From Memphis to Gary, Black Communities Are Left Waiting in the Dark
On Monday morning, the Rev. Earle J. Fisher was not working on next Sunday’s sermon. He was turning his Memphis church into 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.
With church member and activist Amber Sherman, Fisher helped distribute water and generators to residents left in the dark after a derecho — a severe thunderstorm system — tore through Memphis over the weekend. More than 100,000 households lost electricity Saturday evening. By Monday morning, roughly 50,000 people in the 62% Black city were still without power. Memphis Light, Gas and Water told residents that full restoration might not come until Thursday.
Hundreds of miles to the north, Gary, Indiana, is in its second week of widespread outages. Tens of thousands of residents in the 76% Black city have now gone nearly two weeks without power. For Black and low-income families, a loss of power can quickly become life-threatening.
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 interruptions. High-minority areas are four times as likely to suffer a blackout as predominantly white areas, and Black households are nearly twice as likely as white households to experience an outage lasting 24 consecutive hours.
In Memphis, that means thousands of households could spend close to a week in 90-degree heat. Studies show that people die at elevated rates without electricity, especially those over the age of 65. A quarter of the city’s residents live below the poverty line.
“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.”
Residents and elected officials say those disparities are compounded by poverty, aging infrastructure and rising pressure on regional power systems. In Memphis, state Rep. Justin Pearson pointed to one source of that pressure: the city is home to what Elon Musk built as one of the country’s largest clusters of data centers. Those facilities draw massive amounts of power from the same grid that is 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 line from Memphis to Gary, where a third of residents live below the poverty line. Indiana hosts 147 data centers, he said, and Gary’s electric grid alone powers eight of them. Officials have not established a direct link between data centers and the current outages, but experts say the rapid growth of data-center electricity demand is straining a grid that was not built to keep up.
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.
The stakes of leaving Black and low-income communities without power came into focus earlier this month in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. 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. Investigators are examining whether a generator running inside the home led to carbon monoxide poisoning.
Utility debt is not spread evenly. More than 1 in 10 Black households currently carry an overdue utility balance — three times the rate for white households and double the rate for Latino households. On average, Black people who are behind on utility bills owe more than $900.
North Carolina state Sen. Natalie Murdock, who filed a bill this year to ban utility shutoffs during extreme heat, said the deaths were chilling. The bill never received a hearing. “I would hope that we would dream of a world where no one dies simply because they’re behind on their energy bill,” she said.
Pearson also linked the local failures to federal policy, criticizing the Trump administration’s cuts to FEMA.
With official response uneven, residents have improvised. Fisher’s church became one of several informal cooling and resource hubs. 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 replace government support. With redistricting battles reshaping political power in Memphis even as the crisis unfolds, he said who holds office matters.
“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.”