Skip to main content

Tag: Dr. Martin Luther King

When Your Racist Beliefs are Challenged….

When I was in the 7th grade, I went on a weekend trip with a new friend. Drew was Jewish and, as she explained, because her grandmother was with us on that Passover, we would be observing. We went to what I, a young girl newly minted from Mississippi, called the coast, and they called the beach. I remember it as a remote island. I’m sure it...

Continue reading

#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: 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

Dr. King’s Room

The first time I visited the National Civil Rights Museum, what I saw were words. Words and words and more words hanging on the walls upon black and white sheets of paper. So many words. After my early visit, the museum added a few physical exhibits, most notably a big-ass garbage truck in recognition of the striking sanitation workers who brought...

Continue reading