the bus dropped me off every day. I lived a block and a half away, so I spent a whole lot of time, because it was the place to be.“

Here in Memphis, we are fortunate to have not just a few safe places “to be” within the metro system, but 18 branches spread across our sprawling city, serving their communities as only they know how, responding to the needs of the neighborhoods they serve.

Among library systems nationwide, our Memphis Public Libraries are shining examples of this current evolution of the library. As the only public library system in the country to win the National Medal for Museum and Library Service twice (in 2007 and 2021), the Memphis Public Libraries continue to incubate and deliver innovations that garner national attention as well as serving one of the most diverse, creative, charitable, yet poverty-stricken metropolitan regions in the country. The Smithsonian magazine gave our library a feature profile in a 2021 issue with the headline “How Memphis Created the Nation’s Most Innovative Library.”

to the Children’s Department– an expansive miniwonderland of books, games, and story times with an adjoining garden– or the sleek lines of Cloud901, the multimedia playground for teens.

The floors above fill in the rest of the tapestry of free services, information, and knowledge: computer desks and terminals, printers and copiers, laptop bars, and free wi-fi. Makers spaces, sewing machines and circuit boards, 3D printers, Legos, and even Nintendo Clubs, and a seed library. Gallery spaces and themed art displays created by library staff.

On every floor you can find that third place - the being spaces - public living rooms and studies, with chairs and tables. A recording space for oral histories in the Central Library’s Memphis Room, which houses archival materials, local historical collections, old phone books, city directories, and microfilm reels of newspapers and directories. Back downstairs, outside the lobby, there are the studios of WYPL. The Memphis Public Libraries is the only public library system in the country with its own television and radio stations.

And that’s just the Central Library. There is a podcast studio at the new Cossitt Library downtown, and a commercial kitchen at the new Raleigh Library.

And of course, at all of the libraries there are rows and rows, shelves and shelves, and miles upon miles of books. Books, those perfectly bound worlds of memory, stories, and knowledge, which are carefully curated and cultivated by knowledgeable, helpful, and passionate librarians.

Taking it all in, with all that the library has to offer, one must wonder, How does it all work?

So how do libraries - still one of the most trusted institutions, here in Memphis and throughout the world - work? How are they governed? How are they funded? How are they established, built, and maintained? And perhaps as critical as ever, as a pillar of democracy, why do they continue to work?

The history of libraries, from the ancient world to today, is an epic tale of perseverance, as noted and explored vigorously by co-authors and historians Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen for their book The Library, A Fragile History. “If there is one lesson from the centuries-long history of the library,” they tell us, “it is that libraries only last as long as people find them useful.”

At the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, that innovation is on full display. Under a symmetrical canopy of steel, glass, and transparency, it is not the library of our grandparents’ youth, of “shhs” and bespectacled glares. It is open and airy, fostering interaction, acceptance, and invitation on one hand, while providing still cozy nooks and corners on its upper floors for quiet seclusion – those personal spaces for reflection that many of us still seek in our library. In the foyer, there are meeting rooms, a gallery space for local artists, and the welcoming signs of the Friends of the Library Second Editions Bookstore. Through the open doors and into the lobby, there are all the other essentials: book check-out counters, displays about upcoming events, newspaper stands, and shelves of new book releases. Escalators (soon to be restored), elevators, and stairs invite customers to the upper floors. Just past the elevators, one might be enticed by the multi-colored forest of trees that mark the entrance

The earliest libraries date back to 3000 BC in Southwest Asia’s Fertile Crescent, from Mesopotamia to the Nile River in Africa, and continued around 500 BC to early BCE in ancient Egypt, Persia, classical Greece, and Rome. Classical Greece was known for its personal and private libraries, Egypt for the great Library of Alexandria (built sometime between 323 and 246 BC).

Centuries before the invention of the printing press, these early libraries did not house or lend books; they were more akin to today’s archives, and they stored the earliest forms of writing, recorded on clay tablets about an inch thick in various shapes and sizes, holding administrative texts, governmental orders, and collections of resources in disciplines such as geometry, medical science, history, astronomy, and philosophy. Writings on paper, in the form of papyrus scrolls, appeared as early as 2500 BC in ancient Egypt civilizations and continued in use through the heights of the Roman Empire.

“The history of libraries does not offer a story of easy progress through the centuries... Libraries need to adapt to survive, as they have always adapted to survive...”

~The Library, A Fragile History

HISTORY

“Library -- from the Latin liber, meaning ‘book.’ In Greek and the Romance languages, the corresponding term is bibliotheca.”

~Online Dictionary of Library and Information Science (ODLIS)

Ancient Rome is credited for the invention of the first libraries that were open to the “public,” conceived by Julius Caesar and created under Roman soldier and historian Asinius Pollio, built as shrines of dominance in an effort to outshine Alexandria and all preceding libraries. As the book The Library reminds us, “we have to be careful with these phrases (‘open to the public’): authors… were almost by definition members of the elite, and the public they had in mind was composed of people like themselves.”

Such is true for much of library history through the ages. For thousands of years, most libraries did not exist for the benefit of any public; they were impressive structures that housed the personal collections of emperors and noblemen, for intellectual resources or personal interests, and symbols of power or vanity. They were vulnerable to owners’ whims, censorship, or to neglect, wars, or disasters.

In addition, before the invention of Johannes Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press in 1439, the copying of texts was completed by hand by scribes. Scribes were professional copyists, and they also served as latter-day secretaries for kings and noblemen. Their profession was essential to ancient cultures, in the preservation of religious texts, laws, and other forms of literature. And in ancient Rome, they were enslaved.

The early centuries AD through the fall of the Roman Empire (476 AD) also saw a gradual shift that would dramatically reshape the book: the transition of book form, from the scroll to the codex. The codex is the ancestor of the modern book, with pages bound at one edge alongside text formatted in columns, and writing recorded on both sides of sheets made of vellum, papyrus, or parchment.

It was this shift in form that established the book as we know it today, the hand-held, independent, and unplugged organic package that despite movements toward the digital, the cloud, social media reels, videos, or who-knows-what’s-next, is one of last remaining perfections of the world.

As an institution intended for the public good, the

Before we had online circulation systems, libraries used paperbased systems for everyday tasks. This required book card, book pockets (right), charging trays, and the “ca-chunk” sound of a library stamp. From the 1918 Library Supplies, Catalog no. L 1018, the Browne System suggested the use of a book card for every book checked out. The book card was inserted into a book pocket.

~From the Smithsonian’s Libraries and Archive blog

MATERIALS: THE BOOK

library as it exists today is a relatively new creation. In pre-Revolutionary War America, books were in short supply for anyone not wealthy; those in the lower or middle classes had little access to the written word. To remedy this, Benjamin Franklin co-founded the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731 with members of the Junto, a discussion group in colonial Pennsylvania. Theirs was a subscription library, and members donated books - many of them focused on religion and education - from their private collections, making them available to fellow members for free, and to non-members for a fee that was given back once the books were returned.

This model was imitated and evolved throughout the original thirteen colonies for a half-century, and by 1780, over fifty townships in New England had established a library.

The idea of a library functioning for the good of the general public has many origins. However, it is the Peterborough Town Library in New Hampshire, founded in 1833, that lays claim as the first taxsupported library in the United States. Many others followed suit. New York State passed legislation in 1835 that authorized state school districts to raise taxes in support of school libraries. And the Boston Public Library, founded in 1848, was the first free, publicly supported, big-city library in the world, and the first to build out space specifically for children.

Through the mid-nineteenth century, a “library movement” had firmly taken hold following a wave of progress - the belief in knowledge as a vital force, and the conviction that access to knowledge should be free. In the late century, New York State librarian Melvil Dewey - yes, that Dewey - founded the first institution for professional librarianship.

But, it was the influence and charity of wealthy industrialist Andrew Carnegie that had the single greatest impact on the public library as we know it today.

As a boy in the 1840s and ‘50s, young Andrew Carnegie believed that book-borrowing should be free. And “Years later,” as the Carnegie Corporation tells us, “Carnegie wrote that the ‘treasures of the world

The book is still the lifeblood of the living library. And from book selections and acquisitions to their delivery and distribution (D&D) to each branch, a book’s physical journey to the bookshelf is much the same as it’s been for centuries: hands-on and labor-intensive.

On the ground floor of the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, with a couple dozen staff members, it is Monique Williams and Celia Mason’s jobs to see to it that every book makes its journey, from arrival to its intended place on a bookshelf

at one of the 18 branches of the system, ready to be chosen by a reader. That means ensuring that each book is ordered, purchased, delivered, unpacked, sortedrepaired if necessary - cataloged, barcoded, jacketed, stamped, and labeled before the folks at the D&D loading docks pack up their trucks and head out to the branches.

“We’re talking thousands of books,” says Celia. “Our part comes almost last, before the books are ready to go out to the branches and be shelved.”

the scroll

the codex, aka the book

which books contain were opened to me at the right moment,’” and he was determined to make free library services available to all who needed and wanted them. Beginning in 1886, he used his personal fortune to establish free public libraries throughout America, and by his death he had built over 1,600 libraries in the United States.”

Under his charity, Carnegie paid for the physical buildings, but established a system wherein the community took over the the library’s collections and operating costs. He believed that a city could not progress without having a great library to serve its public: “a creation for and of the people, free and open to all.”

What we benefit from and what we contribute to, all

Celia is the manager of Material Services and Repairs. She and her team perform the meticulous work of physically preparing each book for their journey to each branch and shelf. Their work also includes maintaining existing materials: cleaning, repairing, and re-jacketing.

For the new arrivals, says Celia, “it takes about 30 seconds per book. We timed it out for the entire process. It takes a lot of time, and that’s if you’re cruising through one after the other.”

the wonders that make up the library - must originate somewhere. If the best things in life are free - like the programs, events, books, and librarian expertise of Memphis Public Libraries (and those definitely qualify as the “best things”) - then the fundamental question becomes - after Andrew Carnegie’s millions and philanthropists like him - who pays for the rest? The simplest answer is that public services are paid for by public funds, by tax dollars, by the giant contract we all live under that states, “We want a vibrant, safe, and effective community; here is what we are willing to give in order to make that a reality.” When we all benefit from strong infrastructure, smooth roads, functioning sewer systems, we see those public funds at work, understanding that it takes the mechanism of local government to make public services seem standard, ubiquitous, even banal at times.

As a division of city government, the Memphis Public Libraries have enjoyed strong support from city leadership. Significant library facility enhancements in Raleigh, Frayser, Orange Mound, and downtown at the Cossitt Library were launched during Mayor Jim Strickland’s administration, and this investment in our libraries has continued under Mayor Paul Young, a fervent evangelist for the power of the library. Their leadership has shown a deep understanding of the vital importance of a strong library system in providing essential services to a challenged community, and a trust in library staff to seek remedies to meet those challenges.

But by their nature, public dollars can only allow for so much. Memphis IS a vibrant place to live, but that lifeblood, that vibrancy, is often in reaction to the spreading thin of public funds that should make it all work. Director McCloy understands this. “Part of what makes Memphis Public Libraries unique is the fact that it’s Memphis. Necessity is the mother of invention. [Memphians survive] the poverty, health issues, no access, and no transportation. There’s a lot of ingenuity in being able to stay alive and thrive.”

Inventive ingenuity. Like so many things in the library system, the funding finds a way. The metro budget for Memphis Public Libraries is around 24 or 25

The public library “outranks any other one thing that a community can do to help its people.”

~Andrew Carnegie, “the Patron Saint of Libraries”

FUNDING

BEHIND THE STACKS

“The constant visitor, Main Children’s Room, 1914” by photographer Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940), is a still image of a young reader, probably the child of immigrants or first-generation Americans. Hine worked with the National Child Labor Committee from 1911 to 1918, and he is widely known for his unblinking images of often very young children subjected to child labor in factories and fields. Hines’ photos shocked legislators into developing child labor laws, which were finally passed with the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act.

Photo by Mark Fleischer; for a complete list of who’s who, see page 31

FUNDING

“One of the things that I love about [MPL] is that we don’t care about your politics. We don’t care about your religion. . . .We serve everybody.”

~Christine Weinreich

CENSORSHIP

million, according to Deputy Director Chris Marsalek. But “[the budget] fluctuates every year. There are increases in personnel...that are tied to pension... (payroll) tax, things like that, that we have no control over. But again, there’s only so much funding.”

Memphians might be surprised to know how much of that budget goes directly to books and materials. According to Monique Williams, it’s roughly $790,000 per year. Some people think the library must get their books for free, since after all, we aren’t charging anything for them. Right, Ms. Williams? “(Sarcastically) That would be lovely…”

Anyone can walk into a bookstore and buy a new hardback bestseller for around $25, but not your local library. Libraries rely on distributors, contracts, and warehouses to furnish their collections, and they are bound by the parameters of those contracts. And while outright cost for most books is comparable to the public cost of those books, the same cannot be said for other types of materials provided by the library.

The public perception when it comes to ebooks and audiobooks is often the most skewed. “If there’s not a special sale, most of our ebooks cost between … $49.99 to about $69.99. Audiobooks start at $79.99 per copy,” says Monique. “Most of those are metered access, meaning we only get to keep them for a year or two years based on the contracts. When we buy a physical book we get to keep it until it no longer serves the community or it falls apart. Yet the far more expensive ebooks and audiobooks are never ours to keep.”

That budget also includes subscriptions for online databases, serials and periodicals, magazines, newspapers. Less than a million dollars a year for more than just your favorite John Grisham novel and newest Oprah Book Club pick.

“We’re also supplementing our city operating dollars,” according to Monique. Walk into any branch of the Memphis Public Libraries and you will know immediately that it’s more than personnel, books, and magazines. The life-affirming work requires real dollars. If the City of Memphis and the MPL staff are one leg of a three-legged stool that holds up the library system, the other two are the Friends of the Library and the Memphis Library Foundation. Monique continues, “We always talk about how much the Friends and the Foundation do for us, because we couldn’t really do it without them.”

Two private, nonprofit entities support Memphis Public Libraries. The Friends are a collection of volunteers who believe in what libraries can do and work year-round to fund it primarily through book sales and memberships. Christine Weinreich is the Director of the Memphis Library Foundation and explains the MLF as “the fundraising arm of the

Library Timeline

April 6, 1888

Tennessee Grants Charter for Cossitt Library.

Frederick Cossitt’s daughters each donated $25,000 in his honor to establish a public library in Memphis.

State grants charter 1889, calling for a free public library, public art gallery, music hall, lecture room, and museum.

library” with a charter that allows them to have only one beneficiary: Memphis Public Libraries. Christine states, “In the mid 90s, a group of philanthropicallyminded Memphians came together to form the Library Foundation because they really felt it was important to have a world class Central library. It wasn’t until after [the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library] was built and they actually had excess money, that they decided to initiate the endowment and move forward from there as an ongoing resource to support the library.” Enhancements like Cloud901, Teen Innovation Centers at neighborhood branches, special collections, and every day programs are part of the Memphis Library Foundation’s goal. Weinreich continues, “the primary role day to day with MPL is to identify funding resources for the programs that library staff want to be able to implement and library leadership think are priorities.”

Even an institution so thoroughly essential to its community and loved by its patrons has its share of challenges. Some communities in the states of Texas, Montana, Missouri, Utah, Florida, and Arkansas, are even cutting ties with the American Library Association, the national organization that is dedicated to ensuring access to information through libraries and opposing censorship.Two challenges in particular, the rising numbers of book challenges and the trend towards privatizing libraries, are sweeping across the United States.

Privatization is shifting the control of a library from the public sphere to a private company. Local politicians use tax dollars to pay a business entity to run the library, which can mean that factors like political agendas and the “bottom line” influence day to day operating decisions.

Privatization can result in a couple of outcomes. The library becomes more like a business in terms of function and policy, and some of the unique selling points that most public libraries have are often muted or done away with completely. This can include access to an innumerable and diverse collection, a wide array of community programs and resources, transparency on spending and tax dollars, public contribution to collections and policies, and the feel of being ‘The Third Place.’

One might argue in terms of pros and cons when making the decision to privatize a local library. For example, a pro for the financial stakeholders of a privatized library is that it can cost less to maintain it. Financial stakeholders have control over the budget for materials and services that their library provides and can choose when to curb costs. They could slim down the budget for new books, eliminate funding for library programs, and even offer smaller salaries to their workers. The cons of privatizing often fall on

From DIG Memphis, and G.Wayne Dowdy’s Hidden History of Memphis

April 12, 1893

Cossitt Library opens at 33 S. Front Street

Mell Nunnally serves as the first director of Cossitt Library. Serving until 1898

September 1, 1898

Charles Dutton Johnston named library director; Johnston largely responsible for the Tennessee General Assembly passing a law setting aside a percentage of Memphis property tax revenue for library services.

1903. Cossitt establishes first of its branches for African Americans, opening a library within LeMoyne Institute.

Above: Christine Weinreich, center-left, with author Avery Cunningham, right, and Library Foundation board member Crady Schneider

the employees and patrons. Librarians working in a privatized library are typically paid less than their public counterparts, and the library, working on a slimmer budget, can put out less for the public in terms of programs and resources.

Of course, another selling point of privatization for some is the ability to limit and control the collection on their shelves. Book-banning has been around as long as there have been books, but the more recent trends in American politics have added fuel to fires we haven’t seen since the McCarthy era. And banning becomes simpler to do in a privatized library. Along with politicians, whatever private company manages the library decides what goes into it. Any books that don’t fit the company’s ideals or standards can be quietly pulled from shelves under the guise of weeding books due to relevance, correctness, or lack of public desire for them. With the rising politicization of diversity and inclusion, this can mean that books with certain religious content, political beliefs or information, LGBTQIA+ content, history of marginalized communities, critical race theory, or anything deemed ‘inappropriate’ or ‘offensive’ by the operator can be censored and, therefore, unavailable to that library’s community. Across the country, this very thing is happening in school, privatized, and even public libraries thanks to new state laws.

In Memphis and Shelby County, it is no different. Christine Weinreich says, “I think sometimes [in Memphis], we feel like we’re insulated from these kinds of things that happen all over the country… that’s foolish for us to draw any comfort from that.”

Whatever this historic wave of book challenges and privatization brings, Memphis Public Libraries and its supporters have a very clear stance. For Keenon McCloy, the library is not about profit or controlling which books are available for its patrons. “For me, it’s the people,” she says. “I don’t believe in censorship, you know, as a generalization…we don’t want to be censored…we’ve been clear since, well, since I got here. Banning books is not something we’re going to do…People deserve to be able to take in whatever learning or anything they’re interested in. I might not share your taste in it, or whatever, but that’s not for me to judge. It’s all personal.” Chris Marszalek agrees, saying, “I think the public library knows the community better than anyone…I don’t know enough about the operation of a private company running a library, but I just don’t imagine a business model being about meeting all the needs of the community in the way that [Memphis Public Libraries does].”

No matter the political climate, MPL upholds the same standards. Christine of Memphis Library Foundation puts it this way: “One of the things that I love about [MPL] is that we don’t care about your politics. We don’t care about your religion. We don’t care about your ethnicity or whether you are

1906. Children’s Department Opens at Cossitt; converted the Women’s Reading Room into a space specifically for younger readers.

more generally conservative or liberal in any way, socially–any of it. We serve everybody. And I think that message, if you have a one-on-one conversation with people, can really resonate with anyone.”

After all, the public library is just that: public. A reflection of its community. A reflection of you. No matter the patrons, if they walk into their public library and can’t find anything that resonates, affirms, or provides for them, then what is the point? Why do their tax dollars go to this? How does it serve them? Memphis Public Libraries strive to be places where an individual can go and see themselves mirrored not only in the collection, but also in the programming, the librarians, and anything that can be found under their local ‘START HERE’ sign.

Everyone has stories from their first experience at the library. They can close their eyes, go back in time and conjure up the scent of well-worn books and a vision of endless shelves spanning out in front of them. They often remember how old they were when they first passed through library doors, what they did, and how often they went.

Director Keenon McCloy’s memories of the Main Library and her daily visits are still strong. She remembers that “The librarians were really intentional about trying to teach us something or tell us something that we might not have known.” Her first discoveries included the albums in the listening room. “The vinyl was so great,” she says, “Like, ‘you’re going to let me touch this turntable?’ And the librarians were like ‘yes, if you’re responsible with it.’ It was one of those things I had never considered to be in a library.”

For Christine Weinreich, it was growing up in Flint, Michigan. “We would go to the downtown library, which was a big one…the oddest formative memory of my childhood in a library was microfiche…looking at old newspapers and things on microfiche was so fun.”

Past experiences stick with people. They’re steeped in people’s brains–the good, the bad, and the ugly. They can influence what people do in the future, how they behave, and what they do and don’t like. For most, the library is a good experience. It is discovery, safety, and access to a greater world. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t change–that it shouldn’t change. For Keenon, “[The library] is a living document in and of itself. The library continues to evolve.” And it does. Despite similar notes of nostalgia and experiences that all library lovers seem to share, it does change.

The evolution of a library starts and ends with the patron.

The public library of many childhoods, as everyone can guess, gave the public access to shelves of books, librarians with their vast knowledge, and any

THIRD PLACES

“[The library] is a living document in and of itself. The library continues to evolve.”

~Keenon McCloy

1939. Opening of Vance Avenue branch for African Americans

1951. Highland Branch opens. 1955. New Main Branch at Peabody & McLean opens

October 13, 1960. Desegregation of all public libraries

1973. City and county governments created the Memphis/Shelby County Public Library system.

1975. Library Information Center (LINC) was established

2001. Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library opened

Above: Keenon McCloy (photo, J.Howard)

“MPL’s branches are in the city in some pretty high poverty areas and where there aren’t many other resources. [Part of what we provide] is something as simple as a clean bathroom or a water fountain, simple things like that…There’s a lot that can be said for those things.”

~Chris Marsalek

technology required to peruse them. Then it evolved, bringing in newer technology, library programs and activities, resources, and more. It’s evolved in ways that people haven’t even noticed.

For one, MPL has gotten good at providing the simple things. Explained by Chris Marsalek, “[MPL’s] branches are in the city in some pretty high poverty areas and where there aren’t many other resources. [Part of what we provide] is something as simple as a clean bathroom or a water fountain, simple things like that…How many spaces are there…where [you can] come sit down in an air conditioned space? There’s a lot that can be said for those things that people don’t think of when they think of a public library...A lot of people think of libraries as a place where you can come get a book. But for other people, it’s all these other things.”

Keenon adds that, “[Growing up, the librarians] were very into shushing me.” She loved the library, but that was one of the experiences she didn’t like. When she became Director of Memphis Public Libraries, she says, “I was committed to not having a library like that...I didn’t want anyone shushing anybody, because you’re kind of taking away their voice...I’m a loud person anyway...“ Memphis Public Libraries, as it is now, is not one for shushing. Through Keenon’s past experiences and surely those of the librarians in MPL’s employ, the library became a place where you could not only read, but you could also speak.

Similarly, leadership has opened the libraries to a more creative approach in recent years. Chris Marszalek shares, “The opening of CLOUD901 (the innovative teen space in the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library) was a major change for how we operate. [When we] started trying to hire people, we realized quickly that we needed a different type of skill. One job description doesn’t really describe what’s going to happen in the sound studio or in a maker space area...The opening of CLOUD901 made us think, as an organization, differently about all our positions…Obviously, [a Master’s in Library Science] is a very important degree…but we focused more on ‘what skill are you going to bring?’ ‘What background do you have that will help us move forward?’” For all of Memphis Public Libraries’ employees, Keenon sums up, “Program to your passions.” The result? Any employee with an idea, a passion, can create a program. Employees from all different walks of life with different experiences, abilities, and passions are making programs for their communities, expanding what the library offers and who it offers it to.

The Memphis Public Libraries is unique in that

aspect, and also with its two National Medals for Museum and Library Service. “I think Memphians have something special,” Keenon says. “Necessity is the mother of invention. [Memphians survive] the poverty, health issues, no access, and no transportation. There’s a lot of ingenuity in being able to stay alive and thrive.”

That ingenuity is reflected directly in the library’s day to day programming, in customers’ book requests, and in their expressions of their needs and passions.

All of this molds the library, forming and evolving it into something useful to every customer. And as members of their customers’ communities, librarians play a critical role, bringing their skills and passions into their work. Librarians get to know each customer and what they need when they walk through the library’s doors. If one comes in wanting to read a certain book that’s not in the collection, their request makes its way to Collection Development and into consideration for the library’s shelves.

The pandemic is a perfect example of the library’s adapting to the customers’ needs. Cloistered away in their homes, people couldn’t come to their local branch to check out books. But a bookworm’s appetite doesn’t cease, especially in the boredom of isolation. Monique in Collection Development recalled that, “[MPL’s] ebook collection was not heavily poured into when I first moved here…it wasn’t heavily used…the pandemic actually boosted the usage of [ebooks]...more and more people have started using [ebooks]. So [Collection Development has] poured more of the budgets into the Overdrive and ebook collection, because [people started using them]...now that more people are getting into it, their collection has grown.”

The Memphis Public Libraries’ responses to the public’s changing needs during the pandemic marked another of the adaptations discussed in Pettegree and der Weduwen’s The Library, A Fragile History: “libraries only last as long as people find them useful.“ In an evolution that started when Roman leaders opened their library doors to their public, that continued with Benjamin Franklin’s lending libraries and Andrew Carnegie’s free public libraries, libraries must adapt to survive, and to serve. And if a library is doing it right, the more a customer, patron, reader, visitor, and refuge-seeker uses the library, the more it should reflect them and connect them, to their community, to themselves, to their world. The more we use it, the more we should see ourselves.

We’ve asked How does the library work? It works, because at its best, it is us.

Above: Keenon McCloy, left, with Chris Marsalek (photo, J.Howard)

INTERVIEW WITH A LIBRARIAN: MERLYNN CLEMONS

Merlynn Clemons, a fixture in the Cossitt Library since 2008, is a perfect representation of the variety of career backgrounds and skill sets the librarians of Memphis Public Libraries come from.

In the summer of 2024, Emma Pennington of the Memphis Library Foundation sat down with Merlynn in the conference room of the historic Cossitt Library for a candid conversation about her career as a librarian, and what drives her efforts to help people in need.

Emma: What was your background prior to working at MPL?

Merlynn: “I was employed with Housing and Community Development, so I felt [that Cossitt] could be a good fit for me because of my skills and background and working with the organization that provided service to the homeless…I was hired as the Coordinator of neighborhoods…I started off assigned to Orange Mound, Lauderdale, South Memphis, Binghampton, and West Junction.”

Emma: What did that lead into?

Merlynn: “Because of my working and being in the neighborhoods, I was given an opportunity to work as a consultant to develop a social service plan…we established the Department of Supportive Services, and I was given the opportunity to become manager.”

She has also worked with the Memphis Housing Authority as Social Services Supervisor, Regional One Medical Center as Director of Community Outreach, and in various organizations establishing programs to help youth, families, and the [unhoused]. She worked in one such organization, Memphis Urban League, establishing a program for high school dropouts:

Merlynn: “We worked with various construction trades to identify job opportunities for not only boys, but for young ladies to obtain a trade and at the same time acquire their GED diploma and become self-sufficient.”

Emma: Why did you choose to work at the Cossitt branch?

Merlynn: “I accepted the [library] position, thinking that I would only be here for a few years…I was asked which branch that I’d want to work in, and I chose [Cossitt] immediately because of my background in housing and working downtown.”

Emma: So, how do you feel your career background informs your work here at the library?

Merlynn: “…I have had a working relationship, I guess, between housing and job training, youth programs, and assisting adults. [That] ties into the different things that goes on within the library itself, which is exposure to different career opportunities, health care, and resources…[My social work background] really goes hand in hand with [my library career]. [It] helped me to be able to relate to the library customers…”

Merlynn continued to say how her career background draws her to the unhoused population that takes shelter in the library during open hours.

Merlynn: “It’s an open, public facility. And if you think about it’s the only place downtown for people to actually go up to during the day...[People who are unhoused] stick to certain library branches…I believe [they know] how they are treated once they approach the door whether they are welcome.“

ESSAY: UNLIMITED OPPORTUNITIES FOR ALL PASSIONS

There are no bandwidth limitations on possibilities at the Memphis Public Libraries. Restraints are not meant to be placed on the mind. So, imagine how powerful we are when many minds come together for the greater good of our community.

The Memphis Public Libraries system is not just the minds of the close to 300 people who are employed by the City of Memphis working in some capacity at our 18 locations. It’s the collective minds of more than 621,000 individuals who reside in the city and yes— that includes you.

When thinking about what makes libraries work, many consider budgets, mayors, city council members, check-out clerks, and program managers. But the most important element of that equation is you. We never forget that. We do what we do because of you. We exist to help make the lives of every member of this community better, and the best way to meet that objective is by listening to you. That is why we are encouraging you to share what you want and need from your libraries.

Let me tell you about some of the things we’re doing, a few of which you may have already read about in this issue. We are going into communities to meet people where they are and providing library services through outreach. We are assisting with literacy support for preschool-aged children. We are creating STEM programs and educational opportunities for our elementary-aged children. We are offering mental health awareness programs to our teenagers.

We are gathering numerous agencies in the city and surrounding areas concerned with Memphis’ high number of Opportunity Youth— youth between the ages of 16 and 24 who are not in school or working— to come together to talk face to face with our youth and decrease those numbers. We are engaging our seniors in interactive activities that provide cognitive support and connections to others. We are committed to elevating the community in areas of financial literacy. We partner with businesses, schools, daycares, and nonprofit organizations all around the city to cater to the needs of specific neighborhoods.

And here are two startling statements:

First, I could take up this entire issue of MPL UNBOUND just by listing things we are doing, and would still need more space to include it all.

Second, as a library system we still have room to do more. Which is why we are now working with a public relations team to help us find out how we can get boys, who research suggests use libraries less than girls, more engaged. We are also working to find out what you want to see on our television and radio stations.

You, you, YOU! Yes, you are our focus, our purpose, and our lifeblood.

Who am I? I’m just one of the many people at MPL who work to make sure that the bandwidth of possibilities is constantly expanding for you.

-Jamie Griffin, Memphis Public

Libraries Staff Member

With Her Grandmother’s Scrapbook and Recordings, Lori Johnson Retraces History and Her Black Roots in Old Whitehaven

by Lori Johnson MaDear’s Scrapbook

For years, I thought I was the sole oddball in my family possessed by the compulsion to cut, paste, and save all manner of memorabilia. If not for an impromptu visit to my Aunt Doris’s house, I might never have known otherwise.

Upon my arrival that day, I found my aunt sorting through some of her deceased mother’s personal items.

Our “MaDear”— Ethel V. Johnson, my grandmother— was born in 1912, died in Memphis, Tennessee in August of 1999, and I’m guessing this particular visit to my aunt’s home took place shortly thereafter. In any case, when Aunt Doris asked if I wanted the large, tattered, brown album

that had once belonged to MaDear but was now destined for the garbage pile, I was quick to say, “Yes!” without even knowing what the album contained.

Cautiously peering inside the fragile relic, I was thrilled to discover that the pages, though faded and crumbling, were filled with an assortment of items, including newspaper articles, greeting cards, recipes, death notices, funeral programs, and wedding keepsakes. I would never have guessed that my MaDear, of all people, had been interested in collecting and preserving such odds and ends. But judging from the earliest of the decipherable dates in the oversized album, scrapbooking held my grandmother’s attention and interest for nearly thirty years.

Born black and female in the rural South of 1912, Ethel V. Hunter married her childhood sweetheart, Bill Larther

Johnson, when she was just eighteen. Their union lasted nearly sixty years and was blessed with five children. For most of her life, MaDear lived in “Johnson Subdivision,” a rural enclave in southwest Memphis that’s located less than a ten-minute drive from Elvis Presley’s Graceland. Marked by dirt and gravel roads, overgrown brush, foul-smelling ditches, and simple wood-frame homes, “Johnson Sub” seemed perpetually trapped in a bygone era for more years than not, especially given the paved, well-lit streets, manicured lawns, and stately brick homes of so many other neighborhoods bordering Graceland.

From what I gather, my grandmother was a bit of a hellion in her youth—brash, opinionated, and incredibly headstrong. But the grandmother I knew—a plump, bespectacled woman with thin graying hair that just barely held a curl—wasn’t one to raise her voice, except when she was cutting loose with the choir at Old Nonconnah Missionary Baptist Church, or fussing at my poor granddaddy, or keeling over with laughter, which she did on a fairly regular basis.

My grandmother’s keen sense of humor and eye for the absurd spilled over in nearly every tale she told. Like a harmless Pied Piper, she owned the ability to hold an audience captive with both her words and the musical ebb and flow of her voice. No doubt my MaDear’s lap is where I first fell in love with the art of storytelling, where I first

The Emmett Till Murder Trial

One event in particular from 1955 that clearly seized MaDear’s interest was the slaying of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. While visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, for the summer, Till, a Chicago native, was kidnapped and murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman. The white men who murdered the child were summarily tried and found not guilty, though they later admitted to the crime. MaDear’s album includes a number of detailed newspaper articles and photographs about the lynching, the trial, and the individuals involved. Given the number of articles about the incident and the fact that I’ve been unable to identify anything in the album dated prior to 1955, I can’t help but wonder if Till’s murder is what originally sparked my grandmother’s interest in assembling a scrapbook.

heard words like “chill’un” and “chill’ren,” the place where I first reveled in the delectable thrill and wonder of Southern black expressions like “Chile, sho’nuff?” and “Girl, what you say?”

Given my grandmother’s love of the lighthearted, I would have expected her scrapbook to lean in that direction. But only the barest hint of MaDear’s wit is evident amid the hodgepodge of saved items. Most of the album’s contents are of a straightforward and serious nature and, oddly enough, primarily consist of clippings from two Memphis newspapers,The Commercial Appeal and the Memphis Press-Scimitar. These newspaper articles — at least the ones that are still relatively legible and intact — suggest that my grandmother either started the scrapbook in the mid-1950s or else began cutting and saving articles from that period only to paste them into the album at some later date.

A decade or so before MaDear’s death, I conducted a series of taped interviews with her on our family’s history. Had I known then about her scrapbook, I would have surely asked about its contents. Her collection of articles on the murder of Emmett Till would have ranked high on my list of inquiries. What had driven her to clip and save so many news stories about the incident? Had she noticed that, in their coverage of the event, the PressScimitar had consistently written the word “negro” with a

lower-case “n” rather than “Negro,” like The Commercial Appeal? Given that she grew up in the South during a time when lynchings weren’t uncommon, had she ever known anyone who’d been a victim of a lynching? Or, dare I ask, had she ever witnessed one? Finally, why hadn’t she clipped and saved articles about any of the other major civil-rights events that occurred between the mid-1950s and mid-1980s?

Even though MaDear’s scrapbook includes a number of news clippings about sit-ins, boycotts, segregation policies, and racially motivated acts of violence, most if not all of the news stories are specific to the tri-state area of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Why, given my grandmother’s obvious interest in the struggles of black folks, are there no articles in her album about Rosa Parks and the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott? What about 1957’s Little Rock Nine, or the March on Washington in 1963, or the bombing that same year of the church in Birmingham that led to the deaths of four little girls? Not even Lyndon B. Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 warranted a mention. Most perplexing of all is the absence of a single article pertaining to the two most significant local events of my grandmother’s lifetime: the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike of 1968 and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Lorraine Motel.

I may never uncover the reasons behind MaDear’s decision to include certain items in her scrapbook while omitting others. My guess is that she was simply overwhelmed (emotionally and otherwise) by the sheer number of racially charged and life-altering events occurring during that period. But as puzzled as I am by many of my grandmother’s choices, I am grateful that she at least attempted to preserve some of her memories and interests — a strange yet oddly satisfying compulsion that neither of us knew the other owned.

Having access to an album full of almost three decades’ worth of my grandmother’s memories has compelled me to consider what might perplex some future grand- or great-grandchild of mine on encountering my scrapbook. These days when I’m working on a scrapbooking project, I make more of an effort to provide bits of information and explanations. I identify people and places, and I include personal commentary about the significance of the relics and memories I’ve chosen to preserve on acid-free paper between the covers of a sturdy faux-leather binder.

I thought I knew my grandmother. My exposure to her scrapbook revealed just how much I didn’t know about aspects of her personality and the depth of some of her interests. I will likely forever be haunted by those questions that I never even knew to ask. Still, every time I flip through the brittle pages of MaDear’s scrapbook, I feel as though I’ve been bequeathed a precious gift; one lovingly crafted by my grandmother’s hands and ultimately intended just for me.

For me, the collection of articles on the murder are all the more significant because MaDear’s home is where I, as a child, first learned the gruesome details of the tragedy. The year was 1970-something and I was barely a preteen when, while seated in my grandmother’s living room and happily thumbing through a basket of old Jet magazines, I happened upon both the story and the horrific photo of Emmett Till’s bloated and mutilated body, which had been displayed in an open casket

. . . .

at his grief-stricken mother’s request. So grotesque and inhuman was the image to me that I initially couldn’t believe it was real. Surely this was a mannequin of some sort and not an actual child’s body. Though slow to sink in, the truth seared a permanent impression into the dark recesses of my mind. Even now, when I close my eyes, the image is one I can readily conjure. Moreover, I believe my own obsession with black history has its origins in that jarring moment of discovery.

Above and on preceding page: Some of MaDear’s clippings of the 1955 Emmett Till trial from The Commercial Appeal and Memphis Press-Scimitar.

Retracing My Black Roots in Old Whitehaven

Part I: McCorkles, Cannons & Finding Celia

February 18, 1989, marked the day that I first sat down with MaDear, and I recorded our conversations about our family’s origins and our historical ties to Johnson Subdivision (aka Johnson Sub), a small Black community located in the southern portion of Memphis, TN that was founded by the formerly enslaved and their offspring. While those recordings with my MaDear contain tidbits of information which, at the time, I found interesting, it wasn’t until years later that I would fully appreciate the degree to which they substantiate my family’s deep roots in the South Memphis community known as Whitehaven.

Consider the following for example:

“The baby was born and raised on McCorkle Place, right here on Raines . . . right behind the police station. That’s where we stayed in a house and that’s where the little boy was born.”

(Ethel V. Johnson “MaDear” 2/18/1989)

The “baby” being referred to in the interview excerpt was MaDear’s younger brother, Venter Hunter Junior, who died shortly after he was born. Her description of her brother’s passing is a fairly detailed and emotional account that she shared with me on more than one occasion. At the time of the tragedy, MaDear and her family were living on “McCorkle Place,” where her father Venter Sr, farmed three to five acres for the property’s owner, Joseph Harris McCorkle. What I didn’t know when my grandmother first told me the story was that the McCorkles were one of Whitehaven’s founding families. Anna Leigh McCorkle (daughter of Joseph Harris McCorkle) chronicled the community’s history in her 1967 book Tales of Old Whitehaven. It’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve confirmed via the Census available on Ancestry.com that not only did my relatives work on “The McCorkle Place’’ but in the Census of 1920, my then seven-year-old grandmother, and her entire family (parents, siblings, and grandparents) were practically living next door to then twenty-four-year-old Anna L. McCorkle and her family. Whether a clerical or reporting error, the surname of every member of MaDear’s household in the 1920 Census is incorrectly recorded as Hunter. While it is true that MaDear (Ethel), her sisters (Mamie and Alean) and her parents (Ruth and Venter) were all Hunters, the surname of the first two individuals listed in the household, MaDear’s grandparents (Charlie and Margett) was actually Cannon.

The presence of MaDear’s grandparents in the household is

Above: Our “MaDear,” Ethel V. Johnson, my grandmother

Above: Clippings from the Whitehaven Press and its 1963 series on the History of Whitehaven, written by Anna Leigh McCorkle. “Her ancestors were among the first settlers of Whitehaven.”

Right: 1920 Census of the United States reveals that the McCorkles lived a few doors down from the author’s family, and incorrectly records every member of MaDear’s household with the surname “Hunter” - MaDear’s grandparents’ surnames were “Cannon.”

significant for a few reasons, chief among them being the prominent role they played after the sudden death of Venter Junior. According to MaDear, her grandparents — Margett (pronounced and sometimes written as “Margaret”) and Charles “Charlie” Cannon — were the ones who helped wash and dress the dead infant. They were the ones who purchased the child’s casket, and placed it in the buggy for the somber ride to Old Nonconnah Missionary Baptist Church, where a little grave was dug and the family’s beloved was laid to rest.

While MaDear’s knowledge of her maternal lineage didn’t extend much beyond her grandparents, Charlie and Margett, quite a few of the other details she shared with me proved essential in both my ability to trace our family’s story even further back in time and confirming our place in Old Whitehaven’s history.

“Grandma was a Morgan.”

(Ethel V. Johnson “MaDear” 2/18/1989)

Understandably, MaDear sounded a bit uncertain when she first told me that she thought her grandmother had been born a Morgan. After all, at the time of our conversation in 1989, sixty-one years had passed since her grandmother’s death. But the longer MaDear talked, the more confident she became about that particular tidbit of information. Turns out, she was right. Prior to marriage, Margett Cannon was indeed Margett Morgan (aka Margaret Morgan), a fact confirmed by both census documents and her 1928 Tennessee death certificate, which recorded her own mother’s name as Celia Morgan.

Fifty-one-year-old Celia Morgan and several of her children, including a then seventeen-year-old Margett and her twentythree-year-old sister, Fanny (aka “Fannie,” the infamous aunt whose antics MaDear took delight in sharing with me) appear on the Federal Census of 1870 in Shelby County. In the 1870 Census, Celia’s occupation is listed as “housekeeper,” but a Shelby County Tennessee Agriculture Schedule for the same year indicates that she was also a farmer and

possibly a landowner. Celia Morgan either owned or “managed” a total of forty-five acres on which she kept livestock and raised corn as well as a bit of cotton. I can’t help but wonder how a fifty-one-year-old Black woman came to possess (or manage) a forty-five-acre farm assessed at $1400 (roughly $29,000 in today’s dollars) a mere five years after the end of slavery. Was she given the land by a previous owner, perhaps? Did she buy the land with her own personal funds? Or was she simply “managing” the land (or sharecropping) for a white landowner?

A far more remarkable aspect of Celia Morgan’s life, and one that indisputably links her to those founding families Anna McCorkle wrote about in Tales of Old Whitehaven is one I lucked upon while flipping through the pages of Edmondson Presbyterian Church, 1844-1931; Desoto County, Mississippi, a publication authored by David Ragland Davis. While I can’t recall what originally led me to the discovery of this resource, I do know that in the weeks prior to my move from Memphis in 2002, I spent a lot of time in the main branch of the public library researching my family’s history. The library’s “Memphis Room” is where I first stumbled upon the publication by Davis, which contains Edmondson Presbyterian Church’s records and registers.

Founded in 1844, Davis points out that the Presbyterian congregation was “first known as Pisgah, then Edmiston, then Edmondson” before its final incarnation as Whitehaven Presbyterian Church, located in Memphis, Tennessee. The original church (Pisgah) held services in a schoolhouse in DeSoto County, Mississippi. In 1847, the members, many of them of Scotch-Irish descent, chose another site for the church on property owned by William Edmiston and which allowed them to have a cemetery.

Anna McCorkle’s Tales of Old Whitehaven includes several references to Edmondson Church, the church’s cemetery, and various members of the congregation. Even though the church was founded in Desoto County, Mississippi, its relative proximity to Shelby County, Tennessee made it attractive to residents of both regions. Not only were McCorkle’s relatives among the founding

members of the old Edmondson church, but she also was a lifelong member of Whitehaven Presbyterian Church. In Tales of Old Whitehaven, McCorkle’s description of the church, erected in 1847, includes the following: “This building consisted of one room with a slave gallery in back. There were twenty-five members, five of whom were colored.”

Likewise, five “colored members” also appear in the timeline David Ragland Davis compiled from the church’s records. According to notes in his publication, by 1855 the Edmondson congregation consisted of fifty-eight white members and five colored members. An odd chill ran over me when I first discovered the existence of those “colored members” in the records compiled by Davis. Everything about them intrigued me. Who were they? What might have compelled them to join a predominantly white Presbyterian church in the South, particularly in the years prior to the onset of the Civil War? Is it possible that I’m related to one or more of the five? It didn’t take me long to confirm the latter.

The odd chill I’d felt earlier dramatically intensified as soon as I saw the name “Celia” in the Edmondson church records. In an instance, I knew it had to be her, my third great-grandmother, Celia Morgan. Her name appeared on a list of Edmondson members extracted from Session Minutes that were taken between 1844-1891. The complete entry in the Davis manuscript read:

1853 Celia Servant of Dr. Plunkett

The term “servant” was, no doubt, the church’s polite way of describing Celia’s status as an enslaved person who was in servitude to Dr. John Desire Plunkett. Some of the other enslaved individuals owned by Dr. Plunkett and listed as Edmondson church members include Eliza, William, Martha, and Martha Anne. Both Marthas and Celia also appear on an Edmondson Presbyterian Baptism list. According to the list, Celia, “a servant” of Dr. Plunkett’s was baptized in 1854, while both Marthas were baptized in 1857.

Several factors led me to conclude that the Celia named in the Edmondson Church records and my third great grandmother, Celia Morgan, are, in fact, one in the same. First, as previously mentioned, on Margett Cannon’s death certificate her mother’s name is recorded as Celia Morgan. Although, it is worth mentioning that the informant (George Morgan) made an error in his recording of Celia’s name. The certificate asks for the “maiden name of the mother” — a fact, perhaps, the informant either overlooked or didn’t know. Whatever the case, the error was one that ultimately proved beneficial in my search.

Second, when Margett’s younger brother Mose Morgan died in 1930, the informant (his wife, Lauretta Morgan) gave his mother’s maiden name on his death certificate as Celia Plunkett. The most logical explanation for the difference in surnames is that unlike the

informant who signed Margett’s death certificate, Lauretta either knew and/or understood that the form wanted the “maiden” or birth name of her husband’s mother. Plunkett was the name bestowed upon Celia either at birth or when she became one of Dr. Plunkett’s “servants,” while Morgan was the last name she took either after marriage or at the end of her servitude to Dr. Plunkett.

A third piece of evidence involves an old map featured in Tales of Old Whitehaven that includes the surnames of the early Whitehaven landowners and clearly shows that the Plunketts (spelled Plunket on the map) and the Morgans were neighbors with adjoining properties. The enslaved individuals owned by those two families more than likely crossed those property lines on a regular basis, which might explain how Celia Plunkett met and eventually had children with a man whose last name was Morgan.

I doubt if my grandmother knew much, if anything, about her great-grandmother Celia. Knowing my MaDear as I do, I suspect her reaction might have been an equal portion of shock and amusement on hearing all that I’ve uncovered. But I can’t help but wonder what MaDear would think about my contention that Celia very much wanted me to find her, a belief I’ve arrived at over time and based on a series of odd incidents.

PART II - Did I Find Celia or did Celia find me?

In the years prior to my move from Memphis, I became a mother. My son was born in 1996. When he was three, my husband and I began looking for a permanent place for our family to worship At some point during our search, and on what I thought was a whim, we visited Parkway Gardens, a Presbyterian Church with a predominantly African American congregation. The sense of peace and immediate sense of belonging we all felt both with the congregation and within the very walls of the building took me by surprise. It didn’t take more than a couple of visits to realize that our family had found a home in the church, which, at the time, was located on South Parkway East.

Prior to visiting Parkway Gardens, I wasn’t knowingly acquainted with any Black Presbyterians. My third great-grandmother’s membership at Edmondson Presbyterian Church couldn’t have factored into our decision to become Presbyterians or join that particular congregation in 2000, because I didn’t discover Celia’s connection to the church until early 2002.

2002 also marked the year our family moved, first to Beachwood, Ohio and later in 2006 to Charlotte, North Carolina. For years after those moves, my genealogy and family research took a backseat to other priorities and concerns. It’s only been in the last several years that I’ve resumed my research in earnest. In 2022, upon learning that an updated version of McCorkle’s Tales of Old Whitehaven was available through the Edmondson Cemetery Association, I set out to contact them. The association had been created to care for the cemetery at the site of the congregation’s former location in DeSoto County, Mississippi. From what I understood at the time, the Presbyterian congregation, which had begun in Mississippi under the name Pisgah, before later becoming Edmiston and then Edmondson was now Whitehaven Presbyterian Church and located on Shelby Drive in Memphis, Tennessee.

“Easy enough,” I thought. “I’ll just contact Whitehaven Presbyterian.” But despite several attempts, my Google search failed to produce a website, address, or a phone number for the church. Strangely enough, the first thing that did appear in my list of Google results was the church where my family and I were once members:Parkway Gardens Presbyterian. On reporting my findings to my husband, I said “Isn’t that odd? Wonder why that keeps showing up in my results?”

After conducting a brief internet search of his own, my husband offered me an explanation that replaced my furrowed-brow confusion with open-mouthed astonishment. In 2005, Whitehaven Presbyterian Church, a church with an older and predominantly white congregation sold their place of worship to . . . drum roll please . . . Parkway Gardens, the predominantly African American church

Above: 1870 U.S. Census, District 18 in the County of Shelby of Tennessee recorded Celia Morgan’s occupation as “Keeping house.”

Right: From the cover of the book Tales of Old Whitehaven, a plaque marks the Edmondson Presbyterian Church cemetary.

Above and upper-left: More clippings from the Whitehaven Press and its 1963 series on the History of Whitehaven, written by Anna Leigh McCorkle.

my family and I belonged to when we lived in Memphis! To put it more succinctly, Whitehaven Presbyterian Church’s old address on Shelby Drive is currently the home address of Parkway Gardens United Presbyterian Church.

Perhaps it is just a fluke that the Whitehaven Presbyterian congregation that once held services at the church located on Shelby Drive has historical ties to Edmondson Presbyterian Church, the same church where my third greatgrandmother, Celia, was listed as a member in 1853. And likewise, perhaps it’s just by chance that the congregation that currently worships at that same church located on Shelby Drive has historical ties to Parkway Gardens Presbyterian, the church my family and I joined in 2000. But really, what are the odds that Celia and I would be connected, not just through a shared faith, but through an actual place of worship as well as a sort of symbolic passingof-the-torch between those two congregations?

Still, it would be foolish of me not to acknowledge that, given Celia’s status as one of Dr. Plunkett’s enslaved servants, odds are high that her decision to join Edmondson was done more at his behest than her own free will. While I can only speculate as far as Celia’s true feelings about her church membership, I’d like to think she’d take pride in the progress that many of her descendants have made since 1853, when she was first relegated to a pew in Edmondson’s slave gallery. Perhaps, rather than coincidence, it is simply poetic justice that a woman, who was once owned by a doctor, will soon have a fourth great-grandson who has earned the right to wear a “Dr.” in front of his name — the same fourth great-grand (my son, Aaron L. Morris) who, as a little boy, joined Parkway Gardens Presbyterian with his parents in 2000.

I am claiming David Carnes Park as yet another nod and wink, if not an outright nudge from Celia. In 2019, the park, previously known as Whitehaven Park, was redesigned with funds from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee. According to Google Maps, the distance between the park and the church on Shelby Drive is one minute by car and six minutes on foot. So, the park and the church are practically neighbors, in much the same manner as the McCorkles and my MaDear’s family were in 1920. Moreover, according to my research, David Carnes and Celia Plunkett Morgan are RELATED through David’s mother, Louisa Morgan Carnes.

While I have yet to determine the specifics of the relationship between Louisa and Celia, I do know that their connection is tied to Fannie Morgan Tate. Not only was Fannie one of Celia’s daughters, but she was also the cantankerous great-aunt who starred in many of the amusing tales my MaDear shared with me in our discussions about our family’s history. The woman MaDear knew as “Aunt Fannie” was also someone David Carnes considered an aunt. In the Federal Census of 1930 for Shelby County, Tennessee, an eighty-three-year-old woman by the name of Fannie Tait (spelled

Tate by the census) is listed as a member of David’s household and described as his aunt. David Carnes was also named as the primary informant on Fannie Tate’s death certificate. In 1935, MaDear’s Aunt Fannie tragically perished in a house fire, an event MaDear relayed to me during one of our recorded conversations. The 1935 State of Tennessee death certificate signed by David Carnes includes the following pertinent and telling detail about Fannie’s demise: “This woman was accidentally burned to death in her house.”

On a visit to Memphis in October of 2022, I stopped by the History Department at the Benjamin L. Hooks Library in hopes of having another look at Edmondson Presbyterian Church, 1844-1931; Desoto County, Mississippi, the publication where I’d first found evidence of Celia’s affiliation with the church. After all, twenty years had passed since I’d read and made notes on the material while seated at a table in the Memphis Public Library’s Memphis and Shelby County Room.

After conducting a computer search for the reference item and failing to locate a copy in the Memphis and Shelby County Room, Verjeana Hunt, the History Department’s Public Services Supervisor, led me to the open stacks where a number of titles associated with genealogy and family history are housed. She explained that it might take a few minutes to find the reference material since library users sometimes mis-shelve items. Ms. Hunt and I chatted while she meandered down the aisle, searching for the spot on shelves which should have held the publication. She’d stopped several feet away from me and was in the process of visually assessing some of the books and individually bound volumes, when I casually reached up and pulled a title from the shelf directly in front of me.

Nothing about the thin booklet I reached for stood out to me. Nothing more than curiosity about the kind of family histories I might find in the section drove my actions and guided my hand that day . . . at least, that’s initially what I thought. Now, I’m not so certain; sure enough, the publication I pulled from the shelf was the exact one I’d been looking for: Edmondson Presbyterian Church, 1844-1931; Desoto County, Mississippi, edited by David Ragland Davis.

As improbable as it may sound, a part of me truly believes my third great-grandmother, an enslaved Black woman by the name of Celia Plunkett Morgan, has been eager for me to find her. Indeed, for thirty plus years, starting back in 1989 when I first sat down with my MaDear and asked her to tell me what she knew about our family’s history, Celia has quietly assisted in my quest, dropping hints, guiding my steps, and leaving a trail of verifiable documents for me to follow.

No doubt, I’m far from knowing everything there is to know about Celia or our extended family. But thus far, with her and my MaDear’s help, I think I’ve done a fairly decent job of establishing our roots in Old Whitehaven.

Above: 1928 death certificate for Margaret Cannon; maiden name of mother is listed as Celia Morgan

1935 death certificate for MaDear’s Aunt Fannie. Under cause of death, it reads “This woman accidentally burned to death in her house - 724 Walker Avenue”

The author, Lori Johnson, at her graduation with MaDear and her Granddaddy

David Carnes Park

Books Live On to Serve: Thanks to the Friends, Donated Books Find New Lives and Provide Important Funding Resources for Library Programs

Above and Below: Book lovers’ dreams. Thousands of books make their way through the halls, shelves, and carts of the Friends’ groundfloor spaces thanks to volunteers who follow their passions, gently handling, sorting, cleaning, and cataloging books for resale.

Bill shows off a rare 1st edition of a hardcover, Wings, Fur & Shot, published in 1936

VISUALS

ALCHEMY: the third part of MerriamWebster’s definition calls it “the discovery of a means of indefinitely prolonging life.”

For book lovers, to purchase a gentlyused book (as the Second Editions Bookstore says) is just that, to prolong its life. To those who love these treasures of past lives, nothing quite matches the feelings of comfort, discovery, nostaglia, romance, and curiosity that these volumes arouse. Who owned it, we may wonder. Who read it, made notes in its margins, highlighted its passages, turned its pages?

For the Friends of the Library, these donated tomes meet a more literal interpretation of alchemy, by turning their materials into gold once they are sold, transformed to real dollars as one of the sustaining funding streams that support library inventory and programs. Though a fraction of the overall library budget, their funds are quite substantial, well over $300,000 each year, and help library staff pay for community programs, materials, and other resources that directly benefit library-goers.

The stock in trade is of course the donations of books - vinyl records, cassette tapes CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, and magazines are donated as well - taken in by the boxful, handled, evaluated, categorized, cataloged, and finally sorted for library inventory, placement on the shelves of the Second Editions Bookstore, posted for sale on the Memphis Library Friends Amazon site, or made available for the bi-annual spring and fall Friends of the Library Book Sale.

And the hard work that keeps this machine working is delivered mostly by volunteers - booklovers themselves, often retired, laborers of love - handling, sorting, and finally recording these bound treasures, readying them for their next owners or readying them for the biannual Friends of the Library Book Sale, which occur in the spring and in the fall.

“We’re constantly working,” says Mary Aronov, who among other managing duties, is also the co-chair of the Friends Book Sale. “We get donations constantly, and we’re constantly processing them,” she says. “Some end up in our library, some end up in our book store, some we use to sell on Amazon if they are valuable, but many end up in our book sale.”

Ann Bailey-Mitchell, President of Friends of the Library, reminds us that the moneys raised by these sales are unrestricted. “They aren’t set aside for something specific; all that (library staff) has to do is have a need, and our funds can go to meet that need.”

Transforming materials into gold to meet greater needs: alchemy indeed.

Top: Hopeful books, magazines, CDs and vinyl records await their new fates in the boxes and bins of the Garden Level hallway outside the Friends sorting room. (J.Harmon photos)

Right: Bill in the Friends sorting room inspects donated books for their value and eventual sale in either the Second Editions Bookstore or on the Friends Amazon Marketplace (link below).

J.Harmon MF

SCAN ME

The Memphis and Shelby County Room is an area within the History/Social Sciences Department on the 4th floor of the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library where researchers may view items from the library’s archival and manuscript collections. These include historical records of people and families, maps, photographs, newspaper files, books, and music and video recordings. These materials document the development of the community, government, economy, culture, and heritage of Memphis & Shelby County, Tennessee.

Below: Elvis Sightings! One never knows what one might find in a drawer of the Memphis Periodical Index. This one references a Memphis Flyer article about an Elvis sighting at a “New Downtown Eatery,” in June, 1991, almost 14 years after his death in 1977.

EXPLORE THE PAST. INFORM THE PRESENT. SHAPE THE FUTURE. Dig Memphis is the digital archive of the Memphis Public Libraries. showcasing many of the treasures found in the Memphis and Shelby County Room. We have over 20,000 items in 30 different collections. Search the Dig Memphis database directly. Results can be filtered by type of material, subject, and more.

THE MEMPHIS ROOM

TALES FROM THE MEMPHIS & SHELBY COUNTY ROOM

By Wayne Dowdy

Your correspondent takes you on a strange and unusual tour of the Memphis and Shelby County Room where, out of the past, our ancestors speak again.

SOUTH MEMPHIS: “I LOVED IT”

In 2019 History staff member Scott Healy conducted an interview with library volunteer David Beckum. Beckum discussed life in South Memphis and Downtown during the 1950s.

I love South Memphis. Parkway, we lived right off of Parkway, and Parkway, its original concept - if I have this right - was it went from what was then called Riverside Park - now it’s Martin Luther King Riverside - from there all the way to Overton Park. That’s where the ‘parkway’ part came from. From park to park. South Parkway East, East Parkway South, West Parkway, North Parkway, Douglas Parkway. On and on….

Okay, so I loved it, I still love it. I wanna go back. There was such a feeling of safety. Always. In my house-? I don’t know everybody’s story but it was my story? It was a haven. It was a safe place even if you didn’t lock your door and stuck your head in the window to sleep. I remember when we didn’t have air conditioning. We had a huge window fan, and I liked it. And later on, we had an attic fan and wow. That was monstrous. I liked the noise of the window fan at night….

The real excitement came to go downtown. It was a very exciting place and there was the activities that went on downtown. There was the parades - that was a big deal - the Christmas parades, Cotton Carnival came. That was a big deal cuz they had parades every day and every night and a lot of times during the daytime. And they had bands that came from all over the United States to play. That was exciting. The big bands marching down the streets and the floats and then they used to come down the river. Got so sophisticated with these elaborate barges and you’d go and stand on the river bluff and watch them. This would be at night, so there were lights everywhere and they would come down, I think, in most cases to the foot of Monroe. Much fanfare, the king and the queen would get off and there was all that kind of stuff. All that was downtown.

And the big movie houses, the movie palaces of the time were all downtown. We had movie houses all over the neighborhood. There was the Royal over on Lauderdale, which is now and has

been for a long time the well-known Memphis Music People, the Mitchells. And they call it The Royal. That was a neighborhood movie house. Where Stax is now was a movie house that was called The Capital, with a tiny replica of the American capital over the marquis. That was on McLemore, maybe five miles, maybe not that much, west of that was the Joy movie house. That was the ones closest. Then later on was the ones down on Lauderdale called? When that neighborhood Longview Heights came in? There was one called the Rosewood. And that’s where you went on Saturdays. All day. For the shoot-em-ups. Everybody that went to school was there. You’d go back to school on Monday morning and everybody’s still excited about the movies. They were serials. That was a big topic when you got there on Monday mornings, people seemed excited about what they had seen. Well, all of ‘em were twenty cents or something like that and you’d just stay over and over. The big movies you went downtown. Warner Brothers, those stayed in the Palace. The Malco, aka The Orpheum, and the small one downtown on Main Street was called The Strand. Tiny little place. That was the big deal.

WILD STEER WREAKS HAVOC

On October 21st, 1875 an agitated Texas Steer broke from his pen in an East Memphis stockyard and ran like wildfire towards downtown. He moved so fast it was hard to avoid this wild animal barreling down the street. One unlucky man was tossed into the air, while two other people were run over trying to get away. The steer made it to the bluff then turned north onto Front Street and headed toward Jackson Avenue where he threw another person in the air before he was finally subdued.

NOTED ORATOR SPEAKS

Noted journalist and Republican Party activist Roscoe Simmons spoke to a large African American crowd at Second Congregational Church on February 15, 1915. Simmons told the audience that “In 50 years you have built 500,000 homes, come into control of 900,000 farms, amassed $700,000 in property, developed 40,000 businesses, prayed up 40,000 churches, developed schools valued at $20,000,000, presented education with 35,000 teachers, and 500 schools…”

There are millions of stories housed in the Memphis and Shelby County Room. These are some of them.

The Memphis Room, sunset (Harmon)

SCAN

ESSAYS: MY LIBRARY

The Library

By Robert A. Lanier

I am just old enough to remember the old, downtown, Cossitt Library. It was originally the Library. That is to say, it was the only public library in Memphis for many years. Presumably, it either satisfied Mr. Crump, or he had no interest in libraries. Otherwise, he would have had more created. It existed because of a gift for the purpose by a Yankee named Frederick Cossitt, and was constructed in the late 19th Century, when most people in the South were seemingly more occupied with lynching than with reading. It was housed in a reddish-stone, Romanesque building on Front Street which resembled the Bates Motel of the film “Psycho” on the inside. Of course, later there was a small ashlar stone library for African American citizens (which Mr. Crump no doubt had a hand in), but striking firemen let it burn down in the 1970s, when it had become somewhat obsolete, anyway.

As someone interested in history, both local and in the greater world, I was pleased when the Central Library, which had moved to Peabody and McLean in the 1950s, set up a “Memphis Room”. This room concentrated on our local history and archives. I first had the occasion to seek access to its photograph collection when I was working on a little book of local history. As the small photograph collection was tucked away somewhere in the bowels of the Memphis Room and was not cataloged, I did not know what was available for viewing. This created something of a problem, as the Memphis Room custodian required specification of the photographs — rather like the chicken or the egg conundrum, or maybe Catch 22 is more apt. In any event, the result was my ignorance of what was available. Later, when a photographer’s collection was donated, I was one of the volunteers asked to help organize it and label each picture. My selfish motive in volunteering was to actually see what the library was getting. Unfortunately, my ignorance of Library Science, or whatever it is properly called, rendered my efforts unwelcome. If I saw a photograph of a riverboat, I wrote “riverboat” on the label. That was unacceptable. I was told that it should be labeled something like, “Cityscape.” After a few examples of this conflict, I was sent packing. A few years later, Jim Johnson and Wayne Dowdy took charge, and the whole atmosphere changed. The History Department (including the Memphis Room) is now a valuable, welcoming asset to those of us interested in our region’s past. It has remained a repository to which one is happy to not only contribute, but also to utilize. And, not to put too fine a point on it, it is a good place to dispose of those items of local history, whether photographs or

records, which would otherwise wind up in the trash or a flea market in Dubuque. While I am not privy to the financial history of the Library, it does seem to have somehow received just sufficient funds from the City to maintain itself. Those of us antediluvians who tend to favor classical architecture in our public buildings (such as Nashville’s recent library) may quibble about our current library’s glass and steel Contemporary inspiration, but at least it somehow got enough money to get built.

My fascination with the past has led me to photograph (with highly inferior cameras and skill) old Memphis buildings and (most importantly) life on Beale Street. When I was in high school, and had come to realize what a unique asset Beale Street was to Memphis, some friends and I undertook to chronicle in photographs the visible life of the street. I can now safely—I hope—reveal that we misrepresented ourselves as student journalists of the Memphis State College “Tiger Rag” newspaper. I was equipped only with a five dollar camera made in postwar Japan (then synonymous with “junk”), with a Coke bottle quality lens. Through no skill on my part, the photos from that expedition proved to be of genuine historic value. Lacking a repository for this material, I have been able to bamboozle the Library into taking it off my hands. I flatter myself that, by virtue of its rarity if not its quality, it will prove useful to future historians and curiosity seekers.

With the virtual extinction of local newspapers, I’m not sure where future historians will get basic information about local history. There’s an old saying, “newspapers are the first draft of history,” or something like that. Apart from whatever is now stashed on the internet, or “the Cloud”, we still have the microfilm records at the Library, and I presume that they will provide sources for many years to come.

Memphis is also lucky to have the Mississippi Valley Collection at the University of Memphis. It is a valuable adjunct to the collection at the City’s Benjamin L. Hooks Public Library. Rhodes College and LeMoyne-Owen also no doubt have unique assets in their libraries.

In any event, the Library archivists have graciously accepted my modest donations without snickering. One donation I have made I have come to regret. Many years ago a law firm was clearing out their library detritus and offered me several volumes of Polk’s City Directory for Memphis. In my packrat zeal, I scooped up the books for 1940, 1920 and 1919. In a recent, misguided frenzy to prepare for a move from my home (happily postponed indefinitely), I gave them to the Library History Department, which badly needed more sound copies. I have since constantly bemoaned my loss of the convenient way to satisfy my curiosity about one historical thing or another. Pack rats, benefit from my example!

From Mississippi to Memphis and Back

By Susan Cushman

Growing up in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1950s and ’60s, the (air-conditioned) library was a haven during the long hot summers. My clearest memories are in the mid ’60s, when I was at Chastain Junior High school. There was a branch library right across the street from our school, where students would often gather on our walk home, just before stopping at the drugstore for cherry Cokes. That branch was also where we crammed for tests during final exam week, when we had a couple of hours between each scheduled exam. But in high school, I found myself distracted from books for a few years, enticed by extra-curricular activities, boys, and summers by the pool.

As a freshman at Ole Miss in 1969-70, I felt honored to do research in the hallowed halls of the Faulkner Library, especially while writing a term paper on William Faulkner’s iconic book, The Sound and the Fury. But I married after that freshman year and spent the next few decades raising kids whose lives revolved more around sports than libraries.

Fast forward to 2017, when my first novel Cherry Bomb was published. I did lots of research on graffiti and abstract expressionism—both of which played prominent roles in the book—at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library in Memphis, Tennessee, where the large format art books were better than anything I found online. And then my publisher sent me on a “book tour” that brought me back to the library, during which I visited numerous small libraries in Mississippi, especially those events sponsored by the “Friends of the Library” groups. That book tour resulted in the writing of my short story collection, Friends of the Library, which was published in 2021.

Returning to Memphis for more book tours took me back to Benjamin L. Hooks for book club meetings, “Books and Beyond,” and to Cordova and Bartlett Branch Libraries, where I introduced more readers to my books. I found myself inspired by their love for the written word, and their librarians’ commitment to bringing books into the lives of their communities. For my next venture I expanded one of the stories from Friends of the Library into a novel— John and Margaret—which is about a Black boy from Memphis who falls in love with a White girl from Jackson, Mississippi, on the Ole Miss campus in the late 1960s. Some of the scenes in the book are set in the Faulkner Library. My library story had come full circle.

FROM THE STACKS

MPL Staff: What We’re Reading

I am reading Hakim’s Odyssey by Fabien Toulmé.

I wanted to get a more personal account of what it means to be a refugee and to understand what the process is/was to migrate from the Middle East (in this case Syria) to Europe.

As a three-part graphic novel series, it’s a quick read and answers a lot of questions I didn’t realize I had.

Eddie Cordova Branch

I’m reading The Beatryce Prophecy by Kate DiCamillo. It is this month’s pick for our Homeschool Bookclub. The kids select all of the books we read for the bookclub. They chose this one because of Answelica the goat. It butts, it bites and best of all- it drools on the monks. It’s also about faith in others, believing in yourself, and finding beauty in unexpected places. But mostly, it’s about the drool.

Sharon Cordova Library

Shark Heart by Emily Habeck Far and away my favorite book I’ve read this year (and there have been 80 others so far). It’s one that I just picked up while shelving because it looked interesting, and now I can’t stop recommending it to everyone I know.

Kes

Randolph Library

I am reading Black Girls Must Have It All by Jayne Allen. This book is relevant to me because of the perplexing storyline dealing with the raw emotions and feelings of a Black woman dealing with everyday issues such as workplace and career dynamics, raising a family, and mental health awareness. This is the 3rd installment of the series.

Kyla Levi Library

City of the Lost by Kelley Armstrong Diana has heard of a town made for people like her who are on the run and want to shed their old lives. If you are accepted, you live in the wilds of Canada with no phones, no internet, no computers, little electricity, and no way in or out without the town council’s approval. We have all thought about what it would be like to “live off the grid.”

But could we really do it?

Hollye Collection Development Central Library

The Year of Fear; Machine Gun Kelly and the Manhunt that Changed America by Joe Urschel FBI and Memphis police arrive in silence to Raynor Street, Memphis, Tennessee. Inside, a house was American’s most notorious criminal, Machine Gun Kelly who the FBI

I just finished reading Calling Me Home by Julie Kibler. It is a moving story of young interracial love in the late 1930s, a spunky interracial friendship in present day, healing, and hope. This fictional story reminded me that while legal changes can be slow on the uptake, we can personally chose to love and be kind to all those around us, no matter what. The binding of diverse communities is a continued effort.

Anna East Shelby Library Manager

had been chasing all over the Great Plaines and the South. Machine Gun Kelly was wanted for kidnapping. For the FBI, Machine Gun Kelly, real name George Barnes, and his wife, were public enemy’s number one. Joe Urschel, in The Year of Fear; Machine Gun Kelly and the Manhunt that Changed America, paints a picture of America in the nineteen twenties and thirties, when criminals ruled by robbing banks and kidnapping. He recounts the rise of the newly formed FBI. Wanted for kidnapping, Kelly and his wife, Katherine, are chased by the FBI. Urschel writes a well-documented exciting book of Kelly’s life from his days of bootlegging in Memphis to his death.

Marilyn History Department Central Library

BOOK TALK

By Stephen Usery

Journalist and author Boyce Upholt stopped by the WYPL studios on June 25th to record two episodes of the radio program Book Talk, focusing on his debut book, The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi. His journalism has appeared in TIME, Smithsonian, and Garden and Gun, among many other publications. Although he grew up in Connecticut, Upholt has lived in the Delta or along the river since 2009, now calling New Orleans home. The Great River deals with human intervention over the centuries in our attempt to tame a restive river which always finds a way to assert its own will. John M. Barry, author of Rising Tide has said, “The Great River is easily one of the best books ever written about the Mississippi.”

(This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

Book Talk (BT): Is the Mississippi River more of a verb than a noun?

Boyce Upholt: Oh, interesting. I haven’t contemplated that, but I think that could make sense. I feel like it captures kind of what I was after in the book, in a lot of ways. It’s definitely an ever-changing river. Yeah, and I think it’s important to me that people recognize that it is more than a line on a map. It is more than a static thing, and calling it a verb would make a lot of sense.

BT: With all the studies and archeology around the river area, have you found a Mississippi River channel that was just ridiculously far away from the current-day channel?

Upholt: I lived in the Mississippi Delta for nine years. That’s why I call it The Yazoo Basin in the book, to get rid of some confusion with different deltas. But I mean, everything in there is a former river channel. For a while I lived in a house that had this tiny little creek in the backyard that was maybe 15 feet across, real muddy. But that channel was a former channel, and we were probably 25, 30 miles off the river. And it goes much further than that, so it’s pretty incredible, the expansiveness of those changes.

BT: As a person who mainly writes journalism and literature, when you’re starting to deal with numbers and scientific facts, how do you work to get that across to lay readers like us?

Upholt: I mean I mostly try to keep it simple. I am weirdly a mathematical thinker as much as I am a writer. I was. I used to be a math teacher, child of a scientist, so I guess I’ve just been in that world the whole time. But I think I’m lucky that I was a reader growing up and wanted to be a writer, and that forced me to find ways to be unscientific.

I don’t remember who said this, but at some point, someone, was like, “Well, you were talking about mud, and it was really silt.” And I was like, well, okay, in the right places, I do want to make those distinctions, but I think part of that process is not getting too technical, if technicalities aren’t necessary. I mean, the other thing is like I try to balance those numbers with as much, particularly in this book. One of the challenges was there’s no character, but I wanted to make a river the character and like vibrant details make that river come alive, so that the readers have a sort of place to put those figures and numbers, a sense of the physicality in which to contain all that.

BT: As European explorers come to the river, they notice that it’s not the most orderly river, and they want to impose order on the river. What are those early attempts like?

Upholt: In the early 18th century, after the French have decided they’re going to stick around, they’re going to try to turn all this swampy land into a giant tobacco farm operation, essentially. They’re like, well, we need a headquarters. And that’s how we got New Orleans.

But very quickly, after choosing that side, the river overflowed its banks. And they were like, oh, crap, this doesn’t look so good, so they built the first levee along the river. I think it was finished around 1720. And then really it was just the French Quarter, so very small. But it didn’t take long after that for farmers just upstream to say, oh, yeah, that’s a good idea. And then over several decades, the levee is still in pieces. It wasn’t one continuous wall as we have today, but the levee extended throughout the Delta. It wasn’t until the American period, really that people took that levee idea and said, let’s try and build that even further north up into Mississippi and Arkansas and northern Louisiana.

BT: When did the era of mass levees really start?

Upholt: That goes hand in hand with the same time that steamboats are declining, so that’s kind of 1880s. At first, the federal government had long said that they weren’t going to build levees for people. But in the 1880s, they start to say like, well, we’ll do it because it’s going to help navigation, which even though it’s decline, that is a thing that we care about.

They became less and less coy about that, more and more like, look at the good work we’ve done helping landowners. And finally, 1917, it became like on the Mississippi River. It’s like, they said, okay, we’re going to do this. We’re going to take charge of building these levees. It’s a pretty recent project. The levee that follows the Mississippi River for basically

its entire southernmost thousand miles was kind of built over a 50-year period starting after the 1880s.

BT: What do you think is the easiest, lowest cost way to benefit the river right now?

Upholt: One thing that’s already happened, kind of pulling back the levees. We’re starting to put properties that are marginal and not doing well, behind the levees. If you restore wetlands, that is a place that can be like a sump for water to store. So, in a more technical nature, that’s that.

But I think to the extent that I have an answer, it is like, I think we need more people who care about the river. Right? So it’s as simple as the individual person listening to this, especially in Memphis, going to Tom Lee Park, going across the bridge, going to Mud Island, going to the Quad Park Canoe Company, good friends of mine and get out on the water.

I think right now that the things we build tend to benefit a few people who tend to have a lot of wealth and power. Therefore, like with the government, the more people that have a reciprocal relationship with the Mississippi River love it, care about it, the more people we have advocating for solutions that will better serve the river and everything along the river.

MEMPHIS READS

Mark reviews MISSISSIPPI

HIPPIE, A LIFE IN 49 PIECES, by Willy Bearden, Deep Delta Publishing, 2024, 286 pages.

If you live in Memphis and the Mid-South, Willy Bearden’s distinct Delta voice is part of the local soundtrack, as soothing as the hum and rhythm of the waters of the great Mississippi. Bearden is a Memphis-based documentary filmmaker, historian, and writer, and his memoir Mississippi Hippie, A Life in 49 Pieces, channels the same cadences, from his childhood in the 1950s and on into the budding 2000s. Raw and unfiltered, we feel the mud in his toes, the floorboards under his feet, and the pain, beauty, and astonishment in his eyes from his Mississippi Delta home and his rural upbringing.

In the vast flood plain in between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, the cotton-filled region has been called “the deepest South,” by sociologist Rupert Vance in 1935, and “the most Southern place on earth,” by the writer James C. Cobb. It gave birth to the Blues and is firmly rooted in slavery, with a long history of white affluence and Black poverty, legacies of painful oppression and cultural riches.

In one chapter, Bearden reminds his readers “that it is all quaint and funny and endearing when you’re sitting in Memphis, telling someone of the quirks and eccentricities of the Delta, but yet another thing indeed when you’re smack in the middle of it.”

Bearden’s memories give us visceral portraits in stories painful, mythical, and deeply personal. His travels and travails through the roads and fields of his South is also a chronicle of the storied South and beyond, images of America in the last half of the 20th Century, a time and a place that exists in myth and memory, but that resonates and haunts us today.

And on every page there is his voice, both a smooth gravelly road and a lullaby by a campfire. We say that there can be no light without darkness, no joy without pain, and if ever there is pleasure in the pains of memories, this is it.

Memphis Reads is a blog series where members of the Memphis Public Libraries staff can discuss their favorite adult fiction and nonfiction books. Library staff members contribute reviews, essays, and news items about titles in the Library’s collection and raise ideas, questions, and concerns for Memphians to consider.

Aislinn reviews ONE OF OUR KIND, by Nicola Yoon, Knopf, 2024, 272 pages.

In One of Our Kind, by Nicola Yoon, Jasmyn moves her family to a fictional Black utopia outside of Los Angeles, and slowly realizes that something is not quite right. She shakes off her instincts time and time again, talks herself out of her worry over and over, and the reader is left yelling at the pages for her to wake up before it’s too late.

There are some disturbing descriptions of violence in America, particularly violence towards Black Americans. As Jasmyn notes, it is important for us to bear witness to the pain along side her. Most of her alarm bells center around her new neighbors’ reactions to the horrifying story of an 8-year-old girl who was shot by a cop, but there is so much more going on in her neighborhood that is just the tiniest bit troubling. Each little thing is never quite disturbing enough to warrant her unease. It all builds so perfectly that the conclusion is obvious, but in the best way possible.

This book is both a gripping thriller with slow-burn suspense that keeps you looking over your shoulder, and an exploration of what it could mean to be Black in America. I personally had some trouble suspending disbelief in some places, but ultimately, it doesn’t take away from what the author is trying to accomplish.

Laura reviews THE MARS HOUSE, by Natasha Pulley, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014, 469 pages.

The science fiction novel The Mars House by Natasha Pulley features January Stirling as our hero, a principal dancer for the Royal Ballet in London who is forced to emigrate to Mars when the Earth falls apart. There are really no options for him—it’s either die in a refugee camp, battered by wars, famines, fires, and floods, or make the Crossing of space to Mars where they could use his Earthstrong labor.

But Mars-humans aren’t like the Earthstrong; they’re seven feet tall, and slender, and naturalised to very low gravity. Physically, they’ve bred out all characteristics that might indicate their gender; Mars-humans’ pronouns are they/ them. Earthstrong people are scary to Mars Naturals; he/she could literally tear them limb to limb by bumping into them, so ALL immigrants have to wear these exoskeleton cages to prevent them from using excessive force.

So January is caged. He works in a factory. He’s off the grid as much as possible because there’s a rising clamor from the Mars colonists to force Earthstrongers to naturalize, a process which basically leaves humans disabled, if not dead. January would absolutely be unable to dance. And he just can’t stomach the idea that some people are bad just for existing.

Enter Aubrey Gale, a Senator of the House Gale for Mars. They’re beautiful, they’re coveted, and they want every Earthstronger to naturalize—as a requirement to live on Mars. And Gale is running for Consul (which is like the President of the whole colony) and doing a PR tour of the very factory January works at. Their encounter doesn’t turn out well; in fact, Gale inadvertently ruins January’s life. And since the backlash in the polls is plummeting their numbers, Gale offers January a job: a five-year marriage contract.

The ebook is seven hundred something pages, but you’ll never know it. The vibe is Memory Called Empire (Arkady Martine) meets CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner series. It deals with immigration, with trust, with communication and childhood issues and chronic conditions and social mores. Most of all, it’s a tentative romance blooming in the environment of a political nightmare—and there’s no way to know which it really is until the end.

OVERHEARD at the Editorial Desk

MARK: So Sara, our conversation started with an innocent question this summer before a morning editorial meeting, when I asked What are you reading? When you answered with The Power Broker, I about flipped! I had never personally knew of anyone besides my father who even knew about the book, let alone had read any of it.

And I don’t have to tell you that it’s a whopping 50 years old! For additional context, this summer I listened to a New York Times The Culture Desk podcast about this book called “2024 is the year of ‘The Power Broker.’” And I wondered, why is this monster of a book being discussed again? And not just within the New York cultural universe but on a national level? Is it because of its age or is it something else? Turns out it’s both, which we’ll discuss.

Back to that summer morning when I learned - and was flabbergasted - that you were reading the book, I wondered, Why did you pick it up?

SARA: It’s funny that you mention the New York Times podcast. There was another - I forget the name - that came out in August of 2022; shortly after that, in January of this year, another podcast called 99% Invisible started a series on this book. That’s actually how I heard about it. My husband listens to 99% Invisible regularly and told me about it. I was fascinated. Personally, over the past year, I have been noticing just how much impact local politics has on my life, and on libraries in general. I heard about this book and wanted to know how he did it. I wanted to know how local politicians in my city might be gaining power, and how we can check that power when it gets out of hand.

MARK: Yes, unchecked power and the pursuit of power are a couple of the reasons it’s been resonating with readers and listeners today. Here locally, the 2018 Memphis 3.0 Comprehensive City Plan is getting an update and many residents are looking closely at a part of the plan that recommends residential rezoning, and what that could mean for more established neighborhoods. I know many are watching that and how city planners will be responding to concerns.

Then of course there are the comparisons of Moses to Trump - ‘he was like Trump before Trump’ one podcaster said - and now the spector of a second term, which (now that he has won) arrives with frightening unknowns in terms of unrestrained power.

But whew, back to the safety of a book... The Power Broker is still endearing for me because I have a personal history with it. My family on the Fleischer side was displaced by a Robert Moses project, having been forced out of their East Tremont, Bronx neighborhood with the approaching bulldozers of the Cross-Bronx Expressway in 1953. I picked up the book 22 years ago, not long after 9/11 and not long after my uncle passed away. And not only did I start devouring the book, I combed through its index looking for references to the Bronx, and low and behold, came upon the chapter called “One

For those who have never heard of it, it’s a massive and masterful 1200page piece of history by author Robert A. Caro, about New York’s powerful city planner Robert Moses, who oversaw huge projects from the 1920s on and into the 1960s, with new parks, parkways, infrastructure, bridges, and expressways throughout the metro New York area. It is epic and meticulous, it won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize,

Mile,” which happened to be devoted to the very East Tremont neighborhood my family lived in. And to my surprise, during July’s The Culture Desk podcast they spent a good part of the podcast talking about that very chapter and topic.

SARA: I just finished that chapter! The book is incredibly long; I started it in January and made it a goal to finish it by the end of this year. By the time you get to that chapter, nothing that happens is a surprise. It’s interesting; in the beginning of the book, you get the sense that Robert Moses was a bit idealistic. He was fighting against forces bigger than himself to provide the citizens with the parks they wanted. But then… you start to see hints of prejudice in the choices he makes. Robert Moses cares about the rich, he cares about showing off, and he absolutely has no interest in public transportation. Concrete playgrounds are thrown into city blocks, but all of the nice parks and swimming pools are conveniently located far away from the poor neighborhoods. His

highways are extravagant and designed for cars only, because only people who can afford their own car should have access to the beautiful beaches and nicer parks he’s commissioned. So by the time we get to East Tremont, and we discover he would rather displace an entire community of lower class Jewish families than move his highway over just a smidge, you realize that this is by design. His roads, and the rich people who want to drive on them and enjoy spectacular views, are more important than the livelihood of an entire neighborhood.

MARK: Yes, and he even had the almost diabolical foresight to have bridge overpasses built at such a low height as to prevent trucks and buses from passing under.

Moses looked at those neighborhoods as slums - and not solely for the alleged conditions of their housing - but because of their changing demographics heading into the early ‘50s, something that totally resonates with the racial issues we see in some communities today.

East Tremont was predominantly Jewish - my grandmother, my dad, and my uncle would tell us stories about the neighborhood and all the great shops - and there were German familes (like mine), and Irish and Italian families too. But from the south and from the west of the neighborhood, African Americans and Puerto Rican Americans were moving in, and this is where Moses’ racism is on full display (because the neighborhood had few problems integrating).

The path of his expressway cut right through blocks of houses and apartments and cut off the “encroaching” Black and Puerto Rican populations from the rest of the Bronx. That expressway was one of the factors that led to devastation of the South Bronx over the next twenty- to twenty-five years.

And sadly, it sent my dad, my uncles, and my grandparents packing.

The book really is epic, and meticulous. It is described as a biography, but Caro’s book is so much more than that. It reads like a documentary, written in dramatic literary journalism style, and despite its length, is a page-turner.

SARA: Absolutely! Like I said, I’m taking my time with it, but not because it’s boring. It is dense; the print is small, and it takes me about thirty minutes to read four or five pages. That said, I am intrigued by every word of it. The level of detail is exquisite; Robert A. Caro was determined not to leave anything out. It’s like watching Anakin turn into Darth Vader, but over the course of a lifetime.

MARK: Yes. After the great work early in his career - the parks and beaches - his later work descends into a kind of destructive force, as he becomes more hellbent on building highways through some cherished neighborhoods, Greenwich Village and SoHo in particular. It’s almost Shakespearean. And with disturbing reminders of what we’re seeing today.

CROSSWORD: Branches & Bindings GAMES

Across

Oldest Memphis branch, on Front Street

One of the original inhabitants of the Mid-South

Needed to check out books or use Libby

This department has it all in arts, culture, philosophy, religion, etc.

Decimal system still used to catalog books

It takes a Parkway _____ to raise this branch

Wassell _______ was president of the city’s library board for 35 years and has this branch named for him

This department handles book selections

Also named for the place where movies are made

The man we call Claus, his workshop is this direction

Comes in handy, for wallets, keys, and book cards

This is the next branch to get a new space

Only branch not in the city limits, East _____ Newest branch to open

Issued by the Library of Congress for every book

Books would fall apart without them

I Spy . . . Our Library Branches

FOR KIDS: All 18 branches of the Memphis Public Libraries are shown or named at least once in this magazine, including in the drawings on this page, and

their full names and addresses are shown somewhere too. On a separate piece of paper, write down the full names of each branch, and on which pages you find them.

Down

Branch closest to Graceland

This department can help you trace your family tree

A color, a verb, and a branch

Former trolley line to a resort

Named for a French restauranteur, ______ Park

At MPL, we love to remind you to _____ Here

Necessary to list all library books and reference materials

You use this if you prefer eBooks or audio books

Teens use this amazing space, _____ 901, for hands-on, multimedia learning

Check out and return books here

Branch that shares a driveway with Bert Ferguson Park

Get hooked up here at ____ 2-1-1 for all kinds of resources

Memphis is often considered the capital of the Mid-______

This program encourages all to read and _____ Memphis

Also a brand of jeans

Call letters for the Library’s TV and radio station

Our Central branch is named after this legendary Memphian

Don’t worry about these anymore for books turned in late

Only branch named for a prominent Memphis woman, Cornelia ______

Bios / Photo Credits / Citations

ISSUE I CONTRIBUTORS

“With Her Grandmother’s Scrapbook and Recordings, Lori Johnson Retraces History and Her Black Roots in Old Whitehaven,” by LORI D. JOHNSON. Versions of both parts of Ms. Johnson’s essay have appeared in digital form in StoryBoardMemphis.org and Chapter16.org

Ms. Johnson earned an M.A, degree in Urban Anthropology from the University of Memphis. She is the author of two novels, A Natural Woman and After The Dance. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Midnight & Indigo, Coolest American Stories 2022, Novel Slices, Arkana, Chapter 16 and Mississippi Folklife. Lori lives in Charlotte, NC, but still considers Memphis, TN home. Excerpts and links to her published work can be found on her blog “Lori’s Old School Mix.”

“Tales From The Memphis & Shelby County Room,” by WAYNE DOWDY. Memphis author and historian Wayne Dowdy is the Manager of the Main Library’s Memphis and Shelby County Room. He also writes for the local monthly publication Best Times and is the author of several books on Memphis history, including A Brief History Of Memphis, Hidden History Of Memphis, and Mayor Crump Don’t Like It.

ESSAY “The Library,” by ROBERT A. LANIER. Mr. Lanier was born in Memphis in 1938. He served as a Circuit Court judge from 1982 until his retirement in 2004, and as an Adjunct Professor at the Memphis State University School of Law (U of M) in 1981. He was a member of the Tennessee Historical Commission from 1977 to 1982, and was a founder of Memphis Heritage Inc. He is the author of several books about Memphis history, including In the Courts (1969), Memphis in the Twenties (1979), and The History of the Memphis & Shelby County Bar (1981), his most recent, Memphis in the Jazz Age (2021), and his favorite, The Prisoner of Durazzo (2010), about the king who postponed World War I for a year. Lanier also donated hundreds of his personal historic Memphis photographs to the Memphis Room of the Memphis Public Library – part of Lanier’s personal interest with Memphis history and historic preservation – – and they can be viewed on the library’s digital archive and collection (DIG Memphis) under the Robert Lanier Collection.

ESSAY “From Mississippi to Memphis and Back” by SUSAN CUSHMAN. Susan Cushman has nine published books, five that she wrote and four anthologies that she edited. A native of Jackson, Mississippi, she has lived in Memphis since 1988.

BOOK TALK, with STEPHEN USERY. Stephen Usery is the Broadcast Services Manager for The Library Channel TV-18 and FM 89.3 WYPL. He is the host and producer of Book Talk, a syndicated interview program that airs weekly on FM 89.3 WYPL and as a podcast, available for streaming on various platforms and via Podbean, https://wyplbooktalk.podbean.com/

PHOTO CREDITS, NOTES, SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

FRONT COVER

Ed Carpenter’s “light canvasses” structure in the main lobby of the Benjamin L Hooks Central Library, 2024.

Photo by Jamie Harmon (see About the Cover, Page 1)

INSIDE FRONT COVER

The Memphis Periodical Index filing cabinet, located in the 4th floor Memphis Room of the Benjamin L Hooks Central Library, 2024

Photo by Mark Fleischer (MF)

THROUGHOUT THE ISSUE

Original drawings by Rachel Kaelberer Mattson (RKM), Associate Publisher and Director of Development & Communications for the Memphis Library Foundation

INSIDE BACK COVER

Book Pocket Collage. Collage assembled by David Christie from various creative contributions from MPL staff. David Christie for the Memphis Public Libraries in the Business / Sciences Department.

Photo by Jamie Harmon, 2024

BACK COVER

Child waits for parents in the Children’s Section of the old Main Library on Peabody and Mclain. 1960. DIG Memphis; Memphis and Shelby County Room, Memphis Public Libraries. Lightly Colorized in Photoshop.

“What Makes the Library Work,” pages 8-15

Page 8: artistic depiction of the new library, 1998. From DIG Memphis, Digital image 2011. Memphis and Shelby County Room, Memphis Public Library & Information Center

Page 11. New York Public Library Archives, The New York Public Library. “The constant visitor, Main Children’s Room, 1914” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1914. https://digitalcollections.nypl. org/items/510d47d9-8573-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Page 11. The D&D (Delivery & Distribution) group photo:

Pictured from Right to Left: Valerie, Vishunda, Kim B., Taryn, Tasha, Gay, Cathy, Celia, Jennifer, Khalilah, Sparks, Christy, Cynthia, Linda, Kent, Larshay, Kim M., Jason, Monique, Kevin, Eric

Not present for the picture (but equally as important): Ann, Hollye, Priscilla, Maple, Elizabeth, Deborah, Erika, Kim S., Brittany, William, Regina, T.J., Ebonie, LaTonya, Shawn, Montrell, Jaime, Brandon, Terika, Syma

Books that inspired MPL UNBOUND, Issue I

CREDITS

“With Her Grandmother’s Scrapbook and Recordings, Lori Johnson Retraces Her Black Roots in Old Whitehaven,” pages 16-22

SOURCES:

Davis, David Ragland. Edmondson Presbyterian Church, 1844-1931; Desoto County, Mississippi.

Henderson, Nancy, “Reflections of Whitehaven” Better Tennessee (Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee), May 22, 2018. https://bettertennessee.com/david-carnes-parkwhitehaven/

Ethel V. Johnson “MaDear” recorded conversations with Lori D. Johnson, 2 February 1989, 15 March 1989 & Unknown Date 1989.

McCorkle, Anna Leigh. Tales of Old Whitehaven. Jackson, TN: McCowat-Mercer Press, Inc, 1967.

Census and Death Records From Ancestry.com

“U.S., Selected Federal Census Non-Population Schedules, 1850-1880,” Shelby, Tennessee, Agriculture, 1870, database with images, s.v. “Celia Morgan,” Ancestry. com; citing “Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration.”

“1870 United States Federal Census” Civil District 13, Shelby, Tennessee, database with images, s.v. “Celia Morgan,” Ancestry.com; citing “Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration.”

“1920 United States Federal Census,” Civil District 10, Shelby, Tennessee, database with images, s.v. “Anna McCorkle,” Ancestry.com; citing “Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration.”

“Tennessee, U.S., Death Records 1908-1965,” database with images, s.v. “Fannie Tate,” (1881-1935), certificate 16220, Ancestry.com; citing “Nashville, Tennessee: Tennessee State Library and Archives.”

“Tennessee, U.S., Death Records 1908-1965,” database with images, s.v. “Margett Cannon” (aka Margaret Cannon) (1852-1928) certificate 7412, file 190; citing “Nashville, Tennessee: Tennessee State Library and Archives.”

“Tennessee, U.S., Death Records 1908-1965,” database with images, s.v. “Mose Morgan” (1862-1930) certificate 14807; citing “Nashville, Tennessee: Tennessee State Library and Archives.”

Pages 16-22. Special Collections Publications at University of Memphis Digital Commons. McCorkle, Anna Leigh, “History of Whitehaven, 1963” (2021). Shelby County. 20. https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/speccoll-pubshelby/20

SUBMITTING CONTENT

Word Limits:

Letters to the Editor - limit 175 words

Book Reviews - 425 words

Short Fiction or Historical Nonfiction* - 1250 words (1 page), or 2500 words (2 pages)

Historical Nonfiction* Features - up to 5000 words

*Historical pieces will be evaluated for accuracy, narrative structure, and context; facts should be properly cited from credible sources. Writers should follow the notes and bibliography system referenced in The Chicago Manual of Style.

So Much More Than Books CHECKOUT: THE THIRD PLACE

By Juanita White

Our branch - the Hollywood Branch - sits in a community service triangle on the north side of town, flanked by a health clinic and a community center. All three provide “care” of some sort to the people who enter.

This is an older library that could use a fresh coat of paint inside, with a new color scheme that would add brightness and offset the lack of natural light. The lighting could be sharper, allowing customers and staff to read in a more vibrant setting. The mosaic on the outside wall could stand to be replaced. But all of that is small stuff.

If you visit any library you won’t be surprised at who you will find there. Libraries are places and spaces for everyone. You will see babies and older adults, with a mix of children, tweens, teens, and young adults. You might happen upon a lady with her dog reading to a group of eager children. That’s the library for you! And ours is no different.

Libraries are not “one size fits all” facilities. Most libraries in neighborhoods that are located close to the center of the city have a more diverse and eclectic patron base than suburban ones. These libraries cater to people who have needs that align with the demographics of the city. Memphis, while being a lovely city of tree lined boulevards, parkways, and charming older neighborhoods, is also home to many neighborhoods characterized by crumbling infrastructure, abandoned properties, and proud people waiting for change. The activities, programs, and services offered by these libraries vary widely, but they have one common purpose: to be a ray of hope and optimism swaddled in good customer service.

Stay in a branch library for an hour of two in the span of a six-day week and you will see library staff offering programs that help customers create, learn, dance, and share. But so much more happens at the local library, especially the one in which I work.

You will find two adult male roommates, in recovery, who come to read - or not read - a few books at least three times a week.

A speech impaired man who communicates through notes, asking questions such as “do you have an Apple Watch at home that I can have? A no answer is followed by “any watch?”

A man, though not without his developmental challenges, who is both a beloved neighborhood and library fixture, and whose daily presence and hearty laugh are

missed when he fails to visit (which is rare).

Pubescent boys who are obviously not in school but find the time to come in each afternoon and use the computers.

An unhoused woman who has moved from Rhode Island, to Kentucky, to Memphis, staying at truck stops while “working on herself.”

A teenage couple who literally can’t keep their hands off each other.

A retired man who comes each day to read the daily newspaper.

And, a grieving mother who recently lost both her young adult sons to violence but who finds the time to bring gifts for Bingo.

All of these library patrons have one thing in common: they know they are welcome at the library.

People long to be part of a community that nurtures and supports not only their interests but also their spirits. They need to be in places that offer safety and comfort and peace. Libraries, in providing these things, are vessels of humanity.

After-school programs are as common at the library as they are at the YMCA, providing a free, safe, secure place, complete with YMCA sponsored “supper” in a neighborhood nearest to a child’s school or home, where friends gather for games and down time with familiar librarians. Parents rely on this for they now their children will be safe and engaged until they can pick them up.

For many adults the library is a home away from home. They find a space for mid-morning rituals like reading the daily newspaper and checking emails, meeting friends for a quiet conversation or board games and Bingo. The library gives people a respite from phone conversations because talking face-to-face allows people to experience the closeness of a connection that cannot always be captured by phone.

For teens, those mysterious people in many of our lives, the library gives them a chance to develop and showcase their creativity alongside their peers. The library holds a particular attraction for this group in that it allows them to be in the company of their friends without hassle. Here there are video games and anime movies and snacks - a teen’s afterschool joy.

In his book Poverty, By America, Matthew Dowd writes that “poverty reduces people

bound for better things.” Similarly, a lack of resources, a dearth of opportunity, and limited access to things that give life meaning can thwart people’s chances to find, and redefine, themselves. That is when libraries step in to fill the void.

A trio of boys in their late teens come to our library almost daily. Faithfully. On the surface it appears they want only a place to be together, to play video games, to browse the internet. But a casual conversation reveals their thirst for direction in life, for knowledge about the world, and most importantly, knowledge about themselves as Black men in a world that often befuddles them. And they want (need?) someone to listen as they discuss family and reveal painful moments in their lives.

They cloak themselves in an aura of mystery that is belied by their shy, wary smiles. These are the kind of teens one might be inclined to fear but their constant presence at the library tells another story. They could be mischievous, no doubt, and eventually find themselves committing crimes that could derail their chances for a different kind of life. But they could also be rudderless, unemployed, school dropouts with no guidance and a bleak future, living in a depressed neighborhood. Or, as is likely the case, they could be both. It is far better to reach out to them than to shun them. Better to stand in the gap, available to catch them if, and inevitably, when, they fall. Better to be here for them, than outside, against them.

Years ago, a friend who is a licensed therapist, would tell me about the impact of libraries on her clients. She spoke broadly of the need for libraries as a place for children and youth to find themselves amidst the chaos of their lives. Her experience bore out the fact that people, not just adolescents, need spaces where they can go to find themselves, to grow, and to discover what makes life great, and living worthwhile.

The bigger reveal is that libraries are places in neighborhoods that offer people a place to find acceptance without judgement, a sanctuary if you will. It is where people feel welcome, where their interests are nurtured, their spirit soothed, and sometimes, their hunger nourished. For those we see each day, without fail, regardless of weather, the library is home.

And librarians are homemakers.