Tag: I Am A Man Plaza Memphis

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City Cuts Ribbon on ‘I AM A MAN’ Plaza


A once abandoned parking lot rife with weeds next to Clayborn Temple has been transformed into a plaza honoring the 1968 sanitation workers.


Constructed on the corner of Hernando and Pontotoc, the new ‘I AM A MAN’ Plaza officially opened Thursday.


The centerpiece of the plaza is the phrase ‘I AM A MAN’ sculpted in stainless-steel.


Cliff Garten, of Cliff Garten Studios in California who helped design the plaza said as he was contemplating what it should look like, he realized there was “nothing more eloquent than what the sanitation workers simply stated in 1968.”


“The ‘I AM A MAN’ sculpture brings these iconic words into a new moment in our history 50 years later,” he said.


Garten, who was selected from a list of national candidates, said the idea was to create a place that causes people to “feel and respond to” the Clayborn Temple, as a significant landmark in the civil rights movement.


“Let there be no doubt, that the ‘I AM A MAN’ plaza was made for you and belongs to Memphis,” Garten said. “But it also belongs to America.


“It’s a place to teach, a place to gather, a place to feel and to contemplate these significant historic events.”


The city’s UrbanArt Commission, along with local landscape architect John Jackson of JPA, Inc, and poet Steve Fox who wrote the text etched in one of the plaza’s stone sculptures, also contributed to the project.

[pullquote-1]Bordering the plaza is a marble wall with the names of the 1,300 sanitation workers who participated in the 1968 strike. Inside the dedicatory wall, on the pavement are the dates and descriptions of significant events that led up to the strike and took place during it.

Dedicatory wall with the names of all 1,300 sanitation strikers

Doug McGowen, the city’s chief operating officer said the space will “surely be iconic for our city and for the world.”

“People will come from all over to hear the story of what happened here,” he said.


While, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland said the site will serve as a permanent place to “reflect on Memphians who, quite literally changed the world.”

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Editorial Opinion

Memphis: Becoming a Real City of Good Abode

I Am A Man Plaza

Well, this new year isn’t going to start the way things did 50 years ago. Mayor Jim Strickland’s communications director, Ursula Madden, made that clear Tuesday in remarks to a luncheon of the Rotary Club of Memphis at Clayborn Temple — the venerable edifice that served as a point of assembly for striking sanitation workers and their supporters a half century ago.

For some months now, the Temple, which has been undergoing renovation, has, by a profound moral choice of the Rotarians, been the club’s official meeting place. It is also, as Madden explained, next door to the commemorative site, I Am a Man Plaza, now under construction with appropriate monuments, and hard by another development underway, the Martin Luther King Reflection Site, which, as the name implies, will contain memorials that will allow visitors both to recall the events of 1968, that pivotal year of the Memphis sanitation strike and the assassination here of Dr. King, and, by means of reflective devices, to insert their own images into these reminders of history.

It will all be part of MLK50, the city’s commemoration of that history and its formal embrace of the motives that prompted Memphis sanitation workers to demand of their fellow townsfolk simple dignity, an elementary appreciation of their contributions to the city’s life, and workplace justice. “I AM A MAN,” the strikers’ slogan, incorporated all those ideas, and it jibed entirely with King’s humanitarian goals.

Fifty years ago, those ideas and those goals were not the common property of Memphians — or, for that matter, of much of the rest of the world. It is largely forgotten now, but the Memphis sanitation strike, though it had its own trigger in the unfortunate deaths of three workers trapped in defective machinery, was something of a sequel to a similar strike that had convulsed New York City early in 1968. It was not just Memphis but the Big Apple — and in some ways mankind itself — that was uncharitable enough to flout the basic humanity of its most humble citizens.

But here we are a half century later, and the city, on behalf of mankind, has taken it upon itself to raise that slogan of “I AM A MAN” — captured so eloquently in the photographs by Ernest Withers that went around the world — into the very consciousness of the human race.

Indeed, a necessary concomitant of the forthcoming celebration, as Madden acknowledged on Tuesday, was the city’s parallel action, accomplished in the last days of the old year, of renouncing and expunging two flagrant memorials to inequality— the statues of Nathan Bedford Forrest and Jefferson Davis, those paragons to a defeated Confederacy.

In the year to come, the slogan of the striking sanitation workers will be reinforced by a parallel slogan of sorts: I AM MEMPHIS. And, finally, at the site of the National Civil Rights Museum and I AM A MAN Plaza, the city will have moved closer to living up to the phrase it has long claimed: City of Good Abode.

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Ground Breaks on ‘I Am A Man’ Plaza Near Clayborn Temple


Ground broke Monday on the I Am A Man commemorative plaza downtown, set to open by April 2018 in time for the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death.


The $1.5 million plaza will be located on the corner of Hernando and Pontotoc next to Clayborn Temple, a gathering place for sanitation workers and King before the 1968 march and now a Civil Rights Movement landmark.

The project, spearheaded by the city and UrbanArts Commission, will be led and designed by local landscape architect John Jackson of JPA, Inc, as well as Cliff Garten of Cliff Garten Studio in California. Poet and spoken word artist Steve Fox wrote the text that will be etched in the plaza’s stone sculpture.

The interactive plaza, featuring the “I Am A Man” slogan, will aim to “invite all people to a peaceful, interactive, and educational experience that supports the advancement of equity, justice and positive social change.”

The goal of the space is to acknowledge the historical significance of Memphis, the sanitation workers’ strike, and King in the Civil Rights Movement, while providing visitors with the ability to interact with art, creating an experience residents and tourists will want to revisit, and inspiring future generations to stand up for social justice and positive change.

When complete, the plaza will be a focal point of the city-wide commemoration in April.


Ground Breaks on ‘I Am A Man’ Plaza Near Clayborn Temple