Tag: Tami Sawyer

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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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Politics Politics Feature

Democrats Doubling Up in Primary Races

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Tennessee may be a certifiably red (i.e., Republican) state, and, indeed election results in recent years, even in Shelby County, which has a theoretical Democratic majority, have generally been disappointments to the once-dominant Democratic Party.

And the official Party itself has only been reconstituted in the county for a few months after various internal fissures and dissensions caused it to be decertified by the state party in mid-2016.

But none of that has stopped a veritable flood of would-be Democratic office-holders from declaring their candidacies for election year 2018 as the filing season gets going in earnest. Most unusually for a minority party, in fact, many of the races on the ballot this year are being contested by multiple Democratic entries.

That starts at the top of the ballot, as two name Democrats — former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean and current state House minority leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley — are vying for the office of governor. (Even more Republicans are running: six gubernatorial candidates in all, most of them with serious networks and campaign funding at their disposal.)

Jackson Baker

Forrest fan Jenna Bernstein taking her leave

It seemed for a while that there might be a Democratic primary contest for U.S. Senator as well, until the well-backed entry of former two-term Governor Phil Bredesen convinced a promising newcomer, Nashville lawyer James Mackler, to withdraw in favor of Bredesen, whose second gubernatorial win in 2006 was his party’s most recent statewide hurrah. (At least two name Republicans — 7th District U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn and former 8th District congressman Stephen Fincher are vying for the GOP nomination.)

In any case, Democrats are also doubling up — and not just in the marquee races. There are competitive Democratic primary races at virtually every election level.

Take the case of state Senator Brian Kelsey‘s reelection bid in Senate District 31. The long-serving Germantown Republican sent out several S.O.S. emails to supporters this week informing them that he has a Democratic challenger and asking for campaign donations.

The opponent Kelsey had in mind was Democratic activist Gabriela “Gabby” Salinas, who did indeed announce her availability last week as a Democratic candidate in District 31. And she has a backstory that gives Kelsey reason for his concern. Salinas, who survived childhood cancer as a patient at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and went on to do research work herself at St. Jude, was also a survivor later on of an automobile accident that took the lives of family members.

Nor is Salinas the only Democrat seeking to unseat Kelsey. Another declared candidate for the seat is David Weatherspoon, one of several first-time office-seekers on the Democratic side.

On Monday, one of the Democratic Party’s recognized stars in Nashville, state Representative Raumesh Akbari, announced she would seek to fill the state Senate seat left vacant by Lee Harris, who is running for Shelby County mayor. And Akbari has a Democratic opponent in the primary, her House colleague, Joe Towns.

There are numerous other races on the ballot in which Democrats are competing with each other for the honor or capturing an open seat or one currently held by a Republican. One such case is the Shelby County Commission District 13 seat, a swing seat now occupied by Republican Steve Basar.

Both former Election Commissioner George Monger and political newcomer Charles Belenky are competing for that one. Monger, a former boy wonder who became a music manager at 15 and ran for the City Council at 18, declared his candidacy over the weekend, while Belenky turned up as a citizen critic of a purchasing contract at the commission’s regular public meeting.

And where a seat is traditionally considered Democratic, the infighting can be brisk indeed; two Democrats — Eric Dunn and Tami Sawyer — are vying for the Commission District 7 seat; four seek the seat in Commission District 8: David Vinciarelli, Daryl Lewis, J.B. Smiley Jr., and Mickell Lowery; while Commission District 9, vacated this year by the term-limited Justin Ford, is being sought by no fewer than five Democrats — Edmund Ford Jr., Ian Jeffries, Jonathan L. Smith, Jonathan M. Lewis, and Rosalyn R. Nichols.

• Monday’s first county commission meeting of the year was an abbreviated affair, starting at the late hour of 4 p.m. to accommodate attendees at the well-attended funeral at Idlewild Presbyterian church of the late public figure, Lewis Donelson.

On a day when the city was visited by groups of protesters partial to the now-removed statue of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the commission was the site of one such protest — from one Jenna Bernstein of Tampa, who said she had come all the way from Florida to call for the expulsion from the commission of Van Turner, head of Memphis Greenspace Inc., which purchased two parks from the city prior to removing their Confederate monuments.

Bernstein’s mission received fairly short shrift, resulting only in a brief debate between Commission chair Heidi Shafer (nay) and Commissioner Walter Bailey (yea) as to the right of a non-resident to be heard. Shafer’s view prevailed.

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Historical Commission Votes Down Forrest Waiver

Nathan Bedford Forrest Statue in the Health Sciences Park.

As the clock ticked closer to 9:00 a.m. in Athens, Tennessee, on Friday, anticipation overflowed in a packed room at the McMinn County Living Heritage Museum.

Three hours later, the Tennessee Historical Commission (THC) voted down Memphis’ waiver request to remove the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue from a Memphis park.

Before the commission voted, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland told the commission he is speaking on behalf of a very united Memphis that wants the statue removed.

[pullquote-1]

“But first we must understand and come to terms with why this statue exists in the first place,” Strickland said, citing that the statue was put in its current location 40 years after the Civil War, just as Jim Crow laws were becoming active. “It’s a monument to Jim Crow.”

Strickland concluded by adding that his administration has respected the legal process thus far and he asked that the commission would “respect the will of Memphis” and formally take up the waiver request.

However, Sons of Confederate Veterans spokesperson Lee Millar told the commission the picture that Strickland painted about Memphis’ consensus to remove the statue is not accurate. Thousands of Memphians say leave history alone, he said.

One of those Memphians is history teacher Elizabeth Adams, who told the commission that everyone is not in agreement with the mayor and city council.

“If you don’t know your history, you are doomed to repeat it,” Adams said. “Next they’ll want to remove the crosses from our churches.”

Steven Stout, an attorney with the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, advised the commission not to vote on the waiver until after the new THC rule-making process is completed and becomes effective, which could take until February.

“It would be a poor decision to not vote until the rules are adopted,” Stout said.

He added it is “practically impossible” to take a vote and provide reasoning for the vote without referencing the rules. This could present legal challenges in the future.

He says his counsel is aimed to make the commission “less vulnerable.”

But, after nearly two hours of hearing comments and discussion, commissioner Keith Norman of Memphis made a motion to vote on the waiver, which was seconded by Beverly Robertson, also of Memphis. Norman and Robertson are two of three African Americans on the commission.

Heeding legal counsel, the commission voted the waiver request down, but in a second motion voted to approve the city’s declaratory order to pursue an administrative law judge. The judge will decide if the 2013 law prohibiting the removal of war monuments is relevant to the Forrest statue.

This process is expected to be complete by November.

After today’s decisions by the THC, Strickland said he is still hopeful that the city will meet its goal of having the statue down by April 4, 2018.

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Forrest Statue Discussion Tops Historical Commission’s Friday Agenda

An update on the city’s waiver petition for the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue is slated as the Tennessee Historical Commission’s (THC) first agenda item at its meeting this Friday.

As THC chair told city officials late last month, the commission won’t vote on the waiver, but there will be allotted time for public comments concerning the Forrest waiver and consideration by the commission of holding a special session to hear the request. 

Mayor Jim Strickland, Memphis City Council attorney Allan Wade, and City of Memphis attorney Bruce McMullen have said they will attend the meeting to make an oral request for the commission to hear the waiver petition.

The mayor also plans to bring along about 50 local faith leaders and businessmen to make their case for the statue’s removal.

Leader of local activist efforts to remove the city’s Confederate statues, Tami Sawyer says she will also attend the meeting and speak on behalf of the #takeemdown901 supporters.

The THC meeting is scheduled for Friday at 9:00 a.m. EST in Athens.

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The Battle of Memphis — Confederate Statues’ Last Stand?

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Next month, the Tennessee Historical Commission, a group of 28 people from all over the state, most of them white, will tell Memphians whether or not they can remove a huge statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a man who was once Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and made a fortune trading slaves, from a public place in this majority African-American city.

After Dylann Roof, a self-confessed white supremacist, shot and killed nine African-American churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, Memphis leaders rushed to remove the statue. But state lawmakers tightened rules on the removal of such monuments, requiring a super-majority approval of the Tennessee Historical Commission (THC) instead of a simple majority vote.

Allan Wade, the Memphis City Council’s attorney, and others continued to work on the issue.

Then came the tiki-torch-bearing white supremacists to Charlottesville, Virginia, in August. By the time the Unite the Right rally weekend was over, dozens of counter-protestors were injured and one woman, Heather Heyer, was murdered as James Alex Fields, a Nazi-loving 20 year old from Ohio, rammed his Dodge Challenger into the crowd.

In Memphis, hundreds gathered in protest around the Forrest statue and the Jefferson Davis statue downtown. They demanded immediate action, but Mayor Jim Strickland, who has also called for the statues’ removal, said his administration would follow the rule of law on the matter. That means waiting on the October vote of THC members, who voted Friday to leave a bust of Forrest in the Tennessee State Capitol building.

But even if the commission denies the city the right to remove the statue, city leaders have been working on other plans. What follows is a look at how we got here — and where we might be headed. — Toby Sells

Justin Fox Burks

“The Right Thing”

As this Flyer goes to press, the Memphis City Council is set to vote on resolutions to remove or board up the city’s two confederate statues.

Council Chairman Berlin Boyd says council members are “united and [have] unequivocally expressed the will of a vast majority of the citizenry that these reminders of hatred and bigotry have no place in our community.

“We renamed Confederate, Jefferson Davis, and Nathan Bedford Forrest Parks over four years ago, and we have been trying for two years to do the right thing for this community by removing these two statues,” Boyd continues. “The only thing standing in our way has been the people who have created obstacles that have prevented us from exercising what is in the best interest of our citizens.”

The resolutions are based on four concepts presented to the council’s executive committee in late August by council attorney Wade.

Of the options, Wade says the first — immediately removing the statues, followed by destruction or storage — would be the most “drastic” and by law requires a waiver from the THC. But Wade says this action could be taken if the statues are declared a “public nuisance,” similar to the case made for the confederate statues in New Orleans.

Citing a provision of the Civil Rights Act, Wade says an additional argument could be made that the existence of the statues in public parks is discriminatory and prevents African Americans from fully enjoying those public spaces.

But, Wade says, this is not an action the city should pursue without first alerting the state’s attorney general. “I don’t think we should just go and yank them down tomorrow without some due process occurring,” he says.

The second option he presented is the sale of the monuments at an auction or private sale, which Wade says also cannot be done without a waiver. But he says designating a resting place for the statues could aid in the waiver process.

Wade told the council that it’s “probably easier to have someone executed by lethal injection in Tennessee than to receive a waiver from the state’s historical commission,” and that the waiver process would take at least a year.

Though the pending waiver for the removal of the Forrest statue will only require a simple majority to be approved, Wade says the process includes a laundry list of actions that must be taken leading up to the hearing.

Wade told the council committee that the third option — requesting that Governor Bill Haslam seek a special session of the THC — would expedite the waiver process, but Haslam, although an expressed supporter of having the statues removed, has said he will not ask for a special session.

The last option is boarding up the statues. Wade says this temporary option does not require a waiver and could be done in the interim waiting period. Wade says by law, the city is allowed to board up the statues for their “preservation” or “protection.”

He says there is a foundation for this action because the city has already had to invest tens of thousands of dollars to protect and maintain the statues.

However, city attorney Bruce McMullen says the city is seeking a permanent solution and is “not in the business of protecting the statues.”

Mayor Strickland says the city will only seek to remove them legally. If the waiver is not granted by the THC in October, city officials say there are still other viable lawful actions.

“For some time now, the mayor has been working on building consensus to make our goal a reality,” said Ursula Madden, the mayor’s chief communications officer. “If our waiver request is not successful, our pursuit does not end. We have other lawful options to turn to.”

One of those options might be going around the law stating that a waiver is needed to modify or move historic property. The parks could be sold to a proxy, who would then have the statues removed before selling the parks back to the city. — Maya Smith

Justin Fox Burks

The statue of Jefferson Davis in a downtown park

Smooth Agitator

Tami Sawyer’s smart as hell, and she’s not going to take it anymore.

“But what about the black guys?” The question sounds awkward when asked like that, but smoother variations appear in practically every online argument against the removal of Memphis’ public memorials to Nathan Bedford Forrest and Jefferson Davis.

Memphis Mayor W.W. Herenton didn’t remove the offending monuments when he was in office eight years ago, and he’s black. His successor, A C Wharton, didn’t take them down either, and he’s black, too.

So, why is a diverse group of activists, led by #takeemdown organizer Sawyer, being so hard on the white guy in the mayor’s office who says he’s doing everything he can within the framework of the law to remove Forrest and Davis from undeserved places of honor in public memory?

For starters, Sawyer — an uncommonly cool-headed firebrand — doesn’t buy Mayor Strickland’s narrative.

“The law is unjust,” she states, flatly criticizing a Tennessee ordinance preventing the removal of confederate statues in Tennessee. “No other statues in the state have that kind of protection.”

Sawyer recognizes earlier, failed attempts to remove Forrest and Davis, but says, “we’re trying to do this now.” She’s got no issues with criticizing Herenton and Wharton “when we’re talking about the historic achievements of our former mayors.” But, she says, it has “nothing to do with right now. It has no bearing on what the current administration chooses to do.”

Sawyer is a Memphis native, a St. Mary’s grad, and the director of diversity and cultural competence for Teach for America. She jumped into activism with Black Lives Matter three years ago, and into politics in 2016, when she gave House District 90 incumbent John DeBerry a run for his money. Steeped in history and cultural literacy, Sawyer’s activism, like her campaign, was born of frustration.

“I guess it makes sense,” says Sawyer, who practically grew up backstage at the National Civil Rights Museum, where her father once served as chief financial officer. “Martin Luther King died here, and it feels like a lot of hope and a lot of gumption died here, too. We’re really stuck on history, not progress, and I think that’s what makes me sad.”

“There’s a lot of old white money making a lot of decisions in a majority-black city, and there’s no such thing as old black money,” Sawyer continues.

That’s a situation she wants to change, and she believes removal of the confederate memorials is as good a place to start as any.

“If we can’t even get these statues down, how are we going to get something done about the big issues?” she says. “The conversations we have are about how black people, poor white people, and brown people are uneducated and reckless. They don’t care about their kids and have too much sex, so they have too many kids. And they’re killing each other and stealing from each other, and they don’t care about anything. We don’t talk about what it means to spend more money on cops than education or to build more prisons than schools.”

Sawyer doesn’t think statue removal is merely symbolic. “You’re in a 65-percent black city with [a statue of] the Grand Wizard, or whatever big man [Forrest] was in the early days of the Ku Klux Klan,” she says. “I can tell you all the stories about what [he] said or did, but the bottom line is, [Forrest and Davis] felt they were superior to black people and their treatment of black people was odious at best. I can’t think, outside of Native Americans, of another group of people that are told to just take it.”

When asked why she’s not satisfied with the mayor’s plan to work inside the law, Sawyer cites city council attorney Wade, who’s on record as saying the state law exists to ensure no confederate statue in Tennessee will ever be removed.

“[Stricklend] could have let us cover the statue,” Sawyer says, recalling a recent protest and fishing for some evidence of good faith. “Instead [he] sent [his] soldiers in, like we were on a battlefield.”

Sawyer’s activism comes at a cost to her and her family. “My parents always know where I am,” she says, describing an informal check-in ritual the Sawyers adopted when things got weird. “To get a text from your child saying, ‘Hey here’s my new number because I was woken up this morning by white supremacist on my cell phone.’ That’s tough.”

“It creates stress in the family,” Sawyer admits. “They’re supportive, but it’s hard not to sometimes say, ‘Oh, I wish you’d just have a seat.'”

What keeps her going? Last June, a student from Memphis’ Grad Academy discussed the monument in Health Sciences Park. “All my life, I’ve passed that statue,” she [the student] said. “And all my life, I thought that must be somebody important.”

That, Sawyer says, cannot stand.

“No, it doesn’t oppress you everyday,” she says, “but any time it comes into your awareness, it’s like, that’s awful. And it’s in my city.” — Chris Davis

(For the full Q&A with Tami Sawyer visit memphisflyer.com.)

Crowds gathered in Health Sciences park to advocate for the removal of the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

The Saga Of Memphis’ Forrest Statue

All things considered, it’s a wonder that it’s taken this long for a truly serious effort to be launched to remove the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue from a prominent downtown park.

There are few things more apt to give confederate nostalgia a bad name than a swarm of militant neo-Nazis, marching with torches, shouting anti-Semitic slogans, and thrusting out stiff-arm salutes.

And if that vicarious tarnish, famously enacted in Charlottesville, Virginia, was enough to finish off a statue of Robert E. Lee, a respected military commander hitherto given a pass on the strength of a claim that he had only taken up arms during the Civil War to defend his native state of Virginia, consider the actual deeds attributed to the erstwhile “Wizard of the Saddle,” Nathan Bedford Forrest — a slave trader before the Civil War; the supposed author of a massacre of surrendering black troops at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, during the war; and the first Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan after the war.

That’s a hat trick of infamy. Though, to be sure, the general, a certified tactical genius, has had apologists eager to deny or soft-pedal those accusations, none more active and prominent than the N.B. Forrest Camp 215 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which raised some $10,000 to erect a large granite sign bearing large black letters saying “FORREST PARK” in late 2012.

The erection of the sign was an act of hubris, the breach of an unofficial truce between supporters and detractors of the Forrest statue that had held since the last previous dustup in 2005.

Tempers were ultimately cooled back then, at least partly due to the attitude of then-Mayor W.W. Herenton, who opposed “outside agitators” like Al Sharpton, who had joined local officials and clergy to demand a change in the status of the park, a removal of the monument, and a relocation of the graves of Forrest and his wife, which lay underneath the memorial and had been transplanted there from Elmwood Cemetery in 1905.

It was a turn-of-the-century era characterized by the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which sanctioned Southern segregation measures or at least acquiesced in them.

The tide of history, including a full-fledged civil rights revolution, had conspicuously turned by the time of the 2005 controversy, which ended in a sort of stand-off — one that was accepted, though reluctantly, even by Walter Bailey, the venerable Shelby County commissioner and civil rights activist.

But the provocative appearance in 2012 of that that new sign upped the ante in what had become a simmering conflict over the very meaning and symbolism of the confederacy.

Bailey and others cried foul over the new sign, and in the resulting uproar, both the city council and then-mayor Wharton publicly called for the relocation of the Forrest statue and graves.

Action on that front was stymied by legislation in Nashville, but the council did succeed in changing the names of the three downtown city parks associated with the confederacy.

Forrest Park became Health Sciences Park; Jefferson Davis Park became Mississippi River Park; and Memphis Park became the new name of Confederate Park, where a statue of rebel president Davis had been erected in 1964 as an antidote to the civil rights activism of the time.

A renewed burst of activism followed from the murder in 2015 of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, by an unregenerate racist with an obvious fetish for the confederate battle flag. That once ubiquitous standard began coming down from flagpoles everywhere, and simultaneously the fig-leaf of states’ rights as a cloak for the confederacy was becoming more and more transparent.

There was new agitation locally for action on the monuments to both Forrest and Davis, but a formal request by the city of Memphis to the state Historical Commission for a waiver permitting relocation of the statues was denied. And in 2016, the legislature further hardened the state’s ad hoc Heritage Protection Act, which already forbade removal of war monuments, extending that protection now to statues of individuals.

This year, with the shadow of Charlottesville looming large, a consensus toward turning the historical page seemed inevitable. Momentum was gathering to force the issue, with even Governor Bill Haslam siding with the city in its desire to remove the offending statuaries.

Whether the governor’s wishes carry any weight will be determined at the forthcoming October meeting of the Historical Commission. — Jackson Baker

We’re History

The Tennessee Historical Commission is a varied bunch.

The 29-member board includes 24 governor-appointees, split equally among the state’s three Grand Divisions. The other five are ex-officio members: the state historian, state archeologist, the Tennessee Commissioner of Environment and Conservation, the state librarian and archivist, and the governor.

Whites outnumber African Americans and other racial minorities on the board. One seat on the commission — one of the eight from West Tennessee — is vacant.

The board typically votes on whether or not a site should be listed on the Federal Register of Historic Places or whether or not to place one of the state’s historic markers. Voting whether to allow Memphis to remove its Forrest statue during a time of national protest over confederate monuments puts the commission in an unaccustomed hot seat.

“[The decision] juxtaposes the valid historic inquiry of how the Civil War was remembered and memorialized at the time the monuments were erected with the modern sensitivities of a significant portion of the local citizenry, which is itself divided ideologically and racially on the propriety of their location and indeed their existence,” says THC board member Sam D. Elliott, a Chattanooga attorney who says local input on the Forrest removal waiver is one of 13 factors the commission will consider when they vote.

Elliott is a board member of the Tennessee Civil War Preservation Association (TCWPA), a group dedicated to protecting Tennessee’s Civil War battlefields. Also on that board are Lee Millar, the outspoken leader of the Memphis chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and Curt Fields, a well-known Ulysses S. Grant impersonator from Collierville.

One of the West Tennessee seats is filled by local history professor, Doug Cupples, who was one of the members of a board created in 2015 to consider re-naming three Memphis parks. Cupples was against it, saying the confederacy was “a significant part of the city’s history,” and noting that Forrest was one of the city’s top historical figures.

Cupples’ suggestion at the time of the re-naming vote was to add monuments to the park to include African-American citizens.

The commission includes, among others, Earnie Bacon, another TCWPA member; Ray Smith, an Oak Ridge historian, Kent Dollar, a Tennessee Technological University history professor who wrote Soldiers of the Cross, Confederate Soldier-Christians and the Impact of the War on their Faith; and Toye Heape, a member of the Native History Association who once sued the state over a road to be built over sacred burial grounds. — TS

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A Q & A with Take ’em Down 901 Activist Tami Sawyer

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

I interviewed educator and Take ’em Down 901 activist Tami Sawyer Friday, August 25, a week after protests to remove Confederate memorials from Memphis’ public parks ended with police action and arrests. In the same week’s time, Mayor Jim Strickland pushed back against critics and the public conversation about appropriate means/timetables for removing inappropriate statues honoring Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader, Klansman, and general of the Confederate army. Things got personal and cloudy, as they often do when individual feelings become proxy for public narratives.

The interview was condensed into a profile for a Memphis Flyer cover story — a package covering various aspects of the Confederate monument debate. Soundbites don’t always do Sawyer justice, so here’s a more complete picture.
Justin Fox Burks

Tami Sawyer, #takeemdown organizer and activist


Memphis Flyer: How big is this fight over the statues? What does it really look like?

Tami Sawyer: Ursula Madden says 10% of Memphis is on our side 80% doesn’t care and 10% is against us. I don’t think those are scientific numbers.

Maybe not scientific, but do they sound right to you? There’s always a lot of indifference, whatever the issue is.

It feels like it’s probably 30 – 40- 30. And the 40 that don’t care aren’t necessarily against us or against me. The 30 that cares though, are loud, vehement, and angry.

I suspect almost everybody has some opinion on this. There’s certainly no shortage of comments online.

I can’t read it. I haven’t watched video of myself because I can’t ignore the comments. And the way Facebook works now the comments start automatically. The news stations live streamed a lot of things we’ve done instead of just recording them, so those comments scroll across the screen while you’re watching the live video. I just can’t, you know? Because, like today when my flight touched down the first text I get says, “So, I hear you’re running for Mayor.” There’s all this conjecture.

Are you running for Mayor? Is this the big announcement story? I don’t think I’m prepared for the big announcement story.

No, I’m not. I couldn’t run for Mayor off this. Well, maybe I could. I’ll say I could, but I don’t think it would be a smart idea. It would be inauthentic to use this as a launching pad. I do this because I care about it. I am trying to tie politics into it, though because I don’t think we’ve had people-oriented leadership in Memphis. I hope that people are paying attention to the possibility of having leaders who are oriented with them, not the East Poplar business community.

So where did the rumor you’re running for Mayor come from? Detractors who think you’re just doing all this for attention or is it wishful thinking from supporters?

I think a large part of it is detractors. They think this is all a political ploy. They say I’m a demagogue who’s leading the people into bloodshed for my own political gain. At the end of the day 1% of Memphians vote, so unless I was leading the people to bloodshed via voter registration… You know? There is a feeling or assumption that this is all for my own personal profile — my own political profile. I put my family at risk. My parents are business people. My sibling is a business person. And I put their livelihood at risk daily when I go up against the big guys. [pullquote-2]
No matter how supportive they may be, that’s got to create stress.

Yes, it creates stress in the family. They’re supportive but it’s hard not to sometimes say. “Oh I wish you’d just have a seat.”

The same week I turned 50 I posted to Facebook a 20-year-old short story about being caught in the middle of a shootout in CK’s coffee house and noted that it was more or less a blow-by-blow account of a thing that actually happened to me and my wife. 20 years after the fact my mom still freaked out a little — parents wanting their kids to be safe runs deep.

My parents were out of town at the height of everything last week. So, to get a text from your child no matter how old I am — I’m 35 — to get a text from me saying, “Hey here’s my new number because I was woken up this morning by white supremacist on my cell phone…”. That’s tough. I recognize the stress and I do worry. So we have a little system.They always know where I am and they always know when I’m home. So at this last protest they went to a fundraiser and someone comes up to them and says seven people were just arrested, have you talked to your daughter?

Yes. Exactly. That’s got to be really hard for everybody.

Every time we talk about the impact on the family, the bottom line is “We want you to be safe. Even if you continue this path, we’ve got to know that you’re going to be safe.” I’m 35. I’m single. I’m childless. I live alone. My address is public record because I’ve run for public office. At one point my phone number was public record because somebody decided it was cool to post it on TV.

I remember seeing that. They showed a press release or something and didn’t blur out the number.

Channel-3, in their haste to break news, held a copy of the press release in their hand, took a photo and posted that photo like, “Here’s the press release!” Then there was a video. I was so panicked I went off on everybody 3, 13, 24 — “Anyone who’s ever said my name never say my name again. I quit.” (Laughter). You know, I never had a plan. I stepped out three years ago doing this stuff because I couldn’t believe we lived here and it was so quiet. How are we the home of the end — well, almost the end — of the Civil Rights Movement? I guess that makes sense, you know? Martin Luther King died here and it feels like a lot of hope and a lot of gumption died here too. Now we’re really stuck on History, not progress and I think that’s what makes me sad.

That reminds me of a long afternoon at Judge D’Army Bailey’s home in Hein Park. He was frustrated because he never wanted the National Civil Rights Museum to be “History under glass.” He wanted it to be a nexus or flashpoint for a living, progressing movement…

I think the museum with its expansion and programming…

Oh sure, I’m not criticizing the museum. It’s really grown and evolved its mission.

I grew up in the museum. My dad was CFO when I was in high school, so I used to walk in the back door. I remember back then it was just a place you went and visited once. You brought relatives when they came to town and there wasn’t much else going on.

Exactly. A place to look back at something that happened not a place you experienced something that was happening. That’s what frustrated Bailey — and you just sounded a lot like him.

That’s why MLK 50 can’t be just about the remembrance. 50 years later what gains can we say he made? And I have a complicated relationship with that statement because I’m second-generation college educated on one side of my family, and third-generation on the other. I graduated from St. Mary’s. My parents are considered upper middle class in Memphis. I’m considered upper middle class for Memphis. I’ve never wanted economically for much. So my story is not the story of the average black person or low-income person in Memphis. It’s like I told my dad just a week ago, everything they gave me they gave me with a dose of reality. We were never those kids who were allowed to believe we had made it. My mama was like, ‘Y’all are one generation from the hood.’

So it’s not the average story, it’s still part of the story.

When Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote The Case for Reparations, he wrote about a family who thought they bought a house in Chicago only to find out they’d been renting the whole time because of redlining and mortgage fraud. And with the loss of that home, the entire family spirals back into poverty. That’s the story. There’s no such thing as black wealth in our country. Even with people we idolize like Jay-Z or Beyonce — pull the roster of their cousins and family members and you will not find a wealthy generation. For example, Paris Hilton — all of her her generation and her parents’ generation have some wealth. It may be “poor” wealth — a million dollars — or true wealth like Paris. And its wealth because they have enough money for the next two or three generations to never experience poverty. So here in Memphis we have people with money and we have people whose children will have some comfort but, for example, I am probably two or three tough incidents in my life away from going from middle class into being impoverished. There’s a racial wealth gap we’re experiencing here, and we refuse to acknowledge it. There’s a lot of old white money making a lot of decisions in a majority-black city. And there’s no such thing as old black money, so the power structure is skewed. We’re looking at a scientific story here — a comedic line up of what Jim Crow and the following racist policies such as redlining and gerrymandering have done — and the impact of that story on people’s abilities, not to just survive, but grow.

That story’s never really allowed to have much of a public life. It gets lost in more sensational or ideological content.

We don’t have those conversations. The conversations we have are about how black people, poor white people, and brown people are uneducated and reckless, and don’t care about their kids, and have too much sex so they have too many kids, and they’re killing each other and stealing from each other, and they don’t care about anything. We won’t talk about everything I just said. We don’t talk about what it means to spend more money on cops than education or to build more prisons than schools.

Right. It’s all supermarket tabloid headlines and comment section trolling. Numbers show trends, but, “Let’s talk about personal responsibility.”

I had someone ask me about personal responsibility once. I was like, “Yes that’s real.” People have to have personal responsibility. You pick up a gun and rob somebody, you made a bad decision. But now let’s talk about what real social social justice looks like. For every crime, there’s a story. You know we idolize New York gangs today — the Italian gangs, and the Irish gangs that arose in the 20th-Century because of the sheer levels of poverty the Italian and Irish immigrants were experiencing and because of what prohibition meant for the money they could make off liquor sales. But today we don’t talk about “white on white crime” or “Irish on Irish crime” or “Italian on Italian crime.” Instead we watch it on the big screens, and the gangsters get to play themselves.”

Great point. I have three paintings in my house depicting the evolution of the gangs from Jewish to Irish and Italian and eventually Columbian. Organized crime played a real part in moving these groups out of the slums. But before I go down that rabbit hole, let’s talk about the Confederate statues.

Okay.

I’m a big believer that language shapes us. Stories shape us — our identity. So, while taking down a bunch of statues won’t instantly solve crime or poverty, what you want to accomplish here is a real thing that will have real consequences. Critics want to know why you’re putting so much effort into something symbolic when you could be working on the big problems. So is changing the story— that these guys were great men — real, or is it symbolic?

It’s both. It’s not just symbolic if we are able to continue a movement out of this. If we’re able to change conversations and make them about what social, racial, and economic justice really looks like. It’s not more than symbolic if the statues come down and everyone goes home and says ‘racism is solved in Memphis’, which is my fear. It’s more than symbolic because you’re in a 65% black City with a founder of the KKK, or Grand Wizard, or whatever big man he was in the early days of the Ku Klux Klan. And we’ve also got Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. I can tell you all the stories about what they said or what they did, but the bottom line is, they felt they were superior to black people and their treatment of black people was odious at best, no matter what Nathan Bedford Forrest did when he got dementia. Don’t Give A fuck, and you can print that. I don’t care what you renounce at 85, or whatever.

His defenders prioritize a few incidents that don’t really seem to be in balance with how the man made his money or what he fought and killed for. I keep seeing comment section references to this one particular speech he made when a little black girl kissed him on the cheek, or something like that.

He leaned down and kissed the black woman on her cheek. Do you know how many people have done that for political purposes? Trump’s held black babies. He’s held Mexican babies then said he’s going to build a wall around our country to keep them out. Who cares, don’t print that shit on my [Facebook] wall!

But let’s be generous. Let’s allow, whether it’s true or not, that this version of Forrest was the real true Forrest, not the slave trader or the butcher. That’s not how he’s presenting in the park. He’s presenting as ‘The Wizard of the Saddle,’ in the uniform of an enemy the United States…

Bearing arms…

Yes, bearing arms to defend the institution of slavery — the institution that made him rich…

Riding his horse…

Yes, ‘the noble warrior.’

There was a meeting in June and we had maybe eight or nine kids from Grad Academy. And one of them said, “All my life I’ve passed that statue and thought that it must be somebody important. So when I talk about this — about how I don’t want my niece to play in the shadow of him, or turn sixteen and be driving down Union and that statue still stands. No, it doesn’t oppress you everyday. It’s not a thing everyday. But anytime it comes into your awareness it’s like that’s awful. And it’s in my city. I think if we were to pull those statues down — and I don’t care where we put them. I don’t care what happens to them, and you can print that too. If you pull them down and they turn to dust, I’m sorry. People want me to be politically correct about it, but I do not care as long as they no longer stand in the city of Memphis.What I am interested in, is what we do with that space afterwards to unite Memphians.

Oh, right. What should we do? I’ve seen so many suggestions.

I think public art is good. I think having either a contest or a bid process for people to submit proposals about unifying art. However that works. What does not represent our city in a way that uplifts a majority of Memphians is Nathan Bedford Forrest. Or Jefferson Davis either. And these aren’t hidden Parks. These are on major thoroughfares. Their placement is strategic. I think I put an MLK quote on Instagram. It was something about willful ignorance — I’ll have to look it up to get it correct. But it was basically about how continuing to argue and say ‘I don’t get how this hurts black people or how this oppresses African Americans’ is willful. And that’s my biggest concern because, even if the statues come down, the conversation continues: “Y’all are weak. Y’all let a statue bother you.” Those are things I get.
[pullquote-1] How is tearing down the icons of historic oppression weak? You take action, you capture the flag…

We took action. I can’t think, outside of Native Americans, another group of people that are told to just take it. Just take it. Deal with it. I was in Chicago talking about Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. He talks about the waves of immigration that came into our country. Each wave assimilated and were able to uplift their heroes and remove any references to them ever having been the Negro. Right?

Like you were saying about the New York gangs, Luc Sante’s Low Life…

Think about American Gods and the waves religion that came with immigrants. Which ones stood? We still have references to Norse mythology and references even to Egyptian mythology even though we never had an Egyptian immigration wave. Where are the [other] African gods? They were destroyed on plantations in the South. I’d be crazy if I stood forth as a future political later and said I practice the Yoruban religion, right?

You would probably have difficulty persuading a key constituency.

Everyone.

Okay, everyone.

Everybody would say, ‘Okay Tami, you’ve crossed the line now.’ So I don’t think it’s just symbolic. I think it’s pushing or forcing conversations. It’s forcing a lot of people out of a lot of closets. I didn’t know we were, but now that I do I’m pushing even harder than before. Don’t just wear your Klan hood in the closet, come at me. Come out of the shadows with your racist Facebook posts Terry Roland. And lukewarm white progressives who say, “This is not a real issue,” but can’t look a black person in the face and say it.

Well, you told me we were going to talk about white fragility. And this feels like the perfect place to introduce the topic. And maybe, if we’re going to talk about that we should do it in the context of Mayor Strickland’s pushback or meltdown — His comments about all he’s done for the black community — he’s trying to get the statues down, he’s tutored a child etc. A lot of people see this and say, ‘Well, you know he has a point.’ But for me, for whatever points he may have made, the takeaway was that you and the other activists weren’t grateful enough. That seems like textbook fragility.

I’ve lost friends over this. Progressive friends. People who were like ‘Tami, you know I support you all the way. All the way to the governorship if that’s what you want.’ Now they’re like, “I’m ride or die for Strickland, and you are being unfair to this man who got a quarter of the black vote in Memphis.’ This is a man who strategically split the black vote and then goes forward to further split black people in Memphis because the photo op…

Well, it’s Memphis. It’s what we do. But whether it’s intentional or not, when you look at the last week, delegitimizing the activists does appear to be a more pressing, actionable goal for for the Mayor than getting the statues down.

It’s saying, ‘Hey .Tami Sawyer has lost her mind, these are the real black leaders. Don’t go follow that rabble rouser. Everything they’ve put out in the last month has been racially coded, straight out of J. Edgar Hoover’s media playbook.

HA! hadn’t anticipated J. Edgar showing up in the conversation…

Trump did the same thing. Take that photo back in January this year. At the time, black people are in the streets and upset about Trump’s inauguration, but Trump gets the presidents of all the HBCUs in the country to come get their picture made standing around him while he’s signing an agreement — the most basic accord. It was like, “I will support HBCUs.” There was uproar in the black community, and people were split. Some are like, we’ve got to work with him so that’s good, right? Others were like, “Why are we always selling out when we stand up against him? Well, now it’s August 2017 that was January. So, 7-months later the HBCUs are fighting for federal funding which is frozen. They’re boycotting any future HBCU summits. They’re calling for his impeachment, but what will go down in history is the photo op. So anything they may say against him now, all he has to do is tweet that photo of those 25 or 30 presidents of black HBCUs, standing at his desk smiling. Images are so powerful. We don’t even communicate in words anymore, it’s all GIFs or memes.

I’ve got to admit, I don’t even fully understand the conflict. Whatever constraints the Mayor may or may not be under in pursuing statue removal, your aim is straightforward — to take the statues down now. It was your goal yesterday, it will be your goal tomorrow. If the Mayor has a plan that MIGHT get the statues down Friday, your role isn’t to say, ‘Hooray, now this thing that hasn’t happened in the past might happen and sing “Kumbaya,” it’s to turn up the heat. Because “Kumbaya” has a pretty well documented history of failing to get the job done. Is that a fair was to characterize the dynamic?

In his mind and the minds of the people who support him, I’m an agitator and I’ve launched a revolution on Union Avenue. So he can’t be seen smiling with me at a table. But he can be seen with the historical leaders of the black community — pastors. So he goes and gets them forgetting that I’m also supported by pastors.

What do you say to people who believe he’s on your side and you’re being unfair to him? It’s not hard to see how people make the leap from, ‘He has to follow the law’ to the idea that you’re the one being unreasonable.

The law is unjust. Alan Wade said himself  — said the law was built to make sure a Confederate statue was never removed in Tennessee. No other statue in the state is protected like that. Because we’re not trying to move any other statues.

And so these photo-ops, these complaints about gratitude…

What’s infuriating is using the photo to say ‘We will continue to follow the law and these people stood by and supported me and listened to me and that’s that.’ Only, the law is unjust. Alan Wade said himself — the law was built to make sure a Confederate statue was never removed. Never. And then, if you want to, we can talk about the MLK vs. Confederate argument in just a second because that’s another ridiculous argument.

Right? It’s like a swap meet. Like the things these men stood for and represented were in any way comparable.

It is.

I’ll give you Jefferson Davis in exchange for MLK and Sharpton.

Right! I’ll give you Sharpton…

If you put a blanket over Forrest.

It really is that kind of bargaining and then you have to remind them there is no MLK statue in the city where he was killed.

Well, there is a memorial on Main, on the mall. But it’s abstract — a Sphinx of sorts. It’s ramp shaped and always seems to attract more skateboarders than Civil Rights tourists.

He’s not riding a horse, I know that. Even the street names — Forest is one of the most beautiful streets in the city. It runs right behind the zoo. Where is MLK?

Underdeveloped stretch between downtown and midtown…

It’s not just Memphis. That’s a running joke everywhere. You know you’re in a black neighborhood if you see Martin Luther King Street/Boulevard. And it’s not done for racial healing or equality, it’s done to shut people up. ‘So I’m going to give the black community an MLK Street in their neighborhood and be like, ‘Have a great day.’’ But if you pull the incomes of the people who live on the street named Forest and then compare it to the income to the people who live on MLK — that’s your story.

So what does all the drama with the Mayor mean?

It means now I have to rebuild relationships and talk to folks. And we’re all focused on who was in that picture, and why, and who wasn’t in the room, and why, and who got calls and who didn’t. There was the letter showing the city had withdrawn the petition from the THC agenda in 2016, and that didn’t get any traction.There’s a whole letter from a Commissioner of the Historical Commission saying ‘This is not on us, this is on your city because in 2016 the petition was removed from the agenda and no one had attended a meeting in two years.’ And it got buried. Only one station reported on it and that was Fox 13.

And, on the subject of dividing, there was a second petition that emerged and was shared around. It was a Google doc, I think. Said something like, ‘If you REALLY support statue removal, sign this.’ Or something like that — it implied there were other things you COULD do, but this was the serious thing to do. In Google docs. But you’d already been collecting signatures via change.org for a long time.

We’ve got a letter — a petition with 4500 signatures addressed to the Historical Commission, Jim Strickland, and Governor Haslam. And we know Change.org sends notes every time somebody signs. To continuously say we need to focus on the state or the commission is to ignore what we have done that and act like we’re just out here without any direction. We did our research. So if you know that, but you won’t cooperate with us even though we’ve done the research, and we’ve found the loopholes… well? You could have let us cover the statue, instead you sent your soldiers in, like we were on a Battlefield. It goes back to the whole unjust law thing.

And if the City Council’s attorney is saying it’s easier to kill a prisoner with a lethal injection than it is to get a wavier on these statues…
And how long is Alan Wade served this city?

Can’t say right off. He’s been City Council attorney for….

Mayors come and go but Alan Wade stays right where he is. So Alan Wade sits there and tells you this. He tells the whole public, knowing what kind of media is there, knowing who’s in the room live streaming it, knowing everything he says is going to be reported. He deliberately tells you that it’s easier to kill someone with lethal injection in Tennessee than it is to remove a Confederate statue. How can you continue to say, ‘Yes, maybe we’ll follow your process’? And if Alan Wade says the statues can be covered, how do you say, ‘We don’t think we can cover the statues.’ I’m not saying Alan Wade is the Morgan Freeman of attorneys, but he’s close. And I’ll tell you, I wasn’t expecting half of what he said. I was in tears. I mean, legally our fight is being supported here.

Let’s talk about another thing that confuses people, I think — And I’m sorry for asking because this isn’t good question, but it’s one I’m seeing asked all over. What do you say to people who are like, ‘Why are you picking on the poor white mayor who’s doing all he can for you when African-American mayors like Wharton and Herenton did nothing?”

Well…

Maybe we can do a speed round of questions where you address all the terrible questions that show up in comment sections. All the ‘common sense’ questions …

Well, Wharton didn’t get them down. And Herenton didn’t get them down. I’m like, “Okay, sure, but we’re trying to do this now.” Is that stuff something we can discuss when we’re talking about the historic achievements of our former mayors? Sure it is. Absolutely. But it has nothing to do with right now, nor bearing on today and what the current Administration chooses or chooses not to do. I don’t care what Herenton and Wharton did, because I care about what we want to do right now, and if you continue to block our efforts — if you pit us against the police — if our legal observers overhear someone tell the police over the radio, “Arrest all those motherfuckers right now,” you’re not worried about what we really think. You probably wish we’d never brought the issue up, because now we’re tainting the history of your Administration. I can’t sit in a room and celebrate MLK 50 with an Administration that won’t move this statue. It’s like Supreme Court-forced busing. It’s like 70% of white kids being removed from public schools. This is like having to be sued by the NAACP to integrate with just 13 kids — kindergarteners put on the front lines. This is — I’m trying not to use the expression white supremacist because we’ve got in so much trouble for those comments. Because I’m not telling people, ‘You’re a closet racist.’ What I’m saying is, ‘There’s a bias in your awareness and in your policies.’

What you’re describing is the functional cornerstone of white supremacy though. Isn’t it? Not Nazis or extremists…

I just don’t like to use certain words. Like ‘Nazi,’ because it lets people divorce themselves from the idea that this is America and it’s happening right now, right here. Our version of hate is home-grown. It’s not about people watching what happened in Germany. It’s not about that, it’s about homegrown hate. Our supremacist hatred does not come from Germany. It come 1608, Jamestown. And on from there.

The Sons of the Confederate Veterans don’t identify as a White Supremacist group but they described the removal the statues as, and I’m quoting, “cultural genocide in the South,” and as, “A blow against the people of Tennessee.” Seems to me that defines supremacy by completely eliminating blacks and black culture from Southern culture. It’s not genocide, but it’s erasure — which is, near as I can tell, the cultural equivalent.

That’s my thing. If we’re talking about Heritage not hate, when you say this is about the Southerners’ rights, well I’m a Southerner too. My family were all slaves in Fayette County. We have the bills. We own of the land. We have the land my great-great-grandparents were slaves on. Most of the people in Memphis were slaves in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee. So saying the Confederacy is Southern Heritage and depicting Southern Heritage as being blond haired and blue eyed, doesn’t represent all Southerners. At one point there were more black people in the South than white. Until the Great Migration there were. North Carolina closed its borders to black people. South Carolina practiced Eugenics and sterilization. The black population in the South was destroyed as they saw slavery coming to an end. The zoning laws in place in neighborhoods were for the protection of white families, and not against theft and robbery — against friendship and relationships, which goes to the very homegrown fear of the white race being diluted through relations and African descendants. And here we are.

And here we are.

I said something on Facebook about, ‘Don’t tell me my heritage isn’t your heritage.’ I burn in the sun. Gayle Rose had to pull me under a tree at the protest because I was about to die. I was about to die in front of Nathan Bedford Forrest. I was red in the face and hyperventilating, and did not realize I was having a heat stroke. I sunburn as quick as any white person. I overheat. I have freckles. I turn pale in the winter. That’s violence in my blood. That’s violence in my blood. I’m not that by choice. So yeah, we share the same heritage.

So what do you tell people who think the statues are unimportant compared to poverty or other issues.

There are people who think, “You all just want to tear these statues down why don’t you want to solve for crime. Why don’t you want to solve for education? And like that. I get that from black people and white people both. But we are not one-note people. People can care about more than one thing. When I say ‘we’ I mean those of us organizing and meeting and participating. This is a multicultural fight. And it’s made up of people who are engaged in all different types of things. We’ve got Free Palestine out there with us. We’ve got our LGBTQ people. We’ve got Fight for 15 and Black Lives Matter. You can go on and on and on. You got the clergy. There was Jewish clergy, Catholic, protestant Christian clergy. White Christian, black Christian. These are people who are engaged in different things. I work in education. I work at Teach for America so my work daily is about making sure that teachers are prepared to impact their kids lives and not to further oppress or enter into classrooms as oppressors. So there’s that. I work on black economic freedom. I’m well-versed in the racial wealth gap because I’ve spent a lot of time learning about, and trying to find programs and opportunities to get on a level playing field, economically. And what that kind of thing looks like in Memphis and nationally. Social Justice. Criminal Justice.

What does it look like?

We can’t solve for Crime with more cops on the street we need to solve for crime with youth programing. My dream would be by next summer we’d be able to open a social justice camp to gets kids out of the street looking for something to do, but educational. Learning about history and their rights. Training people to be future lawyers and future Justice workers and future activists. Getting kids involved and self-advocating for themselves so, when they see what resources they don’t have, they don’t give up and advocate for their community. The teachers that have shown up and brought their students. Or come on their own are you going to tell them to go focus on education? People can care about more than one thing.

And things like crime and poverty — these are enormous abstract issues that people have been trying to solve since the beginning of civilization. Taking down the statues is so imminently doable.

Yeah, so the statues could have come down. This shouldn’t be the issue that it is. Bottom line. Should have been over.

Or, short of that, any clear, active measure by the Mayor to provide evidence of sincerity… Something people can see and understand the same way they understand what it means when you send in the police.

Let’s cover them. What makes it crazy is we keep going. And nothing. So if we can’t get these statues down, how are we going to get something done about the big issues? It’s like saying, ‘Mr. Mayor, we think there should be more money in the budget for Education,’ and hearing, ‘No, sorry, that’s grandstanding. You should have told me 2-months ago you wanted money for education.’ We’ve decreased the education budget by $65-million and we’ve increased policing by $75-million. And I don’t know what that’s resulted in except for more black and brown kids in jail. You know “tough-on-crime,” and “Fed Up,” well, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t. Building more prisons than schools doesn’t work. You take 18-years away from somebody’s life and then you put them back on the street? My formative years were spent figuring out what it meant to be adult between the age of 18 and yesterday. What if I had to do that in prison for some petty crime? What would I be to society when you let me go? We’re locking kids up at 12 and keeping them for years and expecting them to come home and be a part of a community. Somebody that was locked up 15 years ago missed the advent of the iPhone. You hand them a smartphone and they’re like, ‘Oh can I call you at home?’ I haven’t had a house phone since 2004. Technology moves so fast causing whole populations of black and brown youth to miss out on being able to support and advance their communities. It goes even further. Think about marriage. They talk about black love and why the average black woman has a higher degree, or better job than black men. This is why. Because black men getting arrested for petty crimes and getting 18 years.

When people think of white supremacy they think of the Klan burning crosses and Neo-Nazi skinheads and all the extreme examples. But isn’t it fair to characterize all of this that you’re describing here as how white supremacy actually works?

People say, ‘Well I’m not personally white supremacist.’ We’re saying, ‘But wake up. You’re living out white supremacist structures that continue to oppress, subvert, destroy, and destruct a whole culture.’

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Seeing Promise in Turmoil

CREDIT: Power Box

What difference a day makes.

In one day — overnight, actually — a man’s career and name are ruined.

Now let’s look at the flip side of that: What a difference a day doesn’t make. A teen walks into a police precinct and describes a crime — and then nothing. Not a day, not days, not months … years until the claim is truly pursued.

This week’s cover story is about the charges leveled at Robert Lipscomb. The only truth we have at this point is that someone isn’t telling the truth.

Rumor has it that this is a plot to clear the mayor of any unpleasantness before October’s elections. Rumor has it that this is a plot to defile the mayor before October’s elections.

And then there’s the Cosby Effect people have been throwing around about the additional alleged victims. Are others latching on for attention? Are they for real? Maybe they aren’t, but let’s note that no one believed Cosby’s victims until it was nearly in the double digits.

Whatever shakes out in this case, maybe something positive will come. Maybe someone inclined toward abuse will think twice. Maybe some kid who’s been abused will say, Enough!

I recently profiled Tami Sawyer and her business Power Box for Memphis magazine’s 901 blog. She saw promise in turmoil. We can all learn from her example.

Sawyer is a native Memphian and a social activist. She lived in Washington, D.C., for 10 years. She jokes that she aged out of D.C., but admits that family and a new spark in the city drew her back home.

Last November, two days before Thanksgiving to be exact, a grand jury moved not to indict Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown. Social media erupted. There were calls to boycott Black Friday.

Sawyer saw a different path. Instead of boycotting, she tweeted out, we should buy black on Black Friday. She began Instragramming black businesses. A germ of an idea for Power Box was formed.

Power Box, which launched on August 18th, connects black-owned businesses with consumers. Each week, Power Box profiles businesses, offering giveaways of products from those businesses.

Sawyer has recruited nearly 800 black-owned businesses for the site. She says between 400 and 500 more are in her queue to check out.

Sawyer says the name of Power Box was very deliberate. She latched onto the idea of including “power” early on, but the box came later. As she explains “power box” has meaning. “It’s the transformer. It’s the light in everybody’s head.”

She says of Power Box, “This is a way to have a collective impact. For me, this is true social activism.”

Categories
News News Feature

The Roots of Protest

Poverty is a form of violence.

It holds millions in bondage, locked into neighborhoods stripped of public or private investment, trapped in low-wage jobs. Often, this violence is state-sponsored via policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor, who are often brown and black. So it is a short walk from national protests against police brutality to calls for economic justice.

Rookie activist Tami Sawyer wants to help people in Memphis — the poorest large metro area in the nation — make that journey. In the past two weeks, the 32-year-old St. Mary’s alumna organized two die-ins — one outside the National Civil Rights Museum and another on Beale Street. These and dozens of similar protests nationwide were sparked by deaths of two unarmed black men — Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island. In both cases, a grand jury failed to indict the white officers who killed them.

But the fury on display at protests and on social media is not directed solely at a warped criminal justice system. It is the entire game that is rigged.

“We can scream, we can yell, we can cry on TV,” Sawyer said, “but it will fall on deaf ears. We don’t have economic power.”

For proof, look at last week’s report from the Pew Research Center. Although the economy is recovering, the black-white wealth gap is now at its highest since 1989. In 2013, the median household wealth of white families ($141,900) was 13 times greater than that of black families ($11,000).

African Americans make up 14 percent of the country’s population, but black-owned businesses bring in just 0.5 percent of the nation’s receipts.

It is difficult to amass wealth when just two generations ago, black people were shut out of some trades, red-lined out of more desirable neighborhoods by racist lending policies, and banned from state-run colleges funded by their tax dollars.

With little inter-generational wealth, black people are more likely to be unemployed and, regardless of household income, live in neighborhoods where property values are falling. These poor neighborhoods are more likely to be hyper-policed, which puts black people at greater risk of encounters that could be defused by smart policing or that could end in death.

That’s an oversimplified version of how the criminal justice system functions in a larger machine that devalues black lives. (For the complete account, read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.) But in this context, it makes sense that the Ferguson grand jury decision, announced the Monday before Thanksgiving, spawned the #BlackOutBlackFriday shopping boycott. (Black Friday sales were down 11 percent, but pundits were loathe to credit hashtag activism.)

Sawyer supported the boycott but wondered about the long game. “You’re going to boycott on Friday, but when Cyber Monday comes up, you’re going to go spend money with Best Buy,” she griped.

Her Instagram page became a photo gallery to encourage people to shop with black-owned businesses on #buyblackfriday and beyond. “At the end of day, we don’t make it anywhere, if our own people don’t support it,” said Sawyer, who does employee development for government agencies.

Her vision of economic empowerment grew last week after a chance encounter with D’Army Bailey, a retired judge, attorney, and activist. At a black-owned coffee shop/office space in Uptown, Sawyer talked strategy with a man she’d met through the die-ins.

Bailey sat at a nearby table, eavesdropping. Then he interrupted. “He said, ‘Besides lying in the street, what else do you have planned?'” Sawyer recalled.

He was brusque, but she listened. “He said go to the county commission meeting and see what they’re debating today.”

She did. On the agenda was the economic impact plan for Graceland, which calls for $125 million in public investments to build a private hotel on the property and create 282 jobs.

“The jobs aren’t spelled out,” Sawyer said. “Are they going to be low-wage? Are they going to be middle-income?”

Those questions weren’t asked at the meeting. The lone vote against the plan came from Bailey’s brother, Walter.

“Being aware of how the money in this city is spent is important,” she said. “Our freedom as a culture ties into our economic freedom.”

Her next protest is planned for Christmas Eve, outside Graceland.