Author: Micaela Watts

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Scenes from the Darrius Stewart Rally

A group calling itself the Darrius Stewart Truth Coalition held a “Justice of Darrius” rally on Tuesday afternoon outside the Shelby County Criminal Justice Center.

The group was protesting last week’s announcement that a grand jury declined to indict Memphis Police officer Connor Schilling for the shooting death of Darrius Stewart, an unarmed black teenager killed during a traffic stop in July. Shelby County District Attorney Amy Weirich recommended indictment to the grand jury, but it’s members, whose identities remain a secret, did not agree. 

Schilling is expected to face administrative hearing with the Memphis Police Department, possibly this week. He is still relieved of duty with pay, and that hearing could determine if Schilling should be suspended with pay or possibly terminated.

Stewart was shot on July 17th by Schilling after the car Stewart was a passenger in was pulled over for having a headlight out. Stewart was detained in the back of a squad car after the traffic stop while Schilling checked for warrants. When Schilling discovered Stewart had two outstanding warrants in Illinois and Iowa, he opened the squad car door to place handcuffs on Stewart. Schilling said Stewart then attacked him and struck him with the handcuffs. During the struggle, Schilling fired at Stewart. Stewart died from two gunshot wounds, according to the Shelby County Medical Examiner’s report.

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Scenes from the Darrius Stewart Rally

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News The Fly-By

Evergreen Residents Plan Improvements For Williamson Park

CREDIT: Bianca Phillips

Williamson Park, an elongated 4.5 acres of greenspace with few amenities, is the latest slice of Memphis slated for an upgrade.

It’s a quiet neighborhood park tucked between Williamson and North Willett in the Evergreen Historic District, hidden from major Midtown arteries. It’s a city-owned park, but the residents of Evergreen, rather than the city, have been spearheading the park’s revitalization.

Currently, the park has a small playground and a large, empty grassy area. The neighbors want to see additional trees, playground improvements, and picnic tables.

Bianca Phillips

“Youth soccer teams practice there. Dog owners congregate every evening, and our kids play on the playground. We even hunt Easter eggs and host picnics there,” said Bethany Spiller, an Evergreen resident. “The park fosters relationships among people, and anything [we] can do to make it more enjoyable and safe, the stronger our Midtown community becomes.”

Sarah Newstok, a special projects coordinator for Livable Memphis, is excited about the possibility of using this project as a blueprint for communities across Memphis that want to revitalize their own neighborhood greenspaces.

“We want to create a how-to guide,” Newstok said. “We want this to be a pilot for other projects, so that other neighborhoods that might not have the same resources can follow these steps.”

Newstok said that it makes more sense to tackle greenspace improvements as a whole plan, rather than piecemeal. The partnership that formed between Evergreen residents and community space planners “gave us an opportunity to see what a public/private partnership would really look like.”

Livable Memphis and the crowd-funding website ioby (which stands for “in our backyards”) partnered with Evergreen residents to implement upgrades to the park.

With help from the Hyde Family Foundations, the planning project for Williamson Park was funded in less than 24 hours after it was announced through Livable Memphis. The planning process was led by landscape architects at Ritchie Smith Associates.

Some of the Hyde funds will also cover the cost of planting trees. Newstok is hopeful that some of the funds for other improvements will come from the city.

Tentative plans for the park were unveiled during Livable Memphis’ annual Summit for Neighborhood Leaders, which took place this past Saturday.

The presentation of the Williamson Park Mini-Master Plan was but one segment of the summit. The larger focus — “Engaging in Your Parks and Green Spaces in Memphis” — drew residents from all over the city who have a similar desire to create community spaces in their own neighborhoods.

Janet Hooks, the city’s director of Parks and Neighborhoods, was encouraged by the support for the Williamson Park project and noted that small projects could be a watershed moment for neighborhoods.

“If you see a park that’s run-down, the mindset is that the people living in the area don’t care or are not involved,” said Hooks, adding that, “Private ownership has a domino-effect on a neighborhood. When people are engaged, that suggests to me that we’re on the right track.”

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News The Fly-By

Reproductive Rights Activists Fight to End Law Criminalizing Drug Use By Pregnant Women

For the next eight months, a coalition of women’s healthcare advocacy groups will be doing everything they can to ensure that SB 1391 — labeled the “Tennessee Pregnancy Criminalization Law” by its opponents — will ride into its sunset of expiration without any further legislative action.

The law, which allows women to be charged with assault for using illegal substances during pregnancy, was written in response to Tennessee’s rapidly increasing problem with infants born with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS), which causes treatable, but painful, withdrawal symptoms in infants born to mothers who have abused substances during their pregnancy.

In an unusual move for a criminal statute, the bill included a sunset provision of two years. So the law, which went into effect last July, is set to expire in July 2016. At that time, legislators can consider whether or not to pass a more permanent version of the law.

While the intention of the law may have been to discourage expecting mothers from using addictive substances, some advocates and healthcare professionals insist that the law will tear families apart and criminalize already vulnerable mothers.

“In a lot of spheres, addiction is seen as a health issue, as a disease. But, now if you have a woman who is pregnant, all of the sudden she’s a criminal,” said Allison Glass, the state director for Healthy and Free Tennessee, a nonprofit coalition of groups dedicated to sexual health and reproductive issues.

On October 15th, Healthy and Free Tennessee, along with several coalition partners, met at the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center to discuss their concern with the pregnancy criminalization law, as well as strategies to ensure its expiration. Memphis was one of five of the coalition’s stops across the state.

According to Glass, the law was written vaguely. Whether or not a mother is reported for her infant testing positive for illegal substances is up the discretion of the healthcare provider.

Further complicating the matter, the law was passed on the heels of the Safe Harbor Act, a piece of legislation designed to protect mothers from prosecution if they seek help for substance abuse of legally prescribed drugs. This means the difference between the possibility of treatment and the threat of jail lies in not only the type of drug but whether or not it was prescribed to the mother.

“We have a really imbalanced way of dealing with this issue,” Glass said. “It creates a second class of people who are pregnant.”

The Tennessee Department of Health began tracking reported cases of NAS in 2013. In the years since, more than half of all reported cases were caused by substances prescribed by the mother’s doctor.

Exactly how many Tennessee residents support, or even know about the law, is unclear. Glass believes that educating the public will be key to ensuring the law expires on its sunset date of July 1, 2016.

“We’re trying to help educate folks. It’s an incredibly complex issue. What we’re saying also is that medical experts, people in public health, and people who are experts in treatment facilities … those are the people who need to come together and think about what needs to happen to solve the problem,” Glass said. “This is not a place for our legislators to be passing a law and certainly not through the criminal justice system.”

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News The Fly-By

Show Me $15 Gets First Wage Board Hearing

CREDIT: Micaela Watts

The common thread to the minimum-wage increases seen recently in New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle, are hours of testimony from low-wage workers from both public- and private-sector jobs.

This past Tuesday, Tennessee residents and elected officials held the first Tennessee wage board hearing, where workers receiving the federally mandated minimum wage of $7.25 an hour had the chance to share their testimonies of economic strife.

“We can’t talk about civil rights, and we can’t talk about human rights without talking about economics,” state Rep. G.A. Hardaway said.

The board hearing was scheduled after the Flyer‘s press time, but Hardaway said the board was set up to allow elected officials to hear from the people most impacted by low wages.

“If we’re going to present legislation, we need to hear from the folks that it impacts in order for the message to persuade your colleagues,” Hardaway said. “They need to know who’s going to be impacted the most. Let them witness how it’s going to change lives.”

Hardaway sat on the wage board, along with Memphis City Councilman Myron Lowery; the Rev. Keith Norman of First Baptist Church-Broad; Cherisse Scott, founder and CEO of SisterReach; and Dr. David Ciscel, a retired economics professor from the University of Memphis.

According to Hardaway, after his election to office in 2007, his values have centered around education and economics. In 2014, when Hardaway proposed a bill for an incremental minimum-wage increase, which was ultimately voted down in the Tennessee House, he became familiar with citizen action groups such as Show Me $15.

Show Me $15 is the local affiliate of the national Fight For $15 campaign, which has expanded from an initial mission to organize fast-food workers to include more low-wage workers such as home health-care professionals and even adjunct college faculty. It’s their stories from the frontlines of minimum wage earnings that Hardaway wants heard.

The debate over raising the minimum wage to $15 is national and divided. The latest Pew Research Center reports from 2014 show that a minimum-wage increase is a popular idea, with 90 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of Independents in favor of increases. The issue is more divided among Republicans, with 53 percent in favor of a wage increase and 43 percent opposed.

It’s important to note, however, that these Pew numbers are in response to last year’s failed Democrat-backed proposal to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour.

Raising the wage to $15 an hour is another beast entirely, and Ciscel finds optimism in the years-long adjustment period that he believes workers will likely face during the battle for increasing wages.

“So, while we actually want to see a minimum wage go from $7.25 to $15 an hour, the actual wages that we are talking about are moving from the mid-$8s and mid-$10s,” Ciscel explained.

Not every low-wage worker is earning $7.25 an hour, and Ciscel asserts the increases from the slightly higher ranges of $8.50 to $10 an hour pose less of an economic threat than some might think.

“Historically, as we move the minimum wage up, it means that people have more spending power, and, in fact, it means that new jobs are created through that spending power,” Ciscel said. “What people are trying to scare folks on right now is that short-run adjustment from when you move up to $15 dollars an hour from that $7.25. It’s not going to happen like that for most workers. You’ll have a period of adjustment.”