Many founders of today’s Revival Memphis were also founders of Memphis in May www.memphisinmay.org. In 1977, citizens from different backgrounds united by creating Memphis in May to rebuild their hometown economy after the tragic death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

King’s murder occurred after the tragic deaths of sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker. The workers’ deaths led to the 1968 Sanitation Workers Strike and the birth of the I AM A MAN movement. The strike brought our nation’s most inspiring civil rights visionary, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to Memphis, where he made his historic Mountaintop oratory. His life was tragically cut short by a vagrant criminal from outside of Memphis who had stalked him. Riots occurred all over the country. Downtown Memphis fell into deep decline as residents and businesses left. Visitors stopped coming, causing the landmark Peabody Hotel to close. The venerable Orpheum Theatre struggled to survive and Beale Street structures crumbled into ruin.

All of this occurred during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which was itself the culmination of centuries of discord between whites vs. Blacks and other people of color in the U.S. What made the founding of Memphis in May pivotal and transformational is that it brought together cultures which had been in historic conflict — Black and white men and women — to work together on the creation of major events to bring people back to Memphis, and to establish economic bridges to foreign nations around the world that resulted in many businesses and thousands of new jobs in Memphis and ultimately in Tennessee.