Room In The Inn ended its 2019/2020 season early due to coronavirus.
One of the few shelters for homeless women in Memphis had to shut its doors last week due to the spread of COVID-19 in the community.
Room In The Inn, which places homeless individuals at churches across the city for the night and provides them with a meal and a place to sleep, and sometimes access to showers and clothes closets, ended its 2019/2020 season early.
The shelter, which seeks to accommodate women first, is typically open from November through March, but Monday, March 16th, was its last day of operation this year, Lisa Anderson, executive director of RITI, said.
“Even with all of the extra precautions, the suggested compliance is that we practice social distancing and avoid gatherings in groups, especially in vulnerable populations,” Anderson said. “RITI guests are in this group. Also, many of our volunteers are in age groups and health groups that are at risk.”
The night after RITI shut its doors, First Presbyterian Church opened its doors to operate a temporary emergency shelter for women at the request of the Hospitality Hub. Since Tuesday, the church has had about 20 guests each night.
Kori Phillips McMurtry, pastor of First Presbyterian, said “it’s hard to say what ‘stay at home’ means for people without homes. But we are doing what we can while trying to meet the need of this vulnerable population whose safety net and services are shifting dramatically and disappearing day by day.”
Phillips McMurty said the church is working with others in the community to develop a more sustainable shelter option during the COVID-19 outbreak. In the meantime, at First Presbyterian’s shelter, Phillips McMurtry said staff has been following health official’s recommendations about handwashing, spacing beds six feet apart, and preparing food with the “utmost cleanliness.”
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A concern of Phillips McMurtry is that it is becoming more difficult for homeless individuals to find meals. The church served over 250 people on Sunday and this is twice as many people as the church usually serves at its weekly soup kitchen, she said.
The Memphis Mission Union, a reliable source of meals for the homeless, serves over 313,000 breakfasts, lunches, and dinners each year. But now, the agency has had to limit its meals only to those who are registered guests of the shelter, drastically reducing the number of people served a day.
However, the Mission’s men’s shelter remains open and the agency said it is taking precautionary measures, “knowing that our homeless clients may suffer from a variety of chronic and acute conditions that may affect their immune system response.”
The agency is following the coronavirus infection prevention plan guidelines laid out by the Citygate Network, a group of organizations that provide resources and education to agencies working with vulnerable populations. The plan includes guidelines on disinfection, sanitation, and isolation of sick individuals.
The Hospitality Hub, which is located in Downtown Memphis and provides a range of services to homeless individuals, remains open, but is operating with a “skeleton crew,” said Kelcey Johnson, executive director of the Hub.
Johnson said the Hub’s office will remain open to provide essential services. Intake and counseling services have been suspended to reduce social interaction, but visitors still have access to their personal lockers, restrooms, coffee, and mail.
Dan Springer, deputy director of media affairs for the mayor’s office said the city is “actively coordinating” with the county, the Hub, Community Alliance for the Homeless, and other agencies to monitor the capacity and needs of shelters in the city.
He advises people who are experiencing homelessness to contact the Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association’s hotline at 901-529-4545 for shelter alternatives.
A recently published study from researchers at University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, and Boston University found that homeless individuals who contract COVID-19, are twice as likely to need hospitalization, two to four times as likely to need critical care, and two to three times more likely to die compared to the general population.
The study also predicts the number of additional shelter beds each county in the country will need based on the estimated number of homeless individuals there. In Shelby County, there would need to be 433 additional shelter beds, which would cost just over $13 million.
The study explains the need for additional beds this way: “A cornerstone of the strategy for reducing the infection and transmission rates among the homeless population is to find immediate shelter for those living unsheltered and incorporate social distancing — of approximately 100 square feet per person — into existing emergency shelters. To impose social distancing within shelters and transitional housing, we assume a 50 percent reduction in current density.”
Organizations providing shelter and other services to homeless individuals in Memphis remain open, but are making changes to the way they serve amid the outbreak of COVID-19.
The Memphis Union Mission, the largest shelter provider in Memphis, remains open, but is taking precautions and preventive steps.
Mission officials said Monday that they are adhering to the recommendations of the Citygate Network’s Toolkit for Managing Impact of Aerosol Transmissible Diseases sanitation, hygiene, and infection prevention practices.
Scott Bjork, President and CEO, said, “We are taking these precautionary measures knowing that our homeless clients may suffer from a variety of chronic and acute conditions that may affect their immune system response.”
If a client is identified during screenings as possibly having COVID-19, Mission staff will follow isolation protocols and communicate with the health department for the evaluation and care of the client
Bjork said the Mission is working with the health department and the Memphis Office of Emergency Management to monitor COVID-19’s impact in the city.
Room In The Inn, which places homeless individuals at churches across the city for the night and provides them with a meal and a place to sleep, and sometimes access to showers and clothes closets, remains open.
Lisa Anderson, executive director of Room In The Inn, said that it will continue to operate as long as “we have congregations that will host, which means it’s night-to-night for us.”
However, no new guests are being accepted at this time. So those who have not previously been a guest at Room In The Inn prior to this week aren’t able to receive services for now.
Anderson said the congregations that continue to host guests are taking extra cleaning precautions and ensuring that guests’ sleeping arrangements are spaced apart.
The Hospitality Hub, which is located Downtown Memphis and provides a range of services to homeless individuals, will be limiting its services until further notice.
On an average day, the Hub is visited by 125 people. Among other needs, the organization helps clients find housing and jobs, obtain a state ID or birth certificate, access a mailbox, apply for food stamps, and pay for health care. The Hub said last week that it is suspending its counseling services, but will continue its Work Local program, and keep access to mail and personal lockers open on a limited basis.
At St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, the weekly Wednesday morning community breakfast and clothes closet services, which is open to homeless individuals, will continue. Volunteers will serve guests with gloves and follow all guidelines from the health department, the church notes.
Though Calvary Episcopal Church will refrain from serving any other food, for the time being, it will continue to serve its weekly Sunday community breakfast to those in need, but will do so in disposable containers in the alley behind the church. The church began using this method this week and was still able to serve close to 150 individuals.
Two at a time, guests were allowed to go inside the church to use the restroom and visit the clothes closet.
However, Christine Todd, Calvary’s community ministries coordinator said that the church is running low on hand sanitizer and will not be able to continue to serve without it. Church leaders will meet Tuesday to decide how to move forward.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released interim guidelines for homeless shelters last week amid the outbreak of COVID-19.
The CDC guidelines advised homeless shelters on how to prevent the spread of the virus before, during, and after the outbreak.
During the outbreak, the CDC said that shelters should limit visitors to their facility, ensure clients are sleeping at least six feet apart, provide clients with respiratory symptoms a face mask, and confine clients with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 to individual spaces or a designated room if possible.
The CDC has not made any recommendations that homeless shelters should close during the outbreak.
On a recent rainy Wednesday afternoon, Reggie, wearing an oversized poncho and carrying a backpack full of his belongings, walked into St. Mary’s Episcopal Church to attend a H.O.P.E. meeting.
H.O.P.E., which stands for Homeless Organizing for Power and Equality, is a grassroots organization under the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center (MSPJC) that offers self-advocacy support to those who are currently or have formerly been homeless.
Reggie was one of half a dozen attendees at the group’s February meeting. It was his second time going to a meeting since he came to Memphis a couple of months ago. He joined the others, making small talk as they sat around a table, sharing pizza, coffee, and soda. They got hygiene kits and bottled water to take with them.
Alice Petit, a MSPJC board member, brought two waterproof tents to the meeting. One was for a man who regularly sleeps on the church grounds, and the other was for Reggie.
Reggie is one of some 1,300 individuals without permanent housing in Shelby County. According to the Point-in-Time Unsheltered Count required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) each year, in 2019 there were 58 unsheltered individuals, and 1,267 sleeping in transitional or emergency shelters here on the night of the count last January.
The numbers from this year’s count, which was done on January 22nd, will be available in March. The data will be submitted to HUD and used to determine what resources Shelby County needs to address homelessness and provide housing for unsheltered individuals.
The data shows only a snapshot of the county’s homeless population, says Cheré Bradshaw, executive director of the Community Alliance for the Homeless (CAFTH), which leads a community effort to end homelessness in Memphis and organized the local count.
Bradshaw says CAFTH is the lead agency for coordinating with HUD so that agencies here have the funds to continue their work. Each year, the county gets about $6.7 million from HUD to combat homelessness and provide housing.
Bradshaw says homelessness is a big issue in the county, “but we’re doing really well ending it, at least for a lot of people.” CAFTH’s goal is to end long-term homelessness and make future homelessness “rare, brief, and one-time,” Bradshaw says. “We know that people will become homeless, but they don’t have to sit out there for a year.”
Photographs by Justin Fox Burks
Without a Home
Reggie, who wished to keep his last name out of this story, has not had stable housing for nearly seven years. He was born in Columbia, Georgia, where he grew up in a lower-middle-class family. When he was 18, he was kicked out of his family home and left to fend for himself. Since then, and up until recently, unable to keep a steady job, Reggie moved around regularly, sleeping on friends’ couches, in shelters, and most recently in the woods near his hometown.
After hearing that Memphis had more resources and opportunities than Georgia, he saved enough money through panhandling to catch a Greyhound bus here in January. But Reggie hasn’t found the resources he hoped to find here. He spends his days walking around Downtown Memphis and his nights sleeping on park benches, in alleys, or in church doorways. His meals consist of sack lunches from churches or whatever he can find in Downtown dumpsters.
“I just look for unopened packages,” he says. “I found an unopened pack of Oreos today that someone had thrown away, so I ate that. I just eat whenever and whatever I can.”
After having a violent encounter at a shelter in Georgia, Reggie avoids going to emergency shelters or other places where a large amount of people gather to receive services. “Someone pulled a switchblade on me,” he says. “I thought I was going to die that night. I haven’t been back to a shelter since then because I don’t want any more trouble like that.”
Reggie says the life of a homeless person is constantly discouraging and every day he feels a range of emotions. “It rains and it’s wet and you can’t get dry,” he says. “I feel like there’s no way out. Sometimes I think it’ll be okay, then other times it’s back to being rough. Sometimes it’s depressing. It’s always lonely.”
On the streets, Reggie’s biggest fear is his safety. “People get robbed out here,” he says. “The homeless lifestyle is dangerous. You can’t really relax. You always have to have your guard up. There’s never a night when I can actually just sleep.” The hardest part, though, Reggie says, is not the weather or the lack of security, but the way he is treated. “It’s the way people look at me. They think I’m a criminal or a violent felon or I’m crazy. When people see me walking, they’re terrified just because of my appearance. I have no criminal record. I’m just a person who’s laid-back, quiet, and kind — and looking for help.”
Darius Clayton works with the Hospitality Hub outreach team to help individuals experiencing homelessness.
The Hub
Each day, the Hospitality Hub’s outreach team goes out looking to help people like Reggie.
The Hub, founded in 2007, is a resource agency located Downtown that works to help people exit homelessness.
Kelcey Johnson, executive director of the Hub, says outreach is an important part of the agency’s work “because a lot of people aren’t going to come to see us, so we try to find out where they are and go see them. … A lot of people have never heard of the Hub or don’t trust an agency or they received bad information on the street, like no one will help them or if you’re a felon you can’t come. None of that stuff matters. Anyone can come here.”
Johnson says the Hub is “not a traditional place where homeless people would come. We don’t do soup. We don’t do clothes closets. We don’t do stuff like that.” Instead, Johnson says, the Hub’s staff interviews clients to figure out their specific needs, what is causing their homelessness, and what’s keeping them homeless.
“The cause of your homelessness may be multiple incarcerations,” he says, “but the thing that’s keeping you homeless could be a drug addiction or PTSD from being in prison, the ability to get a job because of your incarcerations, or the ability to keep a job because of mental illness.”
Johnson says the agency works to “attack all those areas by wrapping the person up” and providing clients various types of case management. The Hub connects clients with partner organizations that do “anything and everything,” he says.
The main needs of Hub clients include finding housing and jobs, obtaining a state ID or birth certificate, accessing a mailbox, applying for food stamps, and paying for health care.
On a given day, about 125 people walk into the Hub, Johnson says: “Some people are waiting for us to open just to use the bathroom and get a cup of coffee.”
To better reach those who could benefit from the agency’s services, the Hub is opening a day plaza. It’s expected to open “any day now,” Johnson says, and it will be a “place of beauty where people can rest.”
Over the next year, the plaza will be expanded and more amenities will be added. Johnson says the space will allow the Hub to do a new kind of outreach. The plaza will be similar to a park, serving food daily and providing cooling stations and misters, water fountains, places to rest, and restrooms.
Case managers will also be on-site to talk with visitors and assess their needs. The plaza is only a piece of what the Hub has planned for 2021. The agency is also relocating and expanding into a new office next to the plaza that will house the Hub’s resource center and a new women’s shelter, something Memphis needs desperately.
Based on data from the Hub, 37 percent of Memphis’ homeless population are women, but only 6 percent of the beds in shelters are open to women.
“There’s so much work to do,” Johnson says of the new shelter. “It’s going to be different from every other shelter anywhere. We’re talking to women shelter directors from around the country and gathering best practices.”
The shelter will house 32 private rooms that are expandable to accommodate women with children. Most family shelters require a referral, but Johnson says the Hub’s will be “zero-barrier” and no referrals will be required. “If you’re a woman living with your kids and your boyfriend comes home and punches you, and you decide you want to leave, there’s nowhere for you to go that night in Memphis at this time.”
The goal will be for women to stay there for 21 days as the Hub helps them find sustainable, long-term housing.
Below the shelter, the building will house the Hub’s other services, making it a “one-stop shop, not just a shelter for women,” Johnson says.
Room In The Inn guests line up to enter a church for the night.
Room IN the Inn
Emergency shelters for women are scarce in Memphis, and because of this, Room In The Inn (RITI) gives women first preference.
RITI, which exists to “serve those experiencing homelessness in a safe environment of hospitality,” operates seven days a week, providing emergency temporary shelter at no cost.
Through partnerships with local congregations, RITI places guests at churches across the city for the night. There, guests are given a meal and a place to sleep, and sometimes access to showers and clothes closets.
Lisa Anderson, director of Room In The Inn, helps individuals experiencing homelessness at the RITI intake center.
Many of the guests have jobs, says Lisa Anderson, executive director of the program. And they are working on a plan to get out of homelessness.
“Some have settled into this life,” Anderson says. “Others are temporarily frustrated and need a place to get back on their feet.”
Autumn, a regular at RITI, is looking to get back on her feet. When her husband of 18 years had a stroke and died in 2017, she went from living a comfortable, stable life to living in group homes, on the street, or at RITI.
“My husband had a decent job and made good money,” Autumn says. “Our bills were paid and the kids were taken care of. I never worried, and I definitely never imagined I would be here. It can happen to anyone. It could be anyone.”
OUTMemphis
One demographic at high risk for homelessness is LGBTQ youth, ages 18 to 25, says Molly Quinn, executive director of OUTMemphis.
Nationally, one in four youth living on the street identifies as LGBTQ, according to a recent youth homeless study done by the Williams Institute. Quinn says there is not a lot of local data on the number of homeless LGBTQ youth here, but studies also show that the rate for LGBTQ youth is much higher in urban areas, urban areas in the South, areas with high poverty, and urban areas where people of color make up the majority of the population.
“And Memphis fits into all of those categories,” Quinn says. Over the past decade, she says, the center has received “tons and tons” of inquiries and walk-ins from LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness or housing instability. “People came looking for everything from hygiene supplies and food to long-term housing.”
Quinn says the majority of displaced youth come to OUTMemphis for assistance because they have experienced “family conflict.” This could include being kicked out after coming out to their family, making their home a hostile environment. And a lot of it happens when youth turn 18, Quinn says. “Their parents no longer have a legal obligation to be a parent, so they’re like, ‘Okay, you’re on your own.'”
The majority of those who come seeking help are transgender youth of color, who have few places to go where they can be accepted and supported, Quinn says.
Many of the shelters in Memphis are segregated by sex, says Quinn. “This means transgender individuals either have no place to go or if they go, they have to be closeted or put themselves at great risk.”
Tennessee has no legal protections for LGBTQ people, she adds. This makes it “harder for agencies to rationalize doing the hard work, like working with the trans community when the state government consistently attacks our rights, like they are doing right now.
“Over the years, they’ve come to us and we’ve spent a long time trying to figure out what to do,” Quinn says. “Due to the lack of homeless services in Memphis in general and some of the more conservative politics around sexual identity and gender expression in the community, we basically decided five years ago to do it ourselves. We wanted to go from a place where you could go to figure out where to go to the place that could provide everything.”
OUTMemphis started the Metamorphosis Project in 2015 to respond to LGBTQ youth homelessness. The first piece of the project was the Youth Emergency Services Program (YES), which provides everything except for emergency housing, Quinn says. This includes case management, which helps youth get into college or find a job and housing. They are also provided with food, clothing, and hygiene supplies.
The second part, which began in 2017, is the rapid re-housing program, which works to get youth into permanent housing as quickly as possible and provide financial assistance for at least the first year. The last piece of the project is the Youth Emergency Center, which is slated to open at the end of March. It will be Memphis’ first LGBTQ-specific emergency shelter.
“We believe that LGBTQ people deserve to be and need to be fully integrated into civic life, but we also need spaces that are just ours, especially if you’re young,” Quinn says. “Many of them have never been in a safe space with people who are all either LGBTQ or LGBTQ-affirming like our staff.”
Quinn says OUTMemphis has been building the center at 2055 Southern Avenue for four years, and on Saturday, March 28th, following a ribbon cutting ceremony, the center will be previewed to the public for the first time.
The Youth Emergency Center will serve as a drop-in center for anyone under the age of 25 and won’t be restricted only to those identifying as LGBTQ. The services currently provided at OUTMemphis’ Cooper-Young office will be available at the new center, where, Quinn says, a social worker will be on-site at all times to help facilitate those services.
The new building will have a kitchen, dining room, computer lab, showers, and a laundry room. It will also house four dorm-room-like suites to serve as emergency shelters for LGBTQ youth. Each room is designed for one person, as Quinn says there is “value in youth having autonomy in their own space. The group setting in shelters can be just as traumatizing as living on the street.”
Adult shelters will take youths, Quinn says, but “we know that the needs of someone 18 to 24 years old are very different than someone who is 40 or 50 years old.”
Guests will be able to stay at the new facility for up to 30 days, but Quinn says that most people need between one and seven days in an emergency shelter before transitioning to something more permanent. “We’re hoping to help a pretty significant amount of kids every year.”
Quinn says the shelter could expand, but OUTMemphis “wanted to start small since we’ve never done this before.” Eventually, the additional land on the lot could be used to build more emergency housing or longer-term transitional housing.
Each day someone is homeless, the risk of danger and long-term effects multiplies. “From the day you become homeless to the day you find housing, every day that you’re on the street or homeless, you’re at such high risk for so many other things,” says Quinn.
There is a high risk for contracting HIV, as well as being exposed to drugs, targeted by sexual assault or violence, or soilicited for sex work. “All these factors can contribute to long-term homelessness,” she says. “The risk of long-term impact is so high, especially for trans youth of color.”
‘Like Trying to End Rain’
Kelcey Johnson of the Hospitality Hub says there is no ending homelessness in Memphis.
“If Memphis does a good enough job reducing homelessness, the word gets to Nashville and people there will come here,” he says. “You don’t end homelessness. Every day, people get out of the military and hit the streets. People leave jail or the hospital every day with nowhere to go. There’s no ending it. It’s like trying to end rain. But there is help, and there are options for everyone.”
Johnson says he is committed to the work the Hub and others around the city are doing to help as many people as they can exit homelessness.
“I see something happening every day,” Johnson says. “I see victories every day. I do it because people need advocates. They need someone to speak up for them. People need partners who have knowledge.”
Meanwhile, Reggie yearns to find those partners as he searches for stability and what he calls a “normal life and a way out.
“I just need something to help stabilize me,” Reggie says. “Without a house, you can’t clean up and get to a job, but without a job, you can’t get a house. So what do you do?”
For now, he’s grateful that he can replace his makeshift tent, made from tarps and sticks, with a real one. “That gives me some sense of security. If nothing else, at least I can stay dry.”
Last winter, with a scrawled list of the streets and landmarks mentioned in 100-year-old newspaper articles, I drove east through Memphis, past Shelby Farms, to what I believed might have been the place where a black woodchopper named Ell Persons was burned alive before thousands of spectators. I walked along the edge of the Wolf River, unsure whether this was the place. The river was narrower than I expected, and the bridge was newer than I thought it should have been. There were no markers, no wooden crosses or makeshift memorials like I see so often marking the site of a murder or a deadly car crash. There was nothing but the wind and the winter sun warming the cool air.
The lynching of Persons is a story no one told me about my home. I never heard Persons’ name in a history class or read about the lynching in a textbook. I first encountered Persons’ story in my own reading, years after I finished high school in Memphis and moved away for college. When I went looking for the site where Persons was lynched, there was nothing to suggest whether I was in the right place.
A group of local Memphians is looking to change that. In the year since I first went looking for the site of Persons’ lynching, an as-of-yet unnamed group of ministers, professors, scholars, and churchgoers, inspired by Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson’s speech at the Facing History and Ourselves annual fund-raising dinner, found their mission: to identify and place historical markers at all lynching sites in Shelby County.
Though Persons was not the only victim of lynching in Shelby County, his murder is unique for its surviving details — the case was breathlessly reported in local news leading up to the lynching — and for its spectacle. Thousands of people attended Persons’ lynching, which was, according to some newspaper accounts, the first to be carried out in broad daylight.
In the spring of 1917, a 16-year-old white girl named Antoinette Rappel was found raped and murdered in Memphis, near the Macon Road Bridge. Rappel had been decapitated, her body left under a bridge along the Wolf River. Suspicion fell quickly on Persons, who lived near the site of the murder. Persons was arrested twice, interrogated twice, and released twice before being captured a third time and reportedly beaten into a confession.
In anticipation of a trial — and, ostensibly, to keep him from being lynched — local law enforcement moved Persons to a Nashville jail. As it came time for his arraignment, two police officers accompanied Persons on a train bound for Memphis. An organized mob had set up roadblocks and staked out railroad stations, looking to intercept Persons as he headed back into town. A local paper reported that passenger trains entering Shelby County were being searched by the armed mob. Persons was handed over to the mob when they discovered him on a Memphis-bound train.
Some speculate that the police gave up Persons in an attempt to avoid the riot that would form in Memphis if he was legally protected and granted a fair trial. But even if Persons had avoided the mob and made it to court, almost all local attorneys had refused to serve in his defense. Upon his capture, local papers announced he would be burned the next morning.
By eight o’clock on the morning of the lynching, reporters estimated that 3,000 people had gathered to watch. Some people had been camped out at the bridge for over 24 hours. By nine o’clock that morning, the road leading to the bridge was blocked by traffic for a mile and a half. A teacher at Central High School in downtown Memphis came to class that morning to find 50 boys absent, missing class to attend the lynching with their families. Some children brought notes from home asking that they be excused early from school in order to go to the lynching. The Memphis Press reported an old man on crutches “hobbled and bemoaned the fate that might keep him from arriving on time.” Vendors set up stands among the crowds and sold sandwiches and snacks.
Photographs by Andrea Morales
Clipping from a 1917 newspaper article about Persons’ lynching
Though Rappel’s mother requested that Persons be burned on the spot where they found her daughter, the mob cleared a different space, on the other side of the levee, which they argued would allow the crowd a better view. Persons was hauled to the cleared space, where containers of gasoline were poured over his body. As the fire started burning at his feet, two men ran up from the crowd and sliced off his ears. Other people rushed forward to claim souvenirs but were held back. Some spectators complained too much gasoline had been used and Persons would burn too quickly.
Once Persons’ charred corpse had cooled, he was dismembered. Members of the crowd took Persons’ head and drove with it to Beale Street in downtown Memphis, where they threw the head at a group of black pedestrians. The severed head was photographed and printed on postcards.
Though all accounts of lynchings are horrific, there is something particularly, intimately painful about a lynching in one’s own hometown. Newspaper accounts reported that none of the mob wore masks or attempted to conceal their identities. Among those thousands of witnesses and the few who’d actively captured a man, taken him from police custody, and burned him alive in public, no one feared punishment.
The Chicago Defender printed a photo of the charred head above a description of the horror following Persons’ lynching: “This head was taken and thrown in Beale Street, the district occupied by the business of the Race, by men who make their money off the earnings of the Race. It is the same of all America.”
Randall Mullins of Responding to Racism
• • •
“I hope that our work will move even beyond historical markers to create spaces where we practice reverence for the victims of racial violence as well as learn and stay in touch with the facts,” Reverend Randall Mullins, retired United Church of Christ minister, said of the group’s work to memorialize lynching sites.
The project is inspired by the work of the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Montgomery, Alabama, which has identified nearly 4,000 lynchings across the South between 1877 and 1950. The Equal Justice Initiative hopes to collect samples of soil from each lynching site to be placed in a memorial to honor all victims of lynching. Twenty-one of these lynchings took place in Shelby County, but only three of the sites have been identified so far. Only one — the 1892 lynching of People’s Grocery co-owners Thomas Moss, Will Stewart, and Calvin McDowell — has been recognized with a historical marker.
Steve Masler, an anthropologist and the manager of exhibits at the Pink Palace Museum, heard about the group and contributed his research, as well as a space for biweekly meetings to research and locate the remaining lynching sites. The group will appeal to county or state historical commissions for the markers to be put in place.
Steve Masler, historian and manager of exhibits at the Pink Palace Museum
“Some people think historical markers are just throwing this up in their faces,” Masler said, “but lynching is just as much a part of our history as everything else.”
The project is in its early stages. It will take time to comb through old, often unreliable, newspaper sources and locate the places these terrible events took place. Once markers are in place, the group hopes these sites will be incorporated into local education through organizations like Facing History and Ourselves. The group is also interested in creating meditative spaces at the sites, which would include sculpture or other artwork, in addition to the historical markers.
Margaret Vandiver, a retired professor of criminal justice and the author of Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South, got involved with the project through research for her book. She is interested in the legacy of lynching in the present day. “Until white people look at this and look at it hard,” she said, “we’re going to be stuck where we are.”
For Reverend Mullins, it comes down to telling the truth about our history. “I am angry,” he said, pounding his hand on the arm of his chair, “I am angry that my history teachers didn’t tell me enough of the truth.” Mullins added that he hopes this project “will reveal the tragic connections between our history and the ways systemic racism and white supremacy continue to be present in most of the institutions of our society.”
Tom Carlson and Randall Mullins address the Responding to Racism group at the New Olivet Baptist Church
• • •
These tragic connections should be clear to anyone paying attention. To point to just a couple of examples, in 2015, United States police officers killed 1,138 people, and a disproportionately high number of them were black. The NAACP reports that African Americans represent nearly 1 million of a total 2.3 million incarcerated people. Reverend Earle Fisher, senior pastor at Abyssinian Missionary Baptist Church, compared efforts to memorialize lynching sites to the removal of the Confederate flag from government buildings. Both gestures, he said, are mostly symbolic. “And symbols are important,” he said, “but they are not the end-all, be-all.”
In addition to working for more honest representations of our history, Fisher urges people to also support those who are working for the city’s present and future — organizations like the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center, Manna House, Stand for Children, Grassroots Coalition, REACH, and Room in the Inn.
Dr. Marilyn Taylor’s Facing History students Zoëy Parker and Alexis Sledge discover the story of Persons’ lynching. These Facing History and Ourselves students are hoping to raise $4,500 in order to create a meditation garden at the site of Persons’ lynching.
“As much as I applaud the efforts of the group and stand in solidarity with them, we have to move beyond the symbolic to the more substantial.” This, he said, “requires courage and commitment beyond conversation.”
Some of Memphis’ history is still hot to the touch, impossible to conceal. Downtown, the sight of the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, still stings like a new burn. The public parks named after Confederate generals are populated by Civil War heroes on horseback, their bronze coattails waving in a preserved gust of wind, while other parts of Memphis’ history seem to be hidden.
• • •
A year after I first went looking for the site of Persons’ lynching, I realized I had not found the right place. So I tried again, with the help of directions provided by Steve Masler. I drove east on Summer, to the Putt-Putt golf course, and parked near a Twice-the-Ice machine. I grew up out here, just down Summer, at a little Methodist church parsonage nestled in scant woods. For the four years I lived there, I passed the site every day on the way to school, and I never knew it.
I walked along the driving range behind the Putt-Putt golf course, following an impression in the grass which marks the location of the old Macon Road. I walked through brambles and thorny bushes, listening to the dry grass whispering against my legs and the traffic streaming past on Summer. As I walked along the banks, I caught a glimpse of sun-bleached concrete behind me — a pair of bridge abutments, remnants of the old Macon Road bridge where Persons was killed.
I gained and lost sight of the abutments as I climbed and descended the low hills running along the riverside. When I reached the abutments, I could see they were streaked with years of rain and covered in patchy moss, with pieces of rebar sticking out at odd angles. Those worn abutments resembled old, oversized headstones, but there on the banks of the river where Persons was murdered, there are no monuments or markers. Only a silence.
So little is known about the life Persons lived on this land, near this river — how quiet it must have been at night, how he must have known the Wolf River’s cycles by heart. I wondered if Persons ever came to the river to cool off, cupping cool water in his palms on hot summer days. I imagined the crowds gathered there, the heat of their bodies as they jostled each other, everyone straining to catch a glimpse of a man on fire.
Standing on the banks of the Wolf River, I was struck by the disappearance of the past’s land in today’s terrain. The river has been rerouted, the old Macon Road has long been destroyed. In the decades since Persons’ lynching, it’s as if the earth has been physically recoiling from what happened here, erasing and reshaping the land and water, obscuring the story.
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I don’t think it’s possible to claim a place selectively, to cherry-pick its history. We have a responsibility to reckon with the whole history of our home places, even the stories deliberately left out of the history books, even the places left unmarked, the names we no longer know. May of 2017 will mark 100 years since Persons was killed. By then, hopefully there will be some sign for those looking to learn the stories of this particular place.
Vandiver said that the lynching of Persons “did have national repercussions,” but “in local memory, it almost disappeared.” The fact that Persons’ name is known at all, that he did not become one of many lynching victims whose names have been lost or willfully forgotten, might be thanks in part to the fact that the NAACP sent James Weldon Johnson, the writer, educator, lawyer, and civil rights activist, to Memphis as a field secretary to investigate Persons’ death. After spending 10 days in the city, talking with reporters, law enforcement officials, and locals, Johnson found there was no evidence suggesting Persons was guilty of Antoinette Rappel’s murder.
When Johnson visited the land where Persons had been lynched, the grass was still blackened and charred. An American flag had been planted there, to mark the spot. In the years since Johnson visited Memphis to investigate Persons’ lynching, the burned patches of earth have turned to tall grass, and the American flag is long gone. After his visit to Memphis, Johnson wrote, “I tried to balance the sufferings of the miserable victim against the moral degradation of Memphis, and the truth flashed over me that in large measure the race question involves the saving of black America’s body and white America’s soul.”
Martha Park is a writer from Memphis, living in Virginia. She is the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry.
The fifth season of Room In the Inn (RITI)-Memphis began Saturday night, November 1st, just in the nick of time, with overnight low temperatures hovering one degree above freezing.
RITI-Memphis was inspired by Nashville’s RITI program, where homeless guests are invited to sleep in churches, synagogues, and other worship centers during cold winter months. Each site hosts approximately 12 guests for one night each week from November through March. Ten Memphis congregations are participating this winter, and the number of nights when beds are available has doubled from three nights last year to six nights this year.
In Memphis, guests can sign up for RITI at Manna House in Midtown on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday mornings. They reconvene at Manna House in the evening and are driven to a church for a hot, communal meal and a safe, warm place to sleep.
The Rev. Lisa Anderson, pastor of Colonial Cumberland Presbyterian Church in East Memphis and director of RITI-Memphis, brought the program to Memphis after spending a day with Nashville’s RITI, which just started its 29th season and has more than 180 places of worship hosting guests each week.
“We saw what they were doing, and what a perfect idea priest Charles Strobel [founder of Nashville RITI] had,” she said. “I thought, ‘We could do this at our church.'”
Anderson brought the idea before her congregation, and they agreed to try it.
“For the first two-and-a-half years, it was just an outreach of our church. Then other people found out about it, and we had more volunteers than we could use,” Anderson said. “So, we created a non-profit and began recruiting other congregations two years ago.”
RITI stands out from other emergency shelter options in Memphis. Unlike Memphis’ large shelters, where guests not enrolled in drug recovery programs usually have to pay a fee, shelter with RITI is always free.
“Other large shelters are necessary because there are so many people to serve, but we feel that especially in the winter, people should have a space to stay for free,” Anderson said.
Lisa Anderson
Room In the Inn guests board a van bound for Emmanuel United Methodist Church.
Another, non-tangible aspect of RITI makes it unique.
“The spirit of hospitality is really what is different about Room In the Inn,” Anderson said. “Guests are invited to stay in small groups. It is safer because of the small numbers, and it is more relational because of the small numbers. It presents opportunities for real conversation, real relationships. Guests feel welcome, and the meal is communal. It’s about being together and creating a place of sanctuary.”
Manna House currently serves as the meeting location for RITI, but Anderson said First United Methodist Church downtown recently offered them the use of one of their buildings. RITI is planning to partner with two other ministries, Iona Community of Faith and Urban Bicycle Food Ministry, to create The Carpenter’s House, which will be a space for daytime hospitality, feeding ministries, and social services, as well as volunteer training, pickup, and drop-off for RITI in the winter.
“We hope that being downtown will help us reach more of the downtown homeless population who sometimes don’t come this far east [to Manna House],” Anderson said. “We have big dreams for the space, but right now, we’re just trying to get in there. We’re hoping to be able to do something with it by January.”
The guests of RITI speak highly of the program. One woman named Gloria said, “The first time I ever attended a shelter was when [RITI] opened its doors. I had heard such bad things about other shelters.” She described her experience with RITI as “pleasant, loving, and compassionate.”
A guest named J.J. said, “It’s a pleasant experience for a stranger.”
But a man named Jermaine got straight to the point, saying the best thing about RITI is that “you’re not out in the cold.”
Anderson says churches have been slow to commit to RITI, mainly because of stigmas about homeless people. But she said in all four years, they have had no issues with violence or safety.
Anderson invites faith-based groups interested in hosting homeless guests to visit roomintheinn-memphis.org, read through the congregational resource guide, and contact her at lisa@roomintheinn-memphis.org. Every additional host site means 12 people can be off the streets and out of the cold.
“There are more than 2,000 churches in Memphis, and they are all heated, empty, and locked up at night,” Anderson said.
Justin Fox Burks 
Justin Fox Burks 
Photographs by Justin Fox Burks 
Photographs by Andrea Morales 
Lisa Anderson