Tag: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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News News Blog

Panel, Community to Discuss Intersection of Poverty and Education

CREDIT: United Way

United Way

Panelists featured in the series’ first installment on equity

A community conversation about poverty and education is scheduled for Tuesday, July 17th at the National Civil Rights Museum (NCRM).

It will be the second of three installments in Poverty Unplugged, a series of solution-oriented, community conversations. Hosted by United Way of the Mid-South, the series looks at the intersection of poverty in three different areas.

Tuesday’s installment will focus on access to education and how it can aid personal development. It will also consider the amount of funding in communities that goes to education, if it is enough, and if the funds should be split into other areas.

The panel will consist of Mark Sturgis, executive director of Seeding Success; Danny Song, founder of Believe Memphis Academy; Shante Avant, deputy director of the Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis; and Tami Sawyer, local activist and director of diversity and community partnerships for Teach for America.

“Access to an equitable education is still one of the challenges facing our city and 

country today,” Sawyer said. “We’re hoping we can bring light to what’s keeping Memphis children from quality education and what practices and solutions we’re delivering in our individual and collective work.”

Kirstin Cheers, with United Way, said the overall goal of the three installments is to increase understanding and awareness in the community around the complexity of poverty and “how the multi-faceted layers connect to determine whether a person advances or dormant in this community.”

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“Additionally, it is a formal nod to the incredible work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his final manuscript that included all these topics,” Cheers said. “It started as a partnership with NCRM to ensure the dialogue and steadfast work of fighting poverty continues on in this community beyond April 4th. It took far longer than a day to get here and will take even longer to overcome.”

The first conversation, which was held in April, centered around equity and understanding the difference between equity and equality. The topic for the last installment, which is scheduled for October 2nd, will be fair wages and quality jobs.

In this final installment, there will also be discussion about how the topics of the previous two conversations — equity and education — determine the outlook for individuals and communities seeking self-sufficiency and economic empowerment.

The discussion on Tuesday begins at 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

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Editorial Opinion

Herenton’s Choice

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

The re-emergence of former Mayor Willie Herenton as a candidate for Memphis mayor again in the city election of 2019 was a genuine surprise from the MLK50 week of events and  — in Herenton’s telling, anyhow — was a direct outgrowth of the re-arousal of progressive hopes that came with the kindling of Dr. King’s memory.

Justin Fox Burks

Willie Herenton

Herenton set himself forth as someone who could lift up the martyr’s fallen standard and take the stranded mission to completion. We harbor no disrespect for Herenton, who — before and after his 18 years of service as the city’s chief executive — was a schoolmaster, first and foremost, and who has, publicly and often, expressed the hope of being able to resume that highly useful trade at the charter level. And, in fact, we have vivid memories of our former mayor’s abilities, strength of personality, and determination to succeed.

After the stealth passage of the iniquitous “toy towns” bill in the 1997 legislative session threatened to hem in Memphis’ possible expansion within a ring of under-populated MacMunicipalities, it was Herenton and Herenton alone who resolved to fight a long-odds battle against the powers-that-be in state government to turn back the measure. Almost no one expected him to prevail, but prevail he did, when the state Supreme Court found the toy towns bill to be unconstitutional, in that it had sneaked by unsuspecting urban legislators in the form of a misleading bill caption.

Herenton’s triumph was the city’s — and that of all Tennessee municipalities potentially affected by the city-killing bill — and it led to a new, duly considered and less Draconian revision of cities’ annexation privileges and to a long overdue reform of bill captioning in the General Assembly.

All of this is to say that the man had his moments, and, of course, the mere fact of his ascension as Memphis’ first elected black mayor was historic and then some. But, especially given the careless hand and outright boredom with the job evinced by Herenton during the latter years of his mayoralty and his one-sided defeat by Representative Steve Cohen in an ill-advised Congressional race in 2010, we fear he’d be wasting his time and risking further embarrassment with another mayoral race at the age of 78.

And there’s another matter: with apologies to then Senator Lloyd Bentsen’s rebuke of Dan Quayle in a 1988 vice-presidential debate: Mayor, we knew Martin Luther King; Martin Luther King was a friend of all mankind’s. Like yourself, we just got through venerating his memory; and you are no Martin Luther King.

That’s not the put-down it may seem, because the fact is, Dr. King had no peers. The surest proof of that is that no one else, in or out of his circle, was able to revive the planned revolutionary Poor People’s Campaign that was disrupted by his murder.

We thank you for your past work and for your offer of new service, Dr. Herenton, but, as we look to the future and its challenges, we’d prefer that you’d join with us in looking for and developing the new blood that will guide our destiny in decades to come. You can do that as a teacher and guide, as you have been planning up until now.

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News News Blog

Poor People’s Campaign Sets Training Session Ahead of 40-Day Action Plan

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Leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign, Revs. William Barber and Liz Theoharis


A training session to prepare for the Poor People’s Campaign’s 40 days of nonviolent direct action will take place here Saturday, April 21st at 1 p.m.

Memphis is one of many cities across 30 states with residents planning to take part in the Poor People’s Campaign’s National Call for Moral Revival movement, which is aimed to “expose and engage in moral witness against injustice.”

Specifically, the movement is calling for the overhaul of voting rights laws, programs to help the 140 million Americans in poverty, attention to be brought to ecological devastation, and the curbing of militarism and the war economy.

Leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign, Revs. William Barber and Liz Theoharis unveiled the “moral agenda” last week during a national press conference in Washington D.C.

“Fifty years after Rev. Dr. King and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign declared that silence was betrayal, we are coming together to break the silence and tell the truth about the interlocking evils of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy and our distorted moral narrative,” the moral agenda reads. “We declare that if silence was betrayal in 1968, revival is necessary today.”

The 40 days of action will begin on May 14th and continue through June 23rd, ending with a mass mobilization in Washington D.C.

During the first of the six weeks of action, the focus will be on fighting poverty among children, women, and those with disabilities.

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Systematic racism, veterans and the war economy, ecological devastation, inequality, and the nation’s “distorted moral narrative” will respectively be the focus for the five subsequent weeks.

“With systemic racism and poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy and the often-false moral narrative of Christian nationalism wreaking havoc on our society, people of all races, colors, and creeds are joining together to engage in moral direct action, massive voter mobilization and power building from the bottom up,” Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign said. “We will no longer allow attention violence to keep the poor, people of color and other disenfranchised people down.”

The demands of the moral agenda are drawn from The Souls of Poor Folk audit that the Poor People’s Campaign, along with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the Urban Institute completed. The audit assesses the trends of poverty during the past 50 years, while addressing certain myths society holds about poverty.

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John Cavanagh, director of the IPS said the study provides the data proving that poverty is a structural and systematic problem.

“There’s an enduring narrative that if the millions of people in poverty in the U.S. just worked harder, they would be lifted up out of their condition,” Cavanagh said. “But here we’re proving—with data and analysis spanning 50 years—that the problem is both structural barriers for the poor in hiring, housing, policing, and more, as well as a system that prioritizes war and the wealthy over people and the environment they live in.

“It is unfathomable, for example, that in the wealthiest nation in the world, medical debt is the No. 1 cause of personal bankruptcy filings, and 1.5 million people don’t have access to plumbing.”

To sign up for Saturday’s training session here, visit the Action Network site.

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Editorial Opinion

Jesse Jackson on MLK: “He Has Left This Place”

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As the events and speeches and remembrances of this week have reminded us, it has been 50 years since the death of the great civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He came to Memphis on a mission of social justice and redemption, on behalf of sanitation workers who were striking not just for better working conditions or on behalf of a union, but for simple human dignity and the right to say, in the famous words of signs carried en masse by the strikers and their supporters: I AM A MAN. 

Jackson Baker

Jesse Jackson

Those 50 years ago, a young African-American minister named Jesse Jackson was with King on his mission here, as he had intended to be on King’s forthcoming Poor People’s March in Washington, for which the sanitation strike had come to serve as something of a warmup. Jackson was with King also at the Lorraine Motel when he was struck down by an assassin’s bullet, to become a martyr to the various causes of compassion and Christian justice implicit in the mission of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

It was only appropriate that one of the first acts of commemoration in Memphis of King’s sacrifice should come on Easter Sunday, in a homily delivered by the Rev. Jackson, who in the intervening 50 years came to be a major avatar of social justice in his own right. And it was further appropriate that, bowed somewhat by advancing years and a newly diagnosed case of Pakinson’s disease, he should be delivering his message of remembrance and redemption to a predominantly white congregation at St. John’s Methodist church, symbolically bridging the racial gap that King had sought to eradicate and simultaneously expressing the sense of unity of blacks and whites and all human kinds that King thought belonged to his last mission to eradicate the ultimate injustice of poverty.

At the conclusion of his homily, Jackson pointed out the resemblance of King’s fate in his last days to that of the Christ of the gospels. Memphis, he said, was where the great martyr found his Calvary. Foreseeing the crowds that were expected to be in attendance this week at commemorative ceremonies at the site of the Lorraine Motel, now the National Civil Rights Museum, Jackson said, “But he is not there. The stone has been rolled away.” The lies, animosities, jealousies, and attacks King endured in his life, not only from white racists but also from ambitious militants impatient with his nonviolent means, could no longer touch him in his resurrected state. “He has left this place.”

All of us, said Jackson, all who would dedicate themselves to justice, must go through a ritual crucifixion of sorts, followed by a triumphant resurrection of spirit. He led the congregation at St. John’s in a litany in which they repeated his words, which recapitulated a necessary cycle: “We must go through Friday to get to Sunday. We must go through suffering and doubt and fear and make tough choices. … In the tug of war for the soul of our nation, we must not go backward to hurt or hate. Thank Jesus. Long live Martin Luther King. God bless you!”

All things considered, and regardless of the various faiths of the attendees gathering here in Memphis, it was hard to imagine a more appropriate message to initiate this week of remembrance.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Clayborn Temple Rises …

We cannot understand the moral Universe. The arc is a long one, and our eyes reach but a little way; we cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; but we can divine it by conscience, and we surely know that it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker

It’s early Tuesday, and the rising sun, having begun its annual journey back to the equator, illuminates the south side of Clayborn Temple on Hernando Street. Two painters — black men dressed in white — walk across the gravel lot, breakfast biscuits and coffee in hand, prepping themselves for another day of restoring one of Memphis’ most iconic places.

The thin morning light falls on the west tower, looming six stories high. It serves as an architectural backdrop for a magnificent, arched, stained-glass window. Squint a bit and move in close, and you could be in France, next to an ancient cathedral.

The illusion lasts only until you back away and turn your eyes to the east end of the building, where sheets of plywood, painted over in stained-glass patterns, cover the windows. That’s probably symbolic in one fashion or another, a metaphor for something. It’s clear more work needs to be done, here and elsewhere. On this gorgeous morning, I’ll leave it at that.

It was in this building and on this dusty parking lot — formerly in a city neighborhood, now in the massive shadow of FedExForum — where Memphis’ sanitation workers gathered and rallied and began their marches for justice in the winter of 1968. It was from Clayborn Temple, that the workers and their supporters, carrying signs reading “I Am A Man,” set off to change the city’s policies toward its black service workers and citizens.

But they didn’t just change Memphis; they changed the arc of American history. The sanitation workers’ strike and subsequent marches in the streets of downtown Memphis were a pivotal moment in the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, a bold step toward equality and social justice that drew Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to our city — and ultimately — to his assassination at the nearby Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968.

So yes, there’s a lot of history at Clayborn Temple — history that should be recognized and honored and memorialized. And that’s finally about to happen.

Just last week, the building was recognized by the National Park Service as a National Historic Landmark. And on Monday of this week, the city revealed a proposed plan — conceived with the help of the UrbanArt Commission — that will transform the temple parking lot into I Am A Man plaza.

Fifteen-foot-high, deeply three-dimensional steel letters will form the words “I Am A Man” in monumental fashion. Large stone walls featuring quotations and other writings inspired by the civil rights movement will gently funnel visitors into the space. The artist’s renderings of the project, released this week, are impressive. The timing could not be better, as 2018, the 50th anniversary of the sanitation workers strike and of Dr. King’s death, approaches. It would be wonderful if the plaza could be in place by then, but that may be a stretch.

In a city that has struggled to deal with — and remove — Confederate park names and latter-day monuments built to glorify Southern “heritage,” the proposed plaza is a beacon of positivity and hope, one that should be embraced and celebrated by all Memphians — and all Americans — who believe the moral arc of the universe does indeed bend toward justice.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Civil Rights and Civil Wrongs

CREDIT: Bruce VanWyngarden

Bruce VanWyngarden

Oh would some power the giftie gie us, to see ourselves as others see us. — Robert Burns

Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote the line above in response to seeing a louse on a high-born lady’s bonnet at church. The point being, of course, that while we might think we’re looking pretty good, someone else might be noticing a flaw we’ve overlooked. The reverse is also true: Others may see virtues in ourselves we have taken for granted or forgotten we had.

Such was the case for me last weekend, when my mother, my brother, and his wife came to spend a few days with us. My brother is a Civil War and history buff, and they’d been traveling through Tennessee and Mississippi, visiting various battlefields and historic sites. They’d enjoyed the history lessons and the scenery but were less than impressed with the plethora of Confederate flags and bumper stickers they’d seen on cars and homes and businesses throughout their travels.

The people of the South, they thought, seemed to have regressed since their last trip through three years ago. Enter Memphis. After a couple of days, the dense canopy of oaks, the rambling houses and neighborhoods, the restaurants, the river views, South Main, and the friendly people they met everywhere they went worked their magic.

“This is no backwater town,” my brother said. “The difference between what we’ve seen on the road and here is really surprising.”

“Well,” I said, “we do have a Nathan Bedford Forrest statue, but it probably won’t be here the next time you come through.”

So we drove to see it. I remained in the car while Perry hustled over to the statue and took a couple of shots. Then, as a palate cleanser, we went to the National Civil Rights Museum.

I hadn’t been to NCRM since the renovation a couple of years back, and I want to tell you — all of you Memphians who haven’t been lately, or ever — get down there and see this museum. It’s so impressive now.

The visit begins in a room dedicated to the history of slavery, with a life-sized statuary of men in chains, in the position in which they were restrained for the trans-Atlantic journey. Maps and interactive displays bring the evils of slavery to life in ways that will stay in your head for days. It should be a required experience for every American, and certainly every Southerner.

After a rather hokey short film, which was the only off-putting note of the entire experience, you journey ever-upward, through Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era, and into the struggles of the 1960s. The museum’s former touchstones — Rosa Parks’ bus, the iconic lunch counter, the burned-out Freedom Rider bus, the Memphis Sanitation Department truck, Dr. King’s motel room — are all still there, but they’ve been enhanced with other exhibits and made more compelling and engaging.

As you leave the Lorraine Motel building, you are directed across the street into the former rooming house where James Earl Ray(?) pulled the trigger. It’s sobering to look out the sniper’s bathroom window at the balcony where Dr. King fell. Then — surprisingly, for me — you can immerse yourself in every conspiracy theory about the murder you can imagine: Did Ray have help from the FBI? The Mafia? Memphis police officers? A local racist grocer? Each possibility is examined in detail, and evidence and testimony is presented, pro and con. We left the museum not knowing what to believe, but convinced that it was unlikely that Ray acted alone.

That mystery still lingers, as does the memory of an afternoon well-spent.

So go. Take your family and friends. Give yourself that gift.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Black and White and Read All Over

If you have not read Tom Charlier’s marvelous piece of historical journalism, “The CA at 175: Reporting Our Own Story,” do yourself a favor and get a copy of last Sunday’s paper, or read it online. It’s an unflinching look at the CA‘s history — the good, the bad, and the ugly — and it’s a must-read for anyone who cares about this city.

I say that because the paper has been, for most of its existence, a pretty direct reflection of the attitudes and mores of the citizens of Memphis — its leaders and its common folks — at least, those who were white.

The Commercial Appeal reported on many horrific racial incidents in its first 80 years — lynchings, burnings, race “riots.” The reporting was done from the perspective of those doing — or viewing — the dirty work. “Negroes” were seen as subhuman creatures who got what they deserved, and the sickening details of such incidents were laid out dispassionately, as though the writer were reporting on a baseball game. That casual and brutal racism was the prevailing attitude of the white populace at the time, and, perhaps understandably, it’s reflected in the tone of the CA‘s coverage.

Things took a turn for the better in the 1920s, when the CA courageously took on the Ku Klux Klan, exposing its activities with a series of stories and lampooning the group with editorial cartoons by J.P. Alley. The paper won a Pulitzer Prize for its efforts.

But, as Charlier reports, by the 1960s, the CA was back in the pocket of the old racist South, especially during its coverage of the sanitation workers strike and the subsequent assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. The CA‘s daily cartoon, “Hambone’s Meditations,” which featured a “philosophical Southern darkey,” was another indication that the racial attitude of the paper’s leadership was still less than enlightened, even as social and racial unrest was sweeping the nation.

There’s much more to Charlier’s long and winding saga than a chronicling of the city’s race relations. The CA has done a lot of good for the community, and, as is made obvious with several examples, its stellar reporting through the years — investigative and otherwise — helped shape and define what Memphis is today.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the “The CA at 175″ is the fearless unveiling of the distressing decline in print circulation that has befallen the CA, and daily newspapers in general. Charlier writes: “From its peak of more than 300,000 Sunday subscribers and 225,000 weekday readers in the early 1980s, the paper’s circulation has fallen to nearly 105,000 on Sunday and 69,000 daily.” That’s a depressing set of numbers.

He is quick to point out that the CA, via its website and print edition, is actually reaching more readers than ever before, including almost a million visitors a month online. There, in a nutshell, of course, is the dilemma facing the nation’s daily newspapers: The internet has turned print dollars into digital dimes, with the result being precipitous reductions in staffing at most papers and the outright folding of others.

As last Sunday’s CA history lesson makes obvious, a strong daily paper and strong local reporting are vital to the health of a city. So go read it, if you haven’t already. As I mentioned earlier, it’s online for free, but you should go buy a copy of the print edition.

Some things are worth paying for, and sometimes you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

The Power of Poverty

Memphis is still the nation’s poorest large metro area, and the share of children who live in poverty is climbing. The news, delivered via 2013 Census data released last week, is not a reason to surrender the so-called, half-hearted war against poverty. It is a call to use different weapons and to transform the public policies that conspire to keep people poor.

It is time to take up the mission for which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. died in Memphis: economic justice.

“If the society changes its concepts by placing the responsibility on its system, not on the individual, and guarantees secure employment or a minimum income, dignity will come within reach of all,” wrote King in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?

As a city, we have been mindful of, if not obedient to, King’s call for racial harmony.

We are fond of the aesthetics of integration — witness our civic pride at the sight of interracial crowds at Grizzlies playoffs games — but blasé about the execution of equality.

The overall poverty rate in the Memphis metro area — which stretches to the nearest parts of Arkansas and Mississippi — is 19.8 percent. The disgrace is in the details: The poverty rate is 29.2 percent for blacks, 38.3 percent for Hispanics, and 8.4 percent for whites. A staggering 52.4 percent of Hispanic children and 43.2 percent of black children live in poverty, compared to 9.8 percent of white kids.

From 2012 to 2013, the child-poverty rate rose by 3 percent. Forty-two percent of Memphis’ poor live in female-headed households.

“To reduce child poverty, we need to reduce mothers’ poverty,” said M. Elena Delavega, assistant professor of social work at the University of Memphis.

To do so requires three things: universal childcare, an increase in the minimum wage, and efficient public transportation.

If we could only do one of those, I asked, which one should it be? Delavega sighed. “It’s like if you asked what’s better — to feed a person or give them something to drink,” she said.

“Well, if you don’t do both, they’ll die anyway. We should do those three things, and we should do them at the same time.”

Memphis is rich with experiments in education reform, many funded by generous benefactors and nonprofit foundations.

“Philanthropy is commendable,” King said, “but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.”

The circumstances are dire: “Cuba is better than we are in terms of the investment in education,” Delavega said. It’s true, the communist nation spends more of its GDP on education than the United States, the state of Tennessee, or the city of Memphis.

But King’s rhetoric suggests that millions spent to fix classrooms may be misdirected, if well-intentioned. “We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished,” King wrote in 1967.

In 2013, Shelby County’s poverty rate was 21.8 percent — higher than it was in 1970, 20.6 percent.

“It is clear,” states Mayor A C Wharton’s Blueprint for Prosperity, “that Memphis cannot reduce poverty by pursuing the same strategies that have been prevalent for the past 40 years.”

Taken as a whole, Wharton’s anti-poverty initiative claims it can shrink the poverty rate by 1 percent every year for the next 10 years.

Better childcare is one part of Wharton’s plan, but virtually none of it relies on cooperation from other elected bodies.

But Delavega’s road to economic security for all requires significant investment by the state. In a recent report, the Corporation for Enterprise Development identified 67 policies that states can employ to boost financial security and create opportunities for all residents.

Of those, Tennessee has adopted 18, earning it a rank of 43rd for policies adopted and 44th for outcomes for family economic security.

This is not cause to abandon King’s dream.

It’s time for a revolution. “A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies,” King said. “A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.”

Wendi C. Thomas is a columnist, journalist, and founder of Common Ground: Conversations on Race, Communities in Action. Visit her blog at wendicthomas.com,

and follow her on Twitter @wendi_c_thomas.