The Man Who Couldn't Swim Saved 32

On May 8, 1925, a Black river worker named Tom Lee, who had never learned to swim, took a battered wooden motorboat into the Mississippi and pulled 32 people out of the water. Memphis has been honoring him ever since.

A Boat Called Zev

Lee was a roustabout who made his living on the river. His boat was a 28-foot wooden motorboat named the Zev.

That day, the Corps of Engineers steamboat M.E. Norman was carrying engineers and their families on an outing from Memphis. It was less than a year old, a 114-foot sternwheeler with two decks and twin smokestacks.

As it approached Cow Island Bend on the Mississippi south of the city, the steamboat capsized in the current.

Trip After Trip

Lee was close enough to see it happen. He steered the Zev toward the wreck and began pulling people from the water.

He carried them to a sandbar, went back for more, and kept going. Memphis River Parks counts four trips to the sandbar, and afterward he and the Zev stayed out searching through the night.

The count most often cited, and the one Memphis River Parks gives, is 32 people pulled from the river by a man who could not swim a stroke. The steamboat's captain, in his own account, credited him with at least 25.

One survivor, J.M. Wood, put it plainly: "We all owe our lives to Tom Lee. That's all there is to it."

A Quiet Hero

Lee did not make much of it. "I guess I didn't do any more than anyone else would have done in my place," he said.

The country noticed anyway. He traveled to Washington, where President Calvin Coolidge shook his hand and called him a real hero. The Engineers Club of Memphis raised the money for a brick house on Mansfield Street for him and his wife, Margaret.

The city later hired him to its sanitation department, where he worked for about 20 years. He retired with a pension nearly double the usual amount, and died in 1952.

Thirty-Two Seats on the River

The riverfront park at the foot of Beale Street, once called Astor Park, was renamed Tom Lee Park in the early 1950s, around the time he died. A bronze sculpture of Lee was dedicated there in 2006.

The park was rebuilt and reopened in September 2023. Artist Theaster Gates built A Monument to Listening there from basalt: 32 seats, one for each life Lee saved, plus a taller basalt piece for Lee himself.

It sits on the same river, and anyone who walks the Memphis riverfront can still sit on one.