40 Memphians honored for civic contributions
Back when David May was a young banker in Memphis, he wanted to understand deeply the big city’s fabric.
It was the mid 1990s. Memphis was coming off the dashed dream of landing a National Football League franchise and figuring out the next steps. May, raised in Columbus, Mississippi, longed to enroll in Leadership Memphis. It aims to mix together diverse people of all colors and backgrounds to talk about the city and its future.
“The purpose was to broaden your vision and awareness of everything going on in Memphis,” said May, presently the Regions Bank president for West Tennessee. “I really wanted to join.”
Forty years after its founding, Leadership Memphis will celebrate its anniversary Tuesday morning and commemorate 40 notable Memphians as well as nearly 3,400 alumni, including David May, Class of 1997.
Founded when racial wounds remained exposed following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination a decade earlier in 1968, the nonprofit organization is regarded as key to inspiring the higher level of civic capital that helped hold Memphis together. Its efforts also underscore Memphis’ new distinction: America’s most generous city, according to Chronicle of Philanthropy.
“The biggest change I’ve seen in 20 years has been the connectedness of our organizations that attack the issues we’re facing,’’ said May, who serves currently as investment chair for United Way of the Mid-south, a nonprofit that funds various community groups. “We had groups that didn’t know there was
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“The kind of Memphis that Leadership Memphis always envisioned and wanted, it is starting to happen. It is actualizing the relational and not just the organizational.’’
another organization five blocks away working on the very same issue. Twenty years later, organizations are aligned and working together and aren’t afraid the group next to them is going to get the next capital dollar.”
On Tuesday, Leadership Memphis faithful will gather in a Hilton Memphis conference hall. Forty Memphians will be saluted, including 30 alumni widely known for civic leadership. Another 10 were selected for taking influential actions in their young lives.
“We want to recognize people who have made lifetime achievements and also young change makers who are going to be making a difference 20, 30 or 40 years from now,” Leadership Memphis chief executive David Williams said.
Among the wellknown: Real estate developer Ron Belz, investment executive Staley Cates, insurance executive Fred Davis, philanthropist Pitt Hyde Jr., Southern Heritage Classic founder Fred Jones Jr., Fedex founder Frederick Smith. Among the change makers: African-american arts group founder Victoria Jones and hospitality industry entrepreneur Jose Velazquez.
“Our society and our educational system have moved away from teaching civics to a large extent,” Williams said, referring to a subject that broadly means understanding the process of how Americans gather and agree to make changes.
“We have the opportunity through programs like Leadership Memphis to bring people together to learn and talk about the strengths we have in common,” Williams said. “A lot of time we overlook that. Memphians can be a tad cynical, but great things are being done to address the issues.’’
Leadership Memphis enrolls people who maintain their jobs while taking time to participate in civic programs. The executive class lasts 120 hours over the course of a year. Tuition is about $5,000. The fast track class participates for 40 hours. Tuition for that class is about $1,500.
Not all the work takes place in classrooms. Williams points out Michael Deutsch, a financial executive active in support of the Memphis Inner City Rugby team at Freedom Prep, was enrolled in Leadership Memphis when he reached out to various officials. They arranged a practice field, equipment and team transportation. The rugby team won the state championship last year.
“How do things like that happen? They happen because someone is really passionate about it and they are able to get others to buy into their passion and then execute,” Williams said. “What we accomplish as Leadership Memphis is really what the alumni accomplish.”
The institution traces to another era. In the 1970s, American leaders worried about social decay. Throughout the nation, Americans lost interest in voting. Teen pregnancy rates climbed, divorce became more common and homicide rates rose. In Memphis, those issues were compounded by MLK’S death dispiriting the city. Prominent lawyers Lucius Burch and Lewis Donelson and the Memphis Junior League’s Kate Gooch agreed a kind of leadership forum then common in Atlanta and Nashville would help stabilize Memphis, Williams said. They began to organize what was at first named the Memphis Institute for Civic and Public Responsibility.
“When Leadership Memphis started, Memphis was still coming out of the grief of the King assassination. Still. Ten years later,” said Rabbi Micah Greenstein, senior rabbi of Temple Israel in Memphis. “The tragedy wasn’t that it happened in Memphis but that it happened at all.”
Greenstein, named one of Leadership Memphis’ 40 honorees, said the information sharing David May found useful two decades ago has evolved. In recent years, class members are more apt to forge bonds and act on those bonds.
“The kind of Memphis that Leadership Memphis always envisioned and wanted, it is starting to happen,” Greenstein said. “It is actualizing the relational and not just the organizational.’’
Even today, some Memphians consider the nonprofit a goal-setting machine — a place where business leaders and politicians explain their vision for Memphis and everyone else gets in line. It wasn’t that way at all when education consultant Kenya Bradshaw was enrolled in the Class of 2007.
“I appreciated the diversity of the people who were brought in and the intentional way people were encouraged to form relationships with people they never thought they would be in a relationship with,” Bradshaw said, noting a friendly bond emerged with Shelby Farms Park advocate Laura Adams. “We really looked at the role of race and segregation in systems and how those structures affect how we are today. In a very sophisticated way, they brought that up to be part of your understanding of Memphis.”
While she found the experience exhilarating, Bradshaw said, she still despairs over what she calls the slow pace of progress in a region dogged by poor health, widespread poverty, nagging racism and abundant crime issues.
“I think the problems we face are complex but are not impossible to solve,” Bradshaw said. “I just think we still need to articulate a vision of how we are going to do it all.”
That Memphis has reached the point where it needs a common black-andwhite vision, as opposed to simply needs healing of old racial wounds, may be a legacy of four-decade-old Leadership Memphis. Even with its divides of rich and poor and black and white, Greenstein said, Memphis is better today at understanding how to pull together and try to temper the sort of conflicts that touched off recent rioting in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri.
“Enough people across predictable lines of division not only are known to each other but they trust each other as friends. It’s building bridges with those who share your same values. It’s fighting hate,” Greenstein said.
“It is a unique city because all of its history embraces all of the American history we have lived,” he said. “You can’t just create the city you want in a city 200 years old. Memphis is the Jerusalem of civil rights.’’
Ted Evanoff, business columnist of The Commercial Appeal, can be reached at evanoff@commercialappeal.com and (901) 529-2292.