Society
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StudentNation
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September 26, 2025
As Trump deploys the National Guard to “make Memphis safe and restore public order,” the health risks from the city’s aging infrastructure, plumbing, and paint continue to be ignored.
An aerial view of houses that have had partial pipe replacements of their lead pipes in Memphis, Tennessee, in April 2024.
(Kevin Wurm / Getty)
Violet Newborn had just moved into a new house, a rental on the edge of midtown and Frasier, when her son Logan’s developmental milestones started “moving backwards.” Logan was six months old and suddenly lethargic, always constipated, and refusing to eat or drink. He became joyless and fatigued. He’d sit silently at daycare, or hang his head when Newborn pushed him on the swings.
The doctors took Logan’s bloodwork and found his blood lead levels were 16 micrograms per deciliter—12.5 above the reference value for lead exposure. He was suffering developmental delays, including behavioral problems and a loss of communication skills. “He would act out violently—biting me, hitting me, just banging his head on the floor,” said Newborn.
The lead compounds in the paint of their new rental house tasted sweet, so Logan had been peeling it off the walls and eating it. It was 2020, Newborn was a new mom in the middle of a pandemic, and she couldn’t afford to move. “It was horrible, absolutely horrible,” she said. “I felt alone, and it was just a very dark time.”
The threat of lead poisoning disproportionately impacts children living in Memphis’s oldest neighborhoods. A 2016 study from the University of Memphis found a connection between lead poisoning hot spots and areas with the oldest homes, highest child poverty rates, lowest median income rates, and the highest percentage of black children.
The federal government banned lead in plumbing and paint more than thirty years ago, but the substance continues to poison an estimated 500,000 children across the US each year. In 2015, Flint, Michigan, made headlines when Virginia Tech researchers found lead in the water supply despite months of denial from local and state officials. A study last year in Chicago found that 68 percent of Chicago children younger than 6 were exposed to lead in their drinking water, and predominantly black or Hispanic neighborhoods were both disproportionately impacted, and less likely to have their water tested.
Lead poisoning poses an increased risk in South Memphis, where Elon Musk’s company xAI has spent the last several months skirmishing with environmental groups over concerns about air pollution from the turbines used to power its Colossus supercomputer. But the struggle for decent living conditions started long before: One study in 2013 found that the air in Southwest Memphis contained so many carcinogens from nearby industrial plants that the cancer risk associated with exposure was four times the national average.
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“If you’ve been exposed, and you’re exposed over and over again,