Star-studded concert to honor ’68 strikers
Operatic soprano Jessye Norman, saxophonist Kirk Whalum and actor LeVar Burton will headline a tribute concert April 2 to honor Memphis’ 1968 striking sanitation workers.
Hosted by Mayor Jim Strickland and businesswoman Gayle Rose, the “MLK50 Luminary Awards Concert” at the Cannon Center will start with a private, 5 p.m. ceremony in which Strickland will hand out “The 2018 Luminary Award” medallions to the 30 surviving sanitation workers. The privately funded concert will start at 7:30.
The free-of-charge, invitation-only event is structured similar to a people’s symphony concert. Though tickets won’t be sold, the mayor’s office is expected to give hundreds of invitations to local churches and community organizations who, in turn, will pass those invitations to congregants, volunteers and other citizens.
“The fight for fair wages is still a struggle,” said Rose, who hopes the event will inspire today’s activists to follow the example of the city’s striking garbage workers, whose fight for better working conditions and respect brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis, where he was shot and killed by a sniper on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968.
“The mission of the evening is to light a fire in all of us for the next 50 years.”
The black tie-optional concert also is inspired by the pageantry of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. Rose said the surviving sanitation workers will sit in box seats and wear tuxedos donated by a local firm.
The event features more than 250 musicians including the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, the symphony’s chorus, as well as choruses from the University of Memphis and Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church. Local artist Justin Merrick, the Grammy-nominated former artistic director of the Stax Music Academy, will sing Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
Five-time Grammy Award winner Norman will sing various selections, including Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and the civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome.” Twelve-time Grammy nominee Whalum will play “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” the song King asked native Memphian saxophonist Ben Branch to play moments before the civil rights leader was hit by an assassin’s bullet. Actor Burton (Roots, Star Trek: The Next Generation) will emcee the event.
“Music has a way of saying things that words cannot,” Rose, a former clarinetist and current chairwoman of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, said of the music spectacular she’s assembled.
The concert features a special performance by surviving members of the 1968 Prairie View A&M a cappella concert choir that gave a chance, midnight performance for King and his staff in a smoke-filled meeting room at the Lorraine days before his death.
“That was a delightful moment in my life. I’ve never forgotten it,” said Tom Jones, 70, a former singer at Prairie View, a historically black university near Houston. “(Dr. King) was one of the most interesting, exciting individuals that I’ve ever had a chance to meet face to face.’’
The event also will feature posthumous recognition of sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker, whose tragic deaths in a malfunctioning garbage truck sparked the sanitation strike.
Underscoring the event’s call to activism, the program features quotes from 19th Century orator and statesman Frederick Douglass:
“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”