This is part 8 of a 10-part series on the first tenant movement in Memphis. Read part 7 here.
In December 1970, Memphis Housing Authority opened a new project in the Riverview-Kansas neighborhood called Texas Court. Its 32 townhouse units were built by private developer Alex Katz and run by MHA under a leasing agreement.
In a sea of “sub-standard housing,” newspapers pitched Texas Court (and another connected project, Ashby Court) as a “modern” amenity. But moving in new tenants was slow, even though over 4,000 families were on MHA’s waiting list.
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A few weeks later, on Friday, Jan. 15, 1971, a group of Black Panthers knocked on a front door nearby, at 1388 Horace St. A mother of nine named Vinnie Boyd had been renting a home from local realtor Louis Epstein. But two years after moving in, the house was falling apart — and her repeated pleas for repairs had gone ignored.
The Panthers walked in and got a lay of the situation. Two of Boyd’s children were sick; one had been in and out of Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, and Boyd herself had recently been treated for jaundice. In the back of the house, part of the roof had fallen in. In a write-up later that year, the Panthers described the house as barely habitable:
Mrs. Boyd had to cover the floor with mattresses and boards to keep the air from coming through the cracks… Water pipes in the house were broken; the toilet only worked part of the time. Rats were everywhere. Leo Boyd remembers one rat that was so big they had to kill it with a shotgun. The Boyds could see their next-door neighbors through the holes in the walls.
Boyd paid $52 per month for her “shack,” a full $14 more than the average rent of a public housing tenant. She’d recently threatened to stop paying in an effort to force her landlord’s hand. But she soon faced a new problem: an unexpected eviction notice. At 8:30 in the morning on the 15th, Epstein sent a warning: move out by the end of the night, or “he would see to it that I was out.”
Boyd told the Panthers that she’d applied to MHA some time ago, but never heard back. Out the window and around the corner, the “modern” sheen of Texas Court’s still-vacant apartments called to them — so they decided to make a statement.
Boyd, her children and around 20 Panthers started packing her things into a rented pickup truck. They were soon joined by Boyd’s housemate, Paula Butts, who had three children of her own. The group headed a few blocks up the street to Texas Court, where a two-story vacant apartment served as a temporary field office for MHA.
If you never knew there was a militant response from Black folks fighting for their lives in Memphis slums and projects, think again. Read the whole series here.
Just before closing time at 4:30 p.m., they entered the office and Boyd asked about the status of her application. Still getting processed, the staffers told her — she’d have to wait a while longer. But this wasn’t good enough: she needed somewhere to take her children that night. The Panthers told the MHA staffers that everyone was staying until Boyd received new housing. Outnumbered and unwilling to risk a fight with the Panthers, the staffers walked out.
“We didn’t harm anyone,” an anonymous Panther later told the press. “We told them we were taking over, and these families were going to live here, so they left.”
The Panthers helped Boyd, Butts and their children settle into the office.
Justin A. Davis is a freelance journalist, music critic and former grassroots organizer. He’s covered politics, pop culture and history for outlets like Scalawag magazine, Waging Nonviolence, Post-Trash and Science for the People. He lives in Memphis.
To share this history, Davis used these resources for research:
Harland Bartholomew & Associates, “Land Use Plan for the Kansas Street Urban Renewal Area” (1972)
The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service
The Commercial Appeal Archives
Jet Magazine Archives
Caitlin Lee and Clark Randall, “Inside the St. Louis Rent Strike of 1969,” Belt Magazine (2019)
Memphis Housing Authority Annual Reports
Memphis Housing Authority, Memphis Housing: Quarter Century of Progress (circa 1960)
The Memphis Press-Scimitar Archives
Akira Drake Rodriguez, “Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing” (2021)
John I. Stewart, Jr., “Racial Discrimination in Public Housing: Rights and Remedies,” The University of Chicago Law Review (1974)
University of Memphis Libraries & Rhodes College Digital Archive, Sanitation Strike Tapes (1968-1973)
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