In coming weeks, the Shelby County Health Department is expected to decide whether to approve xAI’s permit to permanently install 15 turbines. Meanwhile, xAI has already purchased another property in nearby Whitehaven to expand its operations in Memphis.
Local residents aren’t backing down. Their distrust escalated into anger in late April, when they packed a meeting to fight xAI’s permit approval.
At the hearing, xAI senior manager Brent Mayo, clad in a black T-shirt and hat with the company logo, said its turbines would be equipped with technology to lower emissions, making it the “lowest-emitting facility in the country.”
After roughly a minute, several in the crowd began to chant, “People over property. People over property,” drowning him out.
The dirt roads, hogs and cotton fields that once made Boxtown feel more country than city are long gone. But the neighborhood still feels alive with history — both good and bad.
Older residents talk about how their ancestors settled here, building homes out of scraps of boxcars, which gave the area its name.
“They wanted something they could call their own,” said Raymond C. Cheers, 74, a local historian, noting that some of the freedmen who lived in Boxtown are now buried in a cemetery there in Mount Pisgah Baptist Church.
As a child growing up in the then-unincorporated Boxtown, Brenda Odell, now 76 and retired from a career in education, remembers going down with her family to check out the site of a future power plant.
