MLK50 founder and The Marshall Project want a judge to force the commission to open its records to the public

By Deborah Douglas, MLK50
and Simone Weichselbaum, The Marshall Project

The Memphis Shelby Crime Commission, a secretive nonprofit that advises local government officials on criminal justice issues, is acting like a government agency and as such, its records should be open to the public, a local journalist and a national criminal justice news outlet contend in a lawsuit filed Wednesday.

The suit was filed in Shelby County Court by Wendi C. Thomas, founder of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, and The Marshall Project, an independent nonprofit news outlet based in New York.

Lawyers for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Memphis law firm Adams and Reese argued the commission, whose board includes Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, Shelby County District Attorney Amy Weirich and other public officials, is the “functional equivalent” of a government agency and thus subject to public disclosure laws.

“Every donor to this has requested to remain anonymous because they don’t want to be perceived, in any way, as currying favor with the police,” said Bill Gibbons, the commission’s president and former county district attorney, during a May interview with The Marshall Project. “And no, I am not going to tell you who they are.”

Nonprofits — unlike government agencies — are generally not required by law to share financial records or other internal documents. The lawsuit argues that the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission, which in its most recent annual report listed 24 of its 50 board members as public-sector employees, is not protected from public scrutiny.

“The public has a right to know how the commission affects the lives of people in Memphis and the surrounding communities, and we hope this action will shed light on the governmental functions the commission performs,” said Katie Townsend, the legal director of the Reporters Committee.

The commission released in October what it said was a list of Memphis-based companies and nonprofits, including FedEx and International Paper, that contributed towards the $6.1 million police retention grant.”

The commission has denied multiple records requests filed by Thomas on behalf of The Marshall Project for details of the donations as well as other documents.

“As a longtime journalist in Memphis, I understand the importance of open records to accountability journalism,” Thomas said in a statement. “I am glad to help The Marshall Project pursue this story by filing public records requests and assisting with the reporting.

“Open records are in the best interest of a democratic society. The lawsuit filed today is meant to benefit all journalists and by extension, the public.”

This story is brought to you by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit reporting project on economic justice in Memphis. Support independent journalism by making a tax-deductible donation today. MLK50 is also supported by the Surdna Foundation and Community Change.

Memphis Shelby Crime Commission sued by local journalist, national news outlet was originally published in MLK50: Justice Through Journalism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

UpTheVote901 invites Memphians to choose candidates who will adhere to the People’s Agenda — to be revealed April 4

Voter education and mobilization group UpTheVote901 has announced it will host a People’s Convention April 27 to galvanize Memphians around consensus candidates for mayor and City Council in the Oct. 3 election.

Every Memphian is invited to join the grassroots, nonpartisan caucus aiming to create a progressive-issues platform called the People’s Agenda to be released April 4, Abyssinian Baptist Church Pastor Earle Fisher, Ph.D. told MLK50: Justice Through Journalism.

Fueled by the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the “fierce urgency of now,” Fisher said Memphis can’t “expect political progress on the wings of inevitability.”

The convention goal is to mobilize a voter base of about 2,500 people under a community-oriented agenda that will serve as an accountability measure for candidates chosen at the convention.

UpTheVote901 seeks to “reclaim our democracy and increase voter participation by constructing and commanding a common policy framework to be implemented by candidates who represent the majority will of the citizenry.”

UpTheVote901 seeks to “reclaim our democracy and increase voter participation by constructing and commanding a common policy framework to be implemented by candidates who represent the majority will of the citizenry.”

When asked if 2,500 people can make a difference in the municipal election, Fisher pointed to the 1991 election of Memphis’ first elected black mayor, Willie Herenton, the city’s last People’s Convention consensus candidate. The former schools superintendent beat incumbent Mayor Richard Hackett by 172 votes of about 250,000 votes cast.

That year, 65 percent of registered voters came to the polls and selected Herenton by 122,585 votes (49.45 percent) to Hackett’s 122,413 (49.38 percent). Perennial candidate Robert Hodges, a local eccentric, got 2,921 votes.

In 1991, Memphis, was 55 percent black. Today, the city is 63.9 percent black and is now the second-poorest large metro in the nation, according to Dr. Elena Delavega at the University of Memphis. Nearly 29 percent of blacks in Memphis live in poverty compared with 12.3 percent of whites who live in poverty here. The poverty rate for Latinos in Memphis is 33 percent, according to the 2018 Memphis Poverty Fact Sheet.

“Now do that math, and then think about how important 2,500 could be,” Fisher said.

“Now do that math, and then think about how important 2,500 could be,” Fisher said.

The filing deadline for the Oct. 3 election is July 18. So far, likely contenders are Mike Williams, who ran in 2015, Lemichael Wilson, a relative unknown, and Herenton, according to The Memphis Flyer. Mayor Jim Strickland has announced his intention to seek a second term.

UpTheVote901 asks local civic and philanthropic organizations, churches, educational institutions and concerned citizens to help recruit, educate and register at least 2,500 people to attend the convention.

Those interested in partnering or seeking more information can email UPTheVote901@gmail.com and put “Memphis People’s Convention 2019” in the subject line.

Where to we go from here?

• UpTheVote901 will release the People’s Agenda on April 4 and host its convention at noon April 27 at black-owned Paradise Entertainment Center, 645 E. Georgia Ave.

• Solution to poverty is simple: more money
• Inequality in Memphis: The Working Poor
• 50 years after MLK’s death, white workers in Memphis area still winning jobs race

This story is brought to you by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit reporting project on economic justice in Memphis. Support independent journalism by making a tax-deductible donation today. MLK50 is also supported by the Surdna Foundation and Community Change.

Memphis People’s Convention seeks consensus on Oct. 3 municipal election was originally published in MLK50: Justice Through Journalism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As she prepared to come to Memphis, Brittany “Bree” Newsome read Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last book, Where Do We Go From Here, and realized two things.

First: He was prophetic. Second: The way some people regard this 50th year since his assassination is “just kind of, like, false,” the activist said.

In essence, the commemoration of King’s death in his prime at age 39, which left behind a wife and four children who would carry the trauma for a lifetime, comes across as just another way black death is enshrined in the American psyche: We’re used to it, so why change anything?

“I sometimes I feel like we almost have a model for what black leadership looks like, and then that story always ends in that person being assassinated, going to jail, dying and poverty,” Newsome observed during an exclusive interview with MLK50: Justice Through Journalism.

In Memphis for the first time, the North Carolina native said she felt a sense of unease of commemorating, well, death. Celebrating King’s birthday as she did in January at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, was logical and easy, much easier than this particular occasion. For the woman who pulled the Confederate flag down from a 30-foot pole at the South Carolina State House pole in 2015, no matter how you slice it, commemorating is really celebrating.

mothboy 💙💛 on Twitter

@jon_snow_420 bree newsome taking down the confederate flag on the grounds of a gvt building is also iconic

Newsome’s insight is compelling, when the racism that used to hide behind Jim Crow laws of the South, now shows up as white nationalists wearing khakis, polo shirts and carrying Tiki torches, as Terri Freeman, head of the National Civil Rights Museum eloquently illustrated at the MLK50 commemorative capstone, An Evening of Storytelling. Held April 4 in a sleek, cavernous hall at the multilevel Crosstown Concourse, a diverse crowd of about 1,200 people came to hear veteran and relatively new civil rights leaders share tales of the struggle.

The day before, Newsome sat down at a Downtown hotel restaurant to talk about the surreal nature of being in Memphis for an occasion such as this. Sitting next to her fiance, Marcus Bass, campaign director for Democracy North Carolina, Newsome processed complicated feelings, while eating a softly turned spinach omelet.

She came up with this: “I feel like the mainstream’s embracing of him is that they’re embracing a watered-down version.”

We agreed that King Day celebrations are a deceptively mainstream way of rendering King in the abstract, disconnected from what’s happening right now.

“I feel like sometimes, the way it’s put forward to us is that the Civil Rights Act [of 1964] was passed, the Voting Rights Act was passed. Mission accomplished,” Newsome said. “No, the mission was not accomplished. You have to confront the fact that his mission was interrupted.”

My take is she’s right about that and the surreal nature of MLK50: While the world wrapped itself in soft, gauzy memories of the quotable, more digestible version of the radical King, America reverted to form in a cycle of surprise, outrage and resignation over the March 18 death of Stephon Clark. He was 22, black and a family man, shot in the back seven times by Sacramento police. He was unarmed.

Clark joins a too-long list of folks who’ve met a similar fate. Think: Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner. Never forget Trayvon Martin, 17, shot and killed by a man altogether comfortable policing a black body. Black communities, too, desperately want police protection served without the suffocating cynicism and danger of an occupying force. Apparently, that’s a tall order when the roots of American-style policing is so closely linked to the “order” part of law and order, interpreted and practiced as black oppression.

Commemoration-cum-celebration really equals recognition. At least for King. But for workaday folks dying in our streets, initial shock rarely converts to real policy changes, especially the spot-on kind King championed, such as guaranteed income. As collective mourning for King goes, the moment did seem surreal, as if there were a national quota of one for remembrance. King was larger-than-life, but as much as many people would like, time does not erase controversy. Besides, these deaths are connected: Remember them all. Change America for them all.

The income inequality King addressed is an acute issue of our time, for example. The federal minimum wage actually peaked in 1968, losing purchasing power, according to Pew Research Center, and several states have chosen to set their own minimums. Fifty years later, the federal minimum is not connected to the cost of living, as if people can live on fantasy dollars.

And what about our daily martyrs, the Trayvons Martins and the Sandra Blands? We force people like them, people like us, to measure up to an idealized King who never was, so they never fit neatly into coffins of benediction allowed for few black American icons. Embalming these fallen everyday black Americans in sympathy while our system of government aggressively denies their right to exist assigns them a benign degree of unimportance that is the hallmark of our racist culture.

Like King, Newsome’s work today is about finding the anointing and unleashing the agency in everyday people. She’s focusing on housing justice as a community organizer in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Like King, Newsome’s work today is about finding the anointing and unleashing the agency in everyday people.

“So it’s like we’re trying to address all these issues, and if we really we can’t do that we can’t build community,” Newsome said. “What I have found is that we cannot address any of those issues if our people are being displaced. If everybody is pushed out — and part of my concern is what’s happening right now with all of this gentrification in these major urban areas — it’s like all the poverty is going to be pushed to the outside to the suburbs.”

Newsome’s entry to the movement was through Moral Mondays protests in North Carolina to protect the right to vote and fight against other regressive policies. Those actions, replicated in Memphis during the run-up to MLK50, was headed up by the Rev. William Barber, who has rebooted King’s Poor People’s Campaign. She’s also working on building sustainable local organizations so marginalized communities can get in front of the issues.

Newsome said modern human rights movements can do more.

“We’re very good at reacting to things,” Newsome said. “Police beat somebody; we react. A store discriminates against somebody; we’re sure to boycott. But how do we organize to keep these things from happening in the first place? How do we organize ourselves to be empowered in a sustainable way?”

Beyond voting, citizens can do a better job of participating in the democratic process, she said. Getting neighbors to attend something as simple as a municipal zoning committee meeting is one way to help citizens understand how money and power operates in tiny, unattended corners, cloaked in boring details with massive consequences.

One example is being proactive about participating in civic decisions on the front end of the process is in affordable housing development, Newsome said: “So, like, the city has committed to build affordable housing, but that’s not addressing the issue of the housing that we’re losing. They’ll say ‘OK, we’re building 200 affordable housing units,’ but meanwhile we’re losing 30 over here, and 40 over there.”

Referring to the Charlotte Housing Trust Fund, Newsome said agreements with developers to set aside a percentage of affordable units doesn’t come close to replacing homes razed to make room for luxury developments.

In Charlotte, Newsome engages with a loose group of about 25 residents committed to keeping track of these kinds of patterns in civic decision-making, she said. Amping up local engagement should and can happen anywhere.

In reorienting the 50th commemoration toward the regular people who make movements, whether it’s in education, policing, voting rights or beyond, the Rev. James Lawson, a featured storyteller, underscored the importance of intent:

“If you want social change,” Lawson said, “you have to be and do the things that produce social change. If you want justice, you must become just people. If you want freedom and access, then your movement must not reflect the enemies of human life” but equality and dignity.

King’s vision was grounded in an awareness of the interconnectedness of America to the world and Americans to one another, be they whites from Appalachia, Mexican-American farmers out West, or destitute black Mississippians and striking sanitation workers in Memphis. His big, scary radical dream of sharing resources and opportunity was grounded in love.

Earlier on April 4, standing outside Room 306 on the balcony where King fell, the museum’s Freeman admonished the crowd: “The only thing this is about is Dr. King.”

But is it?

Where do we go from here?

• 10 MLK quotes that didn’t make the NBA’s MLK Day shirts
• ‘Remember their names. Recognize their lives.’
• Barber: ‘Where there’s a crucifixion, there must be a resurrection’

This story is brought to you by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit reporting project on economic justice in Memphis. Support independent journalism by making a tax-deductible donation today. MLK50 is also supported by the Center for Community Change and the Surdna Foundation.

Mission: Interrupted was originally published in MLK50: Justice Through Journalism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This piece first appeared at American Prospect on Mothers’ Day 2015

I let my well-founded fears of medical abandonment and loss of free agency keep me from being a mother. After all, I’m a black woman. That’s too often how it goes for us.

“What have you ever done right?” That was the question that dominated my mind one night two years ago as I lay in my bed, surrounded by fluffy pillows and a sleepy Yorkie at the foot.

This wasn’t one of those self-denigrating moments I engage in when I internally chastise myself for not writing enough that day or holding my temper tighter, or not giving one of my journalism students much-needed grace under the pressure they face to prepare for an industry that asks them to do everything at once masterfully. No, this was a true thought experiment to force myself to fully identify the things I’ve gotten right in my life as a way of charting a course to build on something righteous and real, instead of wallowing in the wreckage of failed relationships, bridges burnt, tasks incomplete, dreams left to slumber or doors of opportunity walked by, not through.

“You have never had children,” I answered myself.

This reality might seem like a cause of sadness or lament for many people who view having children as a raison d’être or path to true social security in old age. To many of my girlfriends, it’s a cause for hope because in pursuing our dreams for work, play and travel, we had long convinced ourselves there’d always be time for making children. But that’s not true, is it? Abundant eggs crack with age. And so had my dreams of one day being a mother inside a committed partnership with a man who wanted to make family as much a centerpiece of his life as I did mine.

While I’m satisfied in knowing I made a series of deliberate decisions to land me where I stand now, childless, the truth is the American way of living doesn’t really support families beyond a few tax breaks. Subconsciously, I’ve always known this. Why else would we use the Band-Aid for public education reform — charter schools — as the antidote to true progress? If we really cared about stable families, why would we institute a culture of fines and fees a la Ferguson, Missouri, to pay for services enjoyed by the collective? With more women heading families, why won’t we shift our paradigm and adopt workplace policies, schedules, salary structures and paths to the boardroom, as we would if we really cared about families? My gut has long told another story my head wouldn’t hear.

So, as I lay considering the next steps in my life story, I struggled to figure it out. I’ve practiced journalism for two decades, a career I chose at age eight because I felt like I had no voice and figured other people might feel muted into submission, too. Yet, downsized from being a vital, high-performing member of a major media outlet, I now faced joblessness and intermittent contract work due to company bankruptcy and a changed industry, in addition to the lack of a retirement nest egg. I was still reeling from a divorce that sneaked up on me rather than announcing itself loudly for months on end letting me know to get ready for the next phase.

I was thankful in that moment I had no child to worry about as I considered selling my car and downsizing my apartment — or moving back home to my mother’s, which is odd since I didn’t grow up entirely in her house due to the presence of her abusive husband. So I became convinced the need for planning was a righteous thing, and more black women needed to take heed to avoid the burden of single motherhood lest, should the vagaries of a broken economy come crashing down on them, they cheat their children out of opportunities and life quality. I even wrote a fellowship proposal to study the idea of encouraging black women to take a time out to eschew parenthood outside of the bonds of marriage or committed partnership. I called it The Generational Sacrifice.

The Generational Sacrifice

Briefly, the idea goes like this: Despite the unquestioned love of a child and the ability to see shades of oneself in a cherubic face, raising children alone is a burden and often robs those kids the opportunity and attention they deserve. Every indicator puts the black family at the bottom ,with the black woman helming the whole hot mess. Why do our children suffer from the lowest standardized test scores? Why are they so susceptible to peer acceptance over educational and personal excellence? Our children are too often unparented — because one is not enough.

I believed black women could extricate ourselves from this chokehold: All it would take is a generational sacrifice: Stop having babies out of wedlock. Let’s call our movement “Generation G” and we could get T-shirts. Our collective consciousness must once again agree marriage or committed partnership is the best situation for raising children. Then black womanhood must reinforce this notion among one another because group-think is part of the problem. Black women must agree that men are necessary, I posited, especially for raising strong daughters and boys who understand what it means to be a man regardless of the structural inequities that threaten the family at any given point in time. We could then focus on being healthy, and maybe, a little more wealthy, in time, by pressing a generational reset button.

Collective coyness about our intentions to be sexual is dangerous

The sacrifice requires the honesty of admitting black women have sex, like sex and in between committed periods of chastity for many, won’t say no to sex if offered. And that requires another type of honesty: proactive and consistent use of birth control because intercourse is not about giving oneself to a man but sharing what a woman has to offer of her own volition and place of power. Collective coyness about our intentions to be sexual is dangerous, and it’s an attitude passed to younger women and teens who don’t learn how to take control of their sexual destinies (a health issue as much as a moral one) until it’s too late.

When not having babies, the sacrifice allows women to do what they do best: better themselves. There’s no reason why black women shouldn’t be sought after, to embody what it means to be American, shiny and new. Just think, if black women lightened their stress load and spent more time seriously pursuing healthier lifestyles, we’d be quite attractive to men at home and abroad for our fortitude, in addition to our other attributes. Women collectively reinforcing the highest health and wealth standards and practices encourages men to up their game, making them better mates. The trick bag that is the American economy becomes more onerous when women get into debt just to finance the basics in life because the cost of living has risen faster than income. What if black women made a collective effort to get out of debt, stay out of debt and maybe even get richer? If black women pooled their money, shared their knowledge and remained limber and ready to invest because they’re not pouring dollars and energy into one-woman families — what a wonderful America that would be.

Now, I’ve always been willing to stipulate the presence of structural inequity. We’d simply need to close ranks and muster the energy to dismantle poorly built structures by working on the inside and organizing on the outside, unencumbered. The mind game I was engaging in was about what I and my sisters could do for ourselves, knowing no one is coming to save us. It’s a concept born out of love, not judgment, and an idea I thought worth putting on the table.

Guess how far I got it that? Nowhere.

Nobody Wants to Hear That

Nobody wants to hear about what they can’t do. Nobody wants to admit we live in a society that requires a higher standard for some than others. And maybe they’re right. Maybe it’s not fair.

After two years of shopping that idea and getting shot down again and again by people looking sniff out a “respectability politics” argument from a mile away (“You can’t say that! What’s wrong with you?”), I decided to go through another thought experiment: “What is this really about?”

I had dig deep to understand why I never bore children. Going through process of elimination, I realized all the opportunities I had to do so when I was fully realized through my top-notch education and career before getting married, during marriage and after marriage. That it had to do with fear was the revelation.

‘Guuuuuurl, those Salernos be good!’

On the surface, the fear was not having money to make a choice to send my child to parochial or private school. (I’ll be damned if I submit my child to the ravages of a public school education if I found myself in a community with substandard schools.) It had to do with the revelation that I’d never really factored my husband would truly be a partner in rearing my children because, though I know many great fathers, black, white and other, the optics I’d memorized said fathers weren’t engaged on that level. And I wanted my children to have things and experiences.

I said as much years back when I entertained my cousin and her friend in my downtown Chicago condo, serving them homemade chocolate chip cookies, made with expensive premium ingredients and tall glasses of cold organic milk. When the friend looked at my bespoke home and pressed me about having children, I told her I wanted my kids to have access to the finest computer equipment, the best schools, overseas travel and Oreo cookies if they wanted them, not cheap knockoff cookies or Salerno, a brand of butter cookies I viewed as a go-to for cash-strapped moms. She responded, “Guuuuuurl, those Salernos be good!”

Facing my fears, I decided to lean in to the darkness of those feelings and press myself for more. I realize I had always been afraid to put my body in state of pregnancy (read: emergency) where I might have to depend on other people for support or grace as I dealt with morning sickness or other physical changes that would keep me from being a force of nature as I am accustomed. That fear had to do with trust. I did not trust anyone to extend an iota of sympathy at the fact that I might be feeling queasy, so I might need a little time and grace at any given moment. I know this because I’ve been pregnant. Then I wasn’t. Further, I visualized actual childbirth as a horror story with nurses and doctors ignoring my need for compassion, hurrying me through the process because women everywhere do this all the time except it’s me this time and I’m scared now.

“Pregnancy is a condition, not a disease,” my aunt once told me.

Oh.

And that distrust has to with every message I had ever received about my purpose and role as a girl and a woman in this society, where a family member once pronounced me as looking “like a good breeder” — like a horse. As a black woman, I would be expected to do more, take more and be more, but no one would give me a shoulder to lean on if I got out of breath or became momentarily afraid. Because I am supposed to be strong. The idea of childhood, and the vulnerability that comes with it, is not something we’re afforded, as writer Stacey Patton has so eloquently written. This notion that black people don’t feel pain is reinforced early.

A little cultural competence, please?

Lest you think I have been overreacting (due to my ostensible lack of pain-feeling), my fears have a basis. Since age 11, I’d always had debilitating menstrual cramps. At age 12, after several episodes where I’d presented to the ER for Demerol shots to quell the pain, doctors suggested I take birth control pills. Now, coming, as I do, from an evangelical Christian family, the idea of taking a contraceptive drug while still a girl was more than a notion. Even at that age, I felt the doctors thought something was inevitable about me, a black girl, becoming sexually engaged, so they sought to kill the proverbial two birds. They clearly didn’t understand the cultural context of the Holy Ghost empire that was my life and certainly didn’t care.

They clearly didn’t understand the cultural context of the Holy Ghost empire that was my life and certainly didn’t care.

I know they didn’t because my mother and I asked, and asked, and asked if there was anything else they could give me? While I fully had my mother’s support for whatever choice my 12-year-old self wanted to make, being associated with something connected with sex shamed me, leaving me flushed and reddened, something anyone could see if I weren’t such a dark shade of brown. Part of my fear was that my verbally abusive stepfather would use the pills against me by suggesting I was sexually active, or concerned with those matters in some way. I only learned what sex was the year before, from a little purple book my mom left for me when she went back to her room for afternoon prayers. The book, which lives on my bookcase today, has colorful collages to illustrate the point: first flowers, then chickens, then dogs and then humans. But birth control, that’s not something I could deal with.

So, like clockwork, every month I hurt. And screamed.

When I eventually moved to my grandmother’s house in Covington, Tennessee, she was old-school, didn’t believe in seeing doctors for what comes naturally. As I willed myself to die as a form of relief, she plied me with peppermint tea, aloe vera juice, and teaspoons of turpentine and sugar until I could prove she was actually poisoning me with that particular paint-stripping concoction. “Oh, baby, I didn’t mean to try to kill you!” she lamented.

I know, Grandma, I know.

But I never believed my pain was necessary; it was left unattended. Somewhere, there was the right doctor with the right medicine — just not for me. I never believed some fruit that bitch Eve ate a long time ago had anything to do with me.

And finally, during one bout of pain while at track practice at age 15, I was finishing a 400 when my coach, a man, saw me grip my stomach and grimace in agony. “Run, ugly, run!” he shouted. It was the only help he could give, and it echoed the bad medicine of the times. I had been repeatedly told exercise was great for combating cramps, and here I was in peak condition, rounding out a brisk run, and I was in agony and tears — alone. It was the type of aloneness that haunts because I was surrounded by people.

Nobody would come to save me, so I resolved to save myself by avoiding becoming a goddamned statistic by having a child without a husband. I would be one with means, and never suffering the kind of aloneness that comes from needing help from someone I couldn’t trust.

So I’m here, at age 47, with no retirement plan. My company didn’t even have a 401k until three years before my downsizing and it was the first job that paid enough to build the middle-class life for which I had prepared with all the required sacrifices good people make. And I realize that every decision I have ever made had to do with fear. Fear that although I believe in the American ideal and my ability to leverage my ideas in the public conversation to make a difference, I had to wear a protective shield kept me from another kind of safety and security that makes life worth living: The gift of security in the warm embrace of family. My missing children.

I made the generational sacrifice. And I look at my sisters like the mothers of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin and Rekia Boyd, who took a chance on happiness born of passion. I breathe in relief that I don’t have to worry about my black child being mistreated by police or underestimated at school or rendered invisible to their pain, hope and joy. On one hand, my never-born child won’t have to suffer the hypocrisy of a nation that insists families matter but goes out of its way to undermine all women by failing to pay them right, or position and welcomethem into STEM careers where opportunity truly lies. I know people like economist Heather Boushey are thinking progressively about these things, daring to crunch the numbers and offer culture-shifting policies. But today, the reality is being poor means staying that way, and being unable to pay for education means staying dumb and locked out of the marketplace or being over-leveraged in debt. So the idea of making a cohesive family under a sturdy paid-for roof seems an impossible gamble. And being black is to live marked in blood scarlet, wherever one sits on the socioeconomic continuum.

Just ask the President Obama.

And in all that righteousness, what the the nation demands of is no more fair to me than the idea of a black woman asking black women to save themselves by giving up something really important. And it’s me, childless, who’s missing out — on the promise of America, and the love of a child to hug away the pain.

This story is brought to you by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit reporting project on economic justice in Memphis. Support independent journalism by making a tax-deductible donation today.

Why there are—still—no children here was originally published in MLK50: Justice Through Journalism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When news of Erica Garner’s heart attack and subsequent brain damage spread, the perennial conversation about self-care resurfaced in activist circles. Those who have decried that racism kills might argue it claimed another victim in the recent passing of Garner, 27, after a heart attack and subsequent brain damage, according to media reports. She was famously the daughter of Eric Garner, who died in 2014 after pleading “I can’t breathe” several times as a New York cop kept him in an illegal chokehold. In 2016, The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, addressed the issue of self-care for activists who may find themselves overwrought with the responsibility of doing movement work, written by yours truly.

Be A King on Twitter

My heart goes out to Erica Garner's family. So much tragedy. I can't help but wonder how watching her father, with police crushing his neck, say "I can't breathe," and then her work battling the injustice that killed him, affected her health. For many, living isn't easy.

As sins of omission go, Facebook is a lie. This tool, among many other social media platforms, does a grand job of keeping communities of interest tenuously connected, catalyzing the social movements that mark our time. And yet, this “reality” is highly curated, far from the truth and intimacy of our whole lives. Even when the world surrenders to injustice, efforts to correct the wrongs and celebrate what’s right tend to reflect rose-colored timelines where individuals are always on point, in full vitality, acting as productive human beings making monumental things happen in the world — All. The. Time.

This opportunity — and burden — of social media is the first thing social justice activists mention when they talk about the necessity of self-care in the age of black lives mattering. The passion of organizing and convening like-minded people to make a difference through direct action, thought-leadership, raising awareness through campaigns or holding court on Twitter, is infectious. For people convicted with the belief that getting the masses to move and act, it’s difficult not working in and being about the movement constantly.

And as in all things, there’s such a thing as so much being too much.

“Self-care is definitely a conversation in social justice circles that focuses on what we do individually to make sure we’re OK,” says Alicia Walters, movement building director at Forward Together.

“Self-care is definitely a conversation in social justice circles that focuses on what we do individually to make sure we’re OK,” says Alicia Walters, movement building director at Forward Together, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit that works to help women, children and families reach their full potential. “It can look a lot of different ways for a lot of different people.”

At the most basic level, says Dr. Bedford Palmer II, a psychotherapist who teaches at St. Mary’s College of California, self-care means attending to the whole self, not just the at-work or representative self. It’s a conscious effort at maintaining balance, a conversation typically associated with working mothers but one that has meaning in activist circles because of demands that may include staying up nights, attending vigils or being engaged in community events regularly. When individuals neglect self-care, they’re not attending to their families and personal relationships, or exercising and eating (either right or at all), allowing themselves to become burned out. Even people not engaged in direct action, such as workplace “activists,” professionals in corporate environments seeking to ensure women and people of color have access to opportunity or those working to effect change in schools, need self-care.

People can get overwhelmed by the demands of leading a life of social organizing and staying on top of issues and policies that dictate their actions, Palmer says. As they become more aware of systems of oppression, such as inaction on a police shooting as in the Laquan McDonald case in Chicago or abuse vis a vis Sandra Bland in Texas, anger, anxiety and depression can set in. Often, activists get to a point of crisis where the lines between the public self and the private one become so blurred, committed workers just disappear.

“It’s like feast or famine, going from a place of being so connected to feeling isolated,” says Walters, who, as part of her work, helms a group of black, young, female thought-leaders called Echoing Ida, after journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells Barnett, who exercise thought-leadership as their weapon of choice. “I’ve seen this in some people, including myself: We’re just so overwhelmed, we say ‘Self-care? Can’t do it.’ ”

“What this shows me,” she says, “is we don’t have a practice set out for us, particularly as black women, to prioritize ourselves. How can we think about it as a practice, putting our well-being and the well-being of our communities first without guilt trips to our communities if we can’t stay connected?”

After all, Walters says, staying connected on social media, going to all the rallies, writing continuously — is not sustainable.

Staying on message is a survival skill

Brittany “Bree” Newsome was a veteran activist when she climbed the flagpole of the South Carolina statehouse to yank down the Confederate Flag 10 days after the massacre at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston in 2015. She was prepared to go to jail, but the onslaught of attention, offers and social outreach showed she needed an aftermath strategy to avoid getting pulled in all directions, some of them decidedly off-message.

Bree’s family held a family retreat to talk about what she wanted to focus on, and which activities and opportunities supported her social justice mission, says her mother, Lynne Newsome, a retired educator. (Her father, Clarence Newsome, runs the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati.)

“She had a number of things that were not in keeping with her mission, such as advertising and endorsing products,” according to Newsome. “She’s very reflective and is good about discerning where she wants to go and what she wants to do. She’s especially interested in working with young people and committed to the young people in the Charlotte area.”

The flag action, which preceded a vote by the South Carolina legislature to permanently remove it, was just part of Newsome’s life mission to “move from issues-based organizing to organizing the community itself,” according to Bree, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. In addition to traveling to speak about social justice, the NAACP Chairman’s Award winner is focused on building sustained community organizations that address everything from income inequality, food justice and cooperative economics.

“I’m not sure we’ve found a way to manage it,” Newsome says. “She really had to at some point disconnect. She had to take herself offline, stop returning phone calls, stop doing Twitter for a number of days and sit back, relax and commune with herself and God.”

Bree’s support circle includes her sister, Dr. Gina Duncan, a practicing psychiatrist, who offers faith-based approaches in keeping with Bree’s Christian belief system. Newsome says she and her daughter have always “been political junkies,” and Bree’s commitment to direct action just grew more after participating in Moral Mondays, protests to pressure local lawmakers on a range of social justice issues.

“I do sometimes worry about her being pulled into directions and just want to make sure that she doesn’t become overwhelmed,” Newsome says.

‘Self-care is a practice, not a project’

Grace Franklin and her fellow OKC Artists for Justice had the forethought to build a self-care plan into the watchdog efforts during the trial of former Oklahoma City Police officer Daniel Holtzclaw in December, now in prison for life. The group formed after being collectively appalled at the lack of coverage in the case of a biracial (white and Asian) policeman who used his position of authority to seek out and sexually assault 13 African-American females ages 17–57 from precarious backgrounds, including past crimes and drug use.

The group was intent on being in the courtroom at all times, for good reason, because in addition to muted national media interest, an all-white jury was selected when black potential jurors were a part of the pool. Given the climate around police abuse such as Eric Garner’s choking death in New York, or Freddie Gray’s death while in police custody in Baltimore or events that led to Bland’s arrest during traffic stop and eventual death in Waller County, Texas, Franklin and her associates felt someone needed to have the women’s backs.

The days were long.

On court days, members would split court watching into halves. Even before arriving to court, the working day started at 6 or 7 in the morning when members would respond to email or media calls, or work on videos for social media, Franklin explains. They didn’t have a lot of direct contact with the victims during the trial because their work was about community, so it was important to stay on message, amplifying a larger phenomenon about how black women are regarded in American society.

“Then you have to give a debrief,” says Franklin, noting, “on days when the survivors were testifying that was a lot. At 6 or 7 o’clock, we might respond to organizations asking how they could help, then networking or going to community meetings until 10:30 or so.”

Even on days when members didn’t go to court, they went to their day jobs, they worked on tasks, such as manning social media, according to Franklin, an insurance agent. And in “real life,” Franklin was careful to carve out time to care for an elderly parent, which speaks to the responsibilities and pressures activists face in playing multiple roles.

“You’re in a constant state of movement and creativity to get the word out,” Franklin says. “You’re never exhaling, always inhaling. That was about three months of that plus the preparation before the trial happened. It’s constantly on your mind and takes up a lot of your thought.

“One of the things we learned during this process is to take a step back. I value silence, and when you’re in the midst of activism and advocacy, there’s not a lot of silence. I have to cut it off and just be,” says Franklin, who advises doing things that feed one’s energy, like finishing a book or spending time with friends.

For Taja Lindley, her work is her activism and vice versa. The Brooklyn-based performance artist and founder of Colored Girls Hustle leads girlhood programs for mostly girls of color that include life-mapping, conflict resolution, and engagement with social justice and feminist topics.

“I think self-care is a practice, not a project,” Lindley says.

Lindley, one of the 22 Ida’s of Echoing Ida, acknowledges that when people do work they really care about, they’re often willing to put important things on the backburner, like drinking enough water “because we feel we need to be present for the quote unquote movement.” Self-care, for her, is a daily activity that includes playing Miles Davis on Pandora after a long day working, lighting candles and allowing herself to make the mental transition to being her at-home self. She also writes in a journal and regards the act of brewing and drinking tea a contemplative pose that feeds her emotional and spiritual well-being.

“Working for non-profits, people are up to amazing things. Some of us are able to handle responsibilities better than others, and for some people in our community, taking care of ourselves can come in seasons,” Lindley says. “I’ve learned, regardless of what’s happening externally, it’s important to have a constant practice of checking in.”

For Walters, checking in has meant checking out.

She’s been off Facebook for about a year, and got off Instagram, too. Walters now monitors Twitter to follow discussions rather than starting them because being on social media became another obligation that cluttered her brain and didn’t contribute to her well-being.

“People put the way they want the world to see them on Facebook,” says Walters, noting that she “was constantly comparing myself to people and never measuring up. This person is in Brazil. Look at this person’s beautiful family, and I don’t have the family I want yet. Look at this person’s artistry. Just on a personal level, it didn’t make me feel good and [I was] creating stories about their lives while feeling bad about my own.” Professionally speaking, Walters understands the pressure to leverage social media for messaging purposes, and to share information and articles that can drive the discussions of the issues forward.

“But I could go down the rabbit hole with that,” she says.

And with the young women who represent Echoing Ida, the pressure to engage via social media is palpable, Walters says. As millennials, they’ve been weaned on social media, feeling obligated to be present often while being trolled or in a space with other people given to drama. This can affect how they feel about themselves while they’re doing “vulnerable, heroic” things as organizers, always putting themselves out there.

“The whole hypertension piece, the obesity piece, drinking, substance abuse,” he says, which confront so many African-Americans? “That comes from living in an oppressive space.” — Dr. Bedford Palmer II

Moreover, in activism, the work is never done. For OKC Artists, that means formalizing the organization by seeking nonprofit status to provide services for women of color, be it domestic violence, sexual assault or referrals. Also, they’re educating local citizens on the issue of jury selection, which is tied to having a driver’s license not being registered to vote, as is the case around the country. Black voters who move frequently or don’t update their addresses can’t count on being called for jury selection, which has proven a critical exercise of the democratic process, as the Holtzclaw case shows.

In the final analysis, Palmer says, racism is exhausting.

“The whole hypertension piece, the obesity piece, drinking, substance abuse,” he says, which confront so many African-Americans? “That comes from living in an oppressive space.”

A raised consciousness can be heavy because it involves going through stages of revelation that include asking a lot of “whys” and efforts to “separate from the bad stimulus,” Palmer says. Add to that “stereotype threat” that extra layer of mental processing marginalized people often reflexively do in a subconscious effort to avoid confirming stereotypes. Palmer suggests working from an intentional, mindful space to avoid physical and mental setbacks while making a difference. Consider what’s at stake and be aware of the tradeoffs, such as acknowledging if a day job will be affected or if going to jail is an option as a result of engaging in direct action. Avoid isolation, and work to dissipate anger and tension by doing healthy movements like exercise or dance.

“Whatever your hamster wheel is, we all get caught up in it,” Walters says. “There are things we’re obligated to do; family and job fall in that category. Other than that, what do you really have to do?”

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE CRISIS MAGAZINE, THE OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF THE NAACP. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION.

This story is brought to you by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit reporting project on economic justice in Memphis. Support independent journalism by making a tax-deductible donation today.

Self-care in the age of Black Lives Matter was originally published in MLK50: Justice Through Journalism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As far as the Memphis City Council is concerned, the Tennessee Historical Commission holds the cards on deciding whether to remove the Confederate Nathan Bedford Forrest statue from Health Sciences Park.

But the council Tuesday unanimously approved an ordinance that would provide a backup plan for removing or relocating the Forrest monument by Nov. 21, the Memphis Flyer reports.

Even though state law forbids the City of Memphis from removing the statue, the city has other options, such as closing the downtown park and using the space to memorialize 22 people who were lynched in Shelby County, Councilman Martavius Jones told MLK50.

The decision followed last week’s historic commission meeting in Athens and the council’s efforts to find legal ways to remove the statue that honors the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who made his fortune trading enslaved blacks.

“It’s a modestly progressive gesture, but it still doesn’t offer the bold and courageous leadership the community is longing for,” said the Rev. Earle Fisher, a #TakeEmDown901 leader, of the council’s latest action.

Tami Sawyer on Twitter

City Council puts pressure on mayor. "What's your plan?" Plan required by Nov 21. #takeemdown901... https://t.co/6d15WEwnCN

At the Oct. 13 meeting, the 29-member commission denied Mayor Jim Strickland’s (and other Memphians’) in-person request to grant a hearing on a waiver from a 2016 state law that bars removing monuments of historic, national or military significance. The commission did grant permission for a state administrative law judge to decide what happens. That decision is expected sometime in November.

“What we don’t have is a date for the administrative law judge, but as I understand everything is on a fast track,” said Jones, noting the Forrest statue is historically inaccurate because it doesn’t mention Forrest’s connection to slavery or the KKK. “One way to look at it is if we don’t receive fair remedies, those are other avenues we can pursue.”

The ordinance, which seeks the ultimate removal of both Forrest and Confederate President Jefferson Davis, deems them a “public nuisance” that infringes upon the civil rights of black Memphis residents because they erected during the Jim Crow era.

In addition to the 22 people documented as lynching victims in Shelby County, the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative has recorded 233 lynchings in Tennessee between 1877 and 1950. More than 4,000 lynchings were carried out across the country during that time, mostly in the South. The Great Migration to the North from 1916 through 1970 is largely attributed to this reign of terror of black citizens, according EJI’s exhaustive research on the practice.

The move to honor lynching victims echoes the work of notable Memphian and journalist, Ida B. Wells Barnett, born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and freed several months later by the Emancipation Proclamation. In the late 1800’s, Wells Barnett focused her investigative efforts on documenting lynching, including the lynchings of three friends who ran the People’s Grocery in South Memphis, Thomas Moss, Will Stewart and Calvin McDowell. In response to her journalism, Wells Barnett’s Memphis newspaper office was burned by a white mob and she was forced to relocate to the North to Chicago, fearing for her life.

Says Fisher: “The entire environment is reminiscent of the rigidity of the ’60s. We must find the political will and creativity to act more aggressively in support of what the majority of citizens want. Take. Them. Down. Now.”

Where do we go from here?

Sign #TakeEmDown901’s petition to remove the Confederate monuments.

Join Memphis’ Lynching Sites Project, which is working to place a marker at all of the county’s lynching site.

Watch “An Accidental Drowning,” a documentary about the 1939 lynching of Jessie Lee Bond in Arlington, Tennessee, at the Indie Memphis Film Festival Nov. 3.

Read more about the fight to remove Memphis’ Confederate symbols from public spaces.

• Seeking repentance for a 100-year-old lynching
• Nathan Bedford Forrest rides again — this time on a hobby horse
• Memphis’ Forrest monument battle stalls with state historical commission delay
• Inside America’s comfort with Confederate symbols

This report is brought to you by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit reporting project on economic justice in Memphis. Support independent journalism by making a tax-deductible donation today.

City Council could close park if state judge won’t move Forrest statue was originally published in MLK50: Justice Through Journalism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Don’t get it twisted, fighting for justice isn’t sexy. That was one key takeaway #TakeEmDown901’s Tami Sawyer had Friday after joining Mayor Jim Strickland, Memphis City Council member Worth Morgan, clergy and others at the Tennessee Historical Commission meeting in Athens seeking to remove the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue in downtown Memphis.

“There’s nothing sexy about driving seven hours in one direction and seven hours in another at a time in the country when it’s not safe for black folks to be on the road,” said a visibly exhausted Sawyer in a Facebook post as she evoked the specter of the late Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Trayvon Martin and other blacks subject to American-style occupation but not its justice.

As Sawyer and three activists headed back home for a 5:30 p.m. die-in being staged at FedEx Forum in a sustained, unrelenting week of protest and action, she continued: “To be greeted with a Confederate flag when you arrive … I need folks to know we put our lives on the line for this stuff.”

That flag, held by a black man dressed in a gray Confederate uniform, and remarks by Lee Millar, a spokesman for the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, was a living metaphor of the “unconscious influence” of white supremacy mentioned in Strickland’s remarks to the 29-member commission as he entreated them to bend to the will of Memphians. He promised that the tribute to the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan would be carefully stored until a more appropriate place was found to contextualize its meaning, and local decision-making on local issues should be honored.

Despite Strickland’s assurance that 177 clergy members, the congregations they represent and Memphis’ business community want the statue to go, the commission denied the City of Memphis’ request to move forward with a hearing on a waiver from a state law that would allow removal.

But there’s still a chance the commission could allow Memphis to move the statue: They did approve another request for a declaratory order that must, by law, be decided in 60 days. The difference this time is the process won’t be open to the public, according to Sawyer.

“The one that was approved pushes the issue before an administrative law judge,” according to Ursula Madden, the mayor’s spokeswoman. “And the city expects an answer before the end of November. In that petition for declaratory judgment, the city argument is that THC never had jurisdiction over the Forrest statue because it is not a war memorial.”

What the statue was/is really about

Strickland stressed that the Forrest statue is not a war memorial because it wasn’t erected until 40 years after the Civil War ended, as were many of the 1,500 government-backed Confederate tributes across the country. Writer Joanna Rothkopf describes the statues as “mass produced propaganda.” White residents in 1905 were clear on what the statue symbolized as the mayor described in an excerpt from a Memphis News-Scimitar newspaper article on the unveiling:

Strickland said: “Let me just read you a quote: ‘Stalwart, strong and invincible, he sits erect on King Philip, overlooking Forrest Park and turning his eagle eye toward the South, just as he was wont to do 40 years ago when the chaotic conditions of life required the organizing of the Ku Klux Klan for the protection of the honor and independence of Southern social conditions.’

“What were those Southern social conditions?” Strickland asked. “They were Jim Crow laws, which mandated segregation. These laws were being passed in Southern states, including Tennessee.”

Mayor Jim Strickland on Twitter

This entire administrative law process should be finished by the end of November.

Millar, the Confederate spokesman, insisted Memphis is not united on this issue, according to a Memphis Flyer report. And history teacher Elizabeth Adams somehow conflated white supremacy with Christianity by saying: “If you don’t know your history, you are doomed to repeat it. Next they’ll want to remove the crosses from our churches.”

Dedicated to following the letter of the law, Strickland remained upbeat in a statement issued after the commission meeting: “After so many years of so many Memphians fighting for this, this is a positive step. The petition will now be heard before an administrative law judge, and we expect this matter to be successfully resolved by the end of November. Our goal of removing the statues by next spring remains.”

As for #TakeEmDown901 and the more than 5,000 signatures the movement has gathered demanding immediate removal of both Forrest and a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Sawyer said: “We’re going to let our city know that regardless of what the Tennessee Historical Commission said, we want swift action; we want bold leadership; we want them covered. We want them down.”

UPDATE: At Friday’s meeting, the Tennessee State Historical Commission delayed a vote on granting the City of Memphis a waiver to the state law that prohibits the removal of the Nathan Bedford Forrest Confederate monument.

This story was updated. The original story as published Thursday, Oct. 12, is below.

Mayor Jim Strickland, clergy members and #TakeEmDown901 activists are headed to Friday’s meeting of the Tennessee Historical Commission with a request for the 29-member body: Please reconsider.

The commission has said it’s too soon rule on the city’s request to take down Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s statute that stands downtown in Health Sciences Park. First, the commission wants to craft the rules that would govern waivers to the state law that prohibits the removal of war memorials from public spaces.

The commission’s delay will push the waiver request until the next meeting in February — at the earliest. But that isn’t stopping the growing movement to rid the city of Forrest’s equestrian statue.

Strickland, “like a vast majority of Memphians, wants the statue removed,” according to Ursula Madden, the mayor’s spokeswoman.

“We are hopeful that a majority of the commission members themselves support our petition and are equally hopeful that a majority of the commission members themselves support our petition and are equally hopeful that this bureaucratic maneuver is not being used to blunt the momentum wearing seeing in our city in support of our petition,” Strickland said in a Sept. 28 statement.

The Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce drafted a letter, making it clear the local business community stands behind efforts to relocate the statue from public property because it’s good for business: “Divisive symbols, such as this statue, hamper our city’s efforts to attract and retain top talent for the skilled workforce that is critical to our success. As leaders representing the business community we believe that learning from history is incredibly important because history — when placed in its proper context — is instructive to prevent repeating mistakes from our past.”

More than a dozen of the 177 clergy members who signed the mayor’s petition seeking removal will attend, Madden said. Also presenting will be Tami Sawyer, founder of the #TakeEmDown901 movement, which has succeeded in collecting more than 5,000 signatures to remove the statute of the former slave trader. #TakeEmDown901 also mounted a large protest at the edifice in August that also functions as the grave of Forrest and his wife Mary Ann.

During a press conference Wednesday, several local clergy members who signed the mayor’s petition joined #TakeEmDown901’s calls for more aggressive campaign to remove Forrest’s statue. The group also launched a call-in campaign this week in hopes the commission would grasp just how many Memphians would like the statue removed. And #TakeEmDown901 will also live-stream the meeting, posting to the Sawyer’s Facebook page.

“Our history should be the true history of all Southerners, not Southerners of a certain race.” —Tami Sawyer, #TakeEmDown901

“Our history should be the true history of all Southerners, not Southerners of a certain race,” Sawyer told MLK50. “Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest were slave owners, brutal slave owners, who believed black people were not equal, and these statues do not show that historical truth. They are called true Southern gentlemen and patriots, which is not accurate.”

Memphis-based commission member Beverly Robertson, formerly the executive director of the National Civil Rights Museum, has indicated many of her fellow board members are wedded to romantic notions of Civil War history, as are many defenders of the 1,500 or so government-backed tributes across the country, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Many Tennessee residents are avid Civil War re-enactors, Robertson said.

However, many people who celebrate the Confederacy fail to understand how the psychic damage of having a statue lauding a man who built his fortune on black bodies and sought to keep them enslaved hurts African-American residents and those committed to social justice, she said.

The city’s other Confederate statue, Jefferson Davis, is not a part of this round of discussions because the city missed a deadline seeking a waiver to get rid of that one.

Why not take them down and deal with consequences later?

During a recent forum hosted by the Black Law Students Association at the University of Memphis School of Law, Bruce McMullen, the city’s chief legal officer, emphasized the City’s determination to stay on the legal straight and narrow, regardless of how slow the process may be.

Sawyer, however, pinged McMullen for the city’s lack of aggressiveness on removing a monument so clearly an insult to African-American residents and an icon to the structural inequalities that plague local minority and impoverished residents till this day.

All this begs the question: What’s keeping Strickland from yanking down both of Memphis’ Confederate statues as #TakeEmDown901 activists have suggested, demanded even?

As is the case with any legal issue, it’s complicated.

Those complications involve possible jail for Strickland or an injunction filed by the state attorney general’s office to thwart actual removal, according to Demetria Frank, University of Memphis law professor. Memphis also faces a loss of grace in the capitol as the majority-black city is not like the rest of the state, demographically speaking, she said.

“The fear would be if you take it down, some kind of injunction would happen prior to taking it down,” Frank said. If a court “issued some kind of injunction, then whoever gives the order would be in violation of a court order, then he would risk as a public official going to jail. It’s kind of the most extreme thing that could happen. Then you’d have a legal battle.”

A better route, according to Frank would be to have an individual citizen file a lawsuit using language similar to a City Council resolution that describes the presence of the Forrest statue in a public park as a loss of enjoyment for certain community members, namely black citizens who are descendants of the very people the Confederate general fought to keep enslaved. The idea would be not all citizens don’t have “true access” to Health Sciences Park because it’s not a space meant for African-Americans and constitutes a public service or resource that not all people feel comfortable using. Frank compared this situation to a case where a lake has toxic substances that precludes the public from using or enjoying it.

The council, on Oct. 3, delayed going forward with an ordinance to remove the Forrest statue on “loss of enjoyment” grounds, choosing to see what happens at the historical commission meeting first, WREG reported. Staying within legal parameters while moving with due haste is a concern, according to Council Chairman Berlin Boyd.

The gist of the City Council’s rationale is: “The constitutional argument being made is that continuing to have those statues and memorials, that’s not allowing African-Americans to enjoy the park in the same manner as whites can,” Memphis City Council member Martavius Jones told MLK50.

In fact, the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s public accommodation rules could likely be added to such an individual lawsuit, and the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment equal protection clause could be invoked in this case, too, explained Frank, who said a federal judge would likely decide the grounds on which such a suit could move forward. Well-known equal protection cases include Brown v. Board of Education, involving racial discrimination and Roe v. Wade, addressing reproductive rights.

In Memphis’ case, such a lawsuit wouldn’t likely be filed in state court because of an obvious conflict of interest between state law and the wishes of many residents and the Strickland administration and the City Council.

This issue of celebrating the so-called Lost Cause is being debated across the country, and hit a violent point in August when white supremacists flocked to Charlottesville, Va., to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in a local park. Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal died after police say a car driven by James Alex Fields Jr. of Ohio drove through a crowd of counterprotesters. In Durham, North Carolina, protesters toppled a Confederate statue in front of the Durham County Courthouse in August, and vandals decapitated a Confederate statue at Camp Chase National Cemetery in Columbus.

Now, it’s true the City of Dallas took down a Robert E. Lee statue in August, though city council offices have been inundated with criticism of that decision since then, reports the Dallas Morning News. And the Dallas City Council is slated to vote on removal of a Confederate War Memorial near City Hall. But Frank, who originally hails from Houston, said not only is Texas different, but Dallas certainly is.

“They don’t mind being a little brash and less careful,” Frank said. They can still win politically later. The way these issues are playing out in the deeper South is different.

You’ve got big places like Dallas that can start the domino effect, whereas in Tennessee you don’t have that.”

Keep up with MLK50’s reporting on the fight to remove Confederate monuments:

• Peaceful #TakeEmDown901 rally turns tense, taking protest to the streets with a standoff, 8 arrests
• Inside America’s comfort with Confederate symbols
• Confederates’ Lost Cause still cripples the South’s economy

This report is brought to you by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit reporting project on economic justice in Memphis. Support independent journalism by making a tax-deductible donation today.

Memphis’ Forrest monument battle stalls with state historical commission delay was originally published in MLK50: Justice Through Journalism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Tennessee Historical Commission decided to punt on the issue of removing the statue of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest for at least four months.

But Mayor Jim Strickland isn’t taking the unexpected decision laying down. He said he’s going to attend the commission’s scheduled meeting Oct. 13, indicating that City and Shelby County officials are united on the quest to remove from Health Sciences Park what many regard as a painful reminder of black enslavement.

The commission is working out rules for a hearing on the City’s request for a waiver from state law to remove the statue of the slave trader and can’t approach the topic until that’s figured out, according to the Memphis Daily News. It’s harder to move these monuments because of the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act of 2016.

The unexpected delay by the 29-member body moves the entire question till its February 2018 meeting.

“However, this opinion for delay has been made without a vote of the commission,” according to Strickland’s statement posted on social media. “We are hopeful that a majority of the commission members themselves support our petition and are equally hopeful that this bureaucratic maneuver is not being used to blunt the momentum we’re seeing in our city in support of our petition.”

Memphis-based commission member Beverly Robertson has previously indicated several members are sympathetic with publicly displayed Confederate symbols, including one of Jefferson Davis, also situated in a downtown park. Civil War re-enactment culture is alive and well in Tennessee, she said, and the lure of remembering a fonder version of events stands in direct tension with how celebrating the Confederacy comes across to blacks in Memphis, most of whom are descendants of enslaved Africans.

“… what does the Old South mean to me? It means slavery, being hung, lynched,” Robertson, former longtime president of the National Civil Rights Museum, told MLK50.

Evoking the “peculiar” institution of slavery in local and national monuments is more than an aesthetic one, argues anti-statue advocates, such as Tami Sawyer, creator of #TakeEmDown901. Memphians’ efforts at pursuing education reforms, benefitting from a more inclusive economy and flexing political power is all part of a through-line of unfinished business from slavery, Reconstruction to Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement till now.

“So now the Tennessee [Historical] Commission has shown us they are who they stay they are,” Sawyer said in a Facebook video where she threw down the gauntlet: “Mayor Strickland, are you ready to unleash the dogs? Are you ready to take this statue down and fight it in court later?

The unwillingness of state and city officials to move forthwith with a request backed up by 5,000 signatures, a massive protest involving several arrests and commonsense is a slap in the face to local voters, according to Sawyer. The City, too, has collected signatures seeking removal: 177 from local clergy.

Recalling Memphis’ infamous place in civil rights history as the site of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968, Sawyer said if the statute still stands on the 50th anniversary — April 4, 2018— Memphis is “the most hypocritical and unjust city in this nation.”

And the issue of removing the Jefferson Davis statue? Well, that wasn’t a factor for the Oct. 13 commission meeting since the City neglected to include a request to remove it, letting the deadline pass.

But while the state commission has slowed down the process, the City Council is still expected to pursue removal by voting on an ordinance challenging the constitutionality of the statues at its Oct. 3 meeting.

“The constitutional argument being made is that continuing to have those statues and memorials, that’s not allowing African-Americans to enjoy the park in the same manner as whites can,” Memphis City Council member Martavius Jones recently told MLK50.

Want to know more about why removing Confederate statues is so important to people? Read up …

• The time that guerilla art made Nathan Bedford Forrest’s statue disappear
• Celebrating Nathan Bedford Forrest is celebrating white supremacy
• You want to talk about statues?

This report is brought to you by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit reporting project on economic justice in Memphis. Support independent journalism by making a tax-deductible donation today.

Historical commission delays hearing on Confederate statue removal waiver was originally published in MLK50: Justice Through Journalism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

They face a persistent wage gap grounded in discriminatory workplace practices. They’re ignored for leadership positions when fully qualified and suffer poor health outcomes compared with other groups. But a new Nielsen report offers clues about what makes black women keep on keeping on, much in the way tennis great Serena Williams described in a letter to her mother posted Tuesday at Reddit.

In detailing her experience of racialized attempts to denigrate her professional success in tennis and beyond, Williams illustrates the plight of black women who are known for striving but also thriving, skills that are stressed in the Nielsen report on black women’s influence released today at the Congressional Black Caucus conference in Washington, D.C.

“I’ve been called man because I appeared outwardly strong,” Williams wrote, praising her mother for modeling grace, patience and perseverance in the face of racism and sexism. “It has been said that I use drugs (No, I have always had far too much integrity to behave dishonestly in order to gain an advantage).

“But mom,” Williams continued, “I’m not sure how you did not go off on every single reporter, person, announcer and quite frankly, hater, who was too ignorant to understand the power of a black woman.”

Williams’ dauntless spirit is mirrored by black women surveyed by Nielsen.

“Black women have strong life-affirming values that spill over into everything they do.” — Cheryl Grace, senior vice president of U.S. community strategic alliances and consumer engagement

For example, while black women lack sponsors who can help them advance professionally, as research proves, they persist in goal-setting: 64 percent of black women say their goal is to make it to the top of their profession, according to Nielsen.

Community is important among black women surveyed: 29 percent spend three to four hours daily on social media, and 86 percent spent five or more hours a day. But that’s not all: 68 percent seek out variety in their daily lives, a desire that is 27 percent higher than that of white women.

“Black women are not only redefining what it means to be a woman for themselves, but are at the vanguard of changing gender roles and unlimited possibilities for American women of all ages and races,” according to the Nielsen report.

Black women are 14 percent of U.S. women and 52 percent of African-Americans. They skew young, with an average age of 35 years compared with an average age of 43 for white women and 39 for women overall, Nielsen said. More black women are earning bachelor’s degrees, 23 percent compared with 18 percent in 2005. And they mean business: Black women have the majority stake in 1.5 million businesses with more than $42 billion in sales.

Projecting a positive image while thinking holistically about the environment and their role in protecting it proved important to those surveyed by Nielsen:

• 68 percent of black women are content with their appearance.

• 60 percent of black women buy natural products because they are concerned about the environment.

• 63 percent buy natural, citing health concerns for themselves and their families.

• 46 percent of black women agree they often use natural or organic beauty products.

• 68 percent of black women agree they are content with their self-image.

And 55 percent said a company’s environmental record is important in buying decisions, more than the percentage for white women. Some 74 percent of black women agree climate change is a serious threat, 7 percent higher than white women.

According to Cheryl Grace, Nielsen’s senior vice president of U.S. community strategic alliances and consumer engagement: “Black women have strong life-affirming values that spill over into everything they do.”

What Serena Williams’ letter says about black women was originally published in MLK50: Justice Through Journalism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.