Although D’Army Bailey himself was the soul of
discretion, speaking only to clarify technical points, sympathizers and
relatives thundered against would-be privatizers of the National Civil Rights
Museum at a public forum Monday night, exalting Museum founder Bailey as a
martyr in the process.
At least one African-American state legislator came under
attack at the meeting at the Beale St. headquarters of the public workers’ union
AFSCME, as did such venerable figures in Memphis civil rights history as
Maxine Smith and Benjamin Hooks.
After listening to more than an hour’s worth of passionate
rhetoric in favor of continued state control of the Museum, State Representative
Gary Rowe attempted to change the subject to various self-help stratagems
that he said were available to members of the Memphis African-American
community.
Rowe cited as an example some $30,000 raised by his own
Black United Fund of Tennessee and went on to say, “I’m willing to put my money
on the table.” Speaking generically of the Tennessee General Assembly and state
government at large, Rowe said, “They don’t respect us because we’re always
asking something. We’re always begging.”
Rowe then left the meeting and the building and, though his
ears may well have been burning, was spared direct knowledge of the volatile
reaction to his words.
State Representative Joe Towns, who moderated Monday
night’s meeting, took issue with Rowe’s sentiments, reminding members of the
audience they were taxpayers and saying, “You don’t have to beg for your
dollars.”
That was just a warm-up for some of the firebrand rhetoric
to come. Local radio personality Harold “The Navigator” Moore launched
into a philippic against board members of the
The Lorraine Civil Rights Museum Foundation for wanting to exercise its
option to buy the property, now that
$5
million in state construction bonds have been paid off.
Board members, who can purchase the facility from the state for $1, have
indicated they would run it afterward largely on corporate and private
donations.
Dismissing the current Board as “honchoes, black and white” whose primary
loyalty was to corporations, not “the people,” Moore said he had marched with
Dr. King just before his 1968 assassination at the Lorraine Hotel and
went on to say: “I was there when D’Army Bailey was assassinated as chairman of
the Civil Rights Museum.”
That reference was to a rebellion by a Board majority
against Bailey, deposing him as chairman not long after the Museum was opened to
much national fanfare in 1991. The Rev. Hooks took his place after the coup
which Circuit Court Judge Bailey and many others attributed to influential Board
member Pitt Hyde, owner of AutoZone.
Rising to speak in Moore’s wake was D’Army Bailey’s nephew
Jay Bailey, a lawyer active in the burgeoning movement for what he and several
other speakers called “community control,” as opposed to “corporation control”
by the Board.
Jay Bailey escalated the rhetoric further, reciting the
names of current Board members and pointedly referring to Smith and Hooks, both
former luminaries of the NAACP, as black leaders who had “historically been
controlled by corporations.” Realizing that he had left out the name of Greg
Duckett in his run-through, he then relegated the hospital executive to the
same category.
A few speakers later, blogger Thaddeus Matthews
ratcheted up the attack even further, seconding Towns’ argument that “we don’t
have to ask anybody” for state favors and saying of Rowe, “He works for us. He
should be taking the people’s agenda to Nashville.”
Matthews said, “If the Lorraine Motel is our Calvary, then
we may have to fight for it” against adversaries that include “black folks
selling us out.” Rowe, he said, was “another sell-out Negro” concerned among
other things with protecting the interests of his neighbor, longtime Museum
director Beverly Robertson.
A bemused and
non-committal spectator through all of this was Dale Sims, Tennessee’s
state treasurer. Sims attended the meeting in his capacity as member of the
state Building Commission, the high-level body that will make a decision whether
the Museum should continue to receive state funding or be turned over to the
Foundation board.
