Welcome to the Memphis Movement Blog!

Welcome to the Memphis Movement Blog! This is a blog where we chronicle the events, marches, happenings, and other things surrounding the movement in Memphis. We also will post other articles and essays germane to what we are doing here in Memphis and particularity within the Black Lives Matter Movement. We invite you to follow us and share widely within your own social media networks. 

Stewart Incident Triggers Systemic Shift

For six months this year the Black Lives Matter movement in Memphis grew in an ebb and a flow governed largely by the growing list of fatal police encounters in other cities.

There was also an equally volatile and varied set of reactions by civic leaders in those cities as well as protestors.

That all changed in mid-July when Memphis Police officer Connor Schilling pulled over a car with one headlight out on Winchester Road in Hickory Hill, wrote the driver a ticket and after the driver and others in the car had left got into a fight with Darrius Stewart.

The fight ended with Stewart, a passenger in the car wanted on warrants in another state, shot twice by Schilling and fatally wounded.

With that, the movement in Memphis intensified and in some ways the issue grew beyond the borders of the movement to a broader discussion.

And very quickly fundamental changes were made in how such fatal police encounters are handled as a matter of policy.

Read the rest here

Tennessee Legal Opinion is Latest Entry in Police Shooting Controversy

Herbert Slatery

The Memphis City Council cannot subpoena the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s records into the fatal police shooting of Darrius Stewart in July, according to a legal opinion from Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery.

The opinion, dated Aug. 25 and made public last week, garnered statewide attention because it hinges on the absence of a comma in the relevant state law.

But it’s also the latest entry in a chronicle that began July 17 when Memphis police officer Connor Schilling shot and killed Darrius Stewart, a passenger in a car Schilling pulled over for a traffic violation. Paired with the fatal shooting of Memphis police officer Sean Bolton two weeks later – allegedly by Tremaine Wilbourn, also a passenger in a car – the two incidents have become bookends of an already simmering local version of the national discussion about how police do their jobs.

State Rep. Antonio Parkinson, D-Memphis, sought the attorney general’s opinion. It comes seven weeks after District Attorney General Amy Weirich turned the case over to the TBI and one week after the TBI completed its investigation and sent a 600-page report to Weirich.

Her office is reviewing the report, and she has released no information on the conclusion of the investigation.

Read the rest here

Dear White People Who Proclaim “#AllLivesMatter” or “#PoliceLivesMatter”

Dear White People,

I understand (as a fellow white person) where you’re coming from. Us white folks prefer universal and abstract moral claims that relieve us of any responsibility for social change and keep us on the moral high ground. We also prefer to ignore historical particularity in our theologies/philosophies (we just cannot help ourselves, we love the “pure” rationality of the Enlightenment) and so “All Lives Matter” appeals to our sense of universality. As a white theologian, I even agree with you that at a level of a universalized and abstract theology it is true, all lives do matter (including those of the police). God loves everybody. Everyone is made in the image of God.

All that being said, “Black Lives Matter” is a particular statement born in a particular time in which Black lives have NOT been mattering (in part shown in the way Black people have been shot down by the police in numbers far beyond that of white people, and in part through additional systemic racism in our political, economic, and cultural lives). In this particular time and place all lives, therefore, are not mattering. So, if you want “All Lives Matter” to be universally credible, then join with the “Black Lives Matter” movement to help make it credible in this particular time and place in history.

Read the rest here

River of Hope: Black Politics and the Memphis Freedom Movement, 1865-1954

One of the largest southern cities and a hub for the cotton industry, Memphis, Tennessee, was at the forefront of black political empowerment during the Jim Crow era. Compared to other cities in the South, Memphis had an unusually large number of African American voters. Black Memphians sought reform at the ballot box, formed clubs, ran for office, and engaged in voter registration and education activities from the end of the Civil War through the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.

In this groundbreaking book, Elizabeth Gritter examines how and why black Memphians mobilized politically in the period between Reconstruction and the beginning of the civil rights movement. Gritter illuminates, in particular, the efforts and influence of Robert R. Church Jr., an affluent Republican and founder of the Lincoln League, and the notorious Memphis political boss Edward H. Crump. Using these two men as lenses through which to view African American political engagement, this volume explores how black voters and their leaders both worked with and opposed the white political machine at the ballot box.

River of Hope challenges persisting notions of a "Solid South" of white Democratic control by arguing that the small but significant number of black southerners who retained the right to vote had more influence than scholars have heretofore assumed. Gritter's nuanced study presents a fascinating view of the complex nature of political power during the Jim Crow era and provides fresh insight into the efforts of the individuals who laid the foundation for civil rights victories in the 1950s and '60s.

Read more here

#WhiteOut Violence in Memphis

Dr. Stacy L. Spencer, pastor of New Direction Christian Center in Memphis, TN joins talk show host Byron Tyler on Mid-South View Point. Organizers declared Sunday August 30th 2015 “Whiteout Sunday.” Pastors and churches in the community crossed racial and denominations lines on this date to march from Memphis City Hall to the National Civil Rights Museum. Whiteout Sunday communicated that citizens are tired of the violence and crime and believe that as followers of Jesus Christ engaging the issue through unity is the first step to seeing change.

Black Lives Matter Reclaims the 14th Amendment

By Cass R. Sunstein

Black Lives Matter, the activist movement that began in 2013, focuses on violence against African-Americans -- perpetrated not only by the police but also by private vigilantes. Its central goals are to prevent such violence and to hold people accountable when it occurs.

Its supporters proclaim that this is something new, “not your grandmamma’s civil rights movement.” Maybe so. But it may well be your grandmamma’s grandmamma’s civil rights movement. Black Lives Matter taps into an often forgotten, but nevertheless defining, element of our constitutional heritage.

After the Civil War, the nation ratified the 14th Amendment, much of which adopts phrases from the original Constitution and Bill of Rights. But one line was startlingly new: “nor shall any state . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Here’s one way to understand the central meaning of the equal protection clause: Black lives matter.

Nowadays, the idea of “equal protection” is understood as a broad prohibition on discrimination. But the clause refers not to equality in general but specifically to “equal protection.” It was conceived as a direct response to the states’ failure to prevent private and public violence against the newly freed slaves. As summarized more than 20 years ago by the great constitutional scholar David Currie, the clause means that “the states must protect blacks to the same extent that they protect whites: by punishing those who do them injury.”

Read the rest here