Tag: Shelby County

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News News Blog

DeAndre Brown Appointed Director of Office of Reentry

DeAndre Brown (Credit: Shelby County Office of Reentry)

Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris announced today that DeAndre Brown has been promoted to permanent executive director of the Shelby County Office of Reentry. Brown has served as interim executive director since August of 2021. Brown and his wife, Vinessa Brown, founded Lifeline to Success, a nonprofit organization for ex-offenders, after his own incarceration and reentry.

According to a press release from Harris’ office, Brown has expanded programming focused on the mental health of returning citizens since joining the Office of Reentry, including hosting a job fair and block party that drew hundreds. Brown has also extended the FOCUSED program to include inmates with the Division of Corrections. FOCUSED combines job training with other assistance such as family reconnection, financial literacy, and voting rights restoration. In addition, Brown has also established in-prison training programs for janitorial work and the care of natural African American hair.

“DeAndre Brown has shown that he is devoted to helping the formerly incarcerated turn their lives around,” said Harris. “We had hoped his experience and connections to the community would help to grow the reentry programming, and, we were right.”

“I still don’t believe this is happening,” said Brown. “I am actually living the dream. I promise the citizens of Shelby County to use everything in me to make sure the men and women in this program have an opportunity to be successful when they return from prison.”

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News News Blog News Feature

New Trial Ordered in Voting Fraud Case

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

Pamela Moses, the Memphis activist sentenced to six years in prison for voting fraud, will get a new trial. 

Moses lost her voting rights with a conviction in 2015. However, she was working through proper channels to get those rights restored in 2019. Moses had her voter registration documents signed by the Tennessee Department of Corrections (TDOC) and the Shelby County Election Commission.

However, an error was made. A corrections officer mistakenly signed a document stating Moses’ probation was over, though it was not. So, she was not eligible to vote when she filed her papers to, once again, appear on the voting rolls here. 

For this, she was charged, convicted, and sentenced to six years and one day for illegally attempting to register to vote. Many decried the decision, saying the sentence was too harsh and unequal to sentences given to others, particularly white men, for the same crime. 

Shelby County Criminal Court Judge Mark Ward ordered the new trial Friday. Ward presided over Moses’ 2019 trial. He wrote Friday that he does not disagree with the jury’s verdict against Moses. He said Moses likely knew she was still on probation while she was attempting to restore her voting rights, especially with a court order stating her probation would not be over until 2022, he said. 

“Based on this evidence, it was reasonable and legitimate for the jury to infer that [Moses] knew the representations on the form about her probation were untrue when she obtained the statement from the probation officer and when she attempted to use false information to register to vote,” Ward wrote in the order. 

The new trial comes as Ward said some evidence in the 2021 trial should not have been admitted. Also, Ward said prosecutors in the case failed to hand over an email to Moses’ attorney that could have possibly aided her defense. However, prosecutors said they had never seen the email in question before handed a copy of it by Moses’ attorney. Moses’ attorney said the failure to disclose it was not intentional. 

Shelby County District Attorney General Amy Weirich said her office was not to blame for the mistake.

“When reporters or political opportunists use the word ‘state’ they need to be crystal clear that the error was made by the [Tennessee Department of Corrections] and not any attorney or officer in the office of the Shelby County District Attorney.”

Shelby County District Attorney General Amy Weirich

“The Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) failed to turn over a necessary document in the case of Pamela Moses and therefore her conviction has been overturned by the judge,” Weirich said in a statement Friday. “When reporters or political opportunists use the word ‘state’ they need to be crystal clear that the error was made by the TDOC and not any attorney or officer in the office of the Shelby County District Attorney.”

Josh Spickler, executive director with the criminal reform advocacy group Just City, said Weirich’s office “has a well-documented record of failing to produce evidence that could benefit the accused.”

“Yet again, in a very high-profile case that has made national headlines, her office has failed to produce a critical document, and a judge has reversed a conviction,” Spickler said. “We can’t know how often this happens, but this is a clear pattern and it must be addressed. Our community deserves better than this.”

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News News Blog News Feature

Fatal Traffic Crashes on the Rise

Photo by Joseph Chan from Unsplash

Fatal traffic crashes have risen over the last three years in Shelby County, according to data from the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security.

Distracted driving has risen more than any other category of fatal crashes in those three years, from about 6 percent of all fatal crashes in 2019 to 8 percent last year. Alcohol-related crashes are trending back down from a 2020 spike that claimed about 20 percent of all traffic fatalities. Alcohol-related crashes were down to 17.6 percent last year.

These trends and more will bring the Tennessee Highway Safety Office, the Tennessee Highway Patrol, the Memphis Police Department, and more together for a press event here called “Enough is Enough” set for Friday.

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Politics Politics Feature

The Hot Race

Weirich and Mulroy at respective fundraisers (Photos: Jackson Baker)

In these still early days of the 2022 election field, one political race above all is drawing the most attention and seems to be getting fully underway. This is the contest between Republican incumbent District Attorney General Amy Weirich and her most likely Democratic opponent, University of Memphis law professor and former County Commissioner Steve Mulroy.

Both Mulroy and Weirich are on the campaign trail, which at this stage of the game means they are holding fundraisers that function simultaneously as opportunities to get their message out. Mulroy has been getting in the first licks, never failing to call attention to Weirich’s periodic sanctions for judicial misconduct by the Tennessee Supreme Court, by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and by the ethics panel of the Tennessee bar.

Weirich does not respond to these charges, though her supporters will cite them as proof of her zeal in pursuing crime and of a muscular approach that might sometimes cross over a line, but always in the interests of the victims of crime. “I’m tough and I’m fair,” she said Monday night at a well-attended fundraiser at the East Memphis home of GOP County Commissioner Brandon Morrison and her husband Joe. “And I’m never gonna apologize for being tough on crime. And if you want a D.A. that’s not going to fight for victims, that ain’t me. I’ll tell you that right here and right now.”

Mulroy sees things differently. At a pair of fundraisers he held this past week, at the home of Shawn and Shawna Lynch and the Donati Law Firm, he scourged Weirich for what he sees as her undue emphasis on locking offenders up as hype arrest statistics and her failure, as he said in his announcement remarks, to pursue “a conviction review unit like one now operating in Davidson County, an emphasis on justice rather than simply winning verdicts, sequestration of juveniles from adult offenders, and reform of what he called ‘bail inflation.’”

Without naming Mulroy, Weirich singled out this last point on Monday night: “I am not your D.A. if you want someone to commit to letting everyone out without bond. That is not the solution. We saw a little bit of that during the pandemic. And what happened to our crime rate is, it went up.”

Of course, Mulroy maintains, as he did at the Lynch fundraiser, that the Shelby County crime rate, violent crime in particular, “has gone up consistently every year under Weirich’s administration after having slowed down just before she took office.”

Another point of contention between them concerns what Weirich expresses this way: “Much of what frustrates the community right now and has for many years are the laws and the way the system is designed to let people out too soon, and add a disrespectful rate to the victims of those crimes. We need truth in sentencing.”

Mulroy opposes that notion and sees flexibility in incarceration procedures as ways both of applying pure and fair-minded justice and avoiding the indiscriminate long-term pile-up of bodies that, he says, turns prisons into crime schools.

All this being said, we aren’t yet in the general election. Weirich seems so far to be home free in the Republican primary, with no opponents. Mulroy, on the other hand, has two primary opponents, Linda Harris and Janika White, each seemingly well-credentialed enough to make a case for herself. They’re not crazy about Weirich’s record, either.

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At Large Opinion

The Quiet Part

The Ninth District: Note phallic incursion from 2010 redistricting. (Photo: courtesy Congressman Steve Cohen)

Maybe you saw this quote last week, when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the quiet part out loud while defending the defeat of the Voting Rights Act in the Senate: “African-American voters,” he warbled, “are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”

Never mind that McConnell apparently believes African Americans aren’t actual Americans, like, you know, white people. And never mind that the bills his party is passing in GOP-controlled states around the country are intended to change that pesky situation before the next election rolls around. McConnell is intentionally glossing over the fact that the Voting Rights Act would have outlawed the implementation of these undemocratic new laws, and that every Republican Senator voted against it — as did two hypocrites calling themselves Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin.

Since the 2020 election, dozens of restrictive voting laws have been enacted in 19 states, laws that supposedly remedy “voter fraud” (which didn’t happen) but that have the actual purpose of making voting more difficult for poor people and people of color — who just coincidentally tend to vote for Democrats.

You don’t have to look any further than Nashville for a perfect example of how far the GOP is willing to go to establish a permanent and overwhelming majority. Last week, the Tennessee Senate Judiciary and House State Government committees approved three redistricting plans for new state House, state Senate, and Congressional maps, which are drawn every decade after the federal census to reshape state and federal districts, if necessary, to ensure equity at the polls.

The new Republican-created Tennessee maps are a joke at all three levels, a mugging of democracy in plain sight. Newly configured districts in and around Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville are designed to break up neighborhoods and Democratic voting strongholds in urban areas, especially Black communities. The new maps pit Black and Democratic incumbents against each other in four instances at the state representative level and give Republicans a huge numerical advantage in eight out of nine of Tennessee’s Congressional districts. That’s an 11 percent representation in Congress for Democrats, who made up 41 percent of the vote in the most recent statewide election.

The lone outlier is Tennessee’s Ninth District, represented by Congressman Steve Cohen, but it’s not for lack of trying. After the 2010 census (in what was widely seen as a direct skewering of Cohen), the GOP took a literally phallic-shaped piece out of the Ninth that just so happened to include Cohen’s place of worship in East Memphis and a large surrounding Jewish neighborhood. To balance the population math, the GOP added a large chunk of Tipton County to the Ninth, meaning Cohen now represents a disparate melange of rural, inner-city, and suburban voters. This isn’t just unfair to Cohen (or whoever the Ninth District representative may be in the future); it’s unfair to all the residents of the district, who deserve to be represented by someone who reflects their concerns and values. The Republicans, it appears, would prefer it if Memphis residents found themselves being represented by a Republican turd farmer from Atoka.

But compared to Nashville, Memphis got off easy. The Fifth District — represented by Democratic Congressman Jim Cooper, and which currently encompasses most of Nashville and Davidson County — will now encompass parts of five (count ’em!) counties. The city’s vote will be split and allocated to three rural-majority districts. Meaning Nashville’s urban residents will soon more than likely be represented by three Republican turd farmers.

This isn’t how democracy is supposed to work. Our elected representatives shouldn’t be allowed to create districts specifically designed to keep them — and their party — in office. Geographic political districts — at every level — should be created by bipartisan commissions, not party hacks. And yes, I know gerrymandering has been done by Democrats as well. The point is that it’s wrong, no matter who does it, and that we had in our hands a bill that would have eliminated all this cheating, that would have kept states from arbitrarily reducing the number of polling places in certain districts or shortening voting periods or, for god’s sake, banning the dispensing of water to voters in line.

In our system, unfettered democracy is supposed to be a feature, not a bug. But unfortunately, that’s not how the Republicans see it these days.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Here We Go Again: A Revised Version of the Congressional Map

(from Tennessee State Government)


It turns out that the redistricting map of congressional districts that the General Assembly’s majority Republicans trotted out last week has already undergone significant change — and it ain’t over yet.

It will be recalled that last week’s map pretty much left the boundaries of the 9th District in Shelby County itself as they had been for the last 10 years, extending eastward from the Shelby County riverfront and taking in most, but not all, of Memphis proper. But the 2020 Census demonstrated that Shelby, like the rest of West Tennessee, had lagged behind Middle Tennessee in population growth, and the 9th needed to expand, area-wise, to include the proportionate number of citizens.

Accordingly, the first map proposed to expand the 9th northward, taking in the whole of predominantly rural Tipton County rather than restoring sections of East Memphis that a dominant GOP gave to Republican congressman David Kustoff’s 8th District after the 2010 census.

That solution satisfied the Republican map-makers, who knew that the heavily African-American demographics of Memphis made it impossible to gerrymander the 9th into a Republican-leaning district. And it allowed Kustoff to hold on to the affluent East Memphis areas that the 8th gained after the previous census. The 8th would, in any case, continue to be solidly Republican.

But the GOP mapmakers had not reckoned with the desire of Tipton Countians, quickly made public via their legislative surrogates in the Assembly, to keep as much as possible of their domain aligned with the 8th District, predominantly Republican and rural, like themselves.

So the mapmakers went back to work and have come up with a second provisional version of the 8th/9th split. This one would allow the greater part of Tipton County, that portion east of Highway 51, to remain within the 8th District. To compensate for the population shift, portions of Shelby County would return to the 9th District. 

Kustoff would still have what wags in state government call the “finger of love,” the dagger-shaped salient that, after the 2010 Census, was  carved out westward into Memphis territory and includes a generous  hunk of the affluent Poplar Corridor. Indeed, along its margins, the salient would be marginally enlarged in favor of the 8th District.

For his part, Cohen — though disappointed in his wish to regain East Memphis territories that had long been in the 9th District — was more or less satisfied. He would surrender 30,000 Tipton citizens who were included in the first map but would gain the same number of Shelby Countians. “So that’s good. I picked up some in Southeast Shelby [Ashland] Lake, Forest Hill, as well as Bartlett, Morningstar, and maybe more Cordova. I didn’t lose any of the University of Memphis, maybe a parking lot or dormitory on Poplar,  not much,  and I got the Galloway Golf Course back.”

The Memphis congressman seemed content as well to represent the western portion of Tipton County, including a quaintly named community he identified as “Pecker Point.” A little investigation revealed that the proper name for that tiny hamlet — go ahead and google it — is actually “Peckerwood Point,” a fact confirmed by another political figure, former Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland.

Roland, who claims ancestral connections with the community and unabashedly embraces the unusual vernacular of its name, is also interested in the final outlines, still to be determined, of the 9th Congressional District. A resident of Millington, Roland is musing about a possible run for the 9th Congressional seat, presumably as a Republican. He also had recently floated a trial balloon about a possible race for Shelby County Mayor as an independent.  

Though he has held office as a Republican and is a professed admirer of former President Trump, Roland maintains, “Really, I’ve been moving away from this idea of having to be a Democrat or a Republican. That partisanship is not what public service is about.”

Roland also expressed dismay at what he saw as the motivations of the map-makers in the legislature, citing the aforementioned “finger of love” in the 8th District as an example. “That’s gerrymandering, pure and simple,” he said.

However the district lines end up at the hands of the Republican supermajority members, who have apparently carved up the Nashville area to eliminate the long-term Democratic congressman there, the label of “gerrymandering” would seem to be irrefutable.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

GOP Congressional Lines Fragment Memphis and Nashville

Based on the redistricting information revealed by Republicans in the General Assembly the past day or two, numerous voters in Tennessee’s two largest cities may experience disappointment ranging from the irksome to the extreme.

Under the GOP plan, negative reaction is most likely to be felt in the 5th Congressional District, which has consisted to this point of Nashville/Davidson, Dickson County, and part of Cheatham County. The city of Nashville, which is the site of the State Capital, is roughly the same size as Memphis, population-wise, and is profoundly Democratic in its voting habits, would be fragmented in a map backed by the Republican supermajority and spun off into three districts, all of which have had substantial Republican voting patterns. Gone will be the city’s unity, both politically and geographically.

No demographic data from Census 2020 made this necessary, as state Rep. Bob Clement (D-Nashville) and a surrogate for U.S. Representative Jim Cooper (D-Nashville) made obvious, in presenting two redistricting plans that kept Nashville whole while conforming to the requirements of the census data. The essentials of those two plans were contained in a new Democratic proposal to be made public on Thursday.

Clearly, the motive of the Republican majority on the redistricting committee was to gain the upper hand, politically, for the GOP in one of the few areas where its impact has been relatively minimal.

Despite complaints from Freeman and two Shelby County Democrats (Reps. Antonio Parkinson and Karen Camper) that for most members of the House, where the proposal was unveiled, there had been no advance transparency, the GOP majority eschewed extended discussion and voted the new map on to further committees and, in what is likely to be short order, to consideration on on the House and Senate floor.

As Parkinson and Camper made clear, the GOP plan will create discontent in Shelby County as well. On the proposed congressional map, the new 9th District is enlarged in size, as anticipated, to compensate for its stagnated population figures relative to the state as a whole. But the district keeps to its present dimensions in the county itself (the green line in illustration) while expanding northward to take in the whole of Tipton County, a rural and GOP-dominated area that was formerly in the 8th District.

In routing the 9th in that direction, the Republican framers of the map disdained the opportunity to extend the district’s borders eastward to regain parts of eastern Shelby County, including a large Poplar Corridor segment in East Memphis, which were gouged out of the 9th in the previous post-2010 redistricting. To do ask would have reunified the city of Memphis in a single district.

Two scenarios for legislative redistricting have now been made public by the GOP supermajority — those affecting the state House of Representatives and the state’s congressional districts. Plans for the state Senate will be unveiled on Thursday.

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Politics Politics Feature

Gerrymandering Shelby

The proposed new House District 93, one of several salamander-shaped ones. (Photo: Tennessee State Government)

Within the week, a newly reconvened General Assembly will consider new district lines for the state House of Representatives, the state Senate, and the state’s congressional delegation.

As of this writing, only the outlines of the proposed new House have been revealed, though the same general principles will doubtless hold for the Senate and congressional seats.

To go by the legislative Republicans’ previously released House map, the boundary lines of districts are not geopolitical; that is, they do not reflect obvious community clusters and contiguous territories as such.

They are political only in the electoral sense. They represent an effort to maximize the power of the GOP supermajority at the expense of the opposition, Democrats. They zig and zag across community lines, splitting ethnically cohesive population areas as deemed necessary to accomplish that purpose. In other words, they are gerrymandered.

The word “gerrymander” derives from the name of one Elbridge Gerry, who, according to Wikipedia’s account, “as Governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander.”

Several of the GOP’s proposed new House districts in Shelby County run west to east and have an arguable resemblance to the shape of a salamander. (See illustration.)

The root fact of the next House delegation from Shelby County is that it will number 13 members, as against the current 14. In one sense, the change is accounted for by the proposed transfer of House District 90, currently represented by freshman Democrat Torrey Harris, to Middle Tennessee. Harris’ abode is now in District 91, represented by fellow Democrat London Lamar.

That the county was to lose one of its existing representatives was made inevitable by the continuing shift of population density from West to Middle Tennessee, as revealed by the 2020 census.

But, whereas the Shelby County population in the decade of the 2020s will be measurably more African-American than that of the previous decade — an estimated 54.3 percent as of now, compared to the earlier 51.2 percent — the ratio of Democratic districts to Republican ones seems certain to be less rather than greater.

This is despite the fact of the well-documented proclivity of Shelby County’s Black population to vote Democratic rather than Republican.

In other words, the GOP legislative supermajority, whose votes will determine the final district lines, will ensure that Shelby County’s majority party, the Democrats, will bear the sacrifice of the lost House seat, not the minority Republicans.

This is the opposite situation from that, say, of the newly reapportioned 13-member Shelby County Commission, where the existing Democratic majority of eight voted in favor of a new map likely to increase the number of Democrats to nine.

Like they say, politics is politics.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ordains that the number of “minority majority” (i.e., Black) districts cannot be reduced within a specific area. Accordingly, the number of such districts in Shelby County, nine, will be the same, though one of the nine will be the reapportioned District 96, represented now by a white candidate, Democrat Dwayne Thompson. Black Shelby County residents will have gained a slim population majority in the new district, though the popular Thompson has good chances for re-election as the county’s only white Democrat in the House.

Regardless of how that turns out, there will be one fewer House Democrat from Shelby County, and very possibly one fewer Black Democrat.

The Democrats will very likely turn to the courts for potential redress.

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News News Blog News Feature

Covid Testing Sites

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/Facebook
Need to find a Covid test? Here’s our list of Memphis testing sites. 

UTHSC Covid Testing
1068 Cresthaven Road
Monday-Friday; 8 a.m.-4 p.m.
Text COVID to (901) 203-5526 to schedule an appointment

UTHSC Covid Testing (opens January 5th)
3 North Dunlap Street
Monday-Friday; 9 a.m.-4 p.m.
No appointment required

Compass Laboratory Services
1800 Pyramid Place
Monday-Saturday; 7 a.m.-5 p.m.
Register online at https://pe.compasslabservices.com/PatientEntry/Default.aspx; on-site registration available

Christ Community Health Services – Lamar Emissions Station
1720 RKS Commercial Cove
Monday-Friday; 8:30 a.m.- 11:30 a.m.
Text “Test2020” to 91999 for appointment or https://bit.ly/CCHSVaccines; all ages tested

Memphis Health Center
767 Walker Avenue
Monday-Thursday; 9 a.m.-11 a.m.
Call (901) 261-2042 or text “COVID2020” to 474747

Poplar Healthcare
3495 Hacks Cross Road
Monday-Friday; 8 a.m.-6 p.m., Friday: 8 a.m.-4 p.m.
Register online at poplarhealthcare.regfox.com/phc-drive-thru-testing; on-site registration available

Poplar Healthcare – Methodist University School of Nursing (Wilson Hall)
251 S Claybrook Street
(Enter from Linden Ave to access the testing offered at Methodist University.)
Monday-Friday; 9 a.m.-4 p.m.
Register online at poplarhealthcare.regfox.com/phc-drive-thru-testing; on-site registration available

Shelby County Health Department – Collierville
167 Washington Street
Tuesday and Thursday; 8 a.m.-4 p.m.
Call 901-222-9900, by appointment only

Shelby County Health Department – Millington
Monday-Friday; 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m.
Call 901-222-9949, by appointment only

Christ Community Third Street
3362 Third Street
Monday, Tuesday, Friday; 9 a.m.-5 p.m
Saturday, 10 a.m.-2p.m.
Text “Test2020” to 91999 for appointment or https://bit.ly/CCHSVaccines

Tri State Community Health Center
3839 Lamar Avenue
Wednesday: 4 p.m.-7 p.m.; Friday: 9 a.m.-1 p.m.
No appointment needed at this time.

Harbor Town Pharmacy
103 Harbortown Square
Monday-Saturday; times vary
901-347-2774

Mobile Drug Testing
3592 Knight Arnold Road, Suite 327
Monday-Friday; 9a.m.-4:30 p.m.
Register at covidtesting901.com

CVS – Union Avenue
2115 Union Avenue
Monday-Sunday; times vary
sign up on portal www.cvs.com/minuteclinic/covid-19-testing

CVS – Stage Road
5055 Stage Road
Monday-Sunday; times vary
sign up on portal www.cvs.com/minuteclinic/covid-19-testing

CVS – Quince Road
6116 Quince Road
Monday-Sunday; times vary
sign up on portal www.cvs.com/minuteclinic/covid-19-testing

CVS – Winchester Road
6620 Winchester Road
Monday-Sunday; times vary
sign up on portal www.cvs.com/minuteclinic/covid-19-testing

CVS – Park Avenue
3502 Park Avenue
Monday-Sunday; times vary 
sign up on portal www.cvs.com/minuteclinic/covid-19-testing

Germantown Pediatric and Family Medicine
Monday-Friday; times vary
Call 901-854-5455 for an appointment

Medical Testing – American Way
4322 American Way
Monday, Friday; 11 a.m.-8 p.m.
No appointment necessary; Call 901-795-5905 for information

New Life Medical Center
Monday-Friday; 7:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Saturday; 9 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Walk-ins, drive through, or appointment by phone 901-213-0100 or online (newlifemedcenters.com). Rapid test available.

Rapid Care, LLC
1811 Kirby Pkwy, Suite 1
Monday-Friday; 8 a.m.-6 p.m.
schedule online at rapidcaretesting.com

Walgreens – Shelby Drive
6939 E Shelby Drive
Monday-Sunday; 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
schedule online at walgreens.com/coronavirus

Walgreens – Thomas Street
3100 Thomas Street
Monday-Sunday; 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
schedule online at walgreens.com/coronavirus

Walgreens – Elvis Presley Road
3445 Elvis Presley Road
Monday-Sunday; 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
schedule online at walgreens.com/coronavirus

Walgreens – Union Avenue
987 Union Avenue
Monday-Sunday; 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
schedule online at walgreens.com/coronavirus

Walgreens – Jackson Avenue
2471 Jackson Ave
Monday-Sunday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
schedule online at walgreens.com/coronavirus

Walgreens – Ramill Road
3489 Ramill Road
Monday-Sunday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
schedule online at walgreens.com/coronavirus

Walgreens – Austin Peay Highway
4015 Austin Peay Highway
Monday-Sunday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
schedule online at walgreens.com/coronavirus

Walgreens – S. Third Street
1845 S. Third Street
Monday-Sunday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
schedule online at walgreens.com/coronavirus

Test Anywhere Mobile Laboratory 
4444 Delp Street
Monday-Sunday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
Available upon request
Text COVIDTEST to 901-860-4973 or Register at testanywhere.org

Passport Health Memphis/NP Cares Primary Care
4515 Poplar Ave, Suite 131
Call 901-681-2700

Spirit Health Medical
1331 Union Avenue, Suite 1240

Journey 2 Health
5220 Park Avenue, Suite 100
Call 901-676-2026, no appointment needed
 
AFC Urgent Care
Monday-Friday, 8 a.m.-8 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 8 a.m.-5 p.m.
Appointments at AFCUrgentCareMemphisTN.com and click on Covid-19 Testing. Or call 901-254-8040.
 
ZupMed
4576 Poplar Avenue
Monday-Friday 8 a.m.-6 p.m.; Saturday, 8 a.m.-2 p.m.
Appointments at 901-701-7010 or visit zupmed.com
 
ZupMed at Memphis International Airport
 2491 Winchester Road
 B ticketing lobby across from the Southwest Airlines and American Airlines counters
Sunday-Saturday, 5 a.m.-8 p.m.  
Appointments at 901-701-7010 or zupmed.com

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News News Blog

State AG Seeks to Block School Mask Mandates

Credit: state of Tennessee

Tennessee’s Attorney General is seeking a stay on the federal court decisions that allowed mask mandates back in some Tennessee schools.

Governor Bill Lee ordered that parents could opt their children out of mask mandates at public schools earlier this year. Attorneys in Shelby County and Knox County later won legal decisions that nullified Lee’s order and allowed school systems in both places to reinstate mask mandates.

Attorney General Herbert Slatery announced Monday afternoon he has appealed and will immediately seek a stay of those federal district court decisions.

“These orders have impeded the governor’s executive authority during an emergency to direct the state’s public health response, which is why this office will be appealing those decisions,” Slatery said in a statement.