Skip to main content

Month: April 2018

#MLK50: No Neat Bow

I spent yesterday at two different events. One was a service at Calvary Episcopal Church to dedicate a new marker on the site of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s slave market. The old marker referred to Forrest’s time in Memphis where his “business enterprises made him wealthy.” The old marker did not identify Forrest’s business as human trafficking—selling...

Continue reading

#MLK50: The Beloved Community

“It is impossible for white Americans to grasp the depths and dimensions of the Negro’s dilemma without understanding what it means to be a Negro in America. Of course it is not easy to perform this act of empathy. Putting oneself in another person’s place is always fraught with difficulties. Over and over again it is said in...

Continue reading

#MLK50: A Hostile Land

In reading Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community, I was struck by Dr. King’s repeated point that, following the Civil War, the country released the formerly enslaved into the land of their oppressors. These men and women found themselves  in the “territory of their enemies.” In their new life, they were financially dependent...

Continue reading

#MLK50: What was the Civil Rights Movement?

Here in Memphis, we are about to roll from Holy Week and Easter Sunday into the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s assassination. In preparation for this, I’ve been reading Where Do We Go from Here, Dr. King’s last book published in 1968. This phrase—Where Do We Go from Here?—is the tag used by MLK50 for...

Continue reading

We are Risen

On Easter morning, we sing a song of “He is Risen,” and thus miss the point. We are risen, a Resurrected people. This Easter season (yep, there’s an Easter season—50 days of it) I will walk eyes-open every day for images of Resurrection. The season is one of joy. Y’all know me—the images will be my own. Happy Easter, you...

Continue reading