Author: Troy L. Wiggins

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Opinion The Last Word

Living the Dream: Are We Really Working in Service to Dr. King’s Vision?

CREDIT: Phil Stanziola, NYWT&S staff photographer courtesy wikimedia commons

By the time you read this, we will have celebrated a national holiday commemorating the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King was a civil rights pioneer, a champion for nonviolent struggle toward equality and justice, and an outspoken critic of the United States of America. He was a visionary whose idea of the American future was radical during his time, and that vision remains radical today.

Many of us, even people reared on Memphis’ soil, even people old enough to remember the thunderclap of his assassination and the void that followed, have softened our view of Dr. King and his ideologies. We see his legacy of civil rights activism as something of the past, and the injustice that he opposed as a historical blot on the American tapestry that we are quickly rubbing away. After all, because of the efforts of Dr. King and other activists, we now live in a post-racial country. Our collective work to end racism has borne fruit, and discrimination no longer exists within these borders. The American dream has been realized.

Phil Stanziola, NYWT&S staff photographer courtesy wikimedia commons

Martin Luther King Jr.

Except it hasn’t. We owe both Dr. King and the day we observe in remembrance of him more respect than a blind sweep of his teachings and legacy beneath a sheet of self-congratulatory misinformation. This is just as true in Memphis as it is anywhere else.

Legislation in favor of a national holiday recognizing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was first introduced by Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) in 1968, four days after he was assassinated. Originally envisioned as a call to continue Dr. King’s unfinished work, the fledgling national holiday faced constant congressional roadblocks, and legislation supporting it was routinely defeated by officials who cited King’s possible communist ties, his extramarital affairs, and — unofficially — good old American racism as reason enough against any formal recognition of his life. After Herculean efforts from those who supported the holiday, including a multi-million-signature petition from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, endorsement from Chicago mayor Harold Washington, several congressional testimonies from Coretta Scott King herself, and a Stevie Wonder protest song, the first national King Holiday was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1983 and finally observed in January 1986. Only 17 states celebrated the first national King Holiday, and it wouldn’t be recognized as a federal holiday in all 50 states until 1999.

During the holiday, many citizens, including thousands in the Mid-South, participate in some form of volunteerism in the spirit of Dr. King’s statement that “everyone can be great because everybody can serve.” But Dr. King referred to a more lasting sort of service than we allow for in our decontextualized take on this quote. In “The Drum Major Instinct,” the sermon that this quote is lifted from, he discusses serving humanity as Jesus did, with love and with a heart turned toward complete justice for all humankind.

“Say that I was a drum major for justice,” Dr. King said, referencing in this sermon his commitment to transformative economic justice, to ending American imperialism, and to grounding his activism in a true and total love of all oppressed people and a desire for their well-being that dove deeper than the political. Dr. King died fighting for economic and social justice for workers and ending wars as well as for racial justice. He fought for a lasting state change for America, not for his image and philosophy to be warped in order to serve the liberal-guilt industrial complex. It is easy for us, on the national holiday and throughout the year, to pretend to act in service to Dr. King’s life and teachings, but if we are not truly committed to transforming the lives of others, to, as Dr. King said in the closing of his sermon, making “this old world a new world,” then what are we doing?

A commitment to transformative change in this city means a commitment far beyond a weekend volunteering spree. It means fighting day in and day out for those Memphians who find themselves economically and socially dispossessed. It means committing ourselves to an intentionality of vision that includes recognizing that our city faces a complex network of intersectional challenges. It means devoting ourselves to interracial and intercultural inclusivity in more than just our social network feeds. It means challenging ourselves on the very ideas that our country is built on, and determining for ourselves whether we are truly working toward the ideas and moral vision that Dr. King presented to us when we enable systemic ills like mass incarceration, economic injustice, and inequality in housing and transit access to disproportionately hinder certain members of our community.

Four days after we celebrate the legacy of Dr. King, we are swearing into the office of the president a temperamental toddler of a man whose every action sends many Americans sliding into deep depression and anxiety. Most of us assume that if we were to resurrect Dr. King in a post-Trump inauguration America, he would find himself appalled to the point of returning to his eternal slumber. But would he be less appalled by the America he would have found himself in four years ago, during the presidency of a man touted as the literal representation of his teachings? We must ask ourselves: Have we really been working in service to Dr. King’s dream of visionary, transformative equality, or are we just pretending?

Troy L. Wiggins is a Memphian and writer whose work has appeared in the Memphis Noir anthology, Make Memphis magazine, and The Memphis Flyer.

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Opinion The Last Word

New Destination

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Memphians are facing a public transit crisis.

Ask anyone who relies on our bus system to get to work or school or uses it to run routine errands, and they’ll tell you the same thing: Buses are unreliable, the rides are too long, and, in many cases, their routes are nonsensical. Riders from neighborhoods that were previously served by routes like the 31 Crosstown now find themselves without a dedicated bus route, which means a long walk to the closest bus stop and an even longer ride to their destination. Routes to major employment centers are basically nonexistent from these neighborhoods, furthering the economic segregation that, you guessed it, intersects with race: Black Memphians in particular make up 90 percent of bus riders, and over 30 percent of these Memphians live in poverty. The median annual income of workers who use public transit is just over $16,000, and transportation expenses consume 27 percent of their median household income.

Memphis Area Transit Authority CEO Ron Garrison agrees that there is a public transit crisis. In separate columns in The Commercial Appeal and The Memphis Flyer, Garrison painted a dire picture of MATA’s ongoing financial state. According to his most recent column, MATA is underfunded by more than $20 million in comparison to peer cities’ transit systems, due in large part to decreased ridership and targeted budget cuts during Mayor A C Wharton’s tenure. Garrison acknowledges that these factors have forced MATA to make some tough decisions — such as consolidating the routes of the 31 Crosstown, 43 Elvis Presley, and 10 Watkins into the new 42 Crosstown route — that have further impacted ridership and increased ill will between MATA and bus riders. Garrison’s Flyer column ends with the MATA CEO imploring riders and other concerned citizens to contact their elected officials and ask that they give more consideration to MATA’s funding issues.

Justin Fox Burks

Members of the Memphis Bus Riders Union (MBRU), an advocacy group of bus riders founded by “Mother” Georgia A. King, will point out instances where previous significant funding awards were dedicated to reinstating the downtown trolley system instead of restoring key services to underserved neighborhoods and increasing the overall effectiveness of routes outside of downtown. Members of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 713, who have partnered with the MBRU, agree. In his Commercial Appeal column, Garrison identifies the restarting of the trolleys as an important goal for future MATA operations. MBRU members are long past disappointment at these statements, instead attributing the seeming dismissal of their concerns to a longstanding philosophy that prioritizes the concerns of business-minded developers over those of everyday citizens.

The Memphis Bus Riders Union has called the 31 Crosstown “a lifeline” for thousands of Memphians who often could not afford the cost or upkeep of a vehicle and lived in segregation far from their jobs or schools. MATA employees credit the 2012 Short Range Transit Plan (SRTP), conducted by Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates, as key to their decision to consolidate old routes into the new 42 Crosstown route. The SRTP did indeed call for consolidation of routes that used the same thoroughfares. It also positioned downtown Memphis as MATA’s strongest market for riders, criticized circuitous neighborhood routes, and identified MATA’s current funding woes vis-à-vis cities with similar populations and transit system considerations. But the SRTP also cited North Memphis, South Memphis, and Frayser as rapidly increasing transit use neighborhoods and advised MATA about the necessity of broad geographic coverage for riders.

I am a former bus rider. My first time catching the 31 Crosstown bus was when I was 8 years old: I rode it to school. In times when my family didn’t have a car, we relied on it to get to work and run household errands, like buying groceries and paying bills. I caught the 31 Crosstown at a stop on the corner of Firestone and Tully — a stop that does not exist on the 42 Crosstown’s current route. My ride on the 31 Crosstown would end at the intersection of Vollintine and Watkins, where I would then cross both streets to catch the 10 Watkins to Delano Elementary School. If I had to catch the current bus, the 42 Crosstown, I would have to find some way to get to the Vollintine and Watkins stop, the closest stop on the 42 Crosstown’s route to my home in North Memphis. If I were a student trying to get to Manassas High School from New Chicago, which my younger brother currently does, I would have to walk a mile down Firestone, a street full of industrial blight with few safe crosswalks or sidewalks. Students of the former Northside High School who have been re-zoned to Manassas face an even longer walk to their new school.

The increased difficulty of student access has undoubtedly led to closures of historic neighborhood schools like Northside and Booker T. Washington. People who live in the neighborhood now called Uptown have no real route out of their community and into employment or shopping districts of the city. I imagine that the same reality exists for residents of the Riverview-Kansas neighborhood that bookended the southern end of the 31 Crosstown’s route. Reinstating the former routes or creating new routes that more adequately serve neighborhood residents would be a start to fixing this. Investing funding toward repairing these routes in addition to repairing the trolleys would work as well.

Memphis cannot continue to provide inadequate transit services to its riders. Our ineffecient, underfunded transit system contributes to the massive economic and racial segregation that affects countless citizens in this city, and we continue that segregation to our own detriment. According to a 2015 report from the American Public Transportation Association, every dollar we spend on a safe, effective public transit system can generate $4 in economic returns. Public transit drives the local economy and directly generates business sales, revenues and new private investment through ridership expansion and an increasingly mobile workforce.

Memphis is enjoying a period of exciting growth right now, but continued equitable development depends on a strong, reliable public transit system that adequately serves all citizens. As is the case with so many other public concerns, true change in this area will require work from everyone, not just those concerned or an affected few.

Troy L. Wiggins is a Memphian and writer whose work has appeared in the Memphis Noir anthology and Make Memphis magazine.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

A Pre-Trump Survival Guide

Last week, we made a bigot president-elect of the United States. Some folks are feeling partisan disappointment at this. Many others are flush with primal fear, like realizing that you’re trapped inside Jurassic Park just as the news that the raptors have escaped from their enclosure blares from a loudspeaker. But this is our reality, complete with roving bands of Trump supporters carving swastikas on any surface clean enough to bear the mark. If you’re black like me, or brown or Muslim or queer or trans or poor — people living oppressed pre-Trump — you’re probably figuring that this singular event marks the decline of America into the Hunger Games era.

For me, waking up to an impending Trumplandia was like taking a sledgehammer to the chest. I sank into an emotional swamp of depression, disgust, and fear for myself, my friends, and my family. Being the target of good old, homegrown American hatred is nothing new for a lot of us, but the reality of life as a target of soon-to-be President Trump’s actual hatred and his forthcoming policies rooted in that hatred has the road ahead looking mighty decrepit.

Facing this reality, how should we prepare to move forward along this road in the direction of progress and justice? Well, I don’t have all the answers, and I can’t tell you how you should be feeling right now. But I can tell you that we have options. Our resilience and resistance is nothing new. Without us and our refusal to be denied our place in the American tapestry, this country would be a bland, music-less republic full of sadness and weird Jell-O casseroles.

Folks suffering from Trump-shock, take a moment to breathe. Or pray. Or cry. Or break some dishes, or swear your fealty to an ancient eldritch horror with tentacles for a head in exchange for the power to make humans spontaneously combust with a blink. Okay, maybe not the last one. But give yourself the time and space to react to this new, horrible reality. Forgive yourself for your fear, because that’s a normal emotion to feel when you’re facing down the hydra that is white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy — its singular goal is to disempower everyone who’s not a cisgender, straight, white dude. Take the time to process and right yourself. You’ll thank you for it.

Once you right yourself, check on your people. You’re not alone in your grief and fear right now, and there are people in your networks who will need to lean on you. I wasn’t joking about those roving bands of Trump thugs; they’re real, they’re indiscriminate, and they are drunk at the seeming justification for their hatred. Find your people and cover them. Feed them. Let them vent if they need to. Squad up and watch each other’s backs. Come to their aid if you see them suffering from Trumpression. We’re going to need each other if we’re going to make it through this.

After taking care of yourself and finding your squad, start the work of living and resisting. Despite what some think, you don’t have to accept the fact that a vulgar, racist, misogynistic, xenophobic bigot is our president. Especially when that president has made it very clear that he is going to work against everything that you stand for. Sure, he has a lot of power, but so does the Lich King — and he can be taken down in a 25-player raid.

Now is the time to strategize. Gather and hunker down. Determine which representatives are true to your community’s interests and needs. Develop a long-term strategy for electing them to or placing them in key strategic positions. Understand that voting is not the penultimate resistance, but that equity and justice work also requires personal action — use your skills to support organizations and groups whose work aligns with your values. Read literature that broadens your worldview. Artists, create kickass art that challenges people. Community leaders, help those around you understand the gravity of our situation and listen to their ideas on progress. Galvanize yourself and others to work toward the common goal of equality and shared power. Begin to think and act strategically and intersectionally.

And remember, there’s a difference between conversation and debate. Debate has a different aim than conversation; it is used to force people to concede a point, and ultimately silence them. Conversation is used to communicate, to share ideas and expand understanding. Conserve your energy, and work smart. Don’t fall into the trap of debating individuals when you should be conversing with your squad and working to make our systems equitable. Don’t jump too quickly to the blame game. Even though we know white people and their dedication to preserving systems that privilege them played a huge part in this mess (Trump won the white vote over Clinton in nearly every conceivable way, per exit polling data gathered by Edison Research for the National Election Pool. Feel free to debate your mother about that one), blaming them solves nothing. Hopefully, the ones among them who call themselves allies realize the work that they must do and are committed to doing it.

So, take the time to right yourself, then brush yourself off. We have work to do, and we’re going to need all squads on deck. Ring the bells that can still ring.

Troy L. Wiggins is a Memphian and writer whose work has appeared in the Memphis Noir anthology, Make Memphis magazine and The Memphis Flyer.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Memphis’ Lost Generation

Our city has a problem with violence.

Of course, the violence I am talking about is the senseless shooting that took Myneishia “Shugnug” Johnson’s life and left her 1-year-old son, Kylan, an orphan. I am talking about the one-man crime spree that took multiple lives, including that of Memphis Police Officer Verdell Smith, a man who was an undeniable asset to this community.

Both of these lives were stolen by young men who are frequently profiled as the main deliverers of violence and considered the main representation of many Memphians’ idea of crime. But a closer look at the tangled web of our city’s legacy would reveal a long, winding thread that connects these specters of crime, violence, and youth in Memphis.

Our city has a higher-than-average proportion of youth aged 16-24 who are neither in school nor working. Across the nation, 13.8 percent of youth from this age group fit those criteria. In Memphis, that number hovers closer to 22 percent. These youth have been traditionally called “disconnected,” an ironically existential play on their social status. Recently, scholars and social scientists have renamed them “opportunity youth,” because a limitless well of opportunity lay before them ready for the taking.

Except that’s not always the case.

Back to my earlier point about violence. Thinking about violence often conjures a visceral set of images for us: bloody flesh and broken bones. But there is another kind of violence that the United States of America — and Memphis, as a microcosm of America — is excellent at delivering. Sometimes it traffics in the same kind of visceral, bloody compensation that we are familiar with. But sometimes, the violence is more insidious.

Our dedication to systemic disenfranchisement is an example of this violence. Our idea that marginalized people somehow deserve their social standing and our refusal to engage aggressively with remedying both this mindset and our legacy of disenfranchising the poor, nonwhite, and uneducated is a kind of violence of the most cowardly sort.

Upper-middle-class Memphians near my neighborhood share recipes for pepper grenades to prevent home invasions (despite a 35 percent decrease in burglaries where I live) but spare no thought to the systemic violence that manifests as an enormous food desert south of them.

Are we losing sleep over the lack of worthwhile and well-paying employment for people with criminal records or insufficient education? The youth who are products of these environments are seen as problems, burdens, predators who only capitalize on opportunity when it’s criminal. The truth is that these 45,000 youths in Memphis who are connected neither to gainful employment nor education are victims of violence as well. The two young men who are responsible for the deaths of so many productive members of our community likely have histories not only with the kinds of violence that they have committed, but also the kind of violence that is committed against them by us and our city. As black youth — the racial demographic that makes up a larger proportion of that 45,000 than any other — they and others like them, criminal and not, have faced even more pointed violence: specific anti-black policy in the form of crime bills that wrangle them into the criminal justice system for decades, a community that deeply resents them, and a lack of access to opportunity that keeps them free of options to cast off the shackles tying them to that socially engineered environment.

There is no comparing the severity of the violence. We mourn victims of that first, visceral violence because those wounds are so fresh and raw, but what of the violence that we perpetuate with our political foot-dragging, with our dedication to the maintenance of white supremacy, with criminally low wages for the most needy workers, with entire swaths of the city disconnected from essential (and deserved) social services?

When will we unite as a city and mourn that violence? Especially when that violence so often manifests as the other kind, the raw kind, the bloody kind? There are many ideas about how to engage these youth, and so few of them seem to be “repair the effects of the systemic violence that we have wrought on these children and their communities.”

In order to develop a concrete solution for our city’s problem with violence, we need to focus on ensuring that all Memphians — including those who are young and full of potential — are able to access that limitless well of opportunity.

Troy L. Wiggins is a Memphian and writer whose work has appeared in the Memphis Noir anthology, Make Memphis magazine, and The Memphis Flyer.