There were dual press events on the edges of Downtown Memphis, just a few blocks apart, over the past few days. Both featured elected officials and community activists in concert and both addressed the protests that have erupted in Memphis, and around the country, over the past two weeks. 

But if concrete change comes to Memphis, as city Mayor Jim Strickland vowed at one of these events, it won’t come from one assembly or the other. It will come from a collision — or merging — of the two.

Calkins: In a country roiled by violence, Memphis shows amazing grace

On the evening of Wednesday, June 3, Strickland and MPD Director Michael Rallings joined activists DeVante Hill and Frank Gottie at I Am a Man Plaza at Clayborn Temple, announcing a series of weekly meetings with the two march organizers over the coming weeks. 

Strickland called Hill and Gottie “the leaders of the peaceful protest,” which is a questionable accounting of what’s happened in Memphis streets over the past dozen days and nights. 

There’s no “right” way to protest, and if there were this columnist wouldn’t be qualified to bestow that honor. But there has been a different tenor to different local demonstrations. 

Hill has been leading what amount to vigil-like marches from I Am a Man Plaza largely through portions of Downtown that, with many restaurants still not fully operating and events generally still dormant, have been relatively depopulated. The group singing and chanting — COVID be damned — have made for good video, but haven’t much engaged those beyond the marchers themselves. It’s been a relatively safe space for people to express solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement in fellowship with the like-minded.

Meanwhile, other activists have focused either on more sensitive aspects of Downtown, such as the criminal justice complex at 201 Poplar, or have ventured to predominantly white, middle-class areas such as Midtown, East Memphis and Germantown Parkway, actions that have brought on somewhat more disruption. 

Each approach is valid, and each “peaceful” in the sense of nonviolence. 

“Memphis is a spread-out city with significant deficits in education, income and transportation. There are too many people in Memphis for whom it’s a struggle to get to a job every day, much less to a protest.”

And whatever frictions and factionalizations are apparent within the Memphis movement of recent days, they are not total. At a recent Hill-led march from Clayborn Temple, Black Lives Matter activists passed out fliers for a civil disobedience workshop on the grounds of the National Civil Rights Museum for the next night, with Hill pausing his event that night in apparent deference. 

But it was clear to most paying close attention, and particularly those with a memory that stretches back to the 2016 bridge protest and its messy aftermath, that Strickland and Rallings meeting with Hill and Gottie was not a dramatic pivot. It was a strategic case of civic leaders anointing their preferred protesters.

In truth, despite the attention Hill’s garnered from the media and some civic leaders, there is no centralized leadership for these batteries of Memphis protests. 

What will ultimately matter is not who Strickland or Rallings meet with but what comes from it. And that will have a lot to do with the second Downtown display, a Saturday morning gathering at NAACP headquarters on Vance Avenue, where black City Council and County Commission members, state representatives and others broke what had been a kind of collective quiet by essentially vowing to take the baton from protesters in the streets and turn that energy into policy changes.

From public protest to public policy

At a Midtown protest on Saturday night, one demonstrator talking to another put the 11th consecutive day of Memphis protest into perspective, noting that the Montgomery bus boycotts of the mid-'50s lasted more than a year. 

How much longer will our streets be alive with protest?

Doing the right thing is complicated, as protest and pandemic collide

Rising Memphis heat, a rising number of COVID cases and unavoidable fatigue suggest diminishing energy is likely, but it could depend on how quickly and effectively traction is seen from a policy standpoint. 

And this is where things are bound to get trickier. A lot of Memphians got the feel-goods from social-media images of “peaceful” marches, group singalongs and a comparative lack of some of the chaos seen in other cities.

“Comparative” is a key qualifier here, because the story in Memphis has not been entirely tidy. Dozens of protesters have been arrested. Tear gas was used by state and county officers despite the community spread of a respiratory virus. There have been at least two incidents of female protesters thrown to the ground without presenting any kind of physical threat to law enforcement. There’s been some minor vandalism Downtown. And most worrisome perhaps were two incidents in Midtown on Friday night of men driving their cars into protesters. No one was seriously injured, but memories of Charlottesville were unavoidable. 

We love to evoke what we think of as the civil rights era, especially in a city where that history is so palpably present. But the bus boycotts, sit-ins and sanitation strikes weren’t just about appealing to hearts and minds. They were primarily about changing laws and policies. 

Addressing racism at its human core is essential work, but “defund the police,” or even less dramatic-sounding policy proposals, presents perhaps an even thornier conversation. 

It’s time for a radical rethinking of police structure

Strickland vowed “concrete actions” from his I Am a Man Plaza address, and has joined mayors in other cities in signing onto an Obama Foundation pledge to review and reform police use-of-force procedures.

Shelby County Commissioner Tami Sawyer, among those at the NAACP event on Saturday, has vowed to pursue a budget reduction for the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office and suggested on social media that she will push use-of-force reforms promoted by the national organization Campaign Zero. 

In a Daily Memphian guest column, attorneys Bryce Ashby and Steve Mulroy suggest three specific areas of policy action: Strengthening civilian oversight of police by enhancing the subpoena power of the Civilian Law Enforcement Review Board (CLERB); reversing the militarization of the police force that’s occurred over the past couple of decades; and a greater focus on de-escalation training for officers. 

Ashby and Mulroy call this a “radical rethinking,” but it feels like mainstream thinking might be shifting swiftly in their direction. Their proposals feel more like a reasonable starting point than an endgame.

Do reform advocates have the wind at their backs?

When people ask why protests in Memphis have been so different than in most other cities, they’re fishing for a compliment. But there’s one aspect that is never mentioned: They have been smaller than in most other cities. 

Factionalism has turned what might be one 1,000-person event into two or three multi-hundred-person events on many nights. But even if you added it all together, there has been nothing in Memphis like the mass public displays seen in recent days in cities from Nashville to Philadelphia, Boise to Buffalo. 

Protest blog, Day 12: Individuals’ stories add meaning to rally

COVID is a good reason to avoid mass gatherings, but no more a factor here than elsewhere. Memphis isn’t the only city that’s hot, though certainly hotter than most. 

More likely, issues of geography, poverty and demographics are at play. 

Memphis is a spread-out city with significant deficits in education, income and transportation. There are too many people in Memphis for whom it’s a struggle to get to a job every day, much less to a protest. 

The first Memphis Women’s March and the first march against the Trump administration’s travel ban, a few years ago, both seem to have garnered bigger local crowds than any individual demonstration in the past couple of weeks, but were still smaller, per capita, than comparable protests in other cities. 

If there’s a median protester, demographically speaking, for all of these demonstrations, it appears to be someone who’s relatively young and relatively well-educated though, in this particular case at least, not relatively well-off. 

Ironically, the socially engaged college students and recent college grads who seem to take to the streets in larger numbers are much the same population that cities want to retain and attract in their pursuit of economic and population growth. And the ability to easily and comfortably gather in centralized places is a byproduct of desired mobility, social and literal. There’s an argument to be made that in this instance, as in the women’s and travel/immigration marches, the size of a city’s demonstration could actually be an indicator of civic health. 

Or maybe Memphis doesn’t care? Or largely disagrees?

Beyond protest and within leadership: next steps from the George Floyd protests in Memphis

You’d be wrong to draw firm conclusions either way from the size or make-up of these demonstrations. But it’s worth remembering that policing and criminal justice were pivot issues in each of the past two mayoral elections, which Strickland won commandingly — including with strong support from black voters — on a platform of building up MPD and generally tougher policies. 

The comparatively small turnout for Memphis protests does not mean the tide of public opinion isn’t shifting locally, but you could wonder how reflective of the city writ large the protest movement is. 

Of course, now Strickland is among those touting reform. The call, at least in part, is coming from inside the house. 

It’s a cliche that all politics is local, but that has become increasingly untrue.

As Bill Dries reminded us last week, an incoming Strickland administration, in the last year of the Obama presidency, had requested a Justice Department review of local policies and past police behaviors, but this review was called off by the DOJ under Trump’s then-attorney general, Jeff Sessions. 

A different Washington over the past three years might have meant a different Memphis. Now a different Washington might be on the horizon. 

Prior to Trump’s election, there was a growing bipartisan consensus around criminal justice and policing reforms. That path has been blocked over the past few years, but the events of the past couple of weeks might be opening it up again. 

Remember the Memphis Confederate statues saga. There was both institutional will and local activism at work. But as much as those two forces argued with each other (while pursuing the same goal), what truly did not get enough credit was the national nudge. It was Charlottesville that put a national spotlight back on the question of Confederate displays, and statues coming down in New Orleans that set a regional precedent it would have been difficult to deny. 

If laws and policies around policing and criminal justice change in Memphis, it will again be the result of both institutional will and civic activism. But it’s likely again to be a consequence, in part, of a national wave. 

The call is also coming from outside the house. How forcefully will Memphis answer it?