Author: Wendi C. Thomas

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Tale of Two Cities

It’s impossible to watch coverage of Baltimore protests sparked by police brutality and not wonder: Could that happen here?

Could Memphis erupt like Baltimore?

The ingredients behind the Charm City’s unrest aren’t unique to Baltimore, but they’re not identical to Memphis.

For starters, there is no local equivalent to Freddie Gray.

Gray, a 25-year-old black man, died April 19th, a week after his spine was almost severed while in Baltimore police custody. That extreme example of state-sponsored violence collided with longstanding frustrations about police harassment and the dire economic prospects for African Americans.

Two weeks of tense protests over the value of black lives followed. Earlier this month, six police officers were charged in connection with Gray’s death.

In Memphis, the closest comparison to Gray would be Duanna Johnson, said Paul Garner, an organizing coordinator at the Mid-South Peace & Justice Center.

In 2008, Memphis police officer Bridges McRae beat Johnson after she was arrested on prostitution charges.

In 2010, McRae, who is white, pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges. Johnson, who was black, was shot to death in 2008. The case remains unsolved.

But if Memphians didn’t take to the streets after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, there’s little reason to think they’d do so now, said Marco Pavé, a hip-hop artist and activist.

“It’d take something really extreme for us to get on that level,” said Páve, who is also the CEO of Radio Rahim Music.

Still, it’s worth noting the similarities between the two cities.

Healthy public investments flow to tourist areas — such as Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and Memphis’ riverfront. But these investments haven’t trickled down to poor neighborhoods, such as West Baltimore and South and North Memphis.

The share of the black population is identical — 63.3 percent — and both cities have a black mayor and police chief.

The decline of good-paying, union-protected manufacturing jobs hit Memphis hard, but it sent Baltimore reeling.

As Memphis public housing projects were torn down, families were scattered across the city, unlike the concentrated pockets of poverty in Baltimore.

But Memphis has higher rates of poverty and unemployment for African Americans and a smaller share of college-educated residents.

Most of the new jobs are low-wage jobs, like the hundreds Conduit Global promised when it opened a call center last year. Last week, the company announced it will lay off nearly 600 workers, most of whom earn around $10 an hour.

Late last month, the sporting goods mecca Bass Pro Shops opened in the long-shuttered Pyramid, bringing 600 jobs, for which there were thousands of applicants.

A lottery for a city summer jobs program with 1,000 spots drew more than 6,500 applicants.

To help fund youth job programs, Memphis Light, Gas & Water now accepts donations, just like they do for people who can’t pay their light bills.

When a city has to pass the hat to raise money for jobs, something has gone horribly wrong.

Pavé doesn’t advocate violence, “but the thing I would prefer most … is for Freddie not to get murdered. That’s the most egregious part — not the response to the inequality; it’s the inequality itself.”

The Center for Community Change (CCC) and its national coalition of partners realize this, which is why they launched the Putting Families First: Good Jobs for All campaign two weeks ago.

Unrest in communities like Baltimore underscores the need for massive change on a national scale, which is why one of the main goals of Putting Families First: Good Jobs for All is to reinvest in communities of concentrated poverty, like Baltimore and Memphis.

“This campaign seeks to restart the economy in places where racial bias, exclusion, and sustained disinvestment have produced communities of concentrated poverty and despair,” Dorian T. Warren, CCC board member and author of the “Putting Families First: Good Jobs for All” report, explained at the launch.

He continued: “This goal is to channel significant investments to communities with high unemployment and low wages, so they can rebuild their local economies and expand residents’ access to jobs and wealth-building opportunities.”

The choices we’ve made as a nation have brought us to this point. We’ve made the rules of the game, and we have the power to change them.

But in order to move forward, we must see America’s growing population of color as an asset to build on and not a threat to neutralize or worse.

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A Twofer

A Fight for Humanity

First, a few words about the brutal fight earlier this month at White Station High School (WSHS), the crown jewel of the city’s public schools. Students caught on their cell phone cameras an epic brawl between female classmates, the details of which you’ve seen repeatedly on TV or in your social media news feed, if you were conscious during the past week or so.

The level of violence stunned me and, judging by the online reaction, everyone who saw the video, which quickly went viral. The first thing I wondered: What in the world happened in these young ladies’ lives to generate this sort of anger?

The second thought that crossed my mind: How much of our horror was because the fight happened at Spartan Palace, the racially diverse, East Memphis utopia of National Merit finalists and an optional program that draws students who might otherwise go to private schools?

WSHS students quickly launched a PR campaign with a YouTube video and hashtags such as #lovewhitestation and the clever #MakingItRightStation.

As a WSHS alumna, I’m glad that news outlets allowed WSHS to reclaim its identity, even if the stations didn’t acknowledge their complicity in damaging it.

But if Hamilton students made a similar YouTube video, would news directors have been as quick to air it? How many WSHS graduates can get news directors, anchors, or reporters to take their calls compared to alums from Douglass, Melrose, or Manassas?

Do students at all-black high schools know how to convince the media to acknowledge their individuality and humanity? Do they think anyone would listen if they tried? In a nation built on the notion of individualism, it’s time we extend this right to all.

Women’s Foundation Turns 20

Let me give a shout out to the Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis (WFGM) as it celebrates 20 years of grant-making in Memphis. The foundation’s mission “is to encourage philanthropy and foster leadership among women and support programs that enable women and children to reach their full potential.” Since the foundation’s inception in 1995, it has awarded $7.8 million in grants to local nonprofit organizations that work with low-income women and families.

From financial literacy to time-management classes, support for sex trafficking victims, transitional housing for mothers with drug addictions, and entrepreneurship training for girls, programs funded by WFGM touch an estimated 17,000 people each year.

Often the speed bumps of low-income women are relatively minor, said executive director Ruby Bright. “There could be something as simple as not having a driver’s license or having a ticket that could be an impediment to getting a job. … Or something as small as $348 to repair a car.”

Here is where the WFGM can help, in this instance through the $8 million invested in Urban Strategies Memphis HOPE’s case management for low-income families.

The foundation doesn’t have a lobbying arm that works to reform the policies that make it difficult for low-income women to be financially self-sufficient. An example would be welfare rules that eliminate a family’s benefits when the parent earns even a dollar over the income limits.

A better policy would gradually reduce the family’s benefits as the household income increased, Bright said.

Still, the foundation’s leaders have an ambitious goal to reduce the poverty rate in South Memphis’ 38126 ZIP code by 1 percent a year for five years.

The Vision 2020 plan also calls to increase the number of families who collect the Earned Income Tax Credit and boost the number of children who are in pre-K and teens who have summer jobs.

We can support WFGM not only by donating to the organization, but by advocating for fairer public policy, such as an increase in the minimum wage, smarter mass transit, universal pre-K, and better health-care access, especially for those battling addictions.

“Sometimes there is the assumption that people are just freeloading,” Bright acknowledged, “but for the most part, our families want to improve.”

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar,” said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

To be sure, the women and families helped by WFGM’s funding aren’t beggars and WFGM doesn’t toss dollars. But while WFGM continues its work, we need to rebuild the edifice. If we’re successful, the foundation won’t celebrate a 40th anniversary — because it will have no reason to exist.

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Cover Feature News

Cuba, Si!

HAVANA — It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when I fell in love with this place. Was it when I zip-lined over the treetops at a coffee plantation that had been turned into a national park? Or when, drenched in sweat, I struggled valiantly to keep pace with a salsa teacher’s swiveling hips and quick feet?

It could have been during a visit to the Museo Nacional de la Campaña Alfabetización, a tribute to the successful 1961 literacy campaign. Or perhaps it was the Cuban coffee at every meal — and in the evenings, the smoothest rum I’ve ever tasted.

The Museo Nacional de la Campana Alfabetización, the national literacy museum

Just a few days into a weeklong trip, I swore to myself that I would be back. I was in one of the first Memphis groups to visit Cuba after the December 17th announcement by President Obama that U.S.-Cuban diplomatic relations would resume for the first time in more than 50 years.

Travelers enjoying a cigar

In March, the University of Memphis’ study abroad program sent just over a dozen students and community members to Havana. Dennis Laumann, an associate professor of African history, led the group, many of whom were enrolled in his Afro-Cuban history class.

The December announcement meant that we could bring back up to $100 worth of Cuban cigars and rum, souvenirs that were previously forbidden by U.S. restrictions.

A Flamenco dancer

If you’ve traveled to other Latin American or Caribbean countries, Havana will feel familiar. There’s the warm weather, the rain showers that last only moments, the pastel-painted buildings, and supper-time staples of rice and beans.

But when the world’s richest nation forces a smaller, developing one into an economic corner for decades, the poorer nation struggles to thrive. Proof of the struggle surfaces in the crumbling facades of once-beautiful homes and the scarcity of retail outlets where you could practice consumerism and capitalism.

For me, and I suspect, most generations that have no memory of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis or the Cold War, the U.S. isolationist strategy served mostly to create a mystique about the island.

Forbidden fruit always tastes sweeter. And Cuba was delicious.

Here are some highlights from the trip:

The Cars

If you close your eyes and think of Cuba, chances are your mind will produce an image of a 1950s-era, hulking American sedan. Rows of cars just like that greeted us in the parking lot at José Martí International Airport.

A 1950s-era car in pristine condition

Although they may appear to be in mint condition, the only original part is the body, said Rodrigo González, the Cuban program coordinator for Girasol Study Abroad. The cars are “museums on wheels,” he said, and the owners must be magicians to keep them running.

Antique cars shared the roads with Korean-made Kias and boxy Lada sedans, Russia’s version of the Volvo. Many of the cars double as taxis, although they may not be marked as such.

Our taxi driver, Hendry Lago

For about $5 Cuban convertible pesos (the dollar exchange rate is about 1:1), Hendry Lago transported two fellow study abroad travelers and me from Old Havana to our hotel in a gleaming, candy apple red 1955 Chevy.

The seats were covered in pristine white and gray leather and the chrome trim sparkled like the car just pulled off the lot. But on the dash was a very modern touchscreen sound system and under the dash, an air conditioner strong enough to fight Havana heat.

Lago looked like he stepped off the set of Grease with his slicked-back hair and snug jeans. He took the scenic route, cruising down the Malecón, the road that curves along the coast. As he drove, Meredith Kaback pulled a tube of red lipstick from her purse.

The occasion called for it, she said, passing the lipstick to me. I agreed.

The wind was in our hair, the sun warmed our skin, and our lips matched the car. I was smitten.

Cigars

Our tour included a trip to a cigar factory. From the street, the H. Upmann cigar factory, founded by Germans in 1844, was indistinguishable from surrounding buildings.

Our tour guide, Idalmy, told us in her no-nonsense tone: No cameras, phones, or bags were allowed inside. We must stay together — no wandering off (as some of us were prone to do).

Once inside, the cigar factory guide led us up a flight of stairs. He steered us into a long room lined with rows of desks. Bent over the desks were men (and a few women) with stacks of flattened tobacco leaves in front of them. Many of the workers wore ear buds to listen to music on their cell phones. To help pass the time, the factory hired someone to read the newspaper to the cigar makers, the guide said.

The most experienced rollers make the bigger cigars, laying leaves on top of each other and sealing them together with a vegetable-based glue.

In another room, women sat with piles of dampened leaves. With one fluid motion, they stripped the stem from the middle of the wide leaves. No men would want to do this work, our guide told us. This job was for women only. (This was said with no awareness that his remark was sexist.)

In Cuba, cigar factories are state-run. Between 10 to 20 percent of the profit goes to the farmer and the rest goes to the government. No cigars were sold inside the factory, but an overcrowded, small store nearby offered Cuban rum, coffee, and several kinds of cigars, including the Cohiba and Montecristo brands.

The other tourists were surprisingly aggressive, shoving other shoppers out of the way, but I put my Memphis on and muscled my way to the counter.

Cuisine

If there was one disappointment, this was it. With rare exceptions, the food was mediocre.

Breakfast at Hotel Paseo Habana was your standard fruit, fruit juice, eggs, and toast. I followed the advice from TripAdvisor reviewers and ordered French toast, which was tasty the first morning, but not so much after that. Ask for syrup and you got a crystalized pat of honey.

One standout: Doña Juana, a paladar (privately owned, not state-run restaurant) on the top floor of a home in the Vedado neighborhood.

Half of the study abroad group walked there one night, where we had the terrace to ourselves. The menu was in English and Spanish. The server was pleasant and patient as he took our orders.

If you want to impress people on the cheap, this was the place to go.

When the server showed up with shots of Havana Club rum for everyone, I waved him away, thinking he’d brought the drinks to the wrong table.

One of the community members in our group announced that he’d ordered the liquor for us and we all cheered. I thought to myself: He must be rich. Then I looked at the menu again: Seven shots set him back about $7.

For $20, you could get a perfectly cooked lobster dinner with generous portions of rice, black beans, and salad.

Also worth trying: the Las Terrazas coffee at the former coffee plantation (now national park and biosphere reserve) that bears the same name. This small cup of coffee, cacao liquor, milk, and ice was chocolate happiness.

Art

Callejón de Hamel is a short alley devoted to Afro-Cuban culture, art, and music in the Havana Centra neighborhood. Much of the art is made of found objects, such as the old bathtubs cemented into walls. On the bottom of the tubs were poems, which were often political in nature.

Found-object art in the alley of the Callejón de Hamel, which showcases the Afro-Cuban culture.

“Grandma, why do the towns fight?” began one poem of a conversation between an elder and a child. “For love and respect.” 

“And the powerful?”

“For gold and leisure.”

On top of a building that overlooked the alley were two water tanks, one labeled “Agua Blanca” and the other “Agua Negra.” It was a social commentary on the absurdity of racism, which several Cubans proudly claimed no longer exists in their country.

The revolution did bring a formal end to segregation, but scholars we talked to acknowledge that the stains of racism remain. They point out that the faces tourists see are more likely to be white. And since most of the Cubans who fled for Miami are also white, it is their relatives who benefit from remittances sent from the states.

In the Jaimanitas neighborhood, artist José Fuster had turned his community into a wondrous, tile-covered paradise. Although Fuster was out of town, we had lunch in his dining room and spent about an hour marveling at the fanciful sculptures he’s created in his courtyard and along the walls that line sidewalks.

His painting style has earned him the title “Picasso of the Caribbean.” Less than a block from his house, he erected a tile rendering of Hugo Chávez, superimposed over the Cuban and Venezuelan flags.

History

When I asked fellow travelers what their favorite part of the trip was, I expected them to gush over the old cars or maybe the tour of the coffee plantation, where we saw the stone outlines of slave quarters and some of us went zip-lining. But without exception, they were most impressed by the Museo Nacional de la Campaña Alfabetización, the national literacy museum.

The small one-story building holds artifacts associated with the 1961 literacy campaign. In a 1960 speech to the United Nations, Fidel Castro declared that Cuba would be the first nation that “will be able to say it does not have a single illiterate person.”

The next year, more than 250,000 literacy tutors, at least 105,000 of whom were between the ages of 9 and 16, went from cities to rural areas, living and working alongside the farmers during the day and, at night, teaching them to read.

Caricature art showing the animosity between Cuba and the U.S. in the Rincon de las Cretinos.

In a single year, museum director Luisa Campos told us, the illiteracy rate fell from 23 percent to under 4 percent. (The adult illiteracy rate in Cuba today is less than .2 percent, compared to 14 percent in the United States).

Campos asked Nafal Valdes, the quiet, unassuming bus driver who shuttled us around town, to come to the front of the museum classroom.

volunteer

Valdes, Campos told us, had been one of the literacy volunteers. She opened a thick, yellow register book to the page with a tiny black-and-white photo of Valdes at 16.

As we stood and applauded, Valdes wiped away tears.

“When you look at any society, it’s what that society places value in that really defines it,” said Luther Mercer, the managing director of programs for New Leaders, a national nonprofit that develops school leadership.

There are no interactive exhibits at the literacy museum or at the Museo de la Revolución, housed in the stately presidential palace last occupied by ousted Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Instead you’ll find stunning architecture, elaborate murals, and stone tributes to beloved revolutionaries Castro, Ché Guevara, and Camilo Cienfuegos.

A first-floor museum hallway held the only blunt testament to the animosity between Cuba and the United States I saw. In the Rincon de las Cretinos (the corner of cretins), were caricatures of Batista and U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. The denouncements are in English, Spanish, and French.

“Thank you, cretin,” reads the placard next to W’s caricature, “for helping us to make socialim [sic] irrevocable.”

The enmity doesn’t extend to Cubans, who were, without exception, warm and friendly.

Our group spent a lot of time talking with members of Proyecto Espiral, a grassroots community project committed to sustainable development led by young adults.

“They were all very proud of who they were as Cubans,” Mercer said.

And yes, we could talk to whomever we wanted, about whatever we wanted. Before I went to Cuba, I’d been warned to look out for “watchers” who would eavesdrop on our conversations, listening for anti-socialist musings.

Before graduating senior Aukina Brown left on the trip, her friends were full of baseless warnings. “They said our plane would disappear; Fidel Castro wouldn’t let us come back — all kinds of stupid stuff,” Brown said.

But I never had the sense that we were being watched. Most police don’t even carry guns. We walked for blocks and blocks at night and barely generated a catcall.

Granted, the window A/C units at the hotel were loud and the towels scratchy. We had no access to the internet — and I didn’t miss it a bit.

It is hard to remember to throw toilet paper in the trash, not into aging septic systems. Paying the bathroom attendant to get a few squares of toilet paper got old.

“Don’t compare everything to America when you’re there,” Brown said. “Americans can be very nit-picky. … You can’t go with a closed mind and get everything out of it.”

beautiful architecture

If you travel for adventure and to make memories, you will enjoy Cuba.

And now is the time to go, before the country is affected (infected?) with all that the United States has to offer.

Gonzalez, one of our tour guides, said we were lucky to come when we did. “You’re in a historical moment. Until now, most of the Americans have been good Americans,” he said, only half-joking. “But soon, we will get tourists that would have gone to Cancun.”

Those tourists might demand the amenities they’d find on other islands, which could ruin what makes Cuba special.

“I just don’t want Cuba to become Jamaica,” Mercer said. “I don’t want to see Treasure Island down there. I don’t want to see Atlantis Resort. I don’t want to see a McDonald’s on the corner. I’d like to see this place keep its cultural identity and its sense of self and give what it has to offer to the world.”

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Afraid to Love?

I am afraid to love my 18-month-old nephew because he is a black boy, and in my country, police hunt and kill black males as if they were the enemy.

On April 4th, yet another unarmed black man was killed by a white police officer, this time after a traffic stop for a broken tail light in North Charleston, South Carolina.

A brave onlooker caught the incident on his cell phone: Walter Scott, a Coast Guard veteran, was running away from Michael Slager when the officer fired his gun at him eight times, striking him in the back. On the video, Slager walks over to the victim and then jogs away to pick up something in the grass. He returns and drops the object next to Scott’s body.

Slager has been charged with murder, fueling hopes that in this case, justice might be served. But I don’t want justice for my nephew, who I will not name here. I want him to live.

Black men, even when unarmed, are far more likely to be killed by police than any other group. My government doesn’t want us to know how many lives law enforcement officers take, so they don’t track the deaths.

Civilians have their own tally: In 2015, police killed more than 300 people, including at least 18 since Scott was slain.

Do you know what it does to your soul when you mark a young black life with a timeline of deaths?

My sister was pregnant with my nephew when George Zimmerman, a self-appointed deputy of a Florida neighborhood, was found not guilty in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was unarmed.

When New York police strangled Eric Garner, also unarmed, for the capital offense of selling loose cigarettes, my nephew was learning to stand on his own.

He was 10 months old when a white cop shot and killed John Crawford, 22, after he picked up an air rifle in a store that sells guns in Ohio, an open carry state.

When an Asian officer in New York shot and killed Akai Gurley, also unarmed, for the capital offense of walking in a dark stairwell, my nephew was walking.

My nephew turned 1 a few weeks before a white officer gunned down 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who stood in a Cleveland park with a toy gun.

This wake that never ends warps my relationship with my dear, sweet nephew. My girlfriend diagnosed me, after listening to me gush about my niece, who is almost 3. When she asked about my nephew, I replied simply. He’s fine.

“I need you to love this baby more,” she told me.

The love is there — I just hold it in a faraway place. I catch myself when I stare into his hazel eyes or run my fingers through his sandy brown hair.

I read the books he brings to me. I chase him in endless loops around his house. He giggles, looking behind him to make sure I’m still in pursuit. He has that intoxicating baby smell of sweetness and potential, but I don’t inhale.

The fewer memories there are, the less there will be to forget. If I love him completely and the police steal him from my family, it might kill me. I don’t want to die. I don’t want him to die. Withholding my adoration, I tell myself, is an act of self-preservation.

I know this sounds crazy. It feels crazy. Racism is crazy making.

My family can distance him from the parts of town where gun violence, gangs, and drugs are common. There’s no way to keep him from police. I cannot guarantee he will never be stopped for driving a nice car or for matching the generic description of a suspect.

Some who read this will insist that if my nephew never runs afoul of the law, I have nothing to worry about. If he submits immediately, even to unreasonable demands by the cops, if he is passive when police are aggressive, if his brake lights never go out, if he never plays loud music, if he swears off hoodies, if he avoids poorly lit stairwells – he’ll be fine.

To those people I say this: You lie.

Some readers will sympathize. Others will empathize. Others will scoff and dismiss me as an emotional aunt who sees danger where none exists. My only hope is that my confession will help me heal before it’s too late.

I want to love, but I’m scared.

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Deciphering the District Attorney’s Math

Last year, the Shelby County District Attorney’a office touched 153,000 cases. That’s more cases than there are people in Bartlett, Germantown, and Collierville combined.

That number is terrifying — and misleading. (More on that later.)

But it serves to conjure up notions of imminent danger, and I suspect that’s why District Attorney Amy Weirich dropped that figure two weeks ago in Nashville, when she pressed a Senate committee to kill the “75 percent” rule.

The 75 percent rule says that whatever public funding the DA’s office receives, the public defender must also get three-fourths of that amount.

There’s no corollary: If the Shelby County Commission gives the public defender $10,000, Weirich complained, it doesn’t have to give the DA a dime.

Weirich argued that each office should seek funding independently. In a just world, that makes sense. But the criminal justice system is weighted toward the prosecution, which has powers public defenders don’t. At the prosecutor’s service are police and sheriff’s departments, and state investigators who collect evidence, and experts ready to give testimony.

The public defenders must rely on the veracity of those reports, prosecutors’ integrity, and the investigators and experts it can afford. The 75 percent rule is essential to leveling the playing field and protecting the indigent’s constitutional right to effective counsel.

Although the rule has been in effect for decades, it hasn’t been enforced. According to a 2011 report by the Tennessee Administrative Office of Courts, public defenders get 60 percent of state funding. Previous attempts to kill the 75 percent rule failed, and the most recent bill was shipped to a summer study committee.

In the meantime, Senator Randy McNally (R-Oak Ridge) has come up with a budget amendment that would gut funding for public defenders.

“If a local government provides a funding increase or supplement to the office of the public defender in the judicial district,” the amendment reads, “the appropriation made by the provisions of this act to the local government or District Public Defenders Conference for the office of the public defender in that district is reduced by the amount of the local funding.”

In English: If the county commission gave the local public defender’s office an additional $100, the state would decrease by $100 the amount of state funding for that public defender’s office. This would freeze the public defender’s budget, punish indigent clients, and boost the advantage district attorneys already enjoy.

McNally could not be reached to explain the problem his amendment solves. But the amendment is consistent with conservatives’ narrative about the poor, whose deprivation is the result of their own failings. If the poor stand accused of a crime, it’s because they’re guilty.

To right-wingers, the volumes of evidence showing racial disparities in arrest rates, conviction rates, and sentences are figments of liberals’ imaginations.

Another reason to wreck public defenders’ offices lies in prison privatization. How do you maintain a steady supply of people to fill Tennessee’s for-profit prisons?

The government can make new crimes out of previously legal behavior, manufacture a phony war on drugs, set mandatory minimum sentences, and hyper-police communities of color. Now we have another way: Bankrupt public defenders.

But let’s get back to the numbers. According to records, Weirich’s office handled 157,576 new cases in 2014. The number of cases doesn’t appear to be artificially inflated. For example, a suspect charged in connection with 14 separate robberies would count as a single case.

Of those 157,576 cases, 22 percent were traffic citations, 28 percent were misdemeanor citations, and 43 percent were misdemeanor defendants.

That means around seven percent were felony defendants accused of serious crimes like rape and murder. Suddenly, the numbers aren’t so scary.

Add to that the state Supreme Court’s recent rebukes of Weirich’s office and the reversal of two convictions, including last week’s overturned guilty verdict of accused rapist Frederick Herron, and the DA’s complaints seem less relevant.

If the legislature eliminates the checks and balances for the indigent accused, that should be a crime.

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The Long Shadow

Honest conversations about education reform generate more questions than answers.

Are charter schools the answer to what ails poor children? What will it take to turn low-performing schools around? How can public schools best prepare disadvantaged students for college and careers?

To those queries, allow me to add another: What if we’re asking the wrong questions? Is it possible that what happens in classrooms doesn’t matter nearly as much as education reformers say it does?

What if it’s not public schools that need fixing? What if the problem is hyper-segregated neighborhoods and a job market riddled with race and gender favoritism? What if the problem isn’t poor children who struggle to learn but middle- and upper-class parents who hoard opportunity for their kids?

What if we viewed economic and educational inequality not from the stoop where the disadvantaged sit, but from the perch of those who inherit advantage that they rarely share?

If you weren’t pondering those things before, you will after reading The Long Shadow, which chronicles a groundbreaking study of 790 first graders in the Baltimore public schools.

Starting in 1982, Johns Hopkins University researchers Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, and Linda Olson followed these students’ education and career path for nearly 25 years. Some of the students were white, some were black, some of low socioeconomic standing (measured by household income, the parents’ education level and their occupation) and some of relatively higher standing.

The short version of the study’s findings: Children who are born into poor, disadvantaged families almost always end up where they started, especially when the poor children are black.

For the overwhelming majority of the disadvantaged students, “the promise of upward mobility through educational success has proven to be an empty one,” the book’s authors write.

If you understand how efficiently inequality was designed to reproduce itself, this comes as no surprise. But what surprised Alexander most was how much a family’s access to informal job networks mattered.

When the students in the study were asked as adults how they found their jobs, “Whites were more likely to say through family and friends,” Alexander said. “Blacks said [they found their jobs] on their own and being on your own isn’t a good place to be. The people who had the advantage back in the day still have the advantage today and that’s where race comes into play.”

The institutional, legal racism that once strangled African Americans’ job prospects is largely gone, thanks to equal opportunity employment laws. Still, the African-American unemployment rate is reliably twice that of white Americans. In codified racism’s place are informal networks of access and opportunity that produce virtually the same result.

Here’s one example: More and more companies rely on current employees to find new hires, which in itself isn’t a problem. But people tend to refer people who look like them, which is worrisome for groups historically shut out of the job market. According to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, job candidates who are referred are twice as likely to get an interview. Just over 70 percent of employees recommended job candidates of the same race and 63 percent recommended candidates of the same gender.

Hiring biases could help explain part of why the poverty rate in Memphis is so divergent: Less than 10 percent of white families are poor, compared to 33 percent of African Americans, 47 percent of Latinos, and nearly 15 percent of Asians. This is not a problem that can be fixed in public schools.

That brings me to another set of questions: Is it only education reform we need or should we add some workplace reform too?

Who will train hiring managers to recognize and correct for their biases?

Can we adapt the tools used to measure teacher effectiveness to track how well employers do at hiring people who don’t look like them?

Can we convince charitable foundations that sink millions into education reform to also invest in creating equitable workplaces?

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. When it comes to finding a job, we unquestioningly accept that as fact. But when it comes to education reform, we insist the reverse is true.

That leads me to my last question: When will we resolve that dissonance?

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Selma Bound

On Sunday, thousands will descend upon Selma, Alabama, to remember the bloody Sunday 50 years ago when white state troopers attacked peaceful marchers who sought voting rights for black citizens.

Memphians Rychetta Watkins and Joy Turner will be among those retracing the demonstrators’ steps across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of the attack. With them will be 500 fellow members of Girl Trek, a three-year-old national nonprofit that helps black women live healthier lives, primarily through local walking groups.

During the #Selma50 events, speakers will no doubt expound upon the marchers’ determination and the subsequent 1965 Voting Rights Act (since gutted by the conservative faction of the Supreme Court). But without the physical capacity to walk, to put one foot in front of the other, to advance steadily despite the blasts of fire hoses, tear gas, police dogs, and even bullets, the movement would not move.

Without the act of walking, history would be stripped of the Montgomery bus boycotts, the Bloody Sunday march, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and even parts of the Underground Railroad.

“So much of what the activists did was centered around walking … and claiming their right to public spaces,” said Watkins, a program development consultant. “The Girl Trek story is about understanding our history and understanding that our strength begins with our physical health.”

Both women take inspiration from one of Girl Trek’s heroes, Mississippi voting rights activist and sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer.

Her most famous quote, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” spoke to the frustration that accompanied black Americans’ attempts to gain the franchise.

But Hamer’s words could also have a more literal interpretation. A video of her 1964 testimony before a Democratic National Convention’s committee shows an overweight Hamer who gets stuck between two tables as she leaves the room. She can be seen breathing heavily as a man rushes up to move a table so she can pass by.

Hamer was just 59 when she died. I wonder if she would have lived longer if her existence as a black woman had not been endured, as author Zora Neale Hurston described in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, as the mule of the world.

Science has now proven what we could only intuit during the movement’s early years: Chronic stress makes you sick, increasing your risk of weight gain, depression, and heart disease. It’s no surprise that black women, subject to the double whammy of racism and sexism, are more likely to be obese, to have diabetes, heart disease, and to die earlier than white women from those diseases.

For Watkins, the intersection of human rights and health reminds her of the days when she was first learning West African dance. She asked her teacher: What do I have to do to be good at this?

The answer: You have to be strong.

“That resonates on so many levels,” Watkins said. “We get trapped in this stereotype of a strong black woman in only an emotional sense. Too often we think it’s a virtue to sacrifice our physical health to take care of our families and our communities.”

Black women are strong because we have to be, Watkins said, but we can be smarter about how we fortify ourselves. “It starts with honoring your body,” Watkins said. “That is what enables you to do all the rest.”

Turner sees the Girl Trek trip as an opportunity to recommit to better health and voting in all elections, not just presidential ones. She was struck by the police brutality toward would-be black voters as captured in the riveting historical movie Selma.

“I don’t think I would be strong enough to be out there walking arm in arm, getting beat in the face,” said Turner, a grant and contract administrator for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

But she does have the strength to get on the bus and head to Selma. Said Watkins: “The journey continues for full equality for all Americans. The journey to make sure this country lives out the truth of its creed is by no means done.”

To mark the distance of the 1965 march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery, Girl Trek members are encouraged to pledge to walk 54 miles during the month of March. To learn more, go to girltrek.org.

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Good Jobs Lost

For 17 years, Zorina Bowen was a research biochemist. She was good at what she did and loved her job. But in 2006, University of Tennessee Health Science Center laid her off, and she’s struggled to get by ever since.

Her pay shrunk from nearly $30 an hour to less than $10 an hour for part-time work in the home health-care industry.

“I went from sequencing DNA to emptying bed pans,” says the 57-year-old single mother.

Part of Bowen’s story is familiar: It’s the testimony of the shrinking middle class, of good jobs lost and replaced by ones that don’t pay enough to make ends meet. Less noted is the psychological impact, how a changing economy can rattle even the most secure person’s self-esteem.

Bowen is quick to point out: She doesn’t think she’s too good to work as a caregiver — bathing, dressing, and cooking for her elderly client. All work has value, she says, “but the thing is, what is its value to you? Does it challenge you? Does it stimulate you, or are you just going through the motions?”

The slow decline in the federal, state, and local unemployment rate doesn’t capture the 12.5 percent of Americans who are underemployed. For African Americans like Bowen, the underemployment rate is estimated to be as high as 25 percent.

Bowen wants a job that requires the degree she earned. She needs full-time hours. In the years since she left the lab, she hasn’t been able to find either. She’s worked as an administrative assistant at nonprofit organizations, a substitute teacher, and a tutor at an afterschool program.

“I was basically taking any job I could get.”

It was a long way from her years in the lab, including years at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

“My job was to find the dose range to kill off the cancer cells without killing off too many of the normal cells,” she says. She can still rattle off the names of the drugs she worked on, and when she does, she looks happy. But her reminiscing soon gives way to reality. She sounds more like an economist than a scientist as she laments the economic reality for people trapped in low-wage jobs.

“Adjusted for inflation, we’re not making as much as we were in the 1970s,” she says. “Everything has gone up but wages.”

According to the 2015 Assets and Opportunity Scorecard released last month, Tennessee is one of 26 states where more than 25 percent of the jobs are low-wage.

According to the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), which compiles the annual scorecard, Tennessee ranks 43rd in the country for the number of policies adopted to help state residents gain financial security. In several states, 2015 brought increases above the federal minimum wage, but not in Tennessee. In fact, the state has no minimum wage law.

So while national campaigns to raise the pay for fast-food workers to $15 an hour are great ideas, Bowen still doesn’t believe that would be enough.

“Let’s see what it really actually takes to live out here and adjust wages accordingly,” Bowen says. “Because anything under $20 [an hour] is not making it.”

Her advice to her two daughters: Be prepared for anything. Have a job and a side gig. Save not for a rainy day — but seasons after seasons of hurricanes.

“If I’d known then what I know now, I probably would have tried to squirrel away more,” Bowen says. “It was a six-month cushion, not a six-year cushion.”

According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, if the minimum wage had kept up with inflation, it’d be $10.52 an hour, which is about what she makes now. But if the minimum wage had kept pace with worker productivity, it’d be $21.72 an hour. States that increase their minimum wages, the center found, had higher employment growth.

Even with subsidies, Bowen can’t afford health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. Earlier this month, a legislative committee killed Insure Tennessee, Governor Bill Haslam’s plan to accept Medicaid expansion funds.

When she sees politicians dither over increasing the minimum wage or other measures that help her make ends meet, it makes her angry.

“They don’t have a clue,” Bowen says. “They don’t know what it’s really like out here. … They figure people are poor because they want to be.”

Wendi C. Thomas is a journalist and a Writing Fellow for the Center for Community Change. Follow her on Twitter at @wendi_c_thomas

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Thanks, Obama!

Last week, I joined the nine-million-plus Americans who have Obamacare.

My premiums are less than I paid with employer-sponsored health insurance, my deductible went from $2,800 to zero, and I can stick with the same primary care doctor.

Thanks, President Obama!

The opportunity to have affordable health insurance separate from a job allows me and many others to pursue more meaningful work. For the first time in my life, I can explore being not just an employee but an entrepreneur. (Or as Mitt Romney would say, a maker, not a taker.)

Nearly five years after the Affordable Care Act was signed into law and after months of dithering over whether to get on board, Governor Bill Haslam has come up with Insure Tennessee, his too-little-too-late version of Obamacare.

Of course, Haslam would never call it that. But without Obamacare, it’s unlikely that the nation’s richest politician (net worth: $2 billion) would have devised a health insurance plan for the working poor.

Thanks again, Obama!

On Monday, Haslam convened a special session of the state legislature to consider Insure Tennessee. The two-year pilot of Insure Tennessee wouldn’t start until 2016. That means the state would forfeit even more than the $2.4 billion it’s passed up so far by refusing to accept federal dollars for Medicaid expansion, which was a key part of the Affordable Care Act.

Insure Tennessee is aimed at those who earn less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level, or $16,242 for an individual. Haslam’s administration estimates that 200,000 Tennesseans would be eligible for Insure Tennessee.

Even if I stood to benefit, I wouldn’t be impressed.

Said Haslam when he announced his plan: “This plan leverages federal dollars to provide health-care coverage to more Tennesseans, to give people a choice in their coverage, and to address the cost of health care, better health outcomes, and personal responsibility.”

See that last part about personal responsibility? If you thought Haslam was motivated by any Christian obligation to be his brother’s (or sister’s) keeper, those two words should disabuse you of that notion. This right-wing blather about personal responsibility is a smokescreen, part of a nasty narrative that falsely insists those who accept government assistance or subsidies in any way are reckless ne’er do wells.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation estimates that expanding Medicaid would cost Tennessee $1.7 billion over 10 years, most of which would come after 2017, when the federal government’s contribution drops to 95 percent, then 94 percent in 2018, 93 percent in 2019, and 90 percent from 2020 on.

Under Insure Tennessee, state hospitals would cover that 10 percent gap. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because patients with insurance mean more money for hospitals.

But here’s something you should know. According to a New York Times analysis, Tennessee spends at least $1.58 billion each year on incentives for businesses. That’s right, Tennessee would spend far, far less on health care for the working poor than it does on tax incentives, sales tax refunds, and corporate income tax reductions to lure companies to the state. If corporations are indeed people, then Haslam is the most compassionate man on the planet.

But if people are people — including the 918 lives that would have been saved in 2014 with Medicaid expansion — then the refusal to embrace Obamacare is cruel, mean-spirited, and immoral.

It is unconscionable that, just now, Haslam’s administration will give to Tennesseans the care and attention it’s been giving to businesses for years.

But with a Republican governor and a Republican-controlled state house and senate, Insure Tennessee is the best we will get — and it’s far from certain that the legislature’s Tea Party contingent, which is virulently anti-Obama anything, will support it.

Open enrollment for Obamacare continues through February 15th. If you don’t enroll by February 15th, you probably won’t be able to get insurance through the federal exchange this year, unless you get married, have a child, lose a job, or experience some other qualifying life event.

Go to getcoveredtenn.org to schedule an appointment with an enrollment counselor who can walk you through the process.

And once you’re enrolled, you know who to thank.

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Silver Rights Movement

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who would have turned 86 last Thursday, once said: “Equality means dignity. And dignity demands a job and a paycheck that lasts through the week.”

Keep this in mind whenever you see nearly giddy news coverage about new jobs coming to the Memphis area — whether it’s 900 new Williams-Sonoma warehouse jobs just across the state line in Mississippi, 400 jobs added with Target’s new fulfillment center, or the 282 jobs expected after Graceland gets a new hotel.

“But dignity is also corroded by poverty, no matter how poetically we invest the humble with simple graces and charm. No worker can maintain his morale or sustain his spirit if in the market place his capacities are declared to be worthless to society,” King also said.

A living wage in Memphis is around $13 an hour. Average wages at Conduit Global, a call center that opened last year a mile from the nearest bus stop, are around $12. The base wage for Electrolux line workers is less than that.

Today’s hourly wages have the same purchasing power they did when Jimmy Carter was president. (That’s 1979, for those too young to remember.)

Thousands, if not millions of black people, “are poverty stricken — not because they are not working, but because they receive wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the main stream of the economic life of our nation,” King said.

In December, the unemployment rate fell to 5.6 percent, the lowest in six years. That sounds like good news, until you view it through the lens of history and race.

“According to the official statistics,” King wrote in February 1968, “Negro unemployment is twice that of whites.” Fifty years later, the gap remains. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, black unemployment in December was 10.4 percent.

To lure companies to town, city and county government regularly give out multimillion-dollar incentive packages. In the case of Graceland, the tax breaks amount to a staggering $141 million, or more than $440,000 in incentives per job created.

The message from big business and elected officials to the thousands of Memphians mired in low-wage jobs is clear: Be grateful for whatever you get.

Meanwhile, workers struggling to make ends meet have questions that the dealmakers and elected officials don’t answer. Will they offer a steady schedule so that a single mother (there are an estimated 43,000 single moms in Memphis) can be at home most weeknights to check her children’s homework and tuck them in?

Will these jobs come with health insurance (which is critical since Governor Haslam refuses to accept federal Medicaid expansion funds and instead is trying to create his own version of Obamacare)?

Will workers be able to earn sick days, so that catching a stubborn cold doesn’t mean forfeiting several days of pay or coming to work and spreading the germs to coworkers?

Are the job sites accessible by public transportation?

Do these jobs pay enough for a family to save for a rainy day, their children’s education, and their own retirement?

“What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t have enough money to buy a hamburger?” King asked. The business community’s argument has been that the wealth created for businesses eventually trickles down to the workers, although it’s workers’ labor that creates the wealth.

The Pew Research Center recently released a report showing that a rising tide doesn’t lift all boats, especially when the sailors are black and brown. “[E]ven as the economic recovery has begun to mend asset prices, not all households have benefited alike, and wealth inequality has widened along racial and ethnic lines,” wrote Pew researchers.

“The wealth of white households was 13 times the median wealth of black households in 2013, compared with eight times the wealth in 2010,” the report continues. “Likewise, the wealth of white households is now more than 10 times the wealth of Hispanic households, compared with nine times the wealth in 2010.”

To borrow from Operation Hope founder John Hope Bryant, the civil rights movement must give way to a “silver rights” movement.

Remember that King’s final and fatal mission to help striking sanitation workers was part of his quest for economic justice.

“Never forget that freedom is not something that must be demanded by the oppressor. It is something that must be demanded by the oppressed. If we are going to get equality, if we are going to get adequate wages, we are going to have to struggle for it.”

Are you ready to struggle?