Tag: Jesse Jackson

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Politics Politics Feature

Political Works in Progress During MLK50 Week

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

In this week of worldwide remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., focused on his martyrdom here in Memphis, many eminent visitors will have come to celebrate his name and commemorate his mission. One of the first to speak on the subject was Eric Holder, the former U.S. Attorney General under President Obama.

Holder, introduced by the newly elected Democratic U.S. Senator from Alabama, Doug Jones, was keynote speaker at a Monday luncheon at the Peabody held in tandem with a two-day symposium co-sponsored by the University of Memphis Law School and the National Civil Rights Museum. 

Holder reminded his listeners that, “Dr. King’s dream has not been fully realized,” further noting that there has been backsliding on voting rights, criminal justice reform, and the unexpected re-empowerment of white supremacists and white nationalists. The struggle for social justice, Holder said, remains as difficult as it was during the time of King, who, he noted, was seen by many as a “threatening, polarizing, and disliked figure.”

“The age of bullies and bigots is not entirely behind us,” Holder continued. “We have not yet reached the promised land.” He suggested that, as was the case with King, “it is necessary to be indignant and impatient so that it impels us to take action. … We cannot look back toward a past that was comforting to few. That is not how to make America great.”

Holder was complimentary toward Memphis. “I love this city, its energy, its sense of possibility, and its extraordinary progress,” he said, specifically paying tribute to the 901 Take ‘Em Down movement for its successful agitation to remove symbols of Confederate domination from the Memphis landscape.

But he enumerated several problems still much in need of correcting, including continued economic inequality and systematic voter suppression and gerrymandering.

• The subject of voting rights was the subject of one of the most well-attended symposium panels conducted Monday, moderated by UM law professor Steve Mulroy. It was also one of the subjects on the mind of former Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen, now running as a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate and one of the many political figures of note on hand for the MLK50 week of commemorations.

In an interview with the Flyer at the Peabody on Monday, Bredesen mentioned the existence of various “efforts to suppress African American voters [as] one of the things as senator I’d like to address.”

Bredesen said as the former state’s chief executive, he was able to solve vexing problems by governing from the middle, working with both parties, including those he called “economic Republicans.” If elected Senator, he said he would continue in that vein.

As a successful health-care executive before entering politics, Bredesen said he would address the issue of the nation’s medical insurance system, currently at risk because of uncertainty about the fate of the Affordable Care Act. “The act is still on the books,” he said, “and we’ve got to make it work. As was the case with Medicare and Social Security,” he added, “it requires modifications.”

Bredesen sees his ability to compromise across the political aisle as an asset in his forthcoming Senate race against expected Republican foe, the ultra-conservative U.S. Representative Marsha Blackburn, whom he currently leads in statewide polls.

• Meanwhile, retiring incumbent Republican Senator Bob Corker, the man whom Bredesen and Blackburn would replace, was also in town, addressing members of the Rotary club of Memphis on Tuesday and warning of a spendthrift Congress and the importance of the Iran nuclear pact. “The President should know: you can only tear up the agreement one time,” he said. (More at memphisflyer.com, Political Beat blog.)

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News News Blog

Hundreds March in Memphis, Demanding a Livable Wage


Exactly 50 years after the 1968 sanitation workers began their strike and marched from Clayborn Temple to Memphis City Hall, hundreds gathered in Memphis to march the same route on Monday.

As the mass of marchers made their way through the streets of Downtown, stepping to the rhythm of a small marching band, they chanted, holding picket boards resembling those carried in 1968.

The marchers, who were from two dozen cities around the Mid-South, were demanding $15 an hour minimum wage and fair working conditions.

The Poor People’s Campaign and Fight for $15 were the co-organizers of the demonstration.

The group was joined by labor organizer Bill Lucy and Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Memphis, among others.

“This is an historic day because it looks back upon 50 years ago when folks marched to start the sanitation workers strike and to march for decent wages and job conditions,” Cohen said. “Fifty years later we’ve got some of the same problems we had then.”

Some of those problems, he said, are the wealth gap, as well as the number of people living below the poverty line and not working for a livable wage.

“This is an effort to get a $15 dollar an hour, livable wage, which we need to have all over this country,” Cohen continued. “And for workers to have a better life.”

At lunchtime on Monday, close to 100 fast-food employees and Fight for $15 advocates gathered near the Midtown McDonald’s on Union, rallying for respect, $15 an hour pay, and the right to join a union.

Carrying signs with different variations of the “I AM a Man” slogan, strikers in Memphis were among the thousands across the country who participated in strikes like these on Monday to pay homage to the 1968 strikers, while vowing to continue their fight.


“We’re fast-food workers and we count just as well as someone sitting in a corporate office,” a local fast-food employee said. “If it weren’t for us, they wouldn’t get the money that they get.

“We need benefits, we need healthcare, dental, all that,” she said.

On this day in 1968, after two sanitation workers were killed by machinery on the job, hundreds of Memphis sanitation workers began daily marches. They were fighting for the recognition of the local union of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), as well as demanding their pay be raised to $2 an hour — the equivalent of $15.73 today.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Willie Earl Bates

Willie Earl Bates, owner of the Four Way Restaurant in South Memphis’ Soulsville, USA community, died from cancer last week. I’m not sure the city of Memphis knows what it has lost.

Willie Earl Bates

In 2001, after 50-plus years in operation under Clint and Irene Cleaves, Bates purchased the tiny but famous restaurant. He had been an executive with Universal Life Insurance, a real estate developer, and, early in life, delivered The Commercial Appeal in a red wagon, of which he was quite proud. The wagon sits outside the restaurant today in a fenced garden courtyard, dedicated to Bates’ mother, the late Magnolia Gossett Bates.

Bates was also proud to be the owner of a restaurant that helped change history — and served some of the best soul food in the world. Clint Cleaves was Mayor E.H. “Boss” Crump’s driver, and Crump told all of his friends that they needed to support the Fourway Grill (as it was known then) and it soon became the first truly desegregated restaurant in Memphis.

It was also a popular gathering spot for civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and others. The Fourway was immensely popular among musicians, hosting the likes of Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Gladys Night & the Pips, Ike & Tina Turner, and practically every artist who ever recorded around the corner at Stax Records.

I’ve been eating at the Four Way every couple of weeks since starting to work at Stax back in 2004. In 2014, I wrote a piece on Bates for Memphis magazine, and when I asked Mr. Bates what he thought about all of the celebrities who had eaten there (including hip-hop superstar Drake, who had just been there weeks earlier), he said: “I had a mother and daughter from Oklahoma in here not too long ago who had come from St. Jude. They had found out about the restaurant, and the little girl wanted to eat here. That was so touching, so satisfying, to know that we were able to make her happy during a time like that.”

That pretty much sums up Willie Earl Bates and why Memphis may not really know what it has lost.

Bates was a successful businessman and could easily have retired long before his death at 76, but he was too intent on making Memphis — and particularly Soulsville — a better place. He worked with numerous nonprofit organizations to help improve life in the community and often donated food to children’s organizations and other causes.

Former Mayor A C Wharton told me, “The Four Way always has been, and continues to be, a gathering place for community leaders. It may seem a bit quirky, but it was a status symbol to enter The Four Way through the back door and dine in the back room. Principals, doctors, lawyers, and accomplished entertainers, and occasionally, a skinny, hungry black Ole Miss law student like me could often be found in the ‘back room’ being served by Miss Dot.” 

Various crews from the Food Network and Travel Channel featured his famous catfish, turkey-and-dressing, yams, peach cobbler, and chitterlings, which Bates always told me never to order, as he made a face and shook his head.

Last year, author Dave Hoekstra published the critically acclaimed The People’s Place: Soul Food Restaurants and Reminiscences from the Civil Rights Era to Today, and the first restaurant he visited was the Four Way. Hoekstra was asked by the New York Times, “If someone wanted to follow your path, but had time to visit only one city, what would it be?” Hoekstra’s answer: “Memphis. I know at least seven or eight soul food restaurants in Memphis. But to get to what we’re getting at in the book, with the whole combination of the food and the civil rights movement, the Four Way holds a special place in my heart — they were so giving with their stories and with their hospitality. Just the whole history of Memphis and the civil rights movement .”

When I wrote my story for Memphis magazine, it was pretty much standard journalism and storytelling. What I didn’t get to include was how much I loved Mr. Bates and what an important friend he was to me. He had a genuine light-show twinkle in his eye every time I saw him. He was one of the kindest people I have ever known. Memphis was lucky to have had him. I’m luckier to have been his friend.

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News News Feature

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.

It’s not the kind of remembrance people like to attach to those we historically have deemed as heroic martyrs.

A man so disconsolate over what his critics and he himself viewed as abject failure, lying in a Memphis motel room bed, fully clothed, weeping and unable to move for 13 hours. Yet, in his book Death of a King, political commentator and talk-show host, Tavis Smiley, paints a sincere and honest picture of civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a man whose human frailties are put to the test in the final year of his life — in a struggle to regain lost prestige, popularity, and his own moral compass.

Beginning with his controversial Riverside Church speech in New York, delivered one year to the day before his assassination in Memphis, King attempted to lay out a new direction for the nonviolent movement he had fostered. With monumental civil rights legislation already on the books, King wanted to expand the scope and participation of the fight against what he saw as the interconnected triad of poverty, racism, and militarism that he felt was tearing away at the fabric of America during the height of the Vietnam War era.

It was an effort to expand on the coalition, which had proven so successful in winning the hearts and minds of those previously drawn to the civil rights movement. But, like others who’ve risen to great heights of leadership on oratory or sheer will, King unwittingly allowed himself to become more insulated from what was going on around him.

Smiley’s book deftly portrays King as a man on a treadmill. No matter how fast he tried to run, everything and everyone in his life was still passing him by, and he couldn’t understand why. He was the same. But, the rest the nation, which he once briefly held in the palm of his hand, had moved on in fractious directions, including his own previous inner circle at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

In Smiley’s book, one of King’s greatest disconnects was with women, and most importantly, his wife, the long-suffering Coretta Scott King. When they first met when both were in their early 20s, King openly admired her not just for her stunning beauty, but also because she became the most strident and unflinching supporter of his nonviolent strategy. Once they started having children, however, King encouraged her to be more subservient, while at the same time he continued his dalliances with other women. So, entrenched in his chauvinistic attitude, King initially rebuked his colleague James Bevel’s suggestion to all male members of the SCLC and other black ministers to tell their wives about their affairs with other women. According to Smiley, King finally did come clean with Mrs. King about one affair, which he told her he put an end to.

I also was drawn to the turbulent final month of King’s life, when it came to how the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike had become a cause celebre’ with him despite warnings from his SCLC inner circle, including apparently Jesse Jackson, that the issues in Memphis were “small potatoes” and not worth getting involved in. But, coming in a year in which he’d been booed off stages, and he was jeered and ridiculed as out of touch with his own people, the reception King received in coming to Memphis was reinvigorating. Memphis had become to him the potential springboard for his still not fleshed out idea of having a “Poor People’s March on Washington.” He viewed it as a golden opportunity to reestablish the nonviolent movement as a viable form of effective protest.

However, as he did through most of that tumultuous final year of his life, King miscalculated, believing the power of his persona alone could bring together divisive factions. The ensuing riot on Beale Street in March of 1968 devastated him enough to seek refuge in a room at the former Rivermont Hotel. King would regroup. His unwavering faith in his mission would allow him to do no less. But, days later, a bullet would be unforgiving.

I applaud Smiley for his determined and compassionate attempt to humanize a man so many authors before have either lionized or demonized. The book provides a lesson, a study in our own mortality. It encourages us to never be so self-assured, so defiant in the face of unwelcomed truth, or so tunnel-visioned about what we believe is right that we ignore the sage counsel of friends and neglect the love and support of family.

For all of us, even the greatest among us, are only mere mortals in the end.