From Memphis to Gary, Black Communities Are Being Left in the Dark

In the pews of a Memphis, Tennessee, church on Monday morning, the Rev. Earle J. Fisher wasn’t getting a headstart on next Sunday’s sermon, he was preparing a resource hub. 

“This can’t be my normal Monday because like so many others, we’re without power,” said Fisher, who teaches at LeMoyne-Owen College, an HBCU in Memphis. The school was forced to cancel classes because of the outage.

Instead, he and church member and activist Amber Sherman were converting his congregation into a lifeline, distributing water and generators to residents left in the dark after a weekend derecho, a severe type of thunderstorm, tore through Memphis.

More than 100,000 Memphis households lost electricity after a severe thunderstorm and winds struck Saturday evening.

As of Monday morning, there were still roughly 50,000 residents in the 62% Black city without power. Memphis Light, Gas and Water told residents full restoration might not come until Thursday. 

The same story is playing out in Gary, Indiana, a city that is 76% Black, where tens of thousands have now gone nearly two weeks without power. For Black and low-income families, the loss of power can quickly turn fatal. This month, a Black family was found dead in their Rocky Mount, North Carolina, home after losing power for an unpaid bill.

When the power goes out in America, it does not go out equally. Research has found that Black communities face higher odds of outages and longer-duration interruptions. In Memphis and Gary, residents and elected officials say those disparities are compounded by poverty, aging infrastructure, and rising pressure on regional power systems.

“It seems to be a cycle that I hope we break,” Fisher said. “Black and impoverished community members are advocating for environmental protection [and] adequate investments in infrastructure, but there never seems to be an adequate response from the political establishment.”

High minority areas are four times as likely to suffer a blackout compared to predominantly white areas, and, specifically, being Black is associated with nearly two times higher odds of experiencing an outage lasting 24 consecutive hours than white households. 

In Memphis, this means thousands of households may be struggling for nearly a week in 90-degree heat. 

Studies show that without electricity, people die at elevated rates, especially people over the age of 65.

Memphis is a city where a quarter of residents live below the poverty line, and as state Rep. Justin Pearson noted in a video, it is also home to what Elon Musk built as one of the country’s largest clusters of data centers. Those facilities draw an immense amount of power from the same grid now failing ordinary families.

“Working-class Black and rural communities are bearing the brunt of fallout from extreme weather events and the pressure that our grids are facing from the AI data center boom,” Pearson said. “They’re literally being left in the dark and ignored.”

Pearson drew a direct line to Gary, where a third of residents live below the poverty line. Indiana hosts 147 data centers, Pearson said, and Gary’s electric grid alone powers eight of them.

Officials have made no direct correlation between the growth of data centers and power outages. But, partly, because of data centers, U.S. electricity consumption is rapidly increasing and the grid is not built to keep up, experts have said. 

Fisher pointed to the uneven response from public institutions. He noted that hundreds of National Guard troops had been visibly stationed around Memphis in recent months — patrolling Beale Street, Whitehaven, and “even a local Kroger” — yet were nowhere to be found once the power went out.

Rocky Mount’s warning

The stakes of leaving Black and low-income communities without power came into devastating focus earlier this month in Rocky Mount. Tracey Swann, Kenny Swann, and their adopted daughter, Mahala Scurlock were found dead in their mobile home after the city disconnected their electricity over a roughly $2,000 unpaid bill. Relatives said the family tried to pay half the balance, but the city-owned utility refused anything short of full payment or a three-month repayment plan. 

More than 1 in 10 Black households are currently carrying an overdue utility balance. This is three times the rate for white households and double that for Latino households. On average, Black people who are behind in utility bills carry a debt of over $900. 

Investigators are examining whether a generator running inside the home led to carbon monoxide poisoning during the stretch without electricity. 

North Carolina state Sen. Natalie Murdock, who had filed a bill this year to ban utility shutoffs during extreme heat — a bill that never got a hearing — said the deaths were chilling. “I would hope that we would dream of a world where no one dies simply because they’re behind on their energy bill.”

Rocky Mount’s tragedy is a stark illustration of what Fisher and Pearson are both warning about from Memphis and Gary: that utility infrastructure decisions, billing policies, and disaster response systems consistently fail Black communities.

Pearson also connected the dots to federal policy directly, criticizing the Trump administration’s FEMA cuts.

Filling the gaps themselves

With official response uneven, Pearson and Fisher described communities improvising their own safety nets. Fisher’s church became one of several informal cooling and resource hubs, while Pearson’s campaign volunteers canvassed Hickory Hill neighborhoods checking on residents and compiling lists of cooling centers and food distribution sites. 

“You will never be able to underestimate people power,” Fisher said. “There’s always going to be people, individuals, organizations that are filling in the gaps — in a lot of ways, holding cities together by the seams.”

But Fisher warned that mutual aid cannot substitute indefinitely for government support, especially with redistricting battles reshaping political power in Memphis even as this crisis unfolds. “It matters who is in public office and what their vision is for a city or county or the community,” he said, “because moments like this happen when officials don’t care.” 

Read More: 

• Why Upgrading the Nation’s Electric Grid Is a Racial Issue
• I Grew Up in Gary. I’ve Never Seen a Power Outage Like This.

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