Black Memphis Mayor Says He Didn’t Ask For Troops

By Rosaland Tyler
Associate Editor
New Journal and Guide

Paul Young, the 46-year-old Black mayor of Memphis who was sworn into office on Jan. 1, 2024, said he did not ask for the National Guard, making his statement three months after about 100 people gathered June 17 at the National Civil Rights Museum in downtown Memphis and marched down Main Street to protest the opening of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, in Memphis.

Recently, Young told CNN that news reports told him the Trump administration would send National Guard troops to Memphis on Sept. 12, to fight crime. This means the decision was made at a time when Memphis police reported drops in every major crime category in the first eight months of 2025 compared with the same period in previous years. Overall crime hit a 25-year low, and murder a six-year low, police said.

Asked on CNN whether he had “hard confirmation” before Trump’s announcement, Young said: “No, that was the confirmation.”

Young and his wife, Dr. Jamila Smith-Young, are Memphis natives and are raising their daughter and son in the city they grew up in. Young was 43 when he was elected mayor. He beat out 17 other candidates. He has worked with the Downtown Memphis Commission, was appointed commissioner in 2021, and has worked for the past 20 years as a city planner and engineer, in an effort to help rebuild parts of Memphis.

In an Aug. 26 interview with Memphis radio station KWAM, President Trump said, “We’re doing sort of a test right now in D.C., it’s working unbelievably much faster than we thought,” Trump said in the interview. “We’ve arrested hundreds of criminals, hardline criminals, people that will never be any good.”

The president declared a crime emergency when he deployed the National Guard in Washington, D.C., despite the city’s declining crime rate.

Elon Musk and his xAI company are relative newcomers to Memphis and conduct business in the former Electrolux building in southwest Memphis. Musk was able to get xAI up and running in Memphis within 122 days when he used the abandoned Electrolux building instead of taking the time to start from the ground up. It all came down to timing. Musk said.

Grok 3, the product Musk released in a video, is an AI app powered by the Memphis supercomputer. xAI will purchase the 13 acres of city-owned land near the company’s current site for $820,000, where they will build an $80 million facility used to recycle wastewater from a nearby water treatment plant.

According to news reports, in early February, the Memphis City Council approved selling additional land to xAI, where the company will use the land to build a water recycling facility to cool its Colossus supercomputer and two nearby industries.