Month: September 2020

Categories
News News Feature

Local Environmental Justice Activist Sue Williams Receives National Recognition

A leader in local struggles for environmental justice has been recognized by the national office of the Sierra Club in their 2020 awards program.

Last Tuesday, the organization named several awardees in various categories, and Sue Williams, a well known in activist circles around Memphis for decades, was granted the Robert Bullard Environmental Justice Award, recognizing “individuals who have done outstanding work in the area of environmental justice.”

Beginning in the late 1970s, Robert Bullard pioneered the concept of environmental justice, which draws attention to ways in which racism and classism intersect with environmental degradation in systematic ways. Industrial sites or landfills located near poor or minority neighborhoods, for example, make for greater concentrations of pollutants in those areas, with serious health consequences for residents there, especially in developing children. This frame for organizing overlapping interest groups has helped build powerful coalitions of activists from disparate backgrounds over the last 40 years. Sue Williams has been at the forefront of such innovative organizing in the Memphis area.

Since the mid-90s, she’s advocated for people-of-color and poor communities dealing with a myriad of issues. Stopping a low-level nuclear waste incinerator and organizing community advocacy around the Velsicol Chemical plant and its hazardous waste incinerator were two of her most notable causes. William’s background as an attorney has helped her bring an informed legal perspective to such work.

In the early 2000s, she helped train activists in air sampling around the Douglass neighborhood in north Memphis, surrounded by eight polluting facilities. She also assisted communities around hazardous facilities by enrolling in and promoting the Community Emergency Response Training Course. For 16 years, Williams also served on the planning committee for the Environmental Justice Conference, organized by the University of Memphis Anthropology Department, the Sierra Club Chickasaw Group, community leaders, and other community organizations.

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Napa Café Reopens Dining Room and Expands Patio

CREDIT: Photo courtesy Napa Café

Photo courtesy Napa Café

Napa Café before outdoor seating was expanded.



Napa Cafe’s dining room is now open, so customers can return to eating the restaurant’s made-from-scratch fare inside.

The East Memphis restaurant, which specializes in fresh seafood, grass-fed beef, and game, also has expanded its patio.

The dining room had been closed due to COVID-19, says owner Glenda Hastings.

“I opened secretly a couple of weeks ago to get our footing again with having the dining room open,” she says. “We’ve been closed five-and-a-half months. I was only doing curbside and delivery, which I’m still doing. 

“I was just waiting for things to kind of settle in and people to feel comfortable dining out again. I sent my customers a big survey finding out what they wanted. And because they have been supporting me so strongly with curbside and delivery. I wanted to make sure they were comfortable with reopening the dining room. And my employees were comfortable.”

And, Hastings says, “I think we were just ready to see people in the dining room and see our food on plates again. When I walked in the kitchen and saw my first entrées go out on our china I was so excited. It looks so much better than it was in a to-go box for five and a half months.”

As for the expanded patio, Hastings says, “I have 10 to 12 tables out there social distanced nicely. And I have a ton of tropical plants. It’s just beautiful. And, of course, I have the private dining rooms. I have the wine cellar. I have ‘Jan’s Room.’ That’s a little, private dining room named after my longest-serving employee. It serves two to six guests.”

Curbside pick-up and delivery hours were readjusted to 5 to 9 p.m, Wednesdays through Saturdays.

To make a dinner reservation or to order curbside pick-up and delivery, call 901-683-0441.   

Napa Cafe is at 5101 Sanderlin Center. For more information, go to napacafe.com

Categories
News News Blog

COVID-19 Deaths Rise Above 400 in Shelby County

COVID-19 Memphis
Infogram

COVID-19 Deaths Rise Above 400 in Shelby County

Shelby County added 69 new cases of COVID-19 on test results reported since Monday morning.

The figure is not the number of new cases on tests given yesterday. Tests results are not always returned within 24 hours. The new case count comes from numerous tests over numerous days from numerous laboratories.

The latest weekly data available shows 11.6 percent of all tests were positive for the week of August 23rd. The average is slightly up from the 11.2 percent of cases reported for the week of August 16th. The increase was the first in five weeks.

The county’s overall average positive rate for COVID-19 was 10.7 percent on Wednesday. It marked a slight dip from the 10.8 percent average that has held steady for many weeks. The number is the average of all positive tests from all test results reported since the virus arrived here in March.

The total number of COVID-19 cases here stands at 28,547. Seven new deaths were reported in the last 24 hours. The death toll in Shelby County now stands at 404.

The total active number of COVID-19 cases diagnosed in Shelby County fell by 179 from Tuesday to Wednesday, from 1,825 cases down to 1,646. Cases active now are 5.8 percent of all virus cases recorded in Shelby County since March.

There are 9,434 contacts in quarantine. The figure fell again and continues the trend downward from more 10,000 where it stood for many weeks.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

I Showed Up in Boots …

I’m old enough to remember the great Levitt Shell tagging. It was last week, I think. Memphis woke up to the news that political slogans, including “Black Lives Matter,” “Save the Children,” “Eat the Rich,” and various epithets had been spray-painted on the Shell. The images were all over social media by mid-morning, at which point we also learned that presumably the same taggers had defaced the Great Wall of Graceland with similar slogans.

It was a Rorschach test. Confirmation biases kicked in. Some were outraged by the vandalism itself; others were outraged by the fact that people were more upset by graffiti than by the loss of Black lives. Many were convinced that the tagging was done by right-wing agitators looking to smear BLM and start unrest. There was something for everyone.

Steven Askew

Here’s the thing: If you don’t know who did something, you don’t know why it was done. You’re just making noise on social media. By the next day, the paint had been removed, and the brouhaha quickly disappeared, lost in the perpetual churn of the outrage cycle.

There was another story last week that you probably overlooked, and that’s too bad. It was well-reported in The Commercial Appeal by reporter Sarah Macaraeg. A Memphis Police Officer named Matthew Dyess was outed for several racist posts on Facebook. Dyess praised the Kenosha shooter with a meme that read: “Blame it all on my roots, I showed up in boots, and ruined their Black Lives affair.” Another meme Dyess posted read, “Damn, that kid can shoot!” and was tagged with a comment, “Me, watching the news.” And there was more. From the CA story: “A 2017 picture in uniform and the Facebook groups which Dyess follows remained publicly accessible Friday. The groups ‘(F—-) the Organization Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Memphis Brigade, Sons of Confederate Veterans’ were listed among them.”

So, Matthew Dyess is a racist Memphis cop. That’s bad enough. But it gets much, much worse. And it gets personal. You see, Matthew Dyess and his then-partner Ned Aufdenkamp are the cops who shot and killed Steven Askew in 2013. Steven was the son of Sylvia Askew, my wife’s legal assistant at the Federal Public Defender’s office. I went to Steven’s funeral. I know his father and mother. He was a fine young man, an auto mechanic, not a criminal. He was assassinated by two MPD officers. If this had happened in the past year or two, instead of in 2013, Memphis would be an epicenter for protest. Steven Askew’s name would be known as well as George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s. His death was that egregious. MPD and the DA would not be able to bury this story in 2020.

Here’s what happened: Aufdenkamp and Dyess were patrolling an apartment complex on foot, responding to a noise complaint. They noticed the 24-year-old Askew asleep in his car. He was waiting for his girlfriend, who lived in the complex, to get off work. But Steven never got to tell his story. That’s because, when Aufdenkamp and Dyess woke him (with guns drawn), they got spooked and fired 22 rounds at Askew — from behind. Nine bullets struck Steven in the back and neck, and he died. The cops first told investigators that Askew had shot at them but changed their stories when it turned out that a gun on the floorboard (which Askew had a permit for) had not been fired, and didn’t even have fresh fingerprints on it.

Aufdenkamp and Dyess needlessly shot and killed a man who committed no crime. He wasn’t resisting arrest. He wasn’t speeding. He hadn’t even run a stop sign. He was sleeping in his car and probably awoke with a start when officers tapped the window, a response that cost him his life — killed for the crime of sleeping in his car while Black.

Of course, the incident was “investigated,” but even after the lies the officers told investigators were revealed, District Attorney Amy Weirich declined to press charges, saying it would be too difficult to prove the officers committed a crime.

Right. A civil court saw it differently and awarded Askew’s parents $587,000 in damages. But no crime was committed. Nope. Just a teensy mistake by a couple of hard-working MPD officers.

Aufdenkamp had, at the time, a checkered incident history, with several run-ins with the public. Now we learn that Dyess, seven years after pumping numerous bullets into an innocent Black man, is a racist who posts white supremacist crap on Facebook. He needs to be relieved of duty immediately — which is unfortunately seven years too late for Steven Askew.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Best Bets: Dino’s Ravioli

Dino’s Grill owner Mario Grisanti and his dad, Rudy Grisanti, gave basically the same answer to my question: “Is Dino’s the only Italian restaurant in Memphis that puts chicken and spinach in its ravioli instead of ground beef and cheese?”

“As far as I know, we’re the only ones doing it,” Mario says.

“To be honest, as far as I know we’re the only ones that make a chicken ravioli,” Rudy says.

Mario Grisanti and Dino’s ravioli

“To my knowledge, that’s the way we’ve always done it,” Mario says. “Even going back to my great-grandfather Frank Benedetti at the State Cafe at Beale and Main. Everybody else’s, it seems, is beef and cheese.”

Dino’s doesn’t make beef raviolis. “It’s not an option,” Mario says.

That can surprise people. “I had a lady call me. She had a to-go order. About 30 minutes after she picked up her order, she called and said, ‘I just want you to know everything was great, but the inside of my raviolis were green.’ I just started laughing. ‘It’s chicken and spinach that makes it green.’ She said, ‘Okay. I feel so much better.'”

“We have a lot of people who come in and say, ‘Well, we want beef ravioli,”’ Rudy says. “I tell them, ‘I’m sorry. Our ravioli has spinach and chicken in them. Try them.'”

The response is, “These are great. These are fantastic.”

“It really is lighter, for one thing,” Rudy says. “Since we make our own pasta for it, it makes a lighter dish because sometimes raviolis can be pretty heavy.”

And, he says, “In a sense, it’s better for you because it’s less cholesterol and stuff like that. The chicken is really a better choice than trying to add a lot of beef to your diet.”

They’ve made other raviolis, Rudy says. “I’ve made seafood raviolis, and I put a tarragon cream sauce on them. We’ve made salmon raviolis with saffron sauce. But, traditionally, when we make ravioli, it’s always chicken and spinach.”

“We used to make a cheese ravioli with parmesan, ricotta and eggs, and seasonings, but there was just no real call for it,” Mario says. “It’s labor-intensive to make. We’re making probably 20 dozen a day. I don’t have the time to make several different fillings and put them all together.”

Asked how chicken ravioli came about, Rudy says, “I guess it was because beef was a lot more expensive during the Depression than chicken was. That’s just his old recipe, and that’s the way we’ve always made it.

“The main ingredient is the chicken, and then we add spinach to it,” Rudy says. “The spinach naturally makes it greener. But he never really said why, and I never questioned him about it.”

Benedetti added pork brains as a binder to the raviolis, but after he retired, Rudy began using eggs because he couldn’t find decent pork brains.

Unless a customer orders marinara sauce, Dino’s meat sauce includes ground beef, tomato sauce, water, garlic, Italian seasoning, onions, and celery, Mario says. “Marinara is the exact same thing minus the ground beef. And we add diced tomatoes.”

They make ravioli every day, he says. “We’ve done a lot of frozen ravioli, lately. It’s the exact same ravioli, just fried at a boil, with a side of meat sauce.”

Frozen raviolis were very popular when the pandemic began, Mario says. “When all of this first started, we sold a lot of frozen raviolis because one, people can make their own sauce. A lot of people felt more comfortable cooking their own food at their house.”

They’re still popular. “We sell them year-round frozen. I had three dozen go out yesterday, and four dozen tomorrow.”

Simplicity — in addition to flavor — might be one of the keys to the popularity of the food at Dino’s Grill. “None of the stuff we make here is real fancy,” Mario says. “Just good quality, simple, homemade stuff.”

Note: Dino’s still offers its all-you-can-eat spaghetti for $8.95 on Thursday nights.

Dino’s Grill is at 645 N. McLean; 278-9127.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Mass is Minus: Have a Pint of Inefficiency

CREDIT: Richard Murff

Jeff Bezos, owner of the world’s largest bookshop, famously defined a book as paper and binding. Then he made a fortune on the position that there is no good reason to actually pay a writer: The time involved to think up, write, and polish a book until your brain goes numb has no place on a spreadsheet. Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, helpfully suggested that a constant stream of singles, rather than carefully crafted albums, would generate more pennies for the musicians whose careers he’s wrecked. Twitter and Facebook have made communication so efficient that we can’t stand each other anymore.

In a world swamped by data metrics, we’ve developed a fetish for efficiency. In a lot of ways that’s a good thing — engineering in modern cars leaps to mind. It’s also a tricky thing. Consider the American beer industry after prohibition, where a few large players dominated the market, determined to grow not on quality but efficiency. Each brewery chased the other’s market share by tasting more like the competition, which basically left America with two choices of fabulously cheap and nearly identical beers. For most of the 20th century, good ole American know-how made the United States the most efficient beer industry in the world. It was also the worst place in the world to live were you a beer-lover. Murffbrau’s heroic run in Tuscaloosa when I was an undergrad was not because I knew how to make good beer. The stuff was terrible, but it was different. I was also giving it away. I was also insane.

Richard Murff

My point still stands — embracing a bit of inefficiency in order to make something a little different is what transformed the U.S. beer market from the worst place to be for a beer-lover to arguably the best in less than a generation.

I know more people who head to North Carolina’s beer tours than to Napa Valley these days. Sure, wine snobs can be insufferable, but because they were always going on about terroir and starlight and a bunch of other imaginary metrics, no one ever expected them to be efficient. Wine-makers are just expected to be vaguely French at heart.

Craft beer is a delicious monument to inefficiencies: small batch, jerry-rigged distribution, and you might see the person who made it at the gas station. Yes, beer people can get as snobby as the wine crowd, but just ignore them. And sure, you get the odd swing-and-a-miss, but that’s part of the fun. Besides, a miss isn’t always a miss. I’ve definitely softened my stance on gose beer. For this week’s suggestion, I had a High Cotton Scottish Ale, because the unseasonably cold and cloudy weather (it was 88 degrees) put me in the right state of mind. The stars lined up here; it’s a great Scottish Ale, what can I say? It just tastes inefficient. It’s malty, with a bit of caramel and toffee, but clean. This is important because the mid-80s isn’t really all that cold. I’ve been in the back room of High Cotton. You could eat off the floors back there, but it is not a monument to economies of scale.

Even the distribution of craft beer is wonderfully slipshod if you go by the offerings of the local growler shops around town. And that’s the fun part: Put on your gas mask, secure a six-foot perimeter bubble, and say in a loud, clear voice: “Hey, guy, gimme the weirdest thing you’ve got!” Then say it again because chances are he didn’t hear you because your mouth was covered.

Go home, pour a pint, and read a book or listen to music, written by someone who actually thought it out. Or think something out your own damn self. No, it’s not very efficient, but beer is a pretty inefficient way to go about getting gassed. If that’s the goal, you’re better off quaffing vodka.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

NCRM Hosts Webinar on Dismantling Racism

CREDIT: Courtesy of National Civil Rights Museum

The National Civil Rights Museum is hosting a webinar featuring Diane J. Goodman, Ed.D., educator, trainer, and consultant on diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice issues.

Recently on The Dr. Pat Show, a talk radio program, Goodman spoke with guest host Dr. Mariangela Maguire discussing “The Challenges & Benefits committing to Equity & Inclusion.”

Goodman stated about current times, “It is hard for anyone to be watching the news and not to have a response. How do we not focus on the violence?”

Courtesy of National Civil Rights Museum

Diane J. Goodman

Of course, for members of different communities, watching the unrest in the news can create different responses. Goodman prefers to focus on the hopefulness of what society is trying to express, acknowledging that we have laws and remedies that didn’t exist before and people of color in power who haven’t been in power before.

Discussions of racism generally focus on the systemic disadvantages and harm to Black, indigenous, and people of color. The other side of the dynamic is how white people are systematically advantaged or privileged. Through historical and contemporary examples, Goodman will explain what white privilege is, how it operates, ways it is experienced in everyday life, and how it can be used to create more racial justice. This webinar particularly invites white people to examine white privilege in order to more effectively engage in dismantling racism.

“Understanding White Privilege: A Key to Dismantling Systemic Racism,” Wednesday, Sept. 16, 3-4 p.m.
civilrightsmuseum.org, free with registration.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Vote, Dammit: Participatory Democracy Only Works if We Participate.

It never fails. About this time every year, I start to hear the grumbling: “Not a single shop on Summer Avenue for Best Mexican.” Or, “Wait, they think who has the best pizza in town?” Or maybe, “I don’t even know who that is! How come they got nominated?” I’m speaking, of course, about the Flyer‘s annual Best of Memphis contest. Really serious high-stakes stuff.

In a year full of uncertainty and surprises, the consistency is almost a comfort. Almost, but I can’t help getting a little frustrated. We don’t pick the nominees! You do! Or at least, you’re supposed to, if you’d just vote.

Democracy tastes as fine as Dickins Cider.

So to these people, these complainers after the fact, I always say, “This is what happens when you ignore the primaries.” My guess is most folks don’t pay attention until the BOM candidates start making serious pleas for votes, but there is a nomination phase every year. You can write in anyone you want. (That, incidentally, is how “Dickins Cider” — say it out loud — very nearly won Best Strip Club last year. Cheeky.)

In college, I worked at a local pizza place, and the owner used to make everyone with an email address take turns filling out the BOM ballot. Other people make daily social media posts asking you to nominate them. None of that is cheating — it’s just grassoots campaigning. But the point is, if people don’t throw themselves into working to support their favorite taco shops, local singers, and whathaveyous, the folks with the campaign machinery in place are always going to win nominations and make it to the final ballot.

I’ll say it again: This is what happens when you ignore the primaries, when you get engaged only every four years, and then, only if the candidates really motivate you. Gee, it’s almost like I’m not talking about BOM anymore.

Okay, in all honesty, I know that centrists and far-right candidates benefit from low voter turnout. I know that much of the system is overly complicated, that districts are gerrymandered, and there is both active and passive voter suppression. Hell, we’re in the South — there’s a long, disgusting history of Jim Crow-era hoops and hurdles baked into our election history. So I’m not so much speaking to the people who try their damnedest to effect change despite generations of obstacles put in their way.

No, I’m taking aim at my more progressive friends, those who get frustrated and feel boxed out. Well, duh. If you want to bring about real, systemic change, you’re going to have to work quite a bit harder. Because if the party in power can, metaphorically speaking, tell all its employees to nominate it for Best Pizza, it’s damn well going to.

So yeah, here we are. I’ve got some progressive buddies who equate Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump. Different sides of the same coin, they say. To which, naturally, I do a film-worthy spit take and sputter out something like, “Well, one of them condemned the extrajudicial murder of protesters by a teen insurgent, and the other can’t seem to bring himself to do that.” We’re ruled by the minority who has built a coalition of the most wealthy, ignorant, racist, and greedy among us. What happens if we take back even a little of their power?

This is an issue that seems, to me, to plague Tennessee particularly. Thinking back to the Senate race in 2018, I remember former Governor Phil Bredesen name-dropping Memphis in one of the debates. He talked about fixing roads, funding our rural hospitals. It wasn’t exactly awe-inspiring stuff, but at least he sounded like he had a plan. Then-Representative Marsha Blackburn, however, took a different approach. If I’d taken a drink every time she said “NRA” or “Obama,” I’d have died of alcohol poisoning. I don’t really believe that a majority of Tennesseans want assault weapons and hate Obama more than they want drivable roads and access to healthcare. But who knows?

We all know how that election turned out. Senator Blackburn took a page out of the Trump playbook and inflamed people. Now, two years later and in the middle of a pandemic, we haven’t done anything about our rapidly closing hospitals. And I call her office every week to demand she cool it on the “China virus” talk and do something to actually help Tennesseans.

So if you missed the nomination phase in the Flyer‘s BOM contest this year, maybe the best thing to do is just hold your nose and vote for the taco shop you think sucks the least. And next year, campaign for your favorite small, family-owned taco truck. Vote in the nomination period. Text your friends and remind them to vote, too. But whatever you do, for democracy’s sake, don’t withhold your vote in protest. That only helps preserve the status quo. Just vote, dammit.

Jesse Davis is the Flyer copy editor, book editor, and a staff writer.

Categories
News The Fly-By

MEMernet: WTF? on Ebay, AlGreens, and Shell Shock

WTF? for sale

Now you can own a piece of Flyer history. Our 2016 election issue with the “WTF?” headline can be yours on eBay for the low, low price of $100. It was free four years ago. But weren’t we all?

Its condition? Used, but in good shape. Where is it? Olive Branch.

Posted to eBay by butlernation2019

AlGreens

Don’t even care if this wasn’t in Memphis. Still Memphis AF.

Posted by u/productiveslacker73

Shell Shock

You weren’t a citizen of the MEMernet last week if you didn’t read about/see pictures of the grafitti at the Levitt Shell. Graceland and the I Love Memphis mural on Cooper were hit, too. But the Shell’s Facebook post about the graffiti was somehow the sparkiest spark on social.

People raged at the Shell and those upset by the graffiti, accusing them of caring more about “free music” than the lives of Black people. Facebooker Sarah Rushakoff pored over the Shell’s leadership lineup, finding its diversity lacking.

The day after the post, the Shell said on Facebook it had “multiple conversations” and “we appreciate your honesty and willingness to be vocal.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

Bigger, ‘Reimagined’ MPD Promised

The Memphis Police Department (MPD) is on course to get bigger — and “reimagined.”

Crime and police have been central to conversations around Memphis City Hall since late July. That’s when consultants dropped a report to the Memphis City Council that said we need more cops. MPD now has about 2,089 officers. Criminal justice consultants Richard Janikowski and Phyllis Betts from Strategic City Solutions said the city needs 2,800.

Before the size debate began, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland was having community-wide conversations about reforming the police department. These came in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests calling for change in Memphis and across the country.

A new study shows Memphis police Department needs more cops.

Last week, Strickland formalized those conversations with a strategic initiative to “Reimagine Policing.” He formed an advisory council to carry the initiative through its processes. That council includes church leaders like Apostle Bill Adkins from Greater Imani Cathedral of Faith, civil rights leaders like Tonja Sesley-Baymon of the Memphis Urban League, legislators like Sen. Raumesh Akbari, and law enforcement officials like Rosalind Harris with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office.

“Over the next 45 days, this group will be meeting with members of the community to bring forth their initial and immediate actionable solutions,” reads a statement from Strickland. “Once they bring those initial recommendations, the group will reconvene and continue working with members of the community for an additional 45 days to make final recommendations and present them to the administration.”

A website for the initiative, called Reimagine Policing in Memphis, is live. There, citizens can message leaders about changes they want to see in their communities. And they promise they’re listening.

“Trust between law enforcement and the people they protect and serve is essential in our city,” reads the site. “It is key to the stability of our communities, and the safe and effective delivery of police services. We want to listen and do the work to improve our Memphis Police Department.”

Leaders wanted to grow MPD to 2,300 by 2020. They didn’t make it. The new goal of 2,800 will be extremely, extremely difficult, according to council member Worth Morgan, the sponsor of the proposal to increase the MPD complement. He said the consultant study showed more cops will mean less crime.

But council member Michalyn Easter-Thomas wasn’t convinced. She said data could be manipulated to prove any point. If the council was putting numbers to things, Easter-Thomas suggested setting similar goals to poverty, homelessness, and blight around schools.

In 2016, MPD had 30.1 officers per 10,000 residents, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Nashville had 20.9, for comparison. New Orleans had 29.5. New York had 42.3. Chicago had 43.9. Atlantic City had the most with 70.9. Lincoln, California, had the least with 4.2.

So, does it work? Pounds of academic literature says it does. But further reviews, like the one from The Washington Post in June, say more spending on police hasn’t necessarily moved the needle in the last 60 years.

“More [police] spending in a year hasn’t significantly correlated to less crime or to more crime,” Phillip Bump wrote for WaPo.