The city of Memphis is currently under two states of emergency — one for the COVID-19 virus and the other for civil unrest.

One comes with a curfew and the other with the possibility there might soon be a requirement to wear facial masks or coverings in public.

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With that in mind, when Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris began the first of this week’s two updates on the COVID-19 pandemic Tuesday, June 2, there was a lot more on the table than confirmed cases and a positivity rate.

“I think we have to face all of these challenges,” he said. “They are all crashing down at once.”

The Memphis City Council added to its agenda Tuesday, and unanimously approved, a resolution to the family of George Floyd, the man killed a week ago in Minneapolis police custody, expressing its condolences.

Council chairwoman Patrice Robinson began council committee sessions earlier in the day with a moment of silence for Floyd, saying he had died “at the hands of criminals who wear badges.”

All 13 council members sponsored the resolution that expressed their collective sorrow to Floyd’s family for “an act of betrayal of public trust.”

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“There is so much that is happening all around us right now,” Harris said before the Tuesday COVID briefing got to the spike in confirmed cases and strong hints ahead of Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland’s formal extension of phase 2 of the city’s reopening plan for businesses.

Strickland also extended the citywide curfew another night following 31 arrests Sunday at the end of a protest that attempted to occupy one of the two bridges across the Mississippi River at Memphis.

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For Harris, the situation called to mind several key years:

• 1929, the year the Great Depression started and found its way into the fabric of a city that already had a legacy of lots of poverty
• 1878, the year of the worst of the Yellow Fever epidemics that revealed the perils of an unsanitary city and gave the city the final push into losing its charter
• 1968, the year of the sanitation workers’ strike that became a national cause and brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city for his final campaign and a turning point in the city’s trajectory.

He referred to the city’s current and unresolved atmosphere as “the last seven days.”

“The murder of George Floyd tears back the veil of racial injustice — an issue that seems to worsen by the day. African Americans have been too often racially profiled and over-surveilled and thrown in handcuffs,” Harris said, indicating he hopes to tap the energy present in the daily protests now at the one week mark.

“I understand the pains and frustrations of these experiences because I have had all of these experiences,” he said. “We can face down COIVD-19. We can restore our economy and we can turn the page on racial injustice.”

City curfew follows night of 31 arrests, property damage Downtown

The criminal justice reform effort is not a new one by Harris or the Shelby County Commission. And it has proven to be difficult even with a Democratic county mayor and an eight vote Democratic majority on the commission.

Criminal justice reform was a shared goal of the new commission and Harris when they took office in September 2018. But there were differences from the beginning over what to pursue first.

And few are satisfied with where the effort is to date especially after Floyd’s death.

The pandemic had already highlighted issues hiding in plain sight, according to many social justice advocates and reformers who have worked on the long-standing issues particular to Memphis for years.

The “last seven days” he referenced mark a recent revival of a lagging new activism across the last five years that early on, and especially after Donald Trump became president, made it easy to garner a crowd of at least 100 for just about any protest or demonstration in the city.

DeVante Hill has been criticized by protest organizers and others among the new crop of activists for being more a motivational speaker than leader who can harness the energy of those coming to his daily marches toward longer term goals.

And his on-again off-again alliance with Frank Gottie at the start of the daily marches begins to look like the hype for a wrestling match, after a day or two of one too many “chance encounters.”

But the numbers showing up appeal to all of the factions including those involved in Sunday’s break-off march from Hill’s random Downtown route. Tuesday evening, they were at Shelby Farms Park and onto Germantown Parkway the day after a call to Hill and Gottie marchers Downtown to violate the curfew was abandoned.

The fear among all is that the numbers that motivate elected officials and bureaucratic systems to change will inevitably dwindle at least to some degree.

“In Shelby County, we have hundreds of protesters demanding to be heard and who have lifted up important concerns. I hear you,” Harris said Tuesday, far from the march circles and chants on streets taken for a night.