What we all lost in Memphis
MEMPHIS — This sleepy jewel of a town is cautiously feeling its way through a commemoration of the tragedy that struck 50 years ago, when Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in racially segregated Memphis.
There’s no easy way to promote Memphis as a forward-looking city when, for so many people, the place will forever be associated with the blind, bloody race hatred that led James Earl Ray to track and stalk King, snuffing out his life with a rifle shot.
But the city is gamely attempting to move beyond its history. That includes partial amends for its vicious mistreatment of striking black sanitation workers, the injustice that brought King to Memphis in 1968.
A monument has been erected at a site — renamed I Am A Man Plaza — where strikers used to meet next to Clayborn Temple, a black church. The memorial records the names of each of the workers who risked firings, injury and mob violence by daring to march for better pay while bearing signs that said “I am a man.”
And the Memphis City Council voted to pay $70,000 apiece to all living sanitation men who went on strike in 1968. Critics complained that the gesture, while appreciated, was hardly enough to make up for a generation of miserably low pay, cruel working conditions and missed opportunities to build family wealth.
The city’s ambivalent gestures mirror the nation’s uncertainty about what, if anything, should be done to advance King’s dream of a radically more fair and decent society. The National Civil Rights Museum, which converted the Lorraine into a remarkable set of exhibits, recently compiled a set of bleak statistics about black-white inequality in Shelby County, where Memphis is located.
By some measures, the progress since 1968 is barely detectable. About 36% of black households in the county have annual income of less than $25,000, contributing to Memphis’ status as the poorest major urban area in America.
“Unemployment among African Americans in Shelby County has actually gotten much worse since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. It is difficult to explain why this is so, because educational attainment has increased in the same period,” the civil rights report found. “It is possible that the high unemployment rate for African Americans is associated with the War on Drugs because African Americans have been disproportionately targeted for arrest and conviction for drug possession, leading to criminal records that make African Americans less employable.”
As a crowd of politicians, activists, scholars, union officials and ministers descend on Memphis this week to meditate on King’s life and talk about what comes next, we should all heed the quietly persuasive voice of Bishop Charles Blake, the presiding bishop of the Church of God in Christ, a 6-million-strong evangelical Christian denomination whose world headquarters is the Mason Temple in Memphis.
The vast, dramatic sanctuary space of Mason Temple is, literally, sacred ground in the civil rights movement. It is the pulpit from which King delivered his final speech, the stirring oratory of “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” on the night before his murder.
Sitting in a conference room near the sanctuary, Blake told me why he has launched a five-point plan, called the Urban Initiative, that 2,000 churches have already signed onto. It calls for commonsense efforts to boost education, economic development, financial literacy, crime reduction and support for strong families.
All well and good. But Blake went beyond the ordinary programs-and-policy talk to address the nation’s spiritual crisis.
“We’re in trouble. What we preach, we should do. What we claim to believe, we should pursue,” he told me. “We should understand that religion, at its best, is to love those who are impacted by misfortune and trouble. To lift them, care for them, to feed and clothe them.”
And he has little patience for those who want to place all their hope in government action.
“In the age of Trump, it becomes all the more important that we pursue what we can do for ourselves,” he said. “Yes, demand the rights and privileges that every American citizen is entitled to. But we can’t wait for Trump to do for us, or anybody else to do for us. We must all put the priority on ourselves.”
That kind of rarely heard call for black self-help alongside street activism is what black churches — the practical and intellectual wellspring of King’s appeal — must not allow to be lost in this week of political speeches. It is the key to continuing the work cut brutally short on that motel balcony so many years ago.