2025-02-09

Becoming an Activist Part 2: The Memphis Social Ecology Project

This is part 2 in a series. Part 1, Becoming an activist. This post is meant to serve as an overview of the development and history of 10 years of our active community building efforts in Memphis from 1992-2002. My hope is to provide enough of a description that the reader might get an idea of what they themselves might take on in their own community. Anyone can do this.

When I moved to Memphis in the fall of 1992 I was deep into my exploration of Murray Bookchin's Social Ecology. I won't try to explain that here other than to describe it simply as green communitarianism or anarchism. You can read more here. But the framework and philosophy excited me and was the foundation of my organizing effort.

My first step in Memphis beginning in late winter 1993 was hanging a flyer at the mailboxes of our apartment complex seeking anyone interested in putting a community garden in the grass courtyard. I'd gotten permission from the apartment manager months before and was eager to get started. I only got a response from two neighbors but was thrilled to have any interest. It's been 30 years so I don't recall many details other than three or four of us put in a small garden starting with peas, lettuce and broccoli in the early spring. Then later we added corn, squash, peppers and sunflowers. It was far from a wild success but it was a start. I spent the first couple of years just getting to know the neighborhood. In an effort to be helpful and get to know local activists I'd found and begun volunteering at the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center which was located just a mile away.

By the third year I was beginning to feel at home in the neighborhood. I was a regular at the two coffee shops down the street and meeting a nice mix of folks between the two. One was run by a small community of Russian Orthodox Christians and an acquaintance/friend that ran coffee shop at night there had expressed an interest in putting a community garden in at the little church they ran in the neighborhood. I put in a hand to help get it started.

The other was more of a college hangout and I'd had enough conversations with a handful of people there that I felt it was time to get started with the next project which would be a weekly study group oriented towards exploring Social Ecology and more generally green anarchism, libertarian municipalism, radical feminism and social-environmental justice. Over the course of months the topics of the study group ranged from understanding NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) to the then emerging indigenous Zapatista movement in the state of Chiapas Mexico to local labor issues to the status of US political prisoners including Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal among others.

From the outset we wanted to explore the ideas but also wanted to engage in direct action in the neighborhood. We wanted to put the ideas to work. A handful of folks that had expressed interest in conversations started meeting in the little meeting room in the back of the shop and within a few weeks we were packing the room full. I was organizing everything under the name Memphis Social Ecology Project.

A few months later the coffee shop owner agreed to let us use the shop attic as a space to run a little info shop. We cleaned it up, built some shelving and started gathering a mix of zines, magazines and books. It was a bigger space so we moved our study group to the attic and our little collective was born. We ran the "Liberated Existence Resource Center" and study group out of the attic for the first couple of years.

Our next big project was a shared house rented by seven of us. The idea was that we'd be able to learn and do more from a shared house as well as save money which could be directed to projects. We called it Douglass House simply because that was the street the house was located on but I'd assumed/hoped that the street may have been named after Frederick Douglass. As hoped and planned Douglass house became a beehive of activity. The first iteration of Memphis Food-not-bombs was based out of our house and kitchen. We continued to run the study group and resource center at the coffee shop.

The group of us living at Douglass House published a variety of zines, brochures and a mix of hand goods that we sold at local punk rock shows to raise funds to buy books to sell at those shows or loan out at the resource center. Our collective also networked with other activists around the country and we regularly traveled to protests and conferences. We traveled to the Nevada to protest the proposed storage of nuclear waste on Shoshone lands and to Chattanooga to protest the Watts Bar Nuclear Reactor. We attended organizing conferences in New Orleans, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia.

In 1998 we joined the young and blossoming movement to create microradio stations around the country. We ordered a low-power fm broadcasting kit and Free Radio Memphis was born and would be managed by a new collective dedicated to this one project. The Constructive Interference Collective met weekly to manage the station which broadcast out of Douglass House. It was exhilarating.

The station was on the air for a year in that location expanding from several hours, several days a week to several hours every day to 24-7 by the end of the year. There was a lot of interest and before long we had a waiting list of volunteers, proposed shows and hosts. You can read more in this article published by the local weekly newspaper, The Memphis Flyer currently archived on the Internet Way Back Machine. During that first year we co-organized Memphis Against Racism, a fairly large counter protest to a KKK rally on MLK day and Free Radio Memphis was in the middle of the planning and promoting the counter protest as well as covering the day and the fallout in the days after. Video clip of the day YouTube.

It was around this time that we got notice from the FCC that they had been notified by an employee of the Memphis NPR affiliate that we were broadcasting. They ordered us to shut down. Our cat and mouse game had begun. We did shut down the station but not because of the FCC order. After several years in Douglass House we formed a housing co-op in 1998 and purchased a large neighboring house which we dubbed the deCleyre Co-op. And here's a video just before we moved in.

Before proceeding I'll pause to point out that all of these folks building projects with one another and others in the community were simply self-managing. There was no hierarchy, no boss, no income generated from the projects. Not only was our work all volunteer but was often at cost to ourselves which we paid for with our day jobs. There was no special training involved. We were just people interested in a vision of social ecological justice and were willing to spend our free time working to create projects that we thought would help bring that vision to life.

It's also important to note here that a part of this life that may not be apparent in describing the projects was that while our activism was the priority we were also had to pay all the normal bills so everyone had at least a part time job. But because we were a communal household costs were shared and so were less. This is key in allowing for work, activism and also FUN.

Julie and I in the deCleyre garden in the second summer.

We settled into deCleyre in the Spring of 1998. One of our first projects was to begin digging up the outsized front lawn and put in a garden. We were also making plans to get the radio station back on the air. We were also turning the larger ground-floor room into the new space for the Infoshop/resource center. Put up book shelves and on all of the walls and used the large hall closet as the zine library.

By mid-summer everything was ticking along. The garden was well under way and the radio station was back on the air. Two new projects were the establishment of a local of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) as well as a new almost-monthly practice of hosting community potlucks.

On Wednesday, September 23, 1998 an agent of the FCC showed up with US Marshals and the Memphis Fire Department (to help remove the antenna from the roof). Our broadcast equipment was confiscated and we were shut down. We posted the update on our website and not long after another station that had shut down before having equipment seized offered to send us theirs.

On October 31, 1998 we went mobile and came back online as Black Cat Radio. We broadcast from various locations out of the trunk of a car. We did a broadcast from several local punk rock shows including one that required we attach the antenna to the fire escape of a building. In hindsight it was kinda crazy. After several broadcasts from the top floor of a car garage we were caught again on November 18th and the three collective members broadcasting were arrested and charged with theft of services as we had "stolen" electricity. Uh huh. Unfortunately that marked the end of our micro radio broadcasting.

But deCleyre was just getting started. Part 3 is coming soon.

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