Memphis Meetings

Leandre Ke

Person

Speaking turns

• Special Meeting: Memphis City Council: April 21, 2026 48:35

  Good afternoon. My name is Leandre Keyi. My family moved to Memphis from Mount Bayou, Mississippi in the 70s. I was born and raised in 38106, more popularly known as South Memphis. I'm a '9s baby, a millennial as some call it, but Memphis is my home. It's the only one I've ever known. I'm here today to promote discussion and propose an actionable plan to revitalize our city's economy rapidly. The entire globe has undoubtedly been subjected recently to a severe economic downturn. And the fact that Memphis had already been in a period of severe economic hardship prior to that has placed an even more profound burden on those of us who I consider to be collateral victims of the system. We lifelong Memphians are the ones who have have our fondest memories of what Memphis once was, but we are also the most hurt victims of what it currently is. Historically, Memphis was a gathering place where freed slaves congregated to build a true future for themselves. But over the generations, we suffered a betrayal as old as the transatlantic slave trade itself. Just as African elites once enriched themselves by capturing and selling their own people to foreign empires, our local leaders historically sold us out to mega corporations. They enriched their own political careers while packaging our people for profit. The FedEx World Plant, the FedEx World Hub is here. Nike, Amazon, and others followed. They flooded us with warehouses because they saw a massive population of cheap, uneducated back breakers that they could box into uneducated, unskilled labor. They gave us survival, but they stole our economy. We remember Liberty Land and the Midsouth Fair. We remember the homeowners on East Parkway charging $20 to park in their yards because our fairgrounds were so packed. We remember looking into the Memphis night sky and seeing those huge spotlights waving across the sky when the Midsouth Fair was in town. We remember our pyramid hosting major pay-per-view events like the Linux Lewis versus Mike Tyson and the WWF St. Valentine's Day Massacre and a multitude of other events that absolutely flooded our economy with tourism and funding that we needed to thrive.

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