[2] From its western end, Sam Cooper Boulevard runs east for 5.8 miles (9.3 km) to reach its eastern terminus at the I-40/I-240 interchange.

[3] As a road that is owned and maintained by the City of Memphis, no route number is assigned to Sam Cooper Boulevard.

I-40 was proposed to be routed through the center of the City of Memphis and to continue west into Arkansas over the Hernando de Soto Bridge, which was opened in 1973 and carries the traffic on modern I-40 over the Mississippi River.

From there, the route would have continued roughly to the east, parallel to and about .2 miles (320 m) south of North Parkway, just south of the Memphis Zoo and cutting through the northern portion of Overton Park, to connect to the western terminus of modern Sam Cooper Boulevard at East Parkway North.

[2] In 1968, the road was named after Sam Cooper, a Memphis businessman and longtime president of the Humko Corporation, a refinery of vegetable oils.

[3] Once the case was decided by the United States Supreme Court, the ownership of the completed segments of Sam Cooper Boulevard was given to the City of Memphis.

In 2001, the City of Memphis began construction on an extension of Sam Cooper Boulevard west of the North Highland Street exit.

Several of the intersections were eliminated, a viaduct was constructed to avoid the railroad crossings and the route was extended to East Parkway North.

The extension of Sam Cooper Boulevard west of the North Highland Street exit was constructed as a six-lane controlled-access parkway.

In 2006, citizens from the Binghampton neighborhood of Memphis voiced concerns about negative effects that the completion of the western portion of Sam Cooper Boulevard has had on the community.

[citation needed] It was mentioned that the routing of Sam Cooper Boulevard to the south of Broad Avenue had "effectively made" the circa 1.4-mile-long (2.3 km) stretch of Broad Avenue a "ghost town", creating vacant lots in the partly industrial area and an unsafe neighborhood.

[13] The Memphis Flyer cites Robert Montague, executive director of the Binghampton Development Corporation: "When they built Sam Cooper, this area really got buried".

[13] The following year, trees and shrubs were planted alongside Sam Cooper Boulevard and in the median west of North Highland Street.

The exits are still numbered as if I-40 ran along Sam Cooper Boulevard as it was proposed straight through Memphis to connect to Arkansas over the Hernando de Soto Bridge.

[7] The following table lists the existing exits and intersections of Sam Cooper Boulevard as of 2017 from west to east.