Tag: civil rights

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Editorial Opinion

Honoring Benjamin Hooks

It is rare for a public figure to command veneration and loyalty from both sides of the political aisle and from every point on the ethnic spectrum, but such a figure is the Rev. Benjamin Hooks, who, it was announced this week, will be one of eight 2007 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Hooks kept up his tenure as pastor of Middle Baptist Church in Memphis throughout a lengthy service, beginning in 1976, as executive director of the NAACP nationally. He ranks up there with anyone else — including his friend Martin Luther King Jr. — as an exemplar of the civil rights struggle. His effectiveness with the NAACP was enhanced both by his legal brilliance and by a sunny disposition that allowed him to win friends (and disarm adversaries) across the usual social dividing lines.

A proud graduate of LeMoyne College, Hooks also is a veteran of combat service in World War II. On returning home, he got involved in local politics, but even doing so, he maintained friends in both parties. His evenhanded sense of justice would make him the first black Criminal Court judge in Tennessee history. And, while he always supported governmental action against discrimination and to offset the after-effects of segregation, he famously issued this challenge: “I’m calling for a moratorium on excuses. I challenge black America today — all of us — to set aside our alibis.”

Hooks’ career has been crowned in recent years by his service as president of the National Civil Rights Museum. He is a great man, and this week’s great honor is entirely appropriate.

On Closing Mud Island

Mud Island River Park closes for the season this week, if anyone cares.

The most expensive and attractive park on the river closes during the month of November, when the temperatures are pleasant and the colors are changing. Those white tepees and campfires at the south end of the park that pop out on summer weekends might actually get some use on a cold autumn night.

But the park is an odd duck. It is part theme park for tourists and part public park for Memphians. It is expensive to operate and maintain, from the monorail to the museum and shops and restaurants. Admission to the park is free, even if food and soft drinks are pricey. Still, the demand from locals and tourists to keep it open year-round like Overton Park and Shelby Farms simply isn’t there. So the Riverfront Development Corporation closes it, except for special events, until next spring.

This is the same outfit that wants to spend $29 million for a boat landing in Tom Lee Park and $6 million to fix up the cobblestones in the name of reconnecting Memphians to the river, attracting more tourists, and preserving a historic “treasure.” The same things were said about Mud Island when it was built almost 30 years ago.

The fact is that “connecting with the river” is praised more in words than in practice. There are not that many people who want to passively look at cobblestones and barges and pretty views. Most people want to do something and watch something more exciting, like Joe Royer’s “cyclocross” bike race along Mud Island’s Greenbelt Park next weekend. Such events do more to connect Memphians to the river than expensive parks and monuments.

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News

“Memphis is Also America”

The Nation posted an article online today from its April 22, 1968 issue. The essay, by Pat Watters, takes a hard look at Memphis — its white leadership, its newspapers, its racism — in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination earlier that month.

It’s quite illuminating. An excerpt: His movement, his life were Southern; but Memphis, where he died, symbolized more than the South. Its racial crisis of 1968 and its murderous failure were those of all America.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. went there during the fifth week of a garbage workers’ strike that had built into a civil rights movement and a dangerous crisis. The Memphis Negro community had not developed much of a civil rights movement during the early 1960s. So the movement that did come in 1968 capsuled into a few swift weeks the decade’s history of white America’s failure to respond to the nonviolence of Dr. King, and black America’s recoil into despair and a violence of desperation …

Read it all at The Nation‘s website.

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News The Fly-By

The Importance of Having Been Ernest

Mourners of Ernest Withers filled the Pentecostal Temple Institutional Church of God in Christ downtown Saturday afternoon to celebrate the homegoing of the world-renowned photographer.

Withers, who died October 15th at the age 85, left a vast body of work that chronicled the Beale Street blues and the birth of rock-and-roll in 1950s Memphis, and the Civil Rights movement across America.

At the service, friends, family members, and public officials eulogized Withers with a celebratory tone.

Afrocentric spiritualist Ekpe Abioto, dressed in ceremonial boubou, tapped a Congo drum and whistled through panpipes as he led the Withers family into church and down the aisle of the expansive, blue-carpeted sanctuary.

From the pulpit, Abioto delivered the libation, assuring the crowd that “death is only a fulfillment of life.” He asked that both the oldest and youngest people in the room — a COGIC minister in his 90s and a two-month-old baby — identify themselves and be recognized.

Trumpeter Mickey Gregory, a former Stax Records session player and Beale Street club entertainer, represented Withers’ ties to the music industry, performing the popular Thomas A. Dorsey gospel composition “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.”

Memphis mayor Willie Herenton called Withers a “giant and a genius,” expressing his gratitude to God “that I, Willie Herenton, had the privilege of kneeling at [Withers’] feet.

“They don’t put just anybody’s obituary in The New York Times,” he reminded the audience.

The Reverend Samuel Kyles also eulogized Withers: “It is said that a drop of water can knock holes in stone, not by violence, but by oft-falling.” Like that drop of water on the stone, Withers’ “camera knocked holes in the stones of ignorance one click at a time.”

Beale Street developer John Elkington promised “there will always be a Withers gallery on Beale.” He said he once asked Withers if he’d been afraid photographing civil rights-era riots and episodes of police brutality.

“No,” Withers told Elkington. “I was too busy working.”

Finally, family members evoked tender and personal memories of Withers playing on the floor and watching cartoons with his grandchildren. “He saw the world through our eyes,” Withers’ granddaughter, Esi Sawyer, recalled.

Those gathered, and the photographer’s many admirers, would agree that we’re better for having seen the world through his.

A procession down Beale Street, past the last of Withers’ six offices located on the strip over the years, and interment at Elmwood Cemetery followed. Dorothy, Withers’ wife of 65 years, four of their eight children, and numerous grandchildren survive him.

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News The Fly-By

From the Back of the Bus

CREDIT: AP Photo/Khue Bui

In the mid ’60s, Coby Smith and Charles Cabbage helped organize the Invaders, a civil rights group founded in Memphis. Now roughly four decades later, the proposed “Rosa Parks” law — currently awaiting Phil Bredesen’s signature — clears the names of people who were targeted by police for anti-discrimination activities.

The law would expunge the “records of persons charged with a misdemeanor or felony while challenging a law designed to maintain racial segregation.”

Cabbage and Smith recognize the symbolic spirit of the law but insist that it’s too late to offer any practical benefit to thousands of civil rights activists. “Is this only for people who were involved in non-violent civil rights activity?” Cabbage asks. “There are some people who went to the penitentiary and have been vilified their whole lives [due to their civil rights movement activities], and some who’ve had bronze statues made of them.”

Former Invaders count themselves in the first group. Therein lies the rub for the past militants. Their view of the movement and strategies for achieving its goals diverged from the non-violent activities that Martin Luther King Jr. advocated.

“The Black Invaders were defined as a gang and treated as criminals,” Smith says.

It’s one thing to expunge a criminal record, but another to undo the difficulties that arise in one’s life from carrying a record. “Our [criminal] records influence whether or not we have good employment, which we could not get because of our record,” Cabbage says. “How do you address this issue?”

The two men are wary of legislation designed to generate positive press for government officials while forsaking the citizens that the law could help. “This will allow Fred Thompson to run for president with a clear conscience,” Smith quips.

Bredesen has until June 8th to take action on the bill.

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Editorial Opinion

Reaching a Balance

Thanks to a spot that runs regularly on the local Air America radio affiliate, we learn that some or another major media source — we forget which, but we were impressed — declared Memphis “the greatest American place” back in 1998. If we are, it is because the conditions of our existence have historically compelled a mingling of cultures, resulting most noticeably in a series of glorious musical heritages. We use the plural on purpose, having heard music
historiographer David Evans of the University of Memphis discourse convincingly on the separate musical streams — ragtime, blues, jazz, R&B, rockabilly, rock-and-roll, and more — that have issued into the world from Memphis.

But our greatness in the future will depend on how well we achieve a synthesis of our populations in other ways, especially politically and socially. Like the rest of America, Memphis and Shelby County are now past that era in which the words “black” and “white” adequately describe ethnic variety. We are home now to Asians and Hispanics in truly significant numbers.

It is this last fact, along with the rough balance of Caucasians and African Americans in our mix, that made the honor conferred on us this past weekend by Major League Baseball so appropriate. In becoming the site of the first annual Civil Rights Game and, according to baseball commissioner Bud Selig, the likely permanent home of the game, Memphis achieved both a signal distinction and the opportunity to become an annual example to mankind.

That opportunity is a burden, too, of course. We may be currently notorious in the eyes of the state and nation for instances of public corruption, but few other American jurisdictions, we venture, have achieved an effective symmetry in government to the extent that we have.

Consider: The current congressman in Memphis’ 9th congressional district, Steve Cohen, is a white who won a hefty majority last year against a black opponent with a famous last name. The current mayor of Shelby County, where Caucasians still dominate on Election Day, is A C Wharton, an African American who won a lopsided majority in 2004 over a well-known white member of the County Commission.

A white candidate, City Council member Carol Chumney, has gained enough currency in Memphis’ black precincts to have finished ahead of Memphis’ incumbent black mayor, Willie Herenton, in the first major poll of city voters. Meanwhile, a significant number of influential whites are involved in the mayoral effort of another candidate, former MLGW head Herman Morris, who is African American.

Racial issues still flare up in local government. The current controversy over a proposed second Juvenile Court judge is a case in point, though even that issue has as much to do with reaching an effective balance between the county’s municipal and governmental jurisdictions as anything else.

We still argue at the table over who gets the best seat or the first cut of meat. But we sit down together, and we’re used to it. If we can take the next major step and stabilize population flow in an environment that is economically secure for all, we will, in fact, deserve to be called a great American place.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Choosing the Gay Option

The religious right has traditionally argued that homosexuality is a choice and that gays and lesbians can, and should, “change” (i.e., become heterosexual through reparative therapy or religious conversion).

In response, liberal advocates for gay and lesbian civil rights argue that homosexuality, or sexual orientation in general, is not a choice and that gays and lesbians should have civil rights protections because they are born gay or lesbian and cannot change their sexual orientation. Both of these arguments are misleading and oversimplify scientific facts and research on sexual orientation.

The argument that human sexuality is biologically determined is contrary to social scientific research, which suggests that sexuality is largely socially constructed. It ignores not only the sociological evidence against an innate, unchangeable sexuality but also the radical insight of Freud that humans are not born “heterosexual” or “homosexual” and that the development of an exclusive “heterosexuality” requires the repression of homosexual desire.

Even Kinsey, the much misunderstood and misquoted sex researcher, rejected the concept of an innate sexual orientation, preferring to categorize people based on their sexual behaviors.

Kinsey never argued that heterosexuals and homosexuals were two separate innate sexual orientations. Like Freud, he believed that all human beings were potentially bisexual.

Why do many in the mainstream gay movement argue that it is impossible to choose to be gay or lesbian? Many radical feminists argue that women can choose to be lesbian — that identifying as a lesbian is a social and political choice available to women to liberate themselves from patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality.

The early radical gay liberationists argued that gay liberation requires the sexual liberation of everyone from the socially constructed hetero/homo dichotomy. They believed that everyone could be “gay.” They rejected the scientific claim that homosexuality was a biological or psychological pathology or that same-sex desire was even “abnormal.” The gay rights movement created a modern “gay” identity.

There have not always been “gay” people, so it is erroneous to claim that people are “born” gay. Bisexuals are also left out of the “sexual orientation is not a choice” paradigm, since they can choose their sexual identity. If we base gay/lesbian rights on the argument that it is not a choice, then we exclude bisexuals and deny their right to choose.

Why all the focus on the question of can gays change? Why not ask, “Can straight people change”? Both questions focus on the same issue: If we could change our sexual orientation/identity, do we have a right to make that choice? This is the important issue.

The purpose of the “ex-gay” ad campaign (and the public focus on whether gays can change) is to undermine the central claim of the gay/lesbian rights movement that people are born gay or lesbian and that it is not a choice since no one can change their sexual orientation. The religious right is exploiting an opportunity handed to them by the misguided strategy of the liberal/mainstream gay movement.

We should focus the political debate on the freedom of people to be gay, lesbian or bisexual regardless of how or why they arrive at their sexual identity, not wasting time on the futile “nature vs. nurture” debate.

The argument for “gay rights” should not be based on questionable scientific claims of the biological immutability of  “sexual orientation” but rather on the right of gays and lesbians to CHOOSE their sexual identity! This argument sets aside the biological argument and bases gay rights upon the constitutional right to speak and the freedom of conscience guaranteed to religious groups.

Our right to be gay or lesbian or bisexual is the right to be free from religious and government interference in our private lives, to make our choices about who we have sex with and who we want to have intimate relationships with (as long as they are consenting adults). Let’s not let those opposed to sexual equality take away our right to choose.

To be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or straight involves making a series of choices. Those choices should be a right like any other basic human right and not dependent upon scientific opinion about how and why a person arrives at their sexual identity. Let’s defend the freedom to choose our sexual identity and quit hiding behind questionable scientific dogma.

Jim Maynard is a local gay activist. This piece is a modified and abbreviated version of a longer essay.