Author: Elizabeth Cooper

A few months ago, the black community found itself at the intersection of the marriage equality debate as President Barack Obama and the NAACP endorsed same-sex marriage and the Coalition of African American Pastors (CAAP) rapidly responded by denouncing the president’s stance.

The Rev. William Owens, a native Memphian and the leader of the CAAP, said marriage equality is not a civil rights issue. He accused the president of disgracing the civil rights movement.

Owens’ comments enlivened a response from Clergy Defending the Rights of All, a Memphis-based group of religious leaders, which held a press conference at the Memphis Gay & Lesbian Community Center (MGLCC) last Thursday.

An African-American gay minister of the pro-equality organization Operation Rebirth in Chicago has scheduled a pro-equality rally for September 7th in Memphis.

“I think it’s ridiculous that black people would stand up and cosign discrimination against anyone considering our history in this country,” said Tuan Ingram, the gay minister behind Operation Rebirth. “It’s a case of the oppressed becoming the oppressor.”

Ingram will journey from Chicago to meet with other lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and black community leaders in Memphis to protest the CAAP’s anti-gay stance and rally for equality.

When Ingram received no reply after extending an invitation to Owens to meet with him and other leaders of local gay-affirming black churches, he began planning the September rally [Owens did not reply to a Flyer request for an interview]. Ingram wanted to discuss with Owens a variety of issues affecting the African-American community.

“Equality has never hurt any community,” Ingram said. “I have heard no response, which lets me know [Owens] is uninterested in the real issues plaguing our community, like voter suppression, police brutality, drugs and violence, lack of education, and high unemployment.”

Will Batts, the director of MGLCC, had a similar message at the Clergy Defending the Rights of All press conference last Thursday: “There are a lot of important issues for us to deal with in this city, and we need to move on.”

Ingram said he believes the conservatively funded National Organization for Marriage (NOM), for which Owens serves as the liaison to black churches, is funding CAAP to suppress the African-American voting base.

According to a confidential NOM report obtained by the Human Rights Campaign, “The strategic goal of this project [NOM] is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks — two key Democratic constituencies.”

“That memo was from four years ago, and we’ve apologized for it,” NOM president Brian Brown said. “We aren’t the ones who want to split the Democratic vote. The Democratic party’s acceptance of gay marriage is splitting the vote.”

Ingram said he looks forward to meeting and working with the Clergy Defending the Rights of All and any other local groups working for social equality.

A feature-length documentary film about the Invaders, a black-power activist group from the civil rights era in Memphis, is currently in production. The Invaders is native-Memphian Prichard Thomas Smith’s (New Garage Explosion, Mr. Fascination, Memphis Heat) newest project, which will shed light on a marginalized area of local black history.

Because the Invaders have been historically described as a militant organization and blamed for starting violence in the 1968 sanitation march, the film is giving the group a chance to tell their story through a series of member interviews and never-before-seen archival footage from the University of Memphis’ special collections library. Although he now lives in Brooklyn, Smith discussed The Invaders while he was in Memphis working on the film. — Elizabeth Cooper

Flyer: What was culturally significant about the Invaders that led you to make a film?

Prichard Smith: Their name, first off. How was there this thing called the Invaders that I’ve never heard about? Really, it was more curiosity that brought me to it. I mentioned it to J.B. Horrell [who studied history at the U of M], and he gave me more information. It just kind of spiraled into this film. The more we learned and the more people we talked to, we realized there was this group in Memphis that really cared about their community and were trying to make a difference.

So who were the Invaders?

Their community organizing efforts were based on slum landlords, police brutality, and feeding hungry children before school. The fact that these guys have been marginalized and called thugs in every book is unfair. Taylor Branch, who is basically the authority on the civil rights movement, implied in his book that the Invaders were thugs, and that’s just not true.

How have the group’s members been helpful in the making of this film?

Pretty much all of them want to tell their story. If you had done something in your life that was so monumental and never got any credit, it would bother you. Imagine if you were one of the last people to sit down with Martin Luther King and negotiate a plan, and everybody says you were a hoodlum or a thug.

This story has never been told and it’s critical for this to be told, not just to Memphis but to the entire black population of the United States. The Invaders weren’t thugs. They were dudes who were thinking very critically about their situation and trying to figure out exactly how to handle it.

Who has been working on the film and what are their roles?

Well, I came to J.B. with this story. He knew more about it than I did. From there, we’ve been working together researching it and breaking it down. We called Chad Schaffler [producer]. I told him about the story, because we worked on Memphis Heat together. Instantly, he was stoked and said, “I’ll help you produce that.” Chad supplied the crew. He has a company in town that makes really high-quality film and video. Chad has been effectively making our movie look as good as possible with the help of Peter Budd [grip for The Help, Hustle and Flow, and Black Snake Moan] and Ryan Parker [cinematographer].

To see the film’s trailer, go to the Facebook page for The Invaders Movie.

If you’ve driven down Peabody near Cooper in the last month, you may have noticed what appears to be a wooden birdhouse in a yard on the south side of the street.

But if you look closer, that house is full of books. A little sign beneath it reads “Little Free Library: Take a Book, Return a Book.”

This Little Free Library, stewarded by Steve and Jennifer Boren, is the second to pop up in Memphis. A Harbor Town couple maintains the first one in their front yard.

Todd Bol started the original Little Free Library in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2009. Since then, the nonprofit has expanded to include over 2,000 locations worldwide. The local Little Free Libraries were erected after both couples were inspired by a news story about the free library trend on National Public Radio in March.

Little Free Libraries run on the “take a book, leave a book” principle, although people who start their own libraries may fill the boxes up the first time.

“I thought, wow, what a great opportunity for our community,” Jennifer Boren said.

Boren solicited the help of her husband’s tool-savvy father and uncle to build the library. After previewing other Little Free Libraries on the nonprofit’s website, the family designed and built the unique box. On the couple’s four-year anniversary, which falls on the Fourth of July, the two installed the library in 100-degree heat.

“It’s pretty amazing. Within the first day, all the books that I started with in the library were gone, and we had new books,” she said.

The books continued to turn over quickly. She remembered getting home late and checking the library. When she took out her trash a few hours later, someone had taken a book. “Every day you open it, it’s a surprise,” she said. “It’s like Christmas every time.”

Books that have been left in Boren’s library have included Naked by David Sedaris, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, and Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser.

So far, the Borens have had no problems with the library. When a friend asked her what she would do if someone stole all the books, she said, “How can someone steal something that’s free?”

“There’s something to be said for the whole sense of community,” Boren said. “It doesn’t just belong to my husband and me. It’s everybody’s free library. I think when people see that it’s for everyone, everyone takes a stake of ownership in it.”

Boren said she’s been surprised by how many titles leave and return. When she put an audiobook on cassette in the library, her husband joked that no one would ever take it. By the next day, it was gone. A few days later, the audiobook returned and someone else took it.

As a middle school librarian and the mother of a 15-month-old, Boren tries to keep books for people of all ages in circulation. She also monitors the library to ensure nothing too explicit makes its way into the rounds.

Prior to starting the library, the Borens only knew their immediate neighbors, but now the couple is meeting people from all over who stop by for a book and end up staying to chat.

She said exchanging books opens a dialogue unavailable through other media: “People get to share the books they love. It’s neat to see a book you really love gone.”

The colorful array of fresh fruits and vegetables available at the weekly Memphis Botanic Garden farmers market may not indicate the trouble in the heartland’s agricultural sector.

But local farmers tend to agree that dry conditions have indeed affected their crops.

While large farmers throughout the country are losing soy, corn, and hay crops during the drought affecting much of the nation, small farmers’ losses vary according to their access to irrigation.

The Department of Agriculture has classified 1,369 counties in more than 31 states as suffering from extreme drought conditions, including Shelby County, Crittenden County in Arkansas, and DeSoto County in Mississippi. Rainfall in the Memphis region is nearly half the annual average.

“This is the worst I’ve ever seen it, and I’ve been doing this for 35 years,” said Sam Long of Long’s Orchards in Covington.

He said the stems of his peaches are drying, and the fruit is prematurely falling. Not only does he worry about this year’s loss of production, he fears the lack of water essential for his trees’ assimilation of nutrients will decrease the mineral content in the soil necessary for high yields next year.

“They’ll be weak going into winter, and they’ll be weak coming out of winter,” Long said, as he likened the peach trees to a marathon runner. “They need to recuperate and build themselves back up. A tree does the same thing as a person.”

The most talked about crop shriveling under the stress of the dry spell is corn. Dolly Gray from Gray’s Farm in Mason said her 12-year-old grandson picked up an ear of corn and told her that it should have 13 to 15 rows of kernels by now, but it only had 11. As a farmer who plants corn in intervals to prolong the production season, Gray can no longer start a crop and said the last planting has “burnt up.”

“It’s sad to see it just kinda dry up. When you walk through the corn, it’s like walking through it in October,” Gray said.

The farm is cutting the corn that dried in the field to be used for livestock feed. They expect no more fresh corn this year. But Gray said her okra and cotton enjoy the dry heat and are doing well “so it’s not all doom and gloom.”

Free-range cattle ranchers are especially hard hit as pastures dry out. Many began supplementing with feed in June, a process that usually begins in September. The decrease of the production of corn and hay is resulting in higher feed prices. Wallace Mathis of Mathis Creek Farms in Covington said he will be selling cattle at auction to reduce losses.

However, farmers using drip irrigation reported experiencing few problems, though many said germinating seeds for fall and winter crops poses a challenge as the soil dries out too quickly.

Brandon Pugh of Delta Sol Farms in Procter, Arkansas, said community supported agriculture, which functions under a model of mutual support, helps in a year like this. If a farmer loses a crop, so does the member. But if a farmer does well, the member shares in the benefits. “That’s just part of a CSA,” he said. “You are supporting a farmer.”

While large farmers struggle, Pugh attributes having the best year of his CSA to keeping his operation small and diverse: “I got all these things going on, so hopefully if something goes out with one of them, I can just push forward with another. ”

Radical politics are emerging from the underground to the Martin Luther King Labor Center at the corner of Danny Thomas and Beale for a weekend of workshops on immigration in the South and the socialist-feminist decision-making process among other topics.

The three-day Socialist Party USA organizing conference will draw socialists from other cities as well as Memphians interested in social justice and activism. The Memphis local, which formed in October 2008, is currently one of the most active chapters of the national party, which led to Memphis being chosen to host this year’s conference.

“This is our way to get other folks to support Memphis, because they’ve been doing such great work,” said Greg Pason, the party’s national secretary.

The local branch applied to host the conference last November and began planning in January when they were alerted they won the position. Other cities in the running were Detroit, San Francisco, and New York.

The conference workshops range from an international socialist perspective to a session on organizing in the South. Local artists are presenting on the use of protest art as a revolutionary force throughout history, including murals from Haiti and Vietnam, and how to use public spaces as a platform for social change.

Michele Nyberg, co-chair of the Memphis Socialist Party, said organizing at a grassroots level in the South is unique, and the local hopes to share that through this conference.

“Memphis is historically more in need of organizing than some other cities because of the history here and the fact that there is so much civil rights history that needs to be recognized,” she said.

The two keynote speakers were both involved in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Elmore Nickleberry is a sanitation worker who went on strike and marched with Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1968 protests. Coby Smith is grassroots activist and organizer known for his involvement in the black power group the Invaders.

Even people who don’t consider themselves radically minded would still enjoy the speakers, Nyberg said. The speakers’ presentations are free and open to the public on Saturday, July 28th from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Martin Luther King Labor Center.

“We are socialists, but we understand politics outside of the party as long as they don’t move too far from our platform,” Nyberg said.

What is a socialist? According the party’s platform on the website, “We are committed to the transformation of capitalism through the creation of a democratic socialist society based on compassion, empathy, and respect as well as the development of new social structures.”

The party’s 2012 presidential candidate, Stewart Alexander, is scheduled to be in attendance.

The conference will also feature two nights of music. On Friday night, NOTS and Moving Finger are playing at Otherlands Coffee Bar, and on Saturday night, Michael Peery of Magic Kids and Naan Violence are playing at Mulan Bistro.

At the foot of the escalator of the Cook Convention Center last Thursday, the room opened up to a crowd of 200 people waiting in chairs to enter the main room of Project Homeless Connect 2.

Once admitted into the main room, each guest was paired with a volunteer to guide them through partitions of services including Social Security, identification, veterans, medical, housing, and legal, which included the new “street court.”

While this was the second year of Memphis’ Project Homeless Connect (a national effort to provide basic services and housing options for the homeless), it was the first run of the street court. The makeshift general sessions court was set up to clear the homeless of legal impediments to finding employment and housing.

“The idea behind Project Homeless Connect is that you take something away,” said Josh Spickler with the Shelby County Public Defender’s Office. “When you leave, you have something tangible: a haircut, a housing application, or, in our case, an order that says your court costs are waived.”

Spickler was responsible for organizing the street court at this year’s event. Judge Karen Massey presided over the court, while the Public Defender’s Office worked alongside volunteers from the University of Memphis’ Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law and the Baker Donelson law firm.

Tom Williams, vice president of the law school’s Public Action Law Society, said many of the court costs associated with the cases have lain dormant for 10 to 15 years.

“The city’s obviously not getting any money out of that arrangement, and it’s a real impediment to these people’s lives moving in the right direction,” Williams said. “This allows them to wipe the slate and us to focus on moving them forward as opposed to punishing someone continually for being indigent.”

The indigent waited in chairs before the judge’s table while volunteer aides sat next to them, some chatting and joking, others remaining quiet.

“Everyone has a wonderful attitude. We’re here to help,” said Jennifer Mitchell with the Public Defender’s Office. “When you work in a system long enough, you know things aren’t perfect.”

The pace increased after lunch when the records were delivered to the court. Ernest Pernell smiled after a $10 fine associated with a previous DUI charge was dismissed.

“There’s a lot of people in the same situation I’m in who aren’t bad people,” said Quentin Thompson, who was waiting to get his misdemeanors expunged. “They just aren’t getting a chance. Today gives me hope that the opportunity for a chance is coming.”

Williams said the misdemeanors many were seeking to expunge were associated with lack of housing.

“There are a lot of things we do that if we didn’t have homes would be illegal. If you are living on the streets and you’re intoxicated, then you’re publicly intoxicated, as opposed to going into a bar or being in your house.”

Many of those seeking services said bad luck led to sleeping on couches, on the streets, and in shelters. In some cases, the line between homeless and volunteer was nearly indistinguishable but for the volunteers’ orange shirts and the bracelets on the wrists of the homeless.

As people walked away from the judge with newly dropped fees and expunged records, their faces took on a look nearing bewilderment, a smile tinged with disbelief.

During the course of the court from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Massey mediated 20 cases, while the legal aides provided 161 attendees with legal counseling.

Aside from legal matters, 1,204 guests of Project Homeless Connect received 708 housing screenings: 44 people were approved for housing and two were transported into permanent housing arrangements.