MLK50 concert honors 1968 strikers
Her voice floated through the Cannon Center for the Performing Arts, falling like so many dewdrops from heaven on Memphis' surviving 1968 sanitation workers.
As celebrated soprano Angela Brown sang Puccini's haunting "Vissi d'arte,'' one couldn't help reflect on a half-century of contrast. Fifty years ago, these garbage men were the object of open scorn and ridicule in white Memphis. They'd gone on strike, leaving rubbish to pile up as they marched against oppressive, often brutal, working conditions.
Now, on this Monday night, they returned to the spotlight as honored VIPs, sporting tuxedos and sitting in box seats typically associated with the rich and powerful.
"We've come a long way,'' said Robert Taliaferro, 91, one of 30 surviving workers from the 1968 strike honored as the evening festivities began. As one who worked more than 30 years taking out the city's trash, enduring rain, snow, oppressive heat, and the tear gas and night sticks the city's police directed at him and his colleagues, Taliaferro offered a brief but pithy summation of the turnabout: "Thank you, Lord.'' The city honored the men with the privately funded "MLK50 Luminary Awards Concert," a star-studded affair featuring actor LeVar Burton as emcee and more than 200 musicians, including saxophonist Kirk Whalum, former Stax Music Academy artistic director Justin Merrick, the Memphis Symphony Orchestra and the symphony's chorus, as well as choruses from the University of Memphis and Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church.
The evening started with a private ceremony where Mayor Jim Strickland awarded the former sanitation workers with "The 2018 Luminary Award" medallions.
"Fifty years ago the man who occupied my office wouldn't even speak to the sanitation workers,'' Strickland later said from the stage as the concert began, a reference to segregationist Mayor Henry Loeb's staunch opposition to the strike.
Strickland told the estimated 800 concertgoers much has been accomplished since, but emphasized, "We still have a long way to go.''
Concert organizer Gayle Rose told the gathering she hopes her musical spectacular will light a spark for a new generation of activists who will work to overcome Memphis' long struggles with the "cruelty of poverty,'' mass incarceration and other social ills.
"We will be judged 50 years from now not for what we did but for what we didn't do,'' she said.
Musically, the night commenced with a stirring choral rendition of James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing,'' a favorite sung for years by African-American schoolchildren and adopted as the early anthem of the NAACP. The crowd stood as the combined choruses of MSO, the U of M and Mississippi Boulevard Church sang what many call the "Black national anthem."
Burton narrated from the stage, telling the story of the sanitation workers and their volatile strike that brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis and into an assassin's crosshairs 50 years ago on Wednesday.
"They opened doors for their grandchildren, their children,'' Burton said.
Filling in for five-time Grammy winner Jessye Norman, who suffered a broken ankle after slipping on ice and could not perform, accomplished operatic soprano Brown wowed the crowd with her range and power, singing a series of diverse numbers, including "He's Got the Whole World In His Hands,'' and "The Betrayal,'' from "The Crucifixion" oratorio.
Following intermission, Merrick, backed by the symphony, sang an inspiring rendition of Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come," earning outbreaks of applause from the audience.
Next up was a special performance by surviving members of the 1968 Prairie View A&M University a cappella concert choir that gave a chance midnight performance for King and his staff in a smoke-filled meeting room at the Lorraine Motel days before his death. The choir, comprising six members from the '68 choir and supplemented by ten other Prairie View singers from that period, sang the piece they serenaded King with a half century ago, Randall Thompson's "Alleluia," earning a standing ovation.
Saxophonist Whalum then played "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.
Capping the evening was a most moving version of "We Shall Overcome,'' sung in unison by all the performers as well as the audience, all standing, all holding hands and swaying to the anthem that changed America.