Rev. Stacy Spencer attached a three-year-old set of social justice goals Tuesday, June 16, to a chain link fence outside Memphis City Hall.

The goals of the organization MICAH (Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope), of which Spencer is president, were also emailed to Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland. So putting it on the fence was a symbolic action.

It symbolizes the fact that three weeks of daily protests in the city have led to questions about the ways the city has dealt with national and local issues of race.

And those involved have grown to include those whose organizations are usually part of the tradition of meetings large and small, petitions and calls to discuss issues and a way forward.

That’s what brought Spencer and 200 other people to the front of City Hall.

Interfaith leaders call for conversation about racism

“We don’t want any more incremental transformation,” Spencer told the crowd standing on the Main Street Mall Tuesday morning. “We don’t want any more empty promises – no more photo ops, no more backdoor meetings. … My prayer, y’all, is that we do not go back to sleep.”

MICAH leaders originally called for a meeting with Strickland just before the mayor announced he would meet with other religious leaders to begin a review of police policies. He and Memphis Police Director Michael Rallings also distinguished among protest leaders by saying he would include leaders of “peaceful protests.”

Strickland has described the reaction to George Floyd’s Memorial Day death at the hands of Minneapolis police as “a valley.”

“Now the good thing about the valleys we experience is that at some point we start that climb back up to the peak,” he said in his Friday weekly email update. “I’m not saying that we’re there yet or even close to being there, be we are making progress in some areas here locally.”

Strickland, in announcing the series of meetings, has acknowledged that police policies needs to change.

“If a black person is pulled over, particularly a young black male is pulled over by police, there is a much greater likelihood that something tragic happens (than) if somebody like me is pulled over,’’ he said, standing in I Am A Man Plaza – the city park honoring the striking sanitation workers of 1968.

City to have meetings built around protest leaders

The plaza has become a starting point for many of the protests over the past 21 days. It was among Strickland’s and the city’s efforts to mark the 50th anniversary of the strike in 2018.

In the same email update last Friday, Strickland said the police department already has carried out all eight of the police reforms on use of force advocated by the “8 Can’t Wait” national group that some critics of Memphis police want adopted. He has also said police should not be defunded as part of a call to abolish police departments nor should the funding be reduced for reallocation as others have advocated.

A group of 11 religious leaders, including two who are part of the group with which Strickland has been meeting, complained that police have used excessive force in handling local protests and called for an investigation. Strickland has also called for police to investigate two incidents at recent protests involving how police reacted.

Religious leaders: Police handling of Memphis protests ‘excessive’

Spencer made it to one of Strickland’s private meetings through another person in the group initially. But since then, Spencer has said he has no interest in going to another of the meetings.

“I think the mayor needs to listen to more people,” Spencer said when asked about the decision. “We’re asking for a platform where everybody can get the mayor’s attention – his undivided attention – and listen so that we can work together to bring about equity in this city.”

But Spencer is among those who don’t want meetings that lead to more meetings.

“It doesn’t work if we don’t follow it up with action,” he said. “We’re a faith coalition. Faith without works is dead. Talk without works is dead. People want change now. … We have substance, we have strategies. We have plans.”

Earlier this week, more than 100 nonprofit leaders, whose organizations are normally not on the front lines of demonstrations, signed an open letter that declared, “Our city is set up for many of our residents to be oppressed.”

More than 100 nonprofits say city is ‘set up’ for oppression

Like the religious leaders, the nonprofit leaders also complained about the response of Memphis Police to protests.

The statement also rebelled against what has historically been the role of nonprofits in such discussions and calls to action.

“Expecting nonprofits and public goodwill to solve these challenges is not enough,” the open letter reads. “Relying on nonprofits to fill the gap and fix issues that are hundreds of years in the making is not enough.”

The Memphis Bar Association, Ben F. Jones chapter of the National Bar Association and Association for Women Attorneys will hold a unity march next week around the Walter Bailey Criminal Justice Center to show unity “in recognizing that racism reaches every facet of our lives and must also be addressed with the legal community and in the legal system.”

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The march will include former Shelby County Commissioner and attorney Walter Bailey. As an attorney Bailey argued the U.S. Supreme Court case that formally outlawed the deadly force policy that allowed police to shoot fleeing felons.

While the protests since have involved younger Memphians new to protest and activism, it has also put older Memphians with a history of activism that became positions of power and influence back into activism.

“We have stood in these places for too long,” Pastor Rosalyn Regina Nichols of Freedom’s Chapel Christian Church told those at the MICAH protest. “This is a decisive moment. … We are not asking for seats at the table.”

Meanwhile, Memphis City Council member Michalyn Easter-Thomas, part of the city’s new activism with nonprofit experience before her election to the council in October, said she doesn’t see new problems.

“These are not unprecedented times. We have been in the midst of chaos and unrest before right here in Memphis,” she said Tuesday. “We have attempted to repair a torn citizenry. However, despite all of those efforts we remain in a racially and economically segregated city. Examples overflow in our schools, our housing and our workforce.”

Easter-Thomas wants to do away with a referendum on the Nov. 3 ballot citywide that would allow police and firefighters to live within a 50-mile radius of the city or in an adjacent county. The current requirement is that all city employees must live within Shelby County.

She argued during council discussions Tuesday that expanding the residency requirement is “dangerous.”

“This referendum has the power to undo everything this city is fighting for in its liability and reform of local policing,” she said. “We are in need of community and neighbors more than ever.”

Easter-Thomas also said during the online meeting that the decision should involve more than those who can vote.

”I think if we were in council today, we could look outside and see the voices of a lot of Memphians,” she told council members. “They have put signs all over the outside of City Hall saying Black Lives Matter.”