Describe Your County

[memphis]

Shelby County, TN contains the vast majority of metro Memphis, as well as some very rural territory to the north. Official census designations notwithstanding, unlike many other metro areas, we have almost the whole mess all here in one county. City. Suburbs. Agriculture. A 13,000 acre state park that is primarily densely forested, as is our natural state here. Everybody knows about the cotton trade, but Memphis was also a hugely important lumber town a hundred or so years ago. Even in town, we're a very green space. Lawns and large trees are omnipresent, and outside of a small downtown core, there's not much of a concrete jungle, in the way that people from other parts of the country think about what a city looks like. It's way too damn hot for all that here! We have a generally flat terrain, though not completely. We have very small rolling hills in a lot of places, though certainly none of the elevation found in Middle or especially East Tennessee. Population is just under 1,000,000, which is the highest in the state, and we are the largest geographically as well. Majority black overall but not overwhelmingly so, and, like anywhere, residential patterns are largely segregated. The well to do white people (there are not many poor whites here; it's always surprising to visit other parts of the state where they are much more common) tend to cluster along Poplar Avenue, which runs the length of the county all the way from Downtown Memphis out to the ritzy suburbs of Germantown and Collierville. Poplar is also the most important commercial street, both in the sense of retail and office space in the area. It's fairly comparable to Peachtree in Atlanta, though we're obviously a smaller metro area. There are also white people in the newer, suburban places in the eastern part of the county (Cordova, Bartlett, Lakeland, Arlington). The rest of the populated areas, both the north and south sides of town, are full of black people and pretty much out of sight, out of mind for the white people, except perhaps in the sense of the "old neighborhood" that has "changed." Religion holds an enormous sway with most of the people here, black and white, though the churches are de facto segregated as well, of course. Politically, things are pretty simple here. Black people vote Democratic and White people vote Republican, except for all those funky, artsy, hipster types living in the historic properties of Midtown that have so much character with their big front porches and hundred year old oak trees. As black people are the majority, the county is safely Democratic at the presidential level, but some local offices, including county mayor, are held by Republicans.

[memphis]

I've always been interested in Shelby County's voting patterns; when other rural parts of the South were Democratic, this county was somewhat Republican. Even up until the 1990's it voted Republican in Presidential elections, if I'm not mistaken? Are blacks only just recently making up the majority?

The rural parts of the county are a tiny percent of the population. I don't have any data on the rural parts of the county specifically, but for the purposes of countywide election data, we're very much an urban county. The urban South was the first to make the transition to voting Republican. Things take longer in the countryside. We last voted GOP in 1988. We are new to having a black majority, officially crossing over in about 2000. Large numbers of white people have been moving to Nashville and Atlanta in recent decades and black people have long had a higher birth rate. The area was long dominated by black versus white but, like anywhere, we now have noticeable populations of Asians and Hispanics too. I remember in the 1990s my parents thought that it was so novel that there were some South Asian students at my high school. I don't think any parents of high schoolers would be surprised by that today.