Author: Wendi C. Thomas

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New Organization Takes Aim at Amy Weirich Ahead of DA Race

A mobile digital billboard bearing a scathing critique of Shelby County District Attorney Amy Weirch’s tenure circled the Shelby County Criminal Justice Center Wednesday morning. The newly formed organization Memphis Watch is behind the campaign, and said in a release that this is the first in a series of planned actions. (Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50)

This story is co-published with MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit Memphis newsroom focused on poverty, power and public policy — issues about which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. cared deeply. Find more stories like this at MLK50.com. Subscribe to their newsletter here.

With 10 months before voters choose the next Shelby County District Attorney, the push to unseat Republican incumbent Amy Weirich heated up Wednesday with the launch of what organizers call a public education campaign about the prosecutor’s controversial record.

A handful of canvassers handed fliers to the dozens queuing to get inside the Shelby County Criminal Justice Center on Poplar Wednesday morning, as a mobile digital billboard labeling Weirich a “Repeat Offender” circled the center. The campaign is coordinated by Memphis Watch, a newly formed organization that doesn’t have a web presence and does not appear to be led by Memphians.

One of the billboard panels reads: The Tennessee Supreme Court on Shelby County District Attorney General Amy Weirich’s behavior in a murder prosecution: “Flagrant violation,” “off limits to any conscientious prosecutor,” “not at all clear why any prosecutor would venture into this forbidden territory.” The partial quotes were taken from a 2014 Tennessee Supreme Court ruling that excoriated Weirich for her conduct during the 2009 high-profile murder trial of Noura Jackson. The court would later vacate Jackson’s conviction; she was released after spending 11 years in prison.

The billboard’s messages are a condensed version of AmyWeirichFiles.com, which offers a blistering assessment of Weirich’s actions, some of which have drawn intense scrutiny, criticism and in one instance, a reprimand from the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility days before she was to face an examination of her behavior during Jackson’s trial.

Across the country, advocacy organizations and activists are calling for prosecutorial reform, a movement that’s gotten a boost from philanthropists including George Soros, who has spent millions on district attorney races in recent years in an effort to reimagine the country’s criminal justice system.

The campaign comes at the same time that Memphis is experiencing a surge in gun crime, including Sunday’s off-campus killing of a Rhodes College student and last month’s Collierville Kroger shooting that left the shooter and a victim dead and more than a dozen others injured. These incidents and the resulting flurry of news coverage may make residents more receptive to Weirich’s tough-on-crime stance; research has shown that media coverage of crime can lead to increased public support for punitive criminal justice policy.

Outside the justice center Wednesday morning, canvasser Victoria Terry with the progressive nonprofit Memphis For All shared specific criticism about Weirich’s record with passersby.

“When she should do DNA testing, she doesn’t,” Terry said. “She tries kids as adults all the time.”

“There’s another election coming up. So we’re doing everything we can to put somebody better in office, someone who actually cares about our community.”

“Have you heard about our district attorney? She’s the worst in Tennessee,” canvasser Victoria Terry told those waiting to enter the Shelby County Criminal Justice Center Wednesday as she handed out fliers about Shelby County District Attorney Amy Weirich’s prosecutorial record. (Photo by Andrea Morales for MLK50.)

Weirich’s office has opposed DNA testing in the case of death row inmate Pervis Payne and in the case of Sedley Alley, who was executed in 2006. She has also transferred dozens of children accused of violent crimes, most of whom are Black, to adult court where they face stiffer penalties, a practice she defended as recently as Sept. 28, when the DA’s website listed a detailed explanation for each of the 25 cases her office has transferred to adult court this year.  

In an email, Larry Buser, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office, said that “it would be inappropriate for me to comment on campaign issues.”

Intense outside attention to this local DA race is to be expected, said Cardell Orrin, executive director for Stand for Children Tennessee and a community advocate.

“I think it’s reflective of what we’ve been hearing for quite some time from local and national groups of a real concern about the egregious violations that have occurred from Weirich and her office during her tenure,” Orrin said. He said he was aware of Wednesday’s campaign but Stand was not involved.

“We’ve also heard from other national organizations that have said, in context of what’s happening around the country and in other (district attorneys’) offices, you have a problem with your DA that can hopefully be solved.”

“We definitely have to look to see if there’s an alternative.” In the past, Stand has endorsed candidates for office and expects to do so in the DA’s race.

Orrin is also a part of Memphis Nonprofits Demand Action, which graded Weirich and other elected officials on progressive criminal justice policy issues following a number of local protests sparked last summer by the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Weirich received a D for her failure to drop charges against peaceful participants arrested in demonstrations and an F for not investigating accusations of police misconduct during those protests.

One woman took a flyer from Terry, but couldn’t stay for much explanation. Although the woman wasn’t familiar with Weirich and the upcoming August election, she only needed answers to two questions to decide how she would vote.

“Is she Black?” asked the woman, who is Black.

“She’s white,” Terry answered.

“Do we trust her?”

“No,” Terry replied.

“We’re going to get her out of there then,” said the woman, who was at 201 Poplar to handle minor marijuana possession charges. 

Memphis Watch’s senior advisor, Alex Bassos, called Weirich one of the nation’s worst prosecutors; an assertion echoed in a 2017 Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project report which ranked her as the state’s most overzealous prosecutor. 

“So we want her and the political elite in Memphis to know we are here, we are watching, we are loud and we don’t go away or play by polite norms for exposing people’s records.”

Alex Bassos, Memphis Watch senior advisor

According to Bassos’ LinkedIn page, he is project director at Justice Research Group. A Google search for an organization by that name did not return any results. An attorney, he was also chief of products for The Appeal, a nonprofit news organization that closed earlier this year and is reopening as a worker-led publication.

“So we want her and the political elite in Memphis to know we are here, we are watching, we are loud and we don’t go away or play by polite norms for exposing people’s records,” Bassos said by phone Wednesday. “It’s too important. It’s life or death for the people harmed by her and her office.”  

In 2012, Weirich was elected to finish the term of her boss, Bill Gibbons, now executive director of the Public Safety Institute at the University of Memphis and president of the nonprofit Memphis Shelby Crime Commission. Weirich ran for re-election in 2014 and handily beat her Democratic opponent Joe Brown, formerly a Shelby County Criminal Court judge​ and host of the syndicated Judge Joe Brown reality show.​

Weirich’s prosecutorial errors in the Jackson case, including withholding evidence that could have helped the defense, and her office’s practices were the focus of a lengthy 2017 New York Times article by journalist Emily Bazelon. Weirich responded with a tweet storm with the hashtag #ProCrimeNYTimes.

In 2019 Bazelon published “Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration.” The book primarily tells the stories of two prosecutors, one with a more restorative justice approach, and at the other end of the spectrum, Weirich.

Shelby County, which is 54 percent Black, has never had a Black prosecutor. Weirich has one declared opponent, Linda Harris, who was a former Memphis police officer and an assistant U.S. attorney for the Western District. Harris is currently in private practice.

The deadline to qualify to run for district attorney is Feb. 17, according to the Shelby County Election Commission. The primary election is May 3 and the general election is Aug. 4.

Tennessee has the longest elected prosecutor terms of any state in the nation, at eight years. If Weirich wins in August, the next time the office will be on the ballot is 2030.

Wendi C. Thomas is the founding editor of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Contact her at wendicthomas@mlk50.com.

Carrington J. Tatum is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms. Email him at carrington.tatum@mlk50.com

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Opinion The Last Word

The Lies I Tell: The Election, My Niece, and Voter Suppression

CREDIT: Peter Pettus, Library of Congress

Last week, I took my 6-year-old niece with me to early vote. As we walked into the polling place, hand in hand, I lied to her. I didn’t intend to. I just wanted to make the short walk from the parking lot to the building a quick lesson on voting rights.

What we’re about to do, I told her solemnly, is very, very important.

Slipping into the same voice I use to read bedtime stories, I began: A long, long time ago, there were people who fought really hard to keep people like us  —  Black people  —  from voting. But Black people and some white people worked really hard to make sure we could. To make those Black people proud, I said, we have to vote in every election. And, I added as a happily ever after, that’s why we were going to vote today.

Peter Pettus, Library of Congress

Participants in the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965

No sooner had the words left my mouth when I realized I had not been honest. Why had I placed voter suppression in the distant past? Why did I feel compelled to leave out the violence, the blood spilled, the murders? Why did I obscure the villains, leaving them colorless as if their identities aren’t known?

The truth is this: Voter suppression, intimidation, and systemic disenfranchisement wasn’t long, long ago or in a place far away. It’s happening now, here, and all around.

Since the 2010 elections, 24 states have passed laws making it harder to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. From shrinking the number of early voting locations, cutting back the early voting period, enacting strict voter ID laws, and purging infrequent voters from the rolls, Republican-led attacks against the franchise seem unrelenting.

Recently, the Memphis branch of the NAACP sued the Shelby County Election Commission after it limited early voting locations to the Agricenter, which is outside the city core and closer to parts of the county that are majority-white, even though Shelby County is predominantly Black.

The NAACP won its suit, but the commission still managed to open late a key early voting site in the city’s core. The commission blamed it on a miscommunication with poll workers, but it read as spiteful, as if election officials were thumbing their noses at voting rights advocates.

The NAACP and the Tennessee Black Voter Project have since sued the commission again, “for its refusal to allow voters who submitted timely, but allegedly deficient, voter registration applications to correct any deficiencies in those applications on or before Election Day and then vote regular ballots.” A judge ruled against the commission this week.

In Houston, Texas, there have been allegations that volunteer Korean translators were being kicked out of polling places. In Kansas, the lone polling place in the majority-Hispanic town of Dodge City has been moved into the county, a mile from the nearest bus stop.

Ever since the Supreme Court overturned parts of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, Southern states previously required to get federal okay before changing election laws rushed to make it harder for Black and brown people to vote.

“The decision in Shelby County opened the floodgates to laws restricting voting throughout the United States. The effects were immediate. Within 24 hours of the ruling, Texas announced that it would implement a strict photo ID law. Two other states, Mississippi and Alabama, also began to enforce photo ID laws that had previously been barred because of federal preclearance,” said the Brennan Center.

But I didn’t tell my niece about the Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder case that took the teeth out of the Voting Rights Act.

I didn’t tell her about Mississippi voting rights advocate and all-around badass Fannie Lou Hamer, an Indianola, Mississippi, tenant farmer who was fired by her plantation owner after she tried to register to vote in 1962. Undeterred, she opposed the state’s all-white delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Four years later, she was chosen as a delegate for the party’s presidential nominating committee in Chicago.

If I close my eyes, I can see the horrifying image of a battered John Lewis, beaten by a state trooper on Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 for the crime of being a Negro trying to register other Negroes to vote. I know the names of martyrs Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, Rev. James Reeb, and Viola Gregg Liuzzo, all slain because they sought voting rights for Black people in the South.

None of this brutal, gruesome, painful, wretched history did I share with my beautiful, cornrow-wearing, baby teeth-missing, still-needs-a-nap niece. These American stories are the stuff of Black nightmares. So I lied. I turned the fight for the ballot into a fairy tale, where in the end, the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. And while I hope that comes to pass, I’m not sure that’s true either.

I’m not proud of my lie. I was simply trying to shield my niece from what she’ll see soon enough: That the mean people who didn’t want Black people to vote then are still with us now.

Wendi C. Thomas is the editor and publisher of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, where a version of this column first appeared.

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News News Feature

Byhalia, Mississippi

If Trayvon Martin were your son, would you want him presumed innocent and given the benefit of the doubt? If confronting your community’s prejudiced past boosted the odds of a more equitable future for black residents, wouldn’t you embrace the lesson? These questions and themes of empathy, honesty, and forgiveness form the foundation of playwright Evan Linder’s latest work, Byhalia, Mississippi, which has its world premiere at TheatreWorks in Memphis, and three other cities, January 8th.

Linder, co-artistic director of Chicago’s New Colony theater, always knew he’d write what he calls a “red-state show.” And what better place to locate such a show than the town down the road from his parents’ Collierville home, a place with a painful and mostly overlooked racial history?

When Linder wrote Byhalia, Mississippi in January 2014, he had 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and and the black boy’s killer, neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, on his mind.

On a drive through the tiny Byhalia town square, Linder snapped a photo of a black teen outside a barbershop. The boy wore a hooded sweatshirt like the one Trayvon had on when Zimmerman fatally shot him. The photo, which is on the play’s website, frames a central question for the character Jim Parker, who is white.

Wrote Linder: “What would it take (and was it even possible) for Jim to see a boy in a hoodie walking across the street in Byhalia and immediately register that young man as someone else’s child before seeing a young black male? And could he ever see that child as his own?”

The play begins with Jim and his wife, Laurel, also white, expecting their first child. To Jim’s surprise, the baby is born with brown skin. The child is the product of Laurel’s brief affair with Paul Price, the married black principal of Byhalia High School.

As the Parkers’ marriage reels and Ayesha, Price’s wife, grapples with the proof of her husband’s infidelity, she confronts Laurel, who is naïve about what it means to raise a black boy in Byhalia.

Laurel knows about Byhalia’s best-known decedent, author William Faulkner, Ayesha snaps, but does she know about Butler Young Jr. or Alfred “Skip” Robinson?

Here Linder whets the audience’s appetite with a bit of history from the 1970s, when Byhalia was the scene of what Time magazine called “one of the longest civil rights boycotts in Mississippi history.”

The boycotts of white-owned businesses were sparked by the death of Young, a 21-year-old, unarmed black man shot and killed under questionable circumstances by Byhalia police in the summer of 1974. Robinson led the protests as president of the United League of Marshall County.

Then, like now, black residents demanded that the officers involved be charged with murder. Then, like now, black citizens used the only power they had — economic — to try to force the white power structure to give them a measure of justice.

Then, like #blacklivesmatter activists today have found, justice was elusive.

According to a 1974 Harvard Crimson article, “The population of the town is 750 persons, and although 70 per cent of them are black, the mayor, the town leader and all the merchants are white.”

And while Faulkner, who merely died in Byhalia, gets a shout-out on the town’s website, the boycotts, which could be a source of pride and a testament to black citizens’ resilience, are unmentioned.

“People have been fine with letting that history slip away,” Linder said.

The play is not meant to be an indictment of Byhalia specifically, Linder noted, but of our collective selective memory and how our failure to reckon with it honestly hamstrings our future.

As Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Linder, who is white, wants to do his part to deal honestly with race, and this play is a start. “The only way things change is if people are forced to look at it.”

Editor’s note: The world premiere of Byhalia, Mississippi is January 8th in Memphis, Chicago, Toronto, and Charleston, South Carolina. Readings will occur in Los Angeles, Boulder, Colorado, and Birmingham, Alabama, in mid-January. On January 18th, audiences from all seven cities can participate in an online conversation. Go to wpconvo.com/online-conversation to join. Byhalia, Mississippi runs January 8-31 at TheatreWorks in Memphis.

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News News Feature

Crime & Punishment

To the untrained ear, Memphis mayoral candidate Jim Strickland’s plan to reduce crime seems reasonable.

“We need to have zero tolerance for violent crime,” said the Memphis City Council member during a debate last month.

But when he elaborates, he stumbles and disappoints.

“And when I say that, I mean right now, if a juvenile commits a violent act on another human being, they are not automatically taken down to juvenile court,” he continued. “That’s not zero tolerance. That’s the exact opposite. They need to be taken down to juvenile court.”

With that statement, Strickland ignores the mountains of research about young minds and the yawning school-to-prison pipeline.

He brushes away this nation’s shameful history of policing black bodies and, worst of all, overlooks recent history at Shelby County Juvenile Court, which treats black children more harshly than white kids.

His rhetoric isn’t quite a dog whistle, but it’s pandering to our basest instincts.

In theory, a civilized society acknowledges that children and teens, their developing brains incapable of consistent impulse control, deserve more care and compassion than adults.

But in practice, the adult instinct to protect children crumbles under the weight of racial stereotypes. In fact, a 2014 study published by the American Psychological Association found that police officers surveyed saw black boys as 4.5 years older than they were and less innocent.

The most recent context for Strickland’s tough-on–crime stance is a handful of videotaped brawls of black “teen mobs,” as branded by local media. One cell phone video captured an attack at an East Memphis Kroger grocery store (read: supposed to be safe). Another video showed a fight at the once-highly regarded White Station High (read: where fights aren’t supposed to happen).

Through this lens, Strickland’s pleas to enforce the curfew laws sound like smart public policy.

But the relevant context takes a wider view of history, stretching back to Reconstruction and the birth of the nation’s Jim Crow curfew laws, designed to restrict the movement of formerly enslaved men and women.

Follow Strickland’s plan to its logical conclusion in a predominantly black city, and juvenile court will overflow with children whose chief mistake was knuckling up at school or in their neighborhoods.

Private schools, which house the overwhelming majority of the city’s white school-age children, can shield their students’ bad behavior from the public eye.

But for public school students, most of whom in Memphis are black, the hammer of indiscriminate zero tolerance policies falls hard.

According to a recently released report on school suspensions and expulsions in Southern states, researchers found that “[B]lacks were 23 percent of students in school districts across the state [of Tennessee], but comprised 58 percent of suspensions and 71 percent of expulsions.”

Factor in the local evidence, and Strickland’s crime-fighting strategy goes from ill-advised to indefensible.

In 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) determined that Shelby County Juvenile Court treats black children more harshly than white children.

“Black children are more likely to be detained pre-adjudication, less likely to receive warnings and lesser sanctions, and more likely to be transferred to criminal court,” wrote DOJ civil rights investigators in a scathing report.

Just this July, the federal monitor reported that the court has shown a “serious lack of progress” in reducing disproportionate minority contact. “Although the overall number of youth held in secure detention has decreased, a racial gap remains and, in fact, has increased, and race still matters once all other factors are considered,” the monitor wrote.

It gets worse: The Memphis metro area has the nation’s highest rate of “disconnected youth,” defined as people between the ages of 16 and 24 who aren’t in school or employed.

The burden of a criminal record makes residents virtually unemployable and ineligible for many college loans, decimating their chances to build wealth and, in doing so, gain true freedom.

Flawed criminal justice policies have disastrous results for communities of color. Strickland, the only white mayoral candidate with a chance to win, should know this.

He has time to amend his platform before the October election, although a more nuanced approach may alienate his Poplar-corridor base (read: mostly white and more affluent than the rest of the city).

But an informed, evidence-based crime-fighting plan is the responsible thing to do — for Memphis’ children and the city’s future.

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News News Feature

Clean Slate

America loves a comeback story, except when it’s ex-offenders seeking redemption after they’ve served their time. For these men and women, a criminal record often stands between them and a job, an apartment, or a loan. Although they’re no longer behind bars, they’re not free.

But last week, a new nonprofit organization committed to criminal justice reform brought emancipation to a few people.

In one of its first official actions, Just City wrote six $450 checks to cover the expungement fee for six people who’d completed the process to have their records wiped clean.

The Clean Slate Fund covered the cost through a grant from the Mid-South Peace & Justice Center and the Memphis Bar Association.

“One of Just City’s core values is that you should not be defined by the worst thing you’ve done,” Kerry Hayes, one of the organization’s co-founders, said.

Of the six Clean Slate Fund recipients, three were first-time offenders convicted of theft of property under $500, said Josh Spickler, director of the Defender’s Resource Network for the Shelby County Public Defender’s Office.

After they served jail time and paid monthly probation fees and court costs that may have totaled more than $1,000, another hurdle awaited: an expungement fee that rivals the amount of property that they’d taken.

“These are shoplifting cases, and then they’re stuck, because $450 is rent,” Spickler said.

Helping ex-offenders reintegrate into society isn’t a conservative solution or a liberal solution, Hayes said. It’s just common sense.

“This is an investment we’re making in the lives of people who want to work, who do want to contribute to society, but for $450, they would probably be unable to do that,” Hayes said.

I wasn’t able to talk to any of the people who had their records cleared. It defeats the purpose of getting a fresh start if your name or identifying characteristics show up in the paper, Hayes said.

The motivations of some who want their records expunged were sometimes more psychological than practical, Spickler said. “I was just really surprised about how many people have wanted it for peace of mind,” he said. “They feel like they’re marked. And what we see and know about people who have been in contact with the criminal justice system is they are marked.”

In 2012, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) issued a report denouncing the “vast, half-hidden network” of collateral consequences that create a second-class status for the 65 million Americans who have a criminal record.

In Tennessee, a felony conviction means you can’t vote. You can’t work as a home inspector or reflexologist. You can’t be a security guard at the mall. You can’t even sell fireworks.

In 2012, the state legislature amended the expungement law, but it’s still so narrowly tailored that few ex-offenders qualify. Of the 10 recommendations issued by NACDL, number nine is exactly what Just City and the Shelby County Public Defender’s Office has done.

“Defense lawyers,” the NACDL wrote, “should consider avoiding, mitigating, and relieving collateral consequences to be an integral part of their representation of a client.”

The city of Memphis adopted a “ban the box” ordinance in 2010, but Shelby County and most private employers still ask job applicants about their criminal record.

“Some of these people are 20 years out of this mistake, and we still force them to answer this question this way,” Spickler said.

In late July, Just City held its inaugural event to introduce the organization to Memphis — and to ask the question: What is a just city?

“We titled it that so we would not give you an answer,” Hayes told the audience at Hattiloo Theatre. “What we want is for you to start asking the question with us … because when you start to ask the question, everything around you will change.

“If we believe that expectations create reality, which we do, it starts with having a different set of expectations for ourselves and our city. If justice is going to mean anything to any one of us, it’s got to mean absolutely everything to every one of us.”

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News News Feature

Black Wealth Matters

African Americans make up 63 percent of Memphis’ population. The Memphis metro area is the poorest large metro area in the nation. You don’t get rich working for someone else, or so the saying goes. Connect those three points and you have a straight line between the success of local African-American entrepreneurs and the city’s financial future.

If nearly two-thirds of Memphis is shut out of the city’s economic growth, the city will always be burdened by the problems that follow poverty. Here’s where the Economic Development Growth Engine for Memphis and Shelby County (EDGE) could make difference, although I’m not optimistic. Next month, the EDGE board will vote on new policies, including diversity spending requirements for companies that receive PILOTs, the tax breaks and incentives used to lure new businesses and jobs to town.

Right now, companies are asked to make a best-faith effort to spend 25 percent of construction and controllable spending with minority- and women-owned business enterprises (MWBEs) and locally owned small businesses (LOSBs). The new guidelines would go from a “try-your-best” model to an “or-else” requirement of a 15-percent MWBE/LOSB spend in all categories. Companies that don’t comply could have to pay back some of the tax breaks. But the change won’t translate into additional dollars for MWBEs or LOSBs, which makes it feel more like window dressing than a substantial revision.

Since 2011, EDGE has secured nearly $2 billion in projected investments. About 14 percent ($292 million) of that will go to MWBEs and LOSBs. Fourteen percent. In a city that’s 63 percent black and 50 percent female. But if you ask EDGE’s CEO Reid Dulberger how many millions went to African-American businesses, he can’t tell you, because he doesn’t know.

EDGE doesn’t know because it lumps minority-owned, women-owned businesses, and locally owned small businesses into the same pile. This failure (refusal?) to calculate how PILOTs affect black-owned businesses is inexplicable. We measure what matters. Does building black wealth matter much to EDGE, local government, the Chamber of Commerce, or any other agencies with a vested interest in the city’s financial future?

After white men complained that Shelby County’s race/gender-conscious contracting program was biased against white men, the county switched to a program for locally owned businesses, defined as those with annual sales under $5 million.

To understand how thoroughly people of color are shut out economically, look at data measured by the city of Memphis. Although white men make up around 18 percent of Memphis’ population, their businesses received nearly two-thirds of city municipal contracts.

Those most likely to dismiss the racial disparity are also those who profit most. “Blacks are enjoined to get over it, to stop playing the victim role, take personal responsibility,” said Darrick Hamilton, associate professor of economics and urban policy at the New School. But diligence and hard work doesn’t translate into wealth for families of color, Hamilton said last week during a webinar on racial wealth inequality sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the Federal Reserve System.

Among the alarming figures he shared from 2011 federal data: An unemployed white head of household had nearly twice as much net wealth ($21,892) as a black head of household working full time ($11,649). Households headed by white high school dropouts had more wealth ($34,700) than households headed by black college graduates ($23,400). Low-income white families had more household wealth ($60,000) than middle-income black families ($42,800).

“The source of the racial wealth gap is that some individuals have access to some seed money so that they can purchase an asset that will appreciate over their lifetime when they are young adults,” Hamilton said.

It would be easy to blame the gap on black people’s bad choices, said William Darity of Duke University, but there’s no evidence to support that theory.

“These historical and existing structural factors mean that individuals who are engaged in trying to do the right thing are actually overwhelmed by the constraints that they’re confronted with,” Darity said.

Those factors are, in short, rooted in racism — a subject that ruffles feathers for black and white people, although for different reasons. But if EDGE, local politicians, and civic leaders want something we’ve never had — economic parity — they have to do something they’ve never done. We could start by measuring what matters, unless it doesn’t really matter.

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News News Feature

Panhandled

There is no social concern that a new law can’t solve. So in the absence of public policies to help the poor, Tennessee lawmakers created a new class of criminal: the aggressive panhandler.

A law went into effect July 1st that prohibits behavior already covered by other state laws, such as following someone who doesn’t want to be followed (stalking) or touching someone who doesn’t want to be touched (assault).

If you think this law is about anything other than protecting business interests in trendy areas, listen to what the sponsors said as the bill moved through the legislature.

“We have an interest in promoting tourism,” said the Senate sponsor, Republican Brian Kelsey of Germantown. “If individuals fear harm to their person because of aggressive panhandling, then they will no longer come here for tourist events and we will lose those state tax dollars associated with those events.”

House sponsor Raumesh Akbari was more direct. “What we’re really trying to get to … there are certain areas in Memphis that are on the upswing,” said the Memphis Democrat, mentioning downtown specifically. “I actually had a constituent who was punched by a panhandler,” Akbari said.

Anecdotes should not be the basis for public policy. But when it comes to ways to punish the poor and prioritize profits over people, if one law is good, then more are better.

In the Senate judicial committee, Memphis Democrat Sara Kyle was the lone voice of concern. “This seems awfully subjective,” Kyle said, wondering how the law would be enforced. “Isn’t this ‘he said, she said’?”

Kelsey had no such qualms. “At the end of the day, that’s going to be an issue for the prosecutor to prove,” he said.

The first violation is a Class C misdemeanor. A second violation is a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by up to 90 days in jail.

To her credit, Akbari toned down Kelsey’s bill with two amendments.

“If I’m standing still and you walk past me and I kindly ask you to give me a dollar, that’s not aggressive,” she said in a House criminal justice subcommittee. “If someone happens to be intoxicated and says, ‘Please, sir, do you have a dollar to spare,’ that’s not aggressive, just because they happen to be intoxicated while doing it,” she said.

In the end, the bill passed with only one no vote.

Peter Gathje, who helps run the homeless ministry Manna House, had harsh words for the law’s supporters. “Most people’s discomfort around panhandlers is that panhandlers are visible and sometimes verbal reminders that our society is messed up,” he wrote on Facebook.

“If I’m downtown enjoying myself, going out for dinner and drinks, I don’t want to feel like I am that well-dressed and well-fed rich guy in the Bible who went to hell because poor Lazarus didn’t even get the scraps from my table,” he wrote.

Gathje quotes Matthew 5:42, in which Jesus says: “‘Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.’ But then downtown merchants, political leaders, and even a few clergy say, ‘If you give to panhandlers you’re just enabling drug abuse or alcoholism or laziness.'”

Said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose last mission was to unite people across racial lines in pursuit of economic justice: “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Pay attention to King’s choice of words. Panhandlers are produced. They are the creation of a nation in which most of the jobs being created pay less than a living wage. They testify of cities where mental health counseling is scarce, substance abuse treatment is nonexistent, and a night at the city’s largest shelter costs more than $5.

They speak to the nose-chopping, face-spiting cruelty of the Republican legislators who, despite the pleas of thousands of constituents, refused to accept federal dollars to expand Medicaid, costing lives and billions in forfeited revenue.

“In the absence of housing or even shelter, we pass laws stigmatizing those who stand and ask for money,” Gathje wrote.

Take comfort in this: If there is divine reckoning at the end of our days, legislators who turned their backs on the poor will themselves have to beg — for forgiveness and for mercy.

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Committed to Lies

People in search of comfort may turn to scripture after last week’s massacre of nine black churchgoers by a lone white gunman in Charleston, South Carolina. I am drawn to John 8:32, in which Jesus tells his disciples: “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Emancipation by veracity is a beautiful, if elusive, concept. It puts freedom within anyone’s reach. But this nation is committed to lies, never more so than when it comes to racism.

Confessed killer Dylann Roof explained his racist motivations in an online manifesto. In it, he calls black people violent and inferior. He says the authors of slave narratives spoke highly of the institution. He writes that integration sent white people running to the suburbs in search of whiter schools and fewer minorities.

If racism is a continuum, Roof is at the far right end. America’s systems and institutions — all of them — are not as far to the left as we tell ourselves. Typing that — being honest — fills me with anxiety. To state unflinchingly, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did, that America is racist is to open yourself up to attack.

The (direct or indirect) beneficiaries of racist systems have a powerful incentive to be dishonest. So they lie and insist that racism doesn’t exist. How do they lie? Let’s count just a few of the ways.

They lie when they refuse to unflinchingly describe what happened.

This was not an attack on Christianity. It was a calculated terrorist attack on black parishioners at Emanuel A.M.E. Church by a white racist young man. Do not blather about mental illness or speculate that the killer was on drugs. Do not paint him as an outlier. Do not disconnect this racism and this violence from the less graphic but still racist violence of segregated neighborhoods, hyper-policed communities, needless voting restrictions, and attacks on public-sector jobs.

But instead of candor, we get obfuscation, as offered by South Carolina’s Governor Nikki Haley during a press conference last week. “We’ve got some grieving too. And we’ve got some pain we have to go through,” she said, through tears.

Conveniently, the Republican did not elaborate. Is it the pain of grief? Or is it African Americans’ collective pain of political disenfranchisement, economic exclusion, and mass incarceration, all of which are rooted in racism?

They lie when they ignore the echoes.

According to a survivor, Roof said: “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.”

Said Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul in April, when announcing his campaign: “We have come to take our country back.”

Slightly milder iterations of Roof’s racism are as close as the worst of conservative talk radio, where fears of a colored menace — or perhaps a rebellion like that planned in 1822 by Emanuel A.M.E. founder and former slave Denmark Vesey — loom large.

Similar rhetoric pours from the mouths of right-wing politicians. And it is parroted by too many conservative voters, many who would insist they are not racist because they don’t use the n-word and have a black friend.

Roof wrote in his manifesto: “The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens.” The Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group, is a sponsor of “Political Cesspool,” which airs on Memphis radio.

We lie when we say never again.

I am unmoved by interracial unity marches and vigils and the unsatisfying, fleeting displays of kumbaya that follow such tragedies. Arguments over removing the Confederate flag from its place of honor miss the point. The symbols hurt, but the spirit that upholds those symbols kills. And because there is no appetite for exorcism, the demon of racism remains.

The lies dishonor the dead.

They are Susie Jackson, 87; Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45; Rev. DePayne Doctor, 49; Ethel Lance, 70; Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74; Cynthia Hurd, 54; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Myra Thompson, 59; and state Senator Clementa Pinckney, 41, a pastor of Mother Emanuel. But we will not remember their names, just as we do not remember the names of the four black girls bombed to death in 1963 in a Birmingham church by white racists.

I feel like I can have hope or honesty, but not both. The truth is that this massacre could lead America to atone for racism. In the truth lies liberation that could unshackle African Americans from the nation’s bottom rungs. But we can’t handle the truth.

We prefer to lie.

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Black Lives Matter

If racial stereotypes and misconceptions about urban violence had a baby, it would look like the billboard that black businessman Fred Davis erected over his insurance office last month. It reads: “Black lives matter. So let’s quit killing each other.”

Davis insists he’s not mocking the Black Lives Matter movement, which was born in 2013 after neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teen.

With each extrajudicial killing of an unarmed black man, woman, or child by white officers, the slogan gained traction, growing into an indictment of structural inequality that accounts for poorer outcomes for African Americans in every measurable way.

“Black folk should be reminding white folks all the time that black lives matter and [to] stop the legal lynching,” said Davis, who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. But, he added, “all over the country, we are marching and saying that black lives matter, and black people didn’t get the message. Why aren’t Chinese killing Chinese in large numbers or Italians killing Italians in large numbers?”

Because Davis is 81, he can be forgiven for equating nationalities — such as Chinese and Italian — with races. But he does not get a pass for perpetuating the lie that blacks are inherently criminal, and, therefore, fundamentally inferior, so much so that they need to be reminded that homicide is bad.

Although the myth of “black on black crime” has been thoroughly debunked, it’s worth noting yet again that homicide is a function of proximity.

In segregated areas (read: every big city in America), it follows that the victim and assailant will be of the same race. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, most homicides are intraracial: Ninety-four percent of black homicide victims were killed by black people, and 86 percent of white homicide victims were killed by white people.

Davis presupposes that black Memphians are unmoved by murder. This surely comes as news to the dozens of anti-crime, anti-gang, anti-violence organizations in Memphis, including FFUN (Freedom From Unnecessary Negatives), founded by Stevie Moore, a black man whose black son was killed by a black man.

Critiques of urban violence almost always ignore the problem of easy access to guns, which are used in 92 percent of gang-related homicides and 68 percent of all homicides. Countries that have stricter gun laws have fewer homicides, but there’s no political will in the United States to adopt even modest gun control measures.

Sadly, Davis conflates police brutality — implicitly sanctioned by the state, funded by taxpayers and rarely punished — with violence committed by individuals. This isn’t the first time Davis has been guilty of respectability politics, which glosses over systemic failures to instead chastise people.

Two years ago, he put up a billboard that read: “Show your mind, not your behind.” The sign juxtaposed a photo of a black man wearing a cap and gown with a photo of a black man wearing pants that dipped below his waist. 

I wrote then: “Black men could cinch their pants around their necks and the systemic bias against African Americans would still remain.”

“I was given an award by the Church of God in Christ for that,” Davis said proudly. He reminded me that his philanthropic endeavors include a scholarship fund at Manassas High, a program that helps ex-offenders get jobs, and his role as a founding board member of Christ Community Health Center, which provides health care to low-income Memphians.

But what he doesn’t explore are the reasons why Manassas’ virtually all-black student body needs financial help to go to college. He doesn’t denounce the prison industrial complex that disproportionately sucks black men into its clutches. He has no public criticism of the legislature’s refusal to expand health-care access for low-income Tennesseans.

The cure for urban violence is complicated. It demands good jobs that pay enough to make illegal means of making money unattractive and not worth the risk.

It requires public investment in neighborhoods of color so that children can find a safe haven in libraries and community centers.

It calls for an end to mass incarceration, which strips communities of fathers and stability and has not been proven to make neighborhoods safer.

The solution doesn’t lend itself to slogans, and it certainly won’t fit on a billboard.

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Good Moves

The second-floor classroom at Douglass K-8 Optional School was so quiet, you could hear chess pieces slide across the board. Pairs of students were bent over chessboards, their eyes flitting across the squares as their teacher, Jeff Bulington, leaned back in his chair.

He called out moves and the students shifted their pieces to match the directions, which to me sounded like another language. But these students, most of them girls, are fluent in chess and they have the record to prove it.

Last month, Bulington took two girls’ teams to the 12th Annual Kasparov Chess Foundation All-Girls National Chess Championships in Chicago.

Shimera Paxton, Aleha Cole, Marley Fabijanic, and Teiraney L. Biggs came in an impressive second place in the under-14 division. In the under-16 division, the team of Jerrica Randle, Christy Thomas and Jasmine Thomas also took second place.

Marley and Shimera both won a spot to compete at the Susan Polgar national tournament at St. Louis’ Webster University in July, Bulington said.

Bulington is clearly very proud of his students, who come from the middle school and the high school, which is next door. But he’s not effusive and perhaps following his lead, neither are they. I congratulate them and they smile politely. It’s as if they’re thinking: Of course, we did well at the competition. That’s what we do.

This self-assuredness and confidence isn’t in any formal curriculum, but it’s invaluable.

In his 18th-century essay, “Morals of Chess,” Benjamin Franklin remarked that “we learn by chess the habit of not being discouraged by present appearances in the state of our affairs, the habit of hoping for a favourable change, and that of persevering in the search of resources.

“The game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement. Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired or strengthened by it, so as to become habits, ready on all occasions.”

In a valiant but ultimately futile attempt to teach me, Marley and Christy face off.

I asked the girls how much each piece is worth. They hesitated. “It depends,” Marley replied. “A king could be worth five points, but if it’s not in a good spot, it’s not worth as much.”

“The position,” Christy concluded, “affects the value of the piece.”

In chess, that seems fair. In life, not so much.

How do these girls’ positions affect what society thinks they’re worth?

Geographically, they’re situated in North Memphis, firmly inside the C-shaped sea of poverty that cups downtown, North, and South Memphis. These are not neighborhoods from which residents have many obvious options — for employment, grocery stores, or shopping.

If you had to calculate their civic value simply by the amount of public investment here, you’d say they weren’t worth much. However as public school students, they’re priceless to companies like Pearson (and its shareholders), which can make millions off them as test takers.

This emphasis on high-stakes testing produces students who may be able to parrot back what they were taught, but it doesn’t produce thinkers who ask if we’re asking the right questions.

What happens under Bulington’s instruction is different from traditional education, where the knowledge is passed from the teacher down to the students. Here, students are engaged in the production and creation of knowledge, as they teach each other, he explained.

Then there’s the opportunity to travel to tournaments, to try different foods they wouldn’t have at home, to stay in hotels — even what it’s like to fly on a plane, as the team did for the first time on their last trip to Chicago.

Girls are typically marginalized in the chess world, but not here. On this morning in Bulington’s class, there are just three boys.

Bulington, who was also a chess coach at Lester Elementary, hasn’t taught these students long enough to know whether chess will boost their TCAP scores, but he has his own data.

Take Aleha, for example. She’s a relatively newcomer to chess, who joined the team after a stint playing violin in the orchestra. Bulington opened his laptop and showed me a chart that tracked her chess performance over the past year.

I note that the fever line tilts up at an angle that would make any investor’s mouth water.

“These,” says Bulington, “are my investments.”