In Memphis, Lead Poisoning Often Goes Unnoticed and Untreated

In May, FBI Director Kash Patel labeled Memphis the “homicide capital of America,” and vowed to deploy a federal task force to fight Memphis’s high murder rate. Two months earlier, Republican Representative Mark White in the Tennessee House had introduced a measure to take control of Memphis–Shelby County Schools from local school boards and administrators, pointing to consistently poor student math and literacy rates. On September 15, President Trump signed an order deploying the National Guard to “make Memphis safe and restore public order” as crime rates “overwhelmed” local authorities. The order created a task force “to end street and violent crime in Memphis to the greatest possible extent through the promotion and facilitation of hypervigilant policing.”

State Representative Justin Pearson released a statement denouncing that decision. “Our residents deserve federal investment in community-based safety measures, dialogue, and resources that address the root causes of crime,” Pearson wrote.

The office of Mayor Paul Young and Memphis City Council members Pearl Eva Walker and Rhonda Logan did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2022, Anita Tate with the Shelby County Lead Hazard Control Program requested a meeting with the Memphis Shelby County Crime Commission and mailed them a bundle of research on lead poisoning, according to reporting from MLK50. The commission never followed up, and Crime Commission president Bill Gibbons later said he didn’t remember getting the research.

Anita Tate runs lead inspection and mitigation on qualifying residential properties for the Shelby County Lead Hazard Control Program. A majority of her cases are in the zip codes stretching between the Mississippi River and Orange Mound, in a tract of South Memphis where 80 to 90 percent of the homes were built before 1978, according to 2022 US Census data. If these older homes contain lead contamination that goes untreated, entire families can experience elevated blood lead levels that may have critical, and permanent, consequences for health.

“We have multigenerational homes where you have a parent that was elevated, you have grandchildren that are elevated, and now you have great grandchildren that are elevated,” said Hyde.

Chronic exposure to lead causes an irreversible “body burden,” or an accumulation of lead in the internal organs and bones that can damage a range of internal systems. In the 1990s, lead inspector and activist Chet Kibble worked as an environmental supervisor at Memphis Light Gas and Water, where he said he watched the company engage in cost-saving practices that exposed workers and communities to lead and other toxins. He quit that job in 1999 over safety concerns. Nearly 20 years later, he says he ran into an old coworker sitting on the floor of a grocery store with bad knees, a bad back, and a buildup of lead in his body that tested at levels approximately 70 percent higher than normal.

But the consequences of lead exposure are especially critical for children. Lead not only reduces children’s IQ and academic performance but leeches into the blood-brain barrier, permanently stifling soft skills like empathy and impulse control. Researchers find that communities exposed to lead see significant increases in violent crime. For Kibble, the “proof is in the pudding” on the impacts of lead exposure in Memphis, where fewer than 30 percent of students across grades three through 12 met grade expectations for English language arts this year and the violent crime rates rank among the highest in the nation.

Twenty years ago, shortly after Kibble won a federal grant to buy his first XRF machine to detect lead, children started turning up with lead poisoning in Cooper Young, an artsy historic neighborhood in midtown Memphis. Kibble traced the exposure back to Central Avenue, where a steel overpass was shedding lead paint.

This was in 2000, barely a year after Kibble began working as a lead inspector. Around that time nearly 10 percent of children in certain North and South Memphis zip codes had elevated blood lead levels, according to testing data from 2005 to 2012.

Community groups raised donation money to fix that overpass. But the surrounding bridges also had lead, and decades later, Kibble says they’re also chipping. In the decades since, Kibble says he’s also found lead in playgrounds, fire hydrants, telephone poles, road lines, abandoned buildings, and residential properties.

Routine testing results released on August 6 by the Memphis Shelby County School System showed water sources at 24 Memphis area schools contained high levels of lead. That contamination is the result of old plumbing, which often contains lead which breaks down over time and leaches into the water.

In the aging infrastructure of Memphis’s school system, where many buildings were constructed decades before the state banned lead in water supply lines, contamination has become a recurring problem. The case is similar for Memphis’s housing supply, and for homes with lead contamination from peeling paint or corroding water pipelines, the solutions are expensive and often temporary.

When the Shelby County Lead Hazard Control Program first started out, Tate said they ran full abatements, which remove all lead from a property and can cost $30,000 to $50,000 per house. In order to reach more homes, they’ve since switched to running interim control, which Tate said averages at $7,000. Interim controls can temporarily make a house safe for residency, said Sharon Hyde, but without proper maintenance, the problem can reoccur after 15 or 20 years.

The program’s services are also out of reach for many tenants, since Tate said landlords typically refuse to participate on account of the $20,000 lien the program places on their property. Tate has run inspections on about 200 homes in the last four years, and she says about four landlords have cooperated with the program.

LaTricea Adams chairs the Shelby County Lead Prevention and Sustainability Commission, and said their first Shelby County Health department representative supplied testing data broken down by zip code and blood lead level concentration. But that representative moved out of state in 2019, and the LPC hasn’t seen that kind of data since. The LPC and other lead remediation organizations used that data to demonstrate the threat of lead poisoning to city and county government, pushing local officials to put resources towards lead mitigation. Other organizations used it to pitch for grants.

Adams said she isn’t sure why the Health Department stopped supplying that data. The current Health Department representative to the LPC hasn’t come to a meeting in two years, and Adams said she can’t reach the representative by e-mail. But a number of LPC seats are vacant or chronically absent, and the mayor’s office took two and a half years to appoint the commission’s latest member.

Meanwhile, the aging lead plumbing in Memphis public schools is just one item on a nearly $1 billion maintenance backlog, according to officials from the Memphis-Shelby County School systems. Shelby County census data shows the housing supply is aging too, with approximately 56 percent of homes constructed before 1980, and the solutions are expensive and difficult for homeowners or renters to access.

Newborn got her home remediated through a government program, after months of searching for help. Now Logan is 6 years old and no longer suffers from chronic fatigue. He’s since been diagnosed with autism, which is common in children who have experienced lead poisoning, and has learned healthier verbal and nonverbal communication skills.

When Newborn told a neighbor about the lead in older homes, at first he didn’t believe her. “He’s like, oh, there’s no lead here. My children, my great grandchildren, all grown up here. There’s no lead.” Now that neighbor is helping Newborn spread awareness through flyers and local outreach, and two other houses on their block are waiting to be looked at for lead. She still worries about the parents stuck where she was five years ago, when Logan was suffering and she didn’t know where to turn. “My heart went out to parents in that in-between time,” Newborn said. “Not knowing what to do on a daily basis, from sunup to sundown, while they’re waiting for help.”