Tag: civil rights movement

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News News Blog News Feature

Pastor Looks at Role of Black Churches and Black Lives Matter

Photo credit: Daniel Tseng via Unsplash

The Rev. Andre E. Johnson has been seeking answers to complex issues involving Black churches and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.

His research led him to write The Summer of 2020: George Floyd and the Resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement, in which he interviewed people involved in BLM, some of whom relied on religious narratives to describe their involvement.

Johnson previewed his book Thursday during SisterReach’s Social Justice Preacher Series held online. He is founding pastor of Gifts of Life Ministries and has authored several works and teaches at the University of Memphis and Memphis Theological Seminary.

His topic — “Rethinking Faith and Religion: The Spirituality of Black Lives Matter” — put the spotlight on Black churches and civil rights actions.

“This heightened after George Floyd’s murder,” said Johnson. “What we discovered was that for many participants the movement had not only inspired and energized people of faith and Christian traditions, but it also inspired many people and different religious traditions to re-examine their own faith journeys.

Black churches have historically been a pivotal part of social justice movements. Their involvement was exemplified during the Civil Rights Movement where they not only served as safe havens and places of hope for the fight, they also were homes of clergymen who doubled as activists.

While the church has historically played a role in the fight for equal rights for Black Americans, there have been questions regarding the involvement of the church in current movements, such as BLM. In a 2021 entry in the “Uplift Memphis, Uplift The Nation: The Blog For Community Engagement,” from the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis, Johnson wrote that “unlike the Civil Rights movement that it is often compared to, people often do not associate BLM as a faith-inspired movement or one that has anything to do with spirituality.”

“Early in the movement, even some Black pastors lamented the fact that there was a strange silence from the Black church during the Black Lives Matter Movement,” said Johnson.

In his lecture, Johnson explained that his research showed that people used their religion to help them cope with the death of Floyd, and compelled them to get active. He said, however, that many felt they could not solely rely on their religious influences, and that they had to “draw on something else to draw them out to participate.”

He said, “While people of faith have been a part of Black Lives Matter since its inception, some told us that religion played no role in their involvement whatsoever.”

Johnson also quoted respondents who did not identify as religious, and preferred that religion not play a role at all in BLM. 

He noted, however, that the Black church had always had a prominent influence on society such as in the Civil Rights Movement, and that the faith that people learn in the church is “one of the primary reasons for their involvement with BLM.”

“For their involvement with BLM, many recognized and realized that it all started in the church that they are, right now, critiquing,” said Johnson. “It was the church that had lost its way, but some of the participants still found a way to join the movement and grounded it in their faith experiences.”

Johnson explained that it not only speaks to the legacy and history of the Black church, but the legacy of activism “birthed from the church that bore witness to the issues germane to African Americans, across a variety of places and spaces, at all times.”

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Theater Theater Feature

Scottsboro Boys at POTS

Photo: Bill Simmers

In attempting to describe Playhouse on the Square’s production of Scottsboro Boys to a friend, I found the concept of the show somewhat difficult to explain. Scottsboro Boys is the retelling of the case of nine falsely accused Black teenagers, which eventually became one of the sparks that lit the fire of the Civil Rights Movement. The show is a musical, which may come as a surprise given its heavy subject matter. And not just a musical, but a vaudeville-style variety show which features minstrelsy as an intentional part of its social commentary. It’s not so much a story within a story as it is a performance within a performance.

Director Jared Thomas Johnson says, “The construct of the show is fun, makes you laugh, and is entertaining so it hides the ugly truth in plain sight.”

The play begins as the reverie of A Lady, who is eventually revealed to be Rosa Parks. We are quickly introduced to the mistral concept of the performance, as well as the theme “speak the truth.” Parks is one thread running throughout the show, a viewer alongside the members of the audience. Our guides, so to speak, are the two zany, almost slapstick characters of Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo, who play many of the various white characters in the story. Several cast members change characters throughout the play, showcasing dexterity, humor, and vocal talent by the frequent character shifts.

Similarly, the set, made up mostly by the simple repurposing of chairs, changes often. The back of a chair may be reimagined as bars of a cell or the caboose of a train. We first see the nine boys riding a train, which gets stopped by two policemen. Two white girls, who the policemen correctly surmise are sex workers, then accuse the boys of rape in order to avoid being jailed themselves for prostitution.

Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo (Photo: Bill Simmers)

As Johnson puts it, “When dealing with any subject, humor has a way of healing and feeling like a hug, an embrace. I think the show is designed to let you laugh, smile, and enjoy the talents of our Black artists who have crafted some of the best performances I have seen from Black actors in a very long time. The humor makes the characters real people, people I wanna get to know.”

The actors succeed in balancing the juxtaposition of humor and solemnity, masterfully juggling switches between characters, complicated choreography, and powerhouse vocals — often all at the same time. Music director Tammy Holt praises the cast, saying, “It’s rare and invigorating to have the opportunity to put that many Black male voices together on stage, and these men can sing! We really worked to build community so that the bond would be displayed in their performance, and I think it truly does. This cast is heavily committed and engaged in bringing this story to life, so that’s what you see and hear in every note.”

The ensemble numbers throughout the show were a true delight to take in, layered with adroit harmonies and emotion. My friend, Rhett Ortego, and I were both especially moved by “Southern Days.” After the show, Rhett, who has told me before that he normally doesn’t care for musicals, said, “I almost started crying during the one about home.”

Perhaps the most unusual thing about this play is that by the time the cast lines up for the final bow, the overall feeling is that of being uplifted. One might expect to feel overly saddened by the story, but I found that was not the case. And Johnson and Holt both spoke about how important it was to the cast and crew to present this story through a lens of joy.

“We have made a very earnest effort to make the show uplifting, inspirational, and joyous despite the subject matter,” Johnson says. “So I hope folks see there is joy in Black experience at all times.”

Holt adds, “Simply see it, process it, and examine how you will walk forward from the experience.”

Scottsboro Boys runs at Playhouse on the Square through February 19th.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Invaders

The Invaders gained prominence during the 1968 sanitation workers strike

In the summer of 2020, as protests against police violence spread in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, many Americans got a glimpse of what it was like during the height of the Civil Rights era. There was righteous anger, a sense of purpose, and a shared commitment to justice — but there were also bitter disagreements over which tactics were most effective, and a tug-of-war between those who believed state violence must be met with citizen violence, and those who believed nonviolent resistance was the only way. The newfound camaraderie of the street protests came with a frisson of suspicion — is one of us a Fed, reporting our plans and movements to the same law enforcement agencies whose methods and priorities we’re protesting?

All of this will sound familiar to anyone who saw The Invaders when it debuted at Indie Memphis in 2016. The film that director Prichard Smith and writer/producer JB Horrell made, tells the inside story of the Bluff City’s own homegrown Black Power group. Vietnam veteran John B. Smith founded The Invaders when he left the army after his tours of duty. The group aligned themselves with the militant rhetoric of groups like the Black Panthers. The Invaders first gained prominence during the sanitation workers strike of 1968, and then infamy when they were blamed for the riot which overtook Dr. Martin Luther King’s final march in Memphis. Later, the group’s claims that they had been the targets of a spying and smear campaign by the FBI’s COINTELPRO unit were confirmed.

Juanita Thornton

(In the spirit of full disclosure, this columnist worked briefly as a writing consultant on the film, but has no financial stake in the project’s success.)

“I don’t think there are enough stories looking at some of the inner pockets of the Civil Rights movement,” says Smith. “There are the main stories that you hear about the ministers and Dr. King and whatnot. But I would venture to guess that there are many, many more stories like The Invaders that should be told just to give a wider understanding of the whole situation. I think it will continue to be relevant. I think you could argue that if it came out in the middle of the George Floyd protests, that would have been the most relevant time it could have come out. But that’s not how it panned out.”

During the film’s 2016 festival run, which featured a stop at Doc NYC, The Invaders producers, including Memphis filmmaker Craig Brewer, made a deal with a distribution company to help get the film out. But later, Smith says, they asked, “When you say ‘Help,’ does that mean you’ll help us pay for these licenses for all the different archival stuff that we had to license?’ And they basically came back and said, ‘No, we can’t help you with that.’ So from there we were kind of treading water, spinning our wheels.”

With The Invaders in limbo, Smith got a job with New York filmmaker Sacha Jenkins, whose documentary Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues played at Indie Memphis 2022. “I happened to be on the subway train with him, on our ways away from work, and he was like, ‘Hey what’s up with that Invaders thing?’”

Jenkins showed the film to rapper Nas, who signed on to do a new voice-over for the film. “He actually showed up in my office and was like, ‘I’ve never heard of this story! It’s so great! I can’t wait to get this out!’” recalls Smith. “He actually said — and this just threw me — ‘I was having dinner with Colin Kaepernick last night and all I could talk about was The Invaders.’”

Memphis hip-hop superstar Yo Gotti came on board as executive producer to help get the project over the finish line. Now, The Invaders is set for release via video on demand (VOD), which means you can buy or rent it on streaming services or storefronts such as Apple TV, Google Play, and Amazon Prime Video. Smith says a wider release may be in the offing next year. For Smith, the release is the final milestone on a long journey. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he says. “I guess it teaches you patience. There’s the things that you can control, and the things you can’t. Try not to sweat too hard the things you can’t because they will eat you up.”

Categories
Book Features Books

Through a Blue-Eyed Lens

When I moved to Memphis in 1988, I took a position as a warehouse clerk. My Mississippi-born supervisor was a “polite” racist: She’d lower her voice to a whisper when she said the words “Black people.” It was my earliest lesson in how white supremacy perpetuated itself with good manners.

Today, both Yankees like me and Memphians who’ve embraced multicultural values must grapple with such irksome mores, but because they’re often only whispered, those grappling can feel isolated. That’s why Shelley E. Moore’s new memoir, Through a Blue-Eyed Lens: Reflections, Snapshots, Pinholes in Black and White Memphis 1962-1972 (Alchemy Media), is so valuable.

Moore, a white woman raised in Wyoming, Georgia, and Kansas before landing in Memphis at age 8, provides the perfect outsider’s perspective on such mores during the height of the Civil Rights movement. She fearlessly delves into matters of racial relations, as the book zeroes in on them as its central theme. After turning 18, she went on to life adventures elsewhere, but, as she writes, “I have no intention of detailing those decades.” Rather, she’s leaned in to the need to confront her formative years here, equal parts enlightening, troubling, and traumatizing. As such, the volume is a rare social history of a city in turmoil, as experienced by a teenager.

It’s a little-explored window into the city’s official history as well: The author’s father, Jerry Moore, came to here to serve as senior city planner, ultimately becoming the city’s chief administrative officer under Mayor Henry Loeb in 1968. As Moore writes, “I, and many others, have questioned how Jerry reconciled working directly under a man who was an avowed segregationist and obstructionist.” While he doesn’t have much of a voice in this work, Jerry and his wife Sonya hover in the background as “liberally progressive people” who set the tone for their children’s worldview, often at odds with the assumptions of white Memphis.

The resulting culture shock runs the gamut from innocent confusion to outrage to sheer terror. At first, Moore notices the egregious commonalities of segregation — “No White People Allowed in Zoo Today” — but finer details make racial politics more vivid as she matures. When a teenaged Moore naively applies to work as a house cleaner, she’s told, “We only hire Colored maids.”

Significantly, Moore saw the desegregation of schools as it happened. She writes it was “poorly executed,” and the Memphis School Board was “not invested in the process.” But her experience of it went deeper, as she began dating Dwain, a fellow eighth-grader at Bellevue Junior High School who happened to be Black. Even as she learned new dance moves to Stax 45s, she writes, “I was effectively and immediately ditched by my closest white girlfriends. Almost overnight, I became a pariah.”

From there, Moore’s clash with the city’s most reactionary elements only worsened. The story’s bolstered with passages penned by her mother, siblings, classmates, and Dwain himself, the son of a respected Black clergyman. Letters she wrote and received in those years are inserted into the narrative, lending multiple perspectives. All of these voices confirm that, even then, Moore and her family were part of a larger progressive community. But that only made the violence of the era more impactful.

One day after Moore’s mother, siblings, and family friends attended Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s appearance at Mason Temple, and even as Dwain’s family prepared a meal for King in their home that night, he was assassinated. With Mayor Loeb unreachable by phone, it was Moore’s father who personally found him and told him the news.

It was Jerry Moore who represented the city in negotiations with the sanitation workers that King had come to champion. Yet that’s almost an afterthought in this profoundly personal story of privilege mixed with personal risk. Even her father’s clout could not prevent death threats from the White Citizens’ Council, triggered by her interracial dating. Having thus had her feet held to the fire, readers will sympathize with her desire to simply leave when she came of age. We’re lucky she’s come back now, decades later, to confront the demons of racism that still haunt her, and all of us.

Categories
Art Art Feature

“This Light of Ours” at the Brooks

“This Light of Ours” at the Brooks Museum is a timely and necessary exhibition. It is unique among documents of the civil rights movement because it showcases exclusively activist photography. The included images were all tactically made and smartly deployed by artists whose mission was not only to document what was happening, but to influence events in real time. “Our job,” writes exhibition curator and featured photographer Matt Herron “was to get the pictures and get them out into the wider world, not to collect glory or jail time as some civil rights hero.” In order to get their work out into the world, activist photographers developed guerrilla methods — improvising darkrooms, lying to officials, and hiding out when circumstances were dangerous.

The nine photographers whose work is featured hail from vastly different backgrounds. All uprooted their lives to travel through the South as the movement picked up speed in the early 1960s. Bob Fitch’s personal photography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s family is featured alongside Maria Varela’s densely atmospheric photographs of black Southern life. Tamio Wakayama, a Canadian photographer who spent his early years in an internment camp, photographed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at the height of its influence. He later wrote, “There was a pervading sense that not only were we a part of history, but we were history itself.” Work by George Ballis, Herbert Randall, Bob Fletcher, David Prince, and Bob Adelman is also included, organized chronologically by event, rather than by photographer.

The exhibition is divided into four distinct sections: “Black Life,” “Organizing for Freedom,” “State and Local Terror,” and “Meredith March Against Fear and Black Power.” The featured works are both formally visually striking and saturated with important narrative, more than is possible to take in on one viewing. I found myself circling the exhibition, returning to certain photographs again and again with the feeling that there was still more to absorb. It is hard to overstate how moving these images are.

Subtle details within some of the photographs reveal parts of the civil rights story often looked over, such as the pervasive presence of weapons amongst both activists and Southern segregationists. A particularly striking photograph by Herron shows a young organizer and an older man sitting in a small library, facing a curtainless window, their backs turned to the camera. The older man holds a rifle. Herron writes in the exhibition materials, “The movement was nonviolent; the community was not.”

Some of the best photographs in the exhibit are also, on first glance, the quietest. Wakayama’s sparse shot of a memorial service held for slain activists James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner is devastating. Organizer Bob Moses stands amidst the ashes of Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Flowers are situated in rubble and charred wood.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from “This Light of Ours” is that the formal beauty of these photographs — their importance as works of art — is inseparable from their strategic importance as catalysts of social change. In one of Wakamaya’s photographs, a young man stands on the porch of an organizing center in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. A wooden cross bisects the foreground of the photo, visually separating the young man’s head from his body. The cross is emblazoned with a hand-painted logo that reads simply, “Freedom.”

In “This Light of Ours,” we have a potentially important curriculum for today’s protests, where, as Herron put it, “everyone is a photographer and everyone carries a camera.” We need thorough references like exhibitions like this to understand how we got where we are and where we are going next. Herron put it simply: “The job isn’t done. We made a lot of progress in the civil rights movement, but it is far from over.”

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Calling the Bluff Music

From 1925-2010: Four-Year Anniversary of Dr. Benjamin L. Hooks’ Passing

Hooks_UofM_Lecture_pic5_S3VNov42009StandardPhoto-2.jpg

  • The Hooks Institute

Today marks the fourth anniversary of Dr. Benjamin L. Hooks’ passing. He was a staple within the Memphis community and strong advocate for racial, social, and economic justice.

Dr. Hooks was the first African-American criminal court judge in the South subsequent to the Reconstruction Era and the first African-American appointee for the Federal Communications Commission. He led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for 15 years. He was also a Baptist minister, practicing attorney, and respected orator, among several other titles.

During the height of the civil rights movement, he openly antagonized segregation, helped orchestrate protests and lunch counter sit-ins, and promoted the importance of education.

His great-nephew Michael Hooks, Jr. is among the people who drew inspiration from the elder Hooks’ desire to positively impact the community.

“As I’ve gotten older, I appreciate more that I had role models like him and his peers and his contemporaries to look up to,” Michael said. “Our younger generation doesn’t quite have that, and I had it naturally. I got a chance to be in the room with the Morgan Freemans, and [Nelson] Mandelas, and [Bill] Clintons, and I could go on and on. Just being in the room gives you a sense of encouragement that turns into pride and motivation. And he carried himself with such humility and dignity in situations. Being around him gave me a guide on how to act. That’s what I remember the most. I had a real life example that was right there almost every Sunday at dinner, a phone call away, and as he got older called me to help him. Just spending that time around him motivates us to give that kind of time back to the younger generation.”

In 1996, The Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change, a public policy research center that seeks to teach, study, and promote civil rights and social change, was established by Hooks and the Department of Political Science and College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Memphis. The Institute is located within the U of M’s Scates Hall.

The city also has the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library and the Benjamin L. Hooks Job Corps Center, a facility that provides teens and young adults with free career and academic training to help them succeed in today’s workforce. Both establishments are named in honor of the civil rights icon.

Although Hooks’ legacy lives on, Michael is worried about the younger generation failing to truly comprehend and appreciate the importance of contributions made by Hooks and others, which helped improve the circumstances of minorities significantly. He thinks entities like the Hooks Institute can help educate youth and young adults on the struggles and triumphs of their predecessors and how they can utilize the wisdom of past activists to face modern-day dilemmas.

“When you ask the average 20-year-old who Ben Hooks was, they’re not going to be able to tell you,” Michael said. “But the purpose that Ben Hooks fought for and lived for still exists today, and if [the younger] generation doesn’t pick it up, it’s going to be lost. Folks tend to think that it’s all about the 1960s civil rights movement, and I think that we need to encourage young folks to understand that that’s just a template … All that is, is a process. Whatever injustice exists today, take that same template and the process that our forefathers participated in and implement it in something you believe in. Our voting participation is declining, our high school graduation rates are declining, and our college preparedness is declining, at least locally. We have a lot of issues that we need young folks to take the same kind of process and reinvest with the current-day issues. And I think the Ben Hooks Institute would be a platform to do that and take those issues up in a positive and peaceful way.”

Dr. Hooks succumbed to heart failure on April 15th, 2010 in Memphis. He was 85 years old.

To read more about Dr. Hooks and The Hooks Institute’s upcoming gala, “Join Hands for Change: The Civil Rights Movement’s Influence on Music, Fashion and Culture” on Saturday, April 26th, check out my article in this week’s issue of the Memphis Flyer.

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