Local elections ought to be straightforward affairs for voters. Here are six ways our leaders always deny us this right – three today and three tomorrow.

Who buys the cleaning supplies for a safe return to schools during the pandemic? What happens if students forget their face masks? A parent has these and other questions about the Shelby County Schools plan for fall. 

Bree Newsome is the African American woman who scaled the flagpole at the South Carolina capital to bring down the Confederate flag after Dylann Roof killed nine people in Charleston, South Carolina. It is my hope that her name is not relegated to the dustbins of trivial history. Bree Newsome. Hardly trivial.

Everything about the coronavirus has become politicized, so why not a return to school? The answer is simple: The losers will be our children, and that is not an acceptable price to pay for political points.

Tennessee passed legislation to allow legal sports betting in an online-only format in May of 2019, but has yet to roll out platforms to make sports betting available to the public. This is a head-scratcher considering the state has an easy slam dunk opportunity to recoup some of the year’s lost revenue with very little effort.

As you wander the world and see a sign somewhere that says barbecue – by any spelling anywhere else – it’s best to just run. Barbecue in Memphis is quite simply the highest a pig can go. 

Sometimes it seems our memory is as selective as our outrage. Black men are taken into custody every day without incident. Two young Black men accused of killing Memphis police officers – Tremaine Wilbourn and Justin Welch – were arrested without incident.

Redskins owner Dan Snyder for years ignored pleas to drop the moniker, telling USA Today in 2014 that he would never change it. Apparently Snyder has since watched Sean Connery’s last James Bond movie, “Never Say Never Again.” 

Four years ago, James Meredith, others from Mississippi and I were invited to take part in a series of college speaking engagements about progress our state had made in the area of civil rights. Most in the audience were amazed that Meredith, the civil rights legend, was still alive. I can attest that my friend is very much alive, spirited and has something to say.

I will argue that state Rep. John DeBerry has more influence than the entire Tennessee Democratic Party combined. The completely absurd effort to remove him from the ballot is the equivalent of taking Peyton Manning off the field during the Super Bowl.

Memphis is not in a weak position regarding our electricity choices, and $450M for Memphis believes that a city should never sign a $20 billion contract without at least one competitive bid that addresses all costs, terms and options.

The district will provide devices for families who need them, but families are responsible for supervising and troubleshooting online learning. Parents must work together to weather this disruption in education, writes SCS mom Heidi Kupke.

Historian Donald L. Miller’s spellbinding book about the campaign is titled “Vicksburg,” but it could just as easily have been called “Memphis.” 

The ranking in the clerkship category places Memphis Law ahead of law schools such as Washington and Lee, Ole Miss, Georgetown, Emory, Tennessee and Columbia.

The Community Foundation of Greater Memphis' $40 million gift to LeMoyne-Owen College is one of the largest received by any HBCU nationally. It's designed to propel the college to the next level in higher education.

While we see days with alarmingly high numbers of cases, we must focus on the overall trends – trends that demonstrate the acceleration of this disease is rapid, but it is not as precipitous as might be suggested by viewing a single data point.

I was actually looking forward to holding gas pump handles with antiseptic wipes, considering hazmat suits in bathrooms, counting masks in Cracker Barrel, and Atkins breakfast bars in lieu of La Quinta’s breakfast bars.

College President Carol Johnson-Dean took the call announcing the largest endowment the 158-year-old school had ever received: “I literally began to cry.”

Nothing this week has been more distressing than to glimpse the sprouting seeds of a familiar political battle, this time over school openings. It was awful enough to see mask usage amid a pandemic turned into a test of political fidelity. Please, not this time.

In “Bleeding Out,” a senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, writes that "nothing works as well to reduce urban violence as focused deterrence.”

Even as we announce final decisions and protocols, I cannot assure you that it will not change again, because that is how quickly the virus impacts the information we use to make decisions.

A few local, socially conscious judges acknowledged institutional problems with unconscious bias, and they spearheaded the founding of the Center for Excellence in Decision-Making.

Mayor Jim Strickland has been in a no-win situation with the City Hall occupation, especially being a white mayor in a predominantly African American city. And while the ending of the protest was not ideal, history shows it could have been a lot worse.

The team name in question, of course, is Redskins. It has been a standing insult to our country’s first peoples since the team was created in 1933. 

At Ora Alexander’s homegoing, only family could gather. But that was OK. Ora had already touched the lives of so many people she’d simply met in passing.