Peel back the fancy ribbon-cutting ceremonies and press conferences for new jobs and all you’re left with is handouts to big, connected companies and higher taxes for the rest of us.

Companies want to locate in communities that will work with them long after the ribbon-cutting and headlines are done. We know that our local firms are constantly being courted by other communities looking to grow their economies.

There’s something wonderful about musical collaborations, both the totally unexpected and the so-perfect-together-they’re-completely-obvious.

In the late 1960s, African-American students at Memphis State would not settle for second-class citizenship, especially when they paid tuition like their white counterparts, and their parents’ tax dollars supported the institution like the parents of their white counterparts. So they organized.

'My insight on diversity had come from experience as the diverse candidate or double minority. My experience had come as a benefactor of diverse hiring initiatives that opened doors that would have otherwise been closed to someone like me.' 

A plan does not gentrify neighborhoods and displace existing residents. In fact, it seeks to provide the framework to avoid exactly that happening and to guide and coordinate investment so that it has broad-based benefit.

The presidential campaign of 1968 was a last hurrah for the “Old Politics,” in which political machines and party leaders determined the major nominees. It also highlighted a “New Politics,” in which candidates took their cases to the people, through party primaries and modern technology.

'I volunteer and run for those who want to but say they can't, and for those who can't but wish they could.'

Consider the difference between a planned community such as Seaside, Florida, and an overdone Disney sequel. We can simply look to our neighbors in Nashville to see what an overdone sequel looks like in an urban environment.

When her husband was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, a woman who started her own business dropped everything to care for him and their three young daughters. Ten years later, the entrepreneurial spirit returned.

The Rev. James Lawson, who invited Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis 51 years ago, will speak at Memphis Cares 2 on April 7 at Crump Stadium. The event recalls the first Memphis Cares, held three days after King's assassination.

Every three months or so, 50 people who comprise the MSCC board of directors file into a room for their quarterly meeting. They include law enforcement and criminal justice leaders as well as people from business, faith, nonprofit and grassroots sectors.

Playback Memphis was life-giving to this band of 14, who were “voluntold” to participate in what most would deem a crazy idea – bringing police officers together with those who had spent their lives running from them.

In Memphis, new immigrants make up just over 5 percent of the metro population, but account for 9 percent of the area's business owners.

With this entry, McKenzie Leaks was named an ambassador in the national Do the Write Thing Challenge, an anti-violence essay contest. Her essay was one of two chosen from 2,000 submitted by students from 16 schools in the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office Every Day in School program.  

Jared Rawlings' essay was one of two chosen from 2,000 submitted by students from 16 schools in the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office Every Day in School program. He was named an ambassador in the national Do the Write Thing Challenge, an anti-violence essay contest.  

Bill Russell and Bob Cousy saw each other as brothers, not just athletes. Their relationship reflects a standard our society has yet to attain.

In a 1973 interview with Ebony magazine, Memphis sanitation worker John C. White said Dr. Martin Luther King's sacrifice stayed with him: “I've had a better life.”

'I can predict that when the Memphis River Parks Partnership’s work on Tom Lee Park is complete, few will look back and long for the flat field that we experience today.'

Discriminatory laws will only set the tone for continued discrimination – up to and including targeted violence. These proposed laws are a distraction from Tennessee priorities like good schools, healthy environments and safe communities.

Motivated by the fact that the majority of Tennessee’s third-grade students can’t read or do math on grade level, a bipartisan group of legislators has committed to exploring policy improvements for students prior to third grade.

'I’m pretty certain it was that Memphis grit and grind that I wasn’t always so comfortable with that helped me earn a license as a locomotive conductor at nearly 40 years old.'

Here are 20 songs from the Memphis music catalog that will improve your commute one day this week.

John will be lamented and loved as a survivor and casualty of addiction, a saint and sinner, a gentle and tormented soul whose life and death, head and heart, darkness and light were a parable, a revelation, a psalm.

'Ministers and those in other healing professions are called to use their own woundedness in the healing of others. At times, such openness can become an occupational hazard – becoming overwhelmed by the exposure to such pain.'