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- Memphis, 55 years after the killing of Martin Luther King.

Tonight, on Behind The Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I am Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by two professors, two authors.

Author of a book that we have in front of us here, Charles McKinney, is a history professor at Rhodes College.

Thanks for being here.

- Glad to be here.

- And Aram Goudsouzian is a history professor at University of Memphis.

And the book is "An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee".

Co-edited between the two of you.

You also have written many other things about these issues and other issues.

I probably just forgot to introduce Bill Dries, who's also here today.

So we'll do that a little out of order today.

But nonetheless, well, thank you so much for being here.

A big general, impossible to answer question, but 55 years later, I'll start with you, Charles, when you think about Memphis, either right now in this moment, or over the course of time, or relative to the country and the world, where is Memphis relative to the killing 55 years ago?

- That's a great question actually.

I think that if Martin King were here today, he would simply ask us what happened?

Why are we still here?

Why are we still talking about police brutality?

Why do we still have titanic levels of poverty in Memphis?

Why do we still have such entrenched racial subordination in the city?

He would look around and see some of the markers of progress.

He would look around and see an expanded Black middle class.

He would see Black political leadership.

But at his core, he would have some profound questions, and he would probably be profoundly troubled by what's going on in Memphis right now.

- Specifically in Memphis right now, what?

I can imagine, but I want you to say.

- Well, police beating people to death on camera with a sense of impunity.

Memphis still being in the top three in terms of the cities in poverty in the nation.

Again, entrenched racial inequality, that's being made manifest in a host and a variety of ways.

The perpetual challenges that he was seeking to confront during his lifetime.

- Let me bring in Aram, same big, general, impossible to answer question.

- It's a question that I think in some ways deserves a wide frame in terms of thinking about Memphis' longer history.

Thinking about 55 years ago in the assassination of Martin Luther King, in many ways, 1968 operates as a key hinge point in Memphis history, not just for the national narrative of the civil rights movement, of course, with the assassination of King and what it meant in terms of the death of the non-violent ethic, the larger sense of national unrest.

But within Memphis itself, I think it's really key to think about how Memphis had these established patterns of racial politics.

And the sanitation strike in many ways broke those older patterns.

Memphis was unique in terms of its longer racial history, in that Black Memphians could vote right through much of the early 20th Century in ways that in other Southern cities was impossible.

But it was done through the auspices of the Crump machine.

Which meant that Black Power worked only in the larger paternalistic sense.

That you could vote as long as you were voting for Crump's candidates and in Crump's ways.

But in the civil rights era, there was this era of transition.

You had Black voters who are now using their power in ways that were rejecting the older patterns of the Crump machine.

You saw a volunteer ticket here in 1959, which was a slate of Black candidates who challenged for political power, unsuccessfully, but they built up the Shelby County Democratic machine.

You saw a shift in the 1960s, in terms of Black-elected officials, A. W. Willis, serving in the State Representative's House.

But still until 1968, Memphis in many ways operated by the older patterns that Henry Loeb as the mayor embodied in terms of a racial paternalism, and the sanitation strikers.

And that brings many elements of the Black community united around a particular cause.

It's a movement of the working class, of course, and of course, sanitation workers, but it's also a movement that the NAACP gets behind, it's a movement that the Black press gets behind, it's a movement that WDIA gets behind.

It brings in Black Power elements, like The Invaders, the Black Power group at that time.

And so it shatters that older paternalism myth.

And that's why I think in many ways, it operates as this hinge point in terms of thinking about Black politics.

Because after that, Memphis enters into a new era, one that might be characterized more by racial polarization.

Two groups that seem in opposition to each other, with the primary dividing line in Memphis society being built around race.

And you see that in the candidacy of Harold Ford, for instance, who wins by building a Black political machine in the 1970s.

You see it in the Black Monday protests in the late 1960s.

You see it in the busing crisis, which really divides the city over the integration of schools in the 1970s.

And that pattern kind of holds as you go forward.

- Let me bring in Bill.

- So then Aram with with that in mind, what are your impressions when you see today, what amounts to a new generation of political leadership, who in many cases were not alive when Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, and who have a very unique interpretation of the legacy of 1968, and a legacy going further back?

Ida B.

Wells, I dare say, is a more potent figure than she probably was at the end of her life, and certainly here in Memphis, a more relevant political figure than when she left here in 1892.

- I think that speaks to what Charles was saying about kind of the dual legacy in terms of what would Martin Luther King see today.

And that you do have this dynamic generation of Black political leadership, a growth in the Black middle class, an appreciation for Black history and for Black activism that you're suggesting, for instance through Ida Wells, that you wouldn't have seen a couple generations ago, for sure.

And there's a lot of optimism that can be built around that, and there's hope for the future.

By the same token, the issues that Charles was talking about in terms of entrenched issues of poverty, in terms of police brutality, those remain.

- Charles, is the current, what I've called the new activism, is it through the lens of 1968, but with a certain amount of impatience that anything, that large factors such as poverty have not changed significantly enough in Memphis?

- Well, Aram and I, we're historians, so we like to look at the long game, the long view.

So when we think about 1968, we look at it, and we're thinking about that as a moment of culmination, and that moment of culmination is a buildup.

And so you can go back to 1868, 1908, 1918, 1928, moving up to 1968, to see the layers of activism, the layers of thought, the layers of political action, and the layers of pushback as well, that sort of take us to 1968.

So I think we should do the same thing now.

When we think about, and look at some of the activists who are really putting in some work here in Memphis, they're also standing on legacies, and many of them are very well aware of those legacies.

And those legacies go back beyond 1968.

And a lot of that legacy, is the legacy of what do we do when entrenched power does not do what we want them to do.

A lot of these moments can be sort of characterized by moments of culmination in terms of what does it look like to create new modes of communication?

What does it look like to say old messages in new ways?

So for instance, the police reforms that are being passed now, people didn't come up with those in January.

Those aren't new, they've been around for a while.

We've arrived at a point, we've arrived at this other point of culmination where with the combination of the atrocity of the murder of Tyre Nichols, that brings to light, the institutional pushback and resistance to the passage of reform legislation with regard to policing in the city.

And I think most activists understand that.

They understand that they're working in a legacy, particularly in a place like Memphis.

And so, it doesn't surprise me at all when you go and talk to activists, they're thinking through and thinking about Ida B.

Wells, they're thinking through and thinking about other moments that we chronicle in our book.

[panelists laughing] And so, I think it's really important to understand that, and also, it's also important to understand the role of impatience.

People are impatient for a reason.

Folks were impatient in the 1950s and '60s, because after a century of saying, "Hey, America, can we be included "in the mainstream of American life, particularly in the American South?"

The white South was like, "No."

So there is a reason for the impatience.

And so that's the other thing that we have to reflect on and think through in this moment.

- The other thing that I have seen, to your point, is that in the years immediately following 1968, when I was growing up, and when many other people were growing up, there developed a sort of catechism, if you will, of the way the civil rights movement unfolded.

And as more years went by, I think what Dr. King was about, and what other people in the movement and different strands of the movement were about became somewhat sanitized.

Does that constantly have to be challenged in your view?

- Yes, constantly has to be challenged.

We've gone from Martin King marching with sanitation workers and directly confronting systems and structures that are responsible for creating the society in which we live, to King Day of service.

No disrespect to all of the great service work that goes on during Martin Luther King's birthday, but to me, that's a very telling example of the trajectory of how we think about the evolution of how we think about Martin King, for a whole host of folks in the nation.

We've gone from King as this fierce social critic, culture and religious critic, and intellectual, who is challenging the President of the United States, who is challenging American society.

We've forgotten that, and we have sort of whitewashed that King.

The king who spoke out against Vietnam, the King who said we need a massive restructuring of the federal budget, the King who was getting ready to host the Poor People's Campaign.

That King is largely absent when we talk about the life and legacy of that particular individual.

- Aram, your thoughts on that, as a fellow historian.

Is this something that happens as a course of action after enough years go by with any kind of movement?

- I think so, for sure.

In general, in terms of the study of the Civil rights movement, the first generation of scholarship tended to very much follow the story of Martin Luther King as portrayed through the mainstream media.

That was the experience that people could most directly relate to, it created a national narrative, what you might call a Montgomery to Memphis narrative from 1955 to 1968.

It's centered around Martin Luther King, it's centered around mass non-violent protest, it's centered around male leadership.

But then historians started digging deeper, they started looking at the history of communities at places like Memphis.

And what did they find?

They found that the movement doesn't start in 1955, and it doesn't end in 1968.

They found that women are not just in the civil rights movement, but often play central roles and often unique roles in terms of understanding what grassroots organizing looks like.

They find that most people don't adhere to the ethic of nonviolence, that it's a particular strategy that's used in protests.

They see that the issues revolve more around economic justice from the beginning than given credit for.

So it re-frames how you think about the civil rights movement, and it allows you then to then reconsider Martin Luther King and see him in the authentic way that is necessary to see him, as a more complex figure, as a more flawed character, as a more radical figure than we've often given him credit for.

- And a more approachable and attainable character in terms of a model for social action?

- It rather than Martin Luther King as up on his own Mount Rushmore as a founding father of his own, rather a human being, struggling to make sense of America's racial and economic divide in the 1960s, and finding the best path forward.

That's someone who we can use as historians and as the American people.

- One of the sermons that I use of Kings, he gives it in March of 1968, and it's called "Unfulfilled Dreams".

And I use it as a bookend.

We'll start off with, "I Have a Dream", in 1963, and then "Unfulfilled Dreams", and basically in the premise of that sermon is what happens after you work and work and work and work towards something and you don't get it?

What do you do in that moment?

And it's a brilliant and passionate and really profound rumination on failure, on not achieving the things that you had set out for yourself.

And yet you still persist, and yet you would subscribe to a moral code that says even in the midst of this failure, you continue to move forward, you continue to pursue justice, even though you might not actually see it.

And again, we see those themes echoed in his last speech, on April 3rd.

"I might not get there with you, "but we as a people will make it to the Promised Land.

"I'm not going to see it and by no means does that mean we should stop pursuing it."

And so that's the other thing.

I think when we take the historical King seriously, when we take...

He's 39 years old.

He's much younger than I am now.

He's still in the process of being formed.

When we place him in his context as a wonderfully flawed, beautifully complex human being, who is again, seeking to effectuate some fundamental systemic changes, we know and understand that he knows that he's not alone.

He would never put himself on Mountain Rushmore.

He knows that he's part of a tradition.

And so that's the other thing that I think we should... That's the other thing that I think is really important for us to remember, that activists, whoever they are, are part of larger patterns, part of larger organizing traditions.

- Obviously one of the... You brought up one of the failures and "Unfulfilled Promises" is obviously exemplified in the killing of Tyre Nichols recently.

And part of what it was interesting to be the center of essentially worldwide attention.

And to watch from a news seat as a Memphian, this is my adopted home, this horrible, awful, I mean, just tragic, terrible incident, I'm wondering how you all watched that.

After it had happened, City of Memphis, Shelby County leaders got a lot of credit for their handling of it.

That they moved, relative to other cities, quickly, that the police officers were arrested and charged with serious charges.

That the video, most not all, but most of the video was released relatively quickly.

It was interesting to listen to podcasts from New York Times, The Economist there was another British podcast I listen to that was all about it.

Their perspective was Memphis did everything right.

Memphis has, I think, a majority Black police force, and obviously the men who beat Tyre to death, were all Black men.

I think it's a majority Black City Council now.

Like there's these things that we might say are progress, to the promise and the changes, that didn't "work".

There were a lot of reforms that MPD at least signed onto after George Floyd.

And so I don't know who wants to take that.

Like, how do you view the reaction that we're still in...

It's only a few months.

Were there things that were particularly Memphis about that reaction on the part of local leaders, or was it more that after George Floyd, after Ferguson, after all these videos, Memphis had no other choice?

- I think the second one is probably more accurate in my opinion, but that's also to be commended at the same time.

That if the city was transparent in terms of its reaction to the murder of Tyre Nichols, that is at least a step forward.

But it's a logical step considering what we'd seen, especially since given the 2020 and George Floyd.

I think the fact that the officers were Black in some ways allowed for a more rational discussion about the structural elements that feed racial police brutality.

It sort of damped the extremes in terms of what that discussion might have looked like.

I guess that was my initial reaction to it.

- Yeah, I think on the one hand, Memphis is to be commended for doing a whole lot of things, right, but when you pull the frame out, the question is why did it take us this long to have a scenario where a city responded in ways that they were supposed to respond?

Why did it take this long?

That's the thing that I keep coming back to, is in 2023, cops murdering somebody on tape, finally, actually got arrested.

And so the other thing that we have to be mindful of is... And I think activists in this moment are good about this.

How many victory laps are we supposed to take for doing something that we should be doing, that should have happened.

I don't take a victory lap every month when I pay my MLGW bill.

I'm supposed to pay the bill.

My wife doesn't pat me on the back because I make sure the lights stay on.

And so in a lot of ways, this is also sort of the bare minimum.

This is what's supposed to happen when officers of the law operating with a clear sense of impunity, literally beat somebody to death.

They are supposed to be arrested, they're supposed to lose their jobs.

And again, this has been the argument all along.

That, what if these systems were actually working in ways that we thought were appropriate, then this would not be the first time that we would've seen officers acting in this way, being held to account.

So again, yes, dap to Memphis, but also this is indicative of the larger conversation.

And with regards to African American police officers, I think activists and abolitionists and others who have been talking for a while now about the reality of structural racism, the reality of institutions and the ways in which institutions function.

So the abolitionist view of this is, it doesn't matter what the color of the police officers are.

Ellie Mystal, the legal analyst, he was like, "The only race of cop is cop."

so that's the other thing, is, the sense of impunity that has been built into policing all across the country, not just in Memphis, that impunity is also multiracial, in terms of the expectation that you can move into particular sorts of communities, conduct business in all manner of nefarious ways and go home and hang out with your family.

- Yeah, I will say... We have five minutes here... Lee Harris, County Mayor was on some weeks after the incident, and he talked about, as a young man in Memphis he'd had bad interactions with police.

And we, in the course of the conversation talked about the Black police officers killed who Tyre.

And he said, I don't even remember necessarily...

I'm poorly quoting him.

But necessarily who the cops were who threw him in the back of a car and roughed him up.

He said, I think they were Black, and he remembered it that way.

Karanja Ajanaku had won another of all... And this kind of fits in.

That the interesting commentary what happened, Karanja Ajanaku, who's the longtime editor of the Tri-State Defender, we were talking about Tyre Nichols and trying to remember him as a human and as a good young man, he brought up a thing that still sticks with me, which was, we also need to remember the family of the police officers who killed this man, because their lives are now ruined as well.

And it was a level of kind of empathy and understanding or thinking about all this stuff, that I hadn't brought up, but something that you just said reminded that.

With three minutes left here, quick question here from Bill.

I'm interested, we talked about the "Unseen Light" on a podcast when it came out in 2018.

I'm curious to know how you all see activism in the city and the struggle for civil rights here in the last five years or so, and particularly the role of activism in a city that is the biggest blue spot, in what is an otherwise very red state.

- So I would say that I think we've got a vibrant activist community here, and the thing that makes me sad about Memphis, is that the only time we get to hear from activists, the only time we get to hear from folks on the front line of particular types of issues is when we are in the midst of atrocity.

That's one of the things that I think is the perpetual challenge of activists.

Sort of operating on community levels, operating and building networks both within the city, regionally and nationally.

And doing that work regardless of what's going on in other communities, regardless of whether or not they make the news.

And so, that's one of the sad things about this moment.

All of this great work, from Decarcerate Memphis to Black Lives Matter to Memphis For All, this host of organizations.

MEF, Whole Child Strategies, shout out to my wife.

All of these organizations doing all of this great, great, good work on the ground, they remain in the shadows, they remain not heralded in the ways that I think we should be heralding them.

- And so when the spotlight hits, then I think that among the activists, there's a sense that the light's not gonna be on us very long, so we really have to push on this.

- Yeah, right.

- And we've seen that with the police reforms after George Floyd, and now the police reforms after Tyre Nichols.

- Right, and I think that stems, again from... James Baldwin's got this great quote.

He says, "I don't believe what you say because I see what you do."

So, yeah, you have to push when the cameras are on because when the cameras go off, we're gonna go back to business as usual.

Folks in power ignoring activists, ignoring folks from communities, ignoring poor and working class folks, overwhelmingly Black and Brown, who are asking for, who are demanding particular sorts of changes within their cities.

Demanding again, accountability for cops, better transportation, better wages and all of the things that Martin King and others were battling for back in 1968.

- Aram, your your thoughts on this.

- One of the reasons we wrote "An Unseen Light" was to think about what makes movements, what makes action happen.

And often it's a set of accumulated experiences over time.

And there are different strands that feed into it.

There's no one way to be an activist, there's no one way to affect historical change.

And you can see those lessons in the first half of the 20th century, you can see them in the midst of the civil rights era, and you can see 'em now.

One of my favorite pieces in the whole volume is Charles' "Coda", which connects the past to the present, which gets us on the bridge in 2018.

And so I think it's worth always bringing that historical perspective to understanding today to lend it the kind of weight that is necessary.

- We can talk for another 26 minutes.

We do not have another 26 minutes, but again, the book is "An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee", co-authored by the both of you.

People can get it wherever they get their books?

- Exactly right.

- Is that right?

- Find it in bookstores everywhere.

- Find bookstores everywhere.

Thank you both for being here, I really appreciate it.

Bill, thank you, and I'm sorry that I forgot to introduce you for the first time in 13 years, it was inevitable, but at least I saved it.

So if you missed the show today, you can get the full video online on YouTube, or you can go to wkno.org.

You can also get a full podcast to this show on iTunes, Spotify, The Daily Memphian site, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks very much, and we'll see you next week.

[intense orchestral music] [acoustic guitar chords]