[poignant jazzy piano music] - Inspired by investigations conducted under the federal Emmett Till Act of 2008, WKNO set aside this hour for us to talk about journalists and how they uncover racial inequality, and how that affects our conversation about racism in America today.

I'm Laura Faith Kebede, here with some veteran Memphis journalists, Karanja Ajanaku, associate publisher and executive editor for The New Tri-State Defender.

- Glad to be here.

- We also have Otis Sanford, who holds the Hardin Chair of Excellence in economic and managerial journalism at the University of Memphis Department of Journalism.

- Thank you for having me.

- We also have with us Wendi C. Thomas, editor and publisher of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit news organization.

- It's great to be here.

- We also have Jerome Wright, retired editorial page editor at The Commercial Appeal and current deputy editor at The New Tri-State Defender.

- Thank you.

Glad to be here.

- We're going to start off a little bit of, kind of where we came from in the civil rights movement.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., led us to the 1970s, which was a turning point.

Black journalists working for major city newspapers across the South.

Around that time, The Kerner Report on racial inequality that came out soon after King's death said, and I quote, "The journalists profession has been shockingly backward in seeking out, hiring, and promoting Negroes."

And that's when and where the careers of several of our panelists started.

And so I wanted to ask you guys, what led you to journalism?

Who were your heroes and what did you want to accomplish in this field?

Anyone can start.

- I'm an old movie buff, even when I was in school, high school.

And I loved those old movies with reporters solving crimes, being in the middle of things, but they also made a difference.

And I think one of my favorites, still is one of my favorites, is called Northside 777.

You guys know, a very skeptical reporter James Stewart, Jimmy Stewart answered a mother's call about her son being framed for murder.

And she had saved up her pennies as a, as a floor scrubber to hire the attorney, to get him out.

Anyway, a very skeptical Stewart didn't believe at first, but once he looked into it, he was convinced that the guy was innocent and was able to get him off.

[speaking indistinctly] So the fact that they were in the middle of things and, and that they can make a difference, I think inspired me to want to do it.

Yeah.

And I also thought it was cool to see the guys in the trench coats with the cap hats.

[laughing] I thought that was the coolest thing in the world.

- Well, I think for me, I was, I grew up on a farm in Mississippi.

I really didn't have any journalism role models, but my little poor high school did teach a journalism class by a guy who was not a journalist, he was an English teacher.

Bt he inspired me too, 'cause I always wanted to write.

My father loved newspapers so we got the newspaper delivered to our farm every day.

And so I just, I was just inspired by that.

I read the newspaper every day, I pulled through it and I said, one of these days I wanted to be a newspaper reporter and I never wanted to do anything else.

So that was, that was my inspiration.

- I went to college to be a football player and that didn't work out.

[laughing] And I ran into a sister who had a journalism scholarship from the Post-Dispatch.

And then after my first year, my second year, I ran out of financial aid money.

So it's like, how are you going to stay in school and keep hanging out with the sisters?

And that, that really was it.

You know?

And my folks had told me, you got to get a degree 'cause no one else had that.

She knew about a scholarship.

It was a Benjamin Franklin Herrick scholarship.

And she said, well, you should try out for it.

I said, well, I don't know anything about journalism.

She said, well, you helped me with my homework and you know how to talk.

And I went in and I got it.

And so if you want to stay in school and keep hanging out with the sister, then you're going to journalism.

And that's what I did.

And I decided that I would be a sports reporter.

I got hired at The Commercial Appeal and I worked there for 26 years, six months, three weeks and two days, and I never wrote a sports story.

[laughing] - You're a couple of decades later, but please, answer the question.

- Yeah.

I think my story is kind of like Karanja's.

I went to Butler University with intention of being a pharmacist, but I've never been good at math or science, so it fully wasn't like a well-thought-out plan.

But I'd always liked to read and I kind of thought reading and writing were somewhat similar.

And so I switched my major to journalism.

I think it's a miracle that we all either are or have gotten paid to basically get in people's business.

To ask questions that would otherwise seem impolite.

And like Jerome said, you do this thinking you can make a difference in some way.

You know, I think a lot of times journalists are criticized for being pessimist, but I think actually we're optimist because if we didn't think things could be better, we wouldn't, we wouldn't write what we did.

We wouldn't tackle the topics that we have.

- It's almost like a calling.

People talk about ministers having a calling, where in this job, it's a calling, it's a calling to tell stories and tell stories that accurately reflect people's lives and to make change and for the good, but also flush out the bad.

- Well, tell us a little bit about the institutions that you started out at.

What were the challenges, the good things, you know, just what, what was that atmosphere like at that time?

- Well, I was blessed and I'm a product of The Kerner Report that came out in '68 and at the time I started at The Commercial Appeal, they were looking for African-American journalists and I happened to have a reporting teacher who was the managing editor.

And I talked to him about getting a job there because that's where I wanted to work.

And he said, I'll give you a try.

And about nine months later, he called and told me he had a job as a copy clerk for me.

And wanted to know if I was still interested and I was working as a nurse's assistant at the time.

So I told him, yeah, yeah, I was, I was, I was there.

- And Karanja, when you were at the CA you also had a beat that was focused on the black community.

Tell us a little about that, how that came to be.

- We had a beat called minority affairs.

And we were all there and we may remember it differently, but as I recall it, we were getting some heat from the community about how we were not really covering the African-American community and so Michael Grille was the editor and we had a number of African-Americans really, working at the paper than, probably more so than any time has ever worked there.

So we got together, we talked a little bit about what we wanted to talk to Mr.

Grille about when we got in there, you know, and so when we got in there, it seemed to me that Mr.

Grille had a pretty definite idea of what he wanted to do.

This sort of minority affairs deal, which I thought was just a horrible idea.

I mean, I just, I just thought that if we were going to get out and get into the century that we needed to be in, that everybody should be covered and we need to do what we need to do to help people along.

But he just, he was, he had another thing in mind.

And so after the meeting, I went back, I thought about it.

And I went back in and I asked for the job and he said, well, why would you come in here and ask for this job since you just argued against it?

You know?

And I said, well, because I know I'm good enough to make something of it, if you can make something of it.

And I know I'm not scared to tell you that if it needs to die, it needs to die.

And so that's, that's how we went about it.

We didn't have an idea of what to do.

I called Sheila Rule at the New York Times, she was a friend of mine and got some idea of maybe how we should go.

So I started covering the conventions, you know, the Urban League and that kind of stuff going around.

And I found out about these maids that were organizing in Memphis, and they would ride the bus down on Poplar, downtown all the way out.

And I just followed them.

So throughout that beat, I just tried to look at it from multiple angles, what we were doing here from an organized standpoint and just what people doing down here, you know, just to live their lives and, and to try to make things better.

And I did that for about two and a half years until I thought it was time to, to evolve out of it.

- I also remember that black mosaics series you did on that beat, which was just really telling.

It was about storytelling and all, everything that we do is about storytelling anyway, but that's what I remember most about that beat was storytelling.

Telling the stories of people who, whose stories would never have gotten told in the newspaper, had it not been for that beat and your willingness to go out and get it.

- It kind of features on everyday people and the community.

- Well, they came to me with the idea to, to write a story about what it's like to be black in Memphis.

And I just have to tell you, I didn't really think that was an easy thing to do.

It's sort of like asking somebody about their sex life, you know what I'm saying?

You know it, but it's like, are you gonna really tell people, or am I gonna really get people to, to open up and talk to you about it?

And so that was the challenge.

You might remember Dan Henderson was the editor at that time.

I'll give him credit.

It was his idea.

But if we went through the ringer, I mean, he gave me grades on it.

You know, like I had to get an A on the draft before I could get it into the newspaper, you know, and, but I learned some things about, about us as people, and that was a great thing about that beat.

He gave me a chance to figure out, okay, well, who am I, relative to the subject matter, who am I as an African-American person?

And it, it became a profound thing for me.

I mean, it went from just being a reporter to, hey, I think I'm gonna change my name from Leroy to Karanja, you know, that sort of thing.

So it was life changing.

Yeah.

- If I can interject, something you said earlier about when you first arrived as a reporter and I kind of felt initially, felt the same way.

We didn't want to bepigeonholed to cover black news only.

We wanted to get out there and cover city hall, handle the police beat, cover the courts.

And not just where you go cover this black event.

And I, over the years that changed.

And I thought as a reporter and an editor, that it was important that we got out and talked about the issues concerning blacks in this city.

- And how much did that change, Wendi, by the time that you got to the CA.

- I don't remember there being, so I joined, I did an internship in the '90s there.

I got turned down my first time, I have to, they were like, yeah, you're not good enough.

[laughing] But I came back second summer and I think...

I know for sure you were there and maybe you were there like '91 or 2.

- You were my intern, remember?

- Yeah, yeah.

And then I worked with Benita too.

So, you know, by the time I got there full-time in 2003, I don't remember there being like a minority affairs report, I think we'd probably have moved past the idea that you could, that covering black people in Memphis, which by then were, you know, at least half the city population.

That was not considered like an isolated beat over here.

If you were going to cover the community you were... you know, by definition, it was going to be a lot of black people because of the demographics of the city.

- Was there positive change in that regard?

- Yeah, absolutely positive in that regard.

Although it's never, ever quite enough, you know, to me, it's still a lot of the people who were making the decisions didn't look like, didn't look like Memphis until, you know, Mark Russell came there.

There'd never been a black editor of The Commercial Appeal, which is just kind of really, you know, incredible.

Otis should have been the first black editor, if not someone before them, that I, somebody before that I wouldn't have been familiar with.

But I think the fact that even that didn't happen is a kind of sign of how far we were still had to go.

- Well, when talking about the challenges that you face in newsroom, trying to tell those stories that you wanted to tell, are there stories that stick out in your mind that got left untold or ones that, you know, that you tried to push that, that weren't able to, to make it.

- Wow, that's a tough one.

Unlike, my first job, reporting job, was not at The Commercial Appeal.

It was in Jackson, Mississippi at The Clarion Ledger.

Like Jerome, I worked for the, for The Commercial Appeal as a copy clerk, but they wouldn't hire me out of college because they said I didn't have enough experience.

So I went to Jackson and there, I mean, I learned how to be a pretty good reporter there, but it still was Mississippi.

And the stories that were not getting told were the stories of the African-American community in Jackson, to any great degree.

It was relegated to a lot of crime stories there.

And, and there was only two black reporters and I was covering entertainment anyway, so it wasn't, I just couldn't do it.

So that was the problem there.

I don't remember when I came to The Commercial Appeal two years after that.

I don't recall any stories that didn't get told that, that if we really wanted to go out and tell those stories, now there were skepticism in the, in the African-American community about The Commercial Appeal, because it always had been there.

And we were compared to the Memphis Press-Scimitar, the afternoon newspaper.

And a lot of people in the black community thought the Press-Scimitar did a better job of covering them - Which they did.

- than The Commercial Appeal.

Which, I think there was some validity to that because the editorial pages of the Press-Scimitar were a lot more welcoming to the African-American community than The Commercial Appeal's editorial pages.

And that was because of what happened with Dr. King.

When Dr. King came to help the sanitation strikes, the editorial pages of The Commercial Appeal were not kind to him at all.

- They were blistering to the strikers.

- Right.

And they, and they... so that was a lot of distrust there.

So I think the stories that didn't get covered were stories that we couldn't get, because there was this distrust in the black community to the newspaper.

- And to the, to The Commercial Appeal's credit, a lot of the changes, such as courtesy titles and stop saying Negro when you name people and stuff like that, The Commercial actually did first.

While the Press-Scimitar, kept using those titles and everything.

I never quite understood it either.

- I didn't understand.

- Well.

We're going to segue here to go to a story that has not been fully told, which would be the, the 1940 murder in Brownsville, Tennessee of the first NAACP worker who was killed while he was trying to get black people to register to vote.

So we're going to segue to that.

Elbert Williams and we'll, we'll be right back.

[melancholic music] In 1940, thirty-one year old Elbert Williams of Brownsville, Tennessee became the first NAACP member killed while working to register black people to vote.

Brownsville, the county seat of majority black Haywood County, had a new chapter of the NAACP.

With 52 founding members, including Williams.

It was the first NAACP chapter organized in a rural Tennessee county.

- The presidential election is going to be the next year.

All across the country, Roosevelt is running and all across the country, the message has gone out from a number of people of stature within the African-American community is that we, that Roosevelt will be a friend for the African-American community.

So therefore there's this massive push for as many of them to vote as they can.

- At the time, Elbert Williams and his wife, Annie, both worked at Sunshine Laundry in downtown Brownsville.

Williams worked as a fireman, maintaining the boilers that kept the machines working.

He was the first man in his family not to work as a sharecropper.

And he and his wife had a small house on Bradford Street, nearby.

- I think it's in May or early June, that the NAACP starts to try and go to the courthouse to register.

- On the night of June 15th, 1940, a white mob led by two Brownsville policemen, Tip Hunter and Charles Reed, search for the five men who had gone to the courthouse.

They hauled one man to the Hatchie River, interrogated him about other NAACP members, threatened him and told him to leave the county.

Several others fled the area permanently.

For a few days, it looked like the effort to register black people to vote was over, but not everyone was ready to give up.

Despite what happened to his fellow NAACP members, Williams decided to pick up the mantle and organize another meeting.

He confided his plans to Thomas Davis on June 20th, 1940, in what he thought was a private conversation.

Around 10:00 PM that night, a Thursday, as Williams was getting ready for bed, barefoot and in his pajamas, the same police officers grabbed him and Thomas Davis, like they had the others.

Davis was released unharmed.

Elbert Williams was never seen alive again.

- They didn't try and hide who they were.

They were in uniform.

They had no reason to arrest this man.

So the white powers that be had no fear that what I'm doing as it is true in most lynchings that you look at.

- Annie Williams went to the jail to bring her husband some clothes.

But the officer said he wasn't there.

Early Sunday morning, she got a call from C.A.

Rawls, the town's funeral home director, who said that Elbert Williams' body had been found in the Hatchie River.

- Elbert Williams and his wife Annie, had no children, but he doted on his sister's children.

- Leslie McGraw's grandmother was Elbert Williams niece.

- He had probably the best paying job that anybody had had in the family, you know.

With earned income.

Cause he got $10 a week, I believe, at the Sunshine Laundry.

- And Leslie recalls her grandmother's memories of the day Williams' body was discovered.

- And you know, they pulled him out and, they cranked him out with this, with some sort of tool and they were cranking him out, and when he got up, we couldn't even tell it was him except for his clothes.

- Elbert Williams was buried in an unmarked grave that afternoon with no medical examination.

Although it is believed he was beaten and tortured before being shot to death.

It would be another 20 years before black people in Brownsville successfully registered to vote.

No one was ever arrested for Elbert Williams' murder.

- As a young man of 12, 13 years of age, I'd heard of the story.

My grandfather, in his original house and funeral home business was right there, right down the street from Mr. Elbert Williams.

So that was a cry that went out throughout the community.

That if you don't do what you're supposed to do, if you don't stay in line, you gonna end up like that in the river.

- Future Supreme court justice, Thurgood Marshall, then the nation's leading civil rights attorney, investigated Williams' murder and spoke out.

The FBI's own internal review of its handling of the case found its investigation insufficient.

According to documents obtaine by retired local lawyer, Jim Emison, who was writing a book about Elbert Williams.

The Williams case was examined again as one of 132 unresolved crimes included in the federal Emmett Till Act of 2008.

But in 2018, the justice department closed the case as it had many others, because quote, "The statute of limitations "has long run on any federal civil rights crime.

"And there is no basis for federal prosecution "of any other crime.

"Moreover, the absence of any identifiable "living subjects or eye witnesses, "coupled with the fact that the passage "of more than 75 years, makes it unlikely that any living perpetrators or eyewitnesses would be identified."

Relatives of Elbert Williams and those like Jim Emison and John Ashworth, who have been gathering clues to his murder, say the truth can still be uncovered.

The group has already searched several unmarked graves at Taylor Cemetery in Brownsville to find Elbert Williams' remains.

If physical evidence such as a bullet, could be recovered from the grave site, Jim Emison says, he knows where Officer Tip Hunter's gun, possibly the murder weapon, is currently located.

In 2014, Brownsville elected its first black mayor, Bill Rawls, the grandson of the funeral director who buried Elbert Williams.

His grandfather also started a grocery store in the 1960s and black people who attempted to register to vote, found their credit cut off at existing stores.

To Mayor Rawls, the impact of years of communal trauma and racial discrimination can still be felt.

- Oh, I see it today because people are pushed into neighborhoods that are built in floodplains.

I see the educational attainment.

I was just reading an article this morning for some research I'm doing.

And it talks about the counties in the state of Tennessee had the lowest education attainment.

And Hayward county is in the top or the bottom 5, not the top 5, but the bottom 5.

So there's repercussions that goes on from generation to generation because of the mentality.

- Part of why I think some younger people don't get involved in politics or voting is because they don't see themselves there.

- Leslie McGraw hopes that more people will learn about her great uncle, Elbert Williams.

Not just for his death, but for what he accomplished with his life.

- We are the descendants of this voting rights activist that you know, did as much for voting rights suffrage in 1940 as Susan B. Anthony did, you know, in her heyday, right?

And... at a time when only 3% of Southern black voters were registered.

- So I'm not saying to people, you need to go vote today because Elbert Williams lost his life or had his life taken because of voting.

But you need to understand, if you can understand why he saw it as being so important, you need to understand those same dynamics are true for you today.

- Tennessee does not include Elbert Williams' story in its social studies requirements for students to learn.

But does include analysis of organized resistance to Jim Crow laws like the NAACP.

Lesley and other relatives, hope that this native son, one day will be widely honored for his courage.

We're going to segue to be talking about how we account for the past and how journalists haven't covered racial inequality.

And one of the examples that relates to the Emmett Till Act of 2008, uncovering or reopening cases of civil rights murders, an example of that was in 1989 at the Jackson Clarion Ledger, reporter Jerry Mitchell wrote an article about an unsolved murder of NAACP leader, Medgar Evers.

And those stories led to, eventually led to conviction of those murderers.

And I wanted to ask you all a little bit about, you know, that being an example of a larger theme of journalists digging into the past to help us understand where we are today, how impactful do you find these stories in their coverage in the wider media landscape?

- I think they are very impactful.

And there are a lot of journalists who have devoted a lot of time to doing that.

Jerry Mitchell was certainly one of them.

He's not the only one.

A friend of mine, Hank Klibanoff who has, who actually did a book called The Race Beat.

He spent a lot of time uncovering and investigating unsolved civil rights murders.

And actually teaches about it at Emory University now.

So yes, I mean this, this is a reckoning, this is a reckoning that needs to happen.

I think in today's climate, the pushback is that, why are you digging up all of these old cases?

You know, we have people who don't even want us to talk about our racial history in the, in the schools, which is a shame.

But those stories have to be told, they need to be told.

I'm glad that Byron De La Beckwith finally got, you know, justice was served there for Medgar Evers and Vernon Damer was another one, and there are others.

Those stories needed to be told and journalists are the ones to tell them.

- When you bring it back to the present day, I think what Wendi is doing with the MLK50 and the stories that they're producing about the black condition, it sort of carries on that legacy in a, in a modern way.

- I agree.

- Were there local stories that, that tied to this trend, you know, were some of the Memphis stories overshadowed, especially when we talk about, you know, the era of King's assassination, a lot of times this kind of phenomenon of only looking to one leader, instead of looking about the community, were there situations or stories that you thought were overshadowed because of that?

- I don't know that I could say that, but I guess the thing that comes to my mind in terms of anything is just Shannon Street, okay.

And what happened over there, I guess I'm still not resolved in my mind that, that I personally even did enough as a journalist to try to figure out what was going on.

- Can you recap a little bit with that?

- Well, there was an incident over in north Memphis and policemen, a couple of policemen I believe were, were taken hostage in a situation.

There was a lot of uncertainty about how it started, but there was a group over there that they met regularly.

And then there was talk about it, maybe being a cult and this sort of thing, but it ended up being a big shootout and all the men in there, in that house ended up being killed.

And there's just a lot of speculation about what actually happened in that house.

And, you know, we did our stories and everything like that.

And then we did a big magazine piece and I spent a lot of time with Bill Thomas, you know, just trying to track that thing down, but.

- One of the police officers, one police officer got away, the other one didn't.

And the investigation maintains that they tortured the police officer, eventually killed him, killing him.

This gets back to the point Karanja was making about whether or not the officers who eventually stormed the house intended to take those guys captive.

- There's just so much involved with that, you know.

I spent so many hours listening to those tapes of Lindbergh Sanders and the negotiations going back and forth.

And there's this talk about, you know, whether or not they thought the world was gonna end and all this kind of stuff, but in a, in a way it was just a bunch of brothers responding to another brother talking about, hey, we can make the world better than it is right now.

And, but man, trying to get that story out in the midst of that time, it didn't come out.

And I just don't think I had the skills that I needed to, to have done a better job.

- That is a, a classic story there that needed more telling than it really got.

This was what, 1983.

And I'm not, I'm just not sure that the editors at the paper at that time, I'm talking about the top editors, Michael Grille, who was the editor, was a great guy, but I'm just not sure that we had the, the kind of direction that we needed to really go after that story, in a way that would try to really explain what actually happened.

I heard some of those tapes too, because some of that wound up in federal court and I heard some of that.

But another story that I think really got short shrift, going back to Dr. King's assassination, was the death of Larry Payne.

I mean, there's a guy that... was murdered, in my mind, and nothing ever happened.

You talk about getting overshadowed, his death got totally overshadowed.

There were not any reporters at the paper I think, that would have been allowed really to go and get that story.

I don't know, but this was 1968 just before Dr. King's assassination, when that first march turned violent and he wound up dead.

And the circumstances of it to me still remain cloudy.

And I don't, I don't know that there's really been justice there.

- Our visuals director, Andrea Morales from MLK50, she went back and revisited that in 2018.

So the 50th anniversary of his death, and I think you're, you're absolutely right.

But to your point, Karanja, about the Shannon Street killings, which I remember just vaguely in my psyche.

If that happened in early '80s, I was maybe not even quite a teenager yet, but I don't know that then there was the skepticism, or even when I started as a journalist full time, like '93, that there was a skepticism of police narratives, that there is now more broadly, broadly speaking.

So I think black people who've had an experience with law enforcement may have always been a little skeptical, but in terms of an institution, a newsroom, yeah, and just not trusting what the police said, I don't think that, I think it's a relatively, it feels like a relatively new phenomenon.

And I wonder if that had anything to do with how the Shannon Street story was covered or even Larry Payne, you know, that the police weren't, may not be telling the truth.

- Well, I think it was, but as Jerome said, we had a police officer who was killed and I don't think there was any, there's no doubt about that, he was killed.

And so I think the community said, I don't know about this one now.

You've got a, you've got a dead cop here.

Maybe there was something wrong with how the police handled this going in.

They shut off all the electricity.

It was in January.

And they shut off the electricity and then went in and killed everybody.

But we had a dead police officer.

So I think the community was willing to give the police the benefit of the doubt.

- That initial skepticism was against the cops who were able to hear what was going on inside that house when the police officer was being, was being tortured.

And so initially, everybody was asking why the officers didn't go in sooner and to try to save his life.

- That's right.

- And they really, never really gave a good explanation about why, even when the final documents were finally released and we could see everything.

There was never a really good explanation about why.

- And bringing this forward a little bit, both of those stories had a thread of distrust in police, and we know that during the civil rights movement, police spied on activists, not necessarily because they suspected them of wrongdoing, but just because they were challenging the status quo and, and Wendi, you know, you found out a few years ago that you were one of the people that police were surveilling with a, a fake social media account.

And so tell us a little bit about that experience and how that affected your work.

- Yeah.

It was federal trials, it's the ACLU, it's actually kind of reviving what happened at, coming out of the civil rights movement.

City of Memphis, Memphis police were found to be surveilling people.

There was a, y'all help me, in 1978, consent decree, in which the police department said basically, we're not going to do these things that are illegal.

Lo and behold, 40 years later, it's found that they're doing the same, similar things.

And among the, they were monitoring activists on social media and in person.

And I was covering the federal trial, kind of a part two, almost of what... the trial that started in '76 led to the '78 consent decree.

And I'm sitting there in court and I hear this officer who had been portraying a man of color on Facebook, say that he had been following me on social media.

That is...

I was surprised, but maybe not shocked.

I think a lot of journalists who do things that are a little disruptive, kind of just assume that they're being watched.

It's why I make sure that the tags on my car always, you know, up to date, you know, lights are in working order.

You know, journalists I think are held to a higher standard when you're calling other people, you know, trying to hold them accountable that we, you know, keep our house in order as well.

I can't say that it had a chilling effect on my reporting at all, but it is a little disorienting, you know, to know that you're in a city and maybe you're not as confident as you might want to be that if you needed police services, that they would be as... fair, maybe, or intentional about helping as you might want.

That's, a little, a little off putting, but I don't think it affects how we do our job.

- Well, thinking about how, when you were learning about those methods that they use, how did that affect how you approached covering like protests or anything like that?

- Yeah.

You know, luckily I've graduated to a role in my newsroom where I don't have to go out on the street as much anymore.

[laughing] But you know, sending my team out, you know, we're really careful, you know, we have a lawyer, a lawyer lined up in case anybody gets arrested, you know.

In my phone, all my reporter's contact, also has her date of birth, right, cause you need that if you're going to have to bail somebody out.

You know, we're just really intentional about their safety.

And also we think about since we know police monitor activists and organizers, how we show activists and organizers faces... Last summer, after some of the George Floyd protest, there were some stories in which we published pictures, but we weren't showing people's faces, right.

Because we knew that police are monitoring media for faces of activists.

So I think it's, it's being thoughtful and sensitive to that and not wanting to be used as a tool of, of law enforcement.

- Yeah.

And the other story that we have, that we're going to be highlighting actually, is of Larry Payne, one of the stories that was overshadowed during the time of Martin Luther King's death and serving to transition to that now.

One week before Martin Luther king Jr was assassinated in Memphis, a white police officer shot and killed a 17 year old black boy.

His name was Larry Payne.

It was March 28th, 1968, about 6,000 people gathered downtown to show the world that the sanitation workers strike, then in its sixth week, was more than a labor issue.

It was a civil rights issue.

High school and college student were among the supporters who came to march alongside the 1300 strikers.

Local leaders invited Martin Luther King Jr. to join them.

- Dr. King was leading the march.

Somewhere along the route on Beale Street, somebody broke a window.

Windows were broken.

The police who were standing by, just in case, there was going to be, they were actually ready for some problems.

Then they seize the... whoever they could get their hands on.

The people at the front of the march whisked Dr. King away from the, from the march.

Got him to safety.

As violence broke out, more windows were broken.

People were beaten with nightsticks by the police.

And during the whole situation, away from Beale Street, Larry Payne was killed.

- Police reported some young people stealing from a Sears storefront during the chaos.

Witnesses and police agree they saw Larry Payne running with the presumably stolen TV into the basement of an apartment building in the public housing complex, where his mother lived.

But the community and police differed about what happened next.

Leslie Dean Jones, a 25 year old Memphis Police Department patrol man stood outside the basement door and called for Payne to come out.

As Payne opened the door and slid out, witnesses said he had both hands on his head and told Jones not to shoot.

Jones said the 17 year old had only one hand on his head and the other held a butcher knife.

Jones then put the barrel of a sawed off shotgun in Payne's stomach and pulled the trigger, killing him.

Years later, Lizzie Mae Payne recalled she was watching a soap opera on TV, when a neighbor told her her son had been shot.

She said an officer put the end of a shotgun to her stomach to prevent her from getting closer and called her a racial slur.

here was little reporting about Larry Payne's death in local newspapers.

They were focused on the more than 150 people arrested, and the fires that broke out after the march that was quickly becoming a blow to Dr. King's reputation of non-violence.

- I think it was ignored because the local media and the newspapers did not see it as worth putting a lot of resources into.

They bought the police line that it was justifiable.

- But in the city's black community, Payne's death did not go unnoticed.

An estimated 8,000 people came to view his body on April 1st.

The next day, nearly 600 people attended his funeral.

"They killed you like a dog!"

his mother exclaimed.

Reverend James Lawson, one of the strike's organizers, criticized the police killing of Larry Payne in his speech at Mason Temple.

Moments before Dr. King gave his final address on April 3rd, 1968.

- They're only doing their job.

But if their job requires that they stick a shotgun in the midsection of a 17 year old boy who has his arms over his head and is saying, don't shoot.

[cheering] If this be their kind of job, then it's high time...

It's high time that we rid Memphis and this nation of that kind of working, because we don't need it anymore.

- What I feel like... the story, the testimonies from the neighbors, the community informing the narrative, versus the official one by the police, the disparities there feel like they ring extremely loud.

- Andrea Morales, the visuals director of MLK50, wrote about Payne's story on the 50th anniversary of his death in 2018.

- You know, in Memphis in 2014, there was a protest on the corner of Highland and Poplar, the day that Darren Wilson was acquitted for his murder of Michael Brown.

That was the first protest I actually attended in Memphis.

That day, I remember the police being lined up.

They were kind of hemming in that shopping plaza, that shopping plaza was like much more active back then.

There was that record store, like a Party City.

And like the stores had closed, you know, all of the sort of sensational coverage from Ferguson and the looting, you know, became such... like a fear-mongering aspect that it inspires a city to respond by the property being protected over like people asking for like, not getting killed for being black, you know, it's...

It didn't feel like this was like, something that we had put down and picked back up.

You know, it felt like an ongoing pulling of a thread.

- As in most cases of killings by police, a grand jury said Jones was right to shoot Payne.

The boy's family later sued him, but the knife Payne allegedly wielded had been destroyed before the case went to trial.

According to court documents.

- When you look at like, the fact that they were getting rid of evidence, how could you expect this case to have a fair shot?

It didn't have a fair shot even with 25 pages of testimony from neighbors about what they saw.

- Jones died in 2019 at the age of 76.

At the time of the shooting, he told reporters, he was quote, "Very sorry it happened.

I didn't want to kill him.".

If Payne had lived, he would have been 71 years old this year.

- The difference today is, video is everywhere.

And most police departments thankfully, are requiring their officers to wear body cameras.

And I think that is becoming one of the equalizers to trying to get at the whole story.

There was no way that we were going to get the whole story with Larry Payne, just because you had witnesses against the police.

And in 1968, the media was going to go with the police, period.

- The U.S Department of Justice reopened the case as part of the Emmett Till Act of 2008, but closed it again in 2011, because officials said the available evidence wasn't enoug to contradict the officer's claim of self-defense.

There hasn't been an official investigation since.

So during this segment, we're going to talk about where do we go from here.

Today, there's a renewed interest in, in understanding how racial inequality persists, how we got here and what to do next.

And at the same time, the journalism industry is shrinking and learning how to do more with less to meet this demand.

And so for you Karanja, I wanted to start out, The Tri-State Defender remained a voice for the black community.

And I just wanted to hear from you a little bit about why you believe the black press is still necessary today and how that has changed over time.

- Yeah.

I mean, I think when I try to deal with this question, it's like a distressed fundamental, you know, and that we live in a democratic republic and you have to be informed in order to, to do well in it.

And so you want to avail yourself of as many opportunities as you can to get information so that you can compare and contrast, right.

And so we're an important part of that.

And we have a unique position in the sense that we're professional journalists, okay.

And I want to make sure we emphasize that 'cause like, sometimes it's sorta like when you're dealing with African-American entities, we got to prove why our ice creams are colder and all that kind of stuff, you know.

But we're a professional organization and, but we're also just an integral part of the community, you know, we're not just some entity covering it, we're part of that, part of that community, and so, you know, we, we just...

I guess what I'm looking for is this, I know this community is going to come alive in a way that, that it hasn't yet.

And so when I see The Tri-State Defender's being uniquely positioned to be able to chronicle that and to stimulate that, you know, because, I coined this term, I called it objective advocacy, you know, and so, I take my professional skills, but I'm not trying to play like, I'm not pushing for the betterment of African-American community openly and outwardly and every kind of way, that I can get us to do that.

And so in that context, I don't, It's not even a question of whether or not we're going to be relevant.

It's just like asking, is the African-American community going to be relevant?

- Yeah, and Otis, I wanted to shift to you since you're at the University of Memphis teaching journalism, the next generation of journalists.

And sometimes it seems, when in our media landscape, that we're operating in different realities increasingly so.

And so how, how do you prepare the next generation o.. for that?

- I've been teaching out there now for over 10 years, going on 11 years and every semester I tell the students pretty much the same thing about being prepared to do this job.

You have to have passion.

You have to be willing to, to do some things that you're not sure that you are capable of doing right now, but you will be once you learn how to do it.

But you got to have that passion.

And I tell the students that yes, the newspapers are shrinking.

People are turning away from the paper itself.

If you think about paper, but when you look at Memphis right now, and this is what I tell my students, there are a lot of opportunities to do good journalism right here in Memphis.

And, and you know, we have them around this table here.

You have MLK50 that is doing a wonderful job, you have The New Tri-State Defender that has some history behind it.

With the stories that Alex Wilson told and how they covered the, the city sanitation strike that was totally different from how the white press told it.

You have these other nonprofits and then you still have the traditional newspaper, The Commercial Appeal.

They're still trying to hang on there.

We still have affection for it and we want them to succeed.

But I tell my students that there are opportunities out there.

The storytelling, the, the digging, you know, being skeptical, but not being cynical, being able to uncover stories, all of that is still available.

And there are still a lot of jobs out there that require you to do that.

And we want to train you and teach you in the new way of doing it.

Multimedia, using video, podcasting, using social media for good journalism purposes and not just for gossip.

I tell the students all of that.

And thankfully our enrollment is up and we're, we're sending people out there to do this kind of job in a lot of different venues.

- And also because of this, this kind of fractured landscape and just the polarization of American politics, you know, how, how do you see that affecting how journalists cover racial inequality, today?

- Last week, I saw a study that was released on the sixth of this month from City University in New York that compared, that took a look at the coverage of African-American events and people since the George Floyd killing.

And it was pretty telling.

And for instance, it said the black press was more likely, they're like, one in every five stories had something about the African-American condition, either good or bad.

But mainstream media, it was 1 in 10.

When they talked about other issues, it was like 70% of... African-American press has said 70 to 75% more stories about African-American condition than just traditional press.

It gets back to the question that Karanja answered about the importance of the black press in telling these stories and focusing on these deals.

And then again, I go back to what Wendi has been doing with MLK50, and what Otis has been doing in his columns and commentary.

It's important.

Yeah.

- And Wendi, I want to bring you in too, right in the, the motto of MLK50 is justice through journalism.

And I want to hear a little bit from you, like what that motto means to you as like putting your stake in the ground of what journalism means today.

- Yeah.

I think it's, you know, Justice Through Journalism is maybe just being more direct about what I got into journalism to do, right.

And so it was kinda like always, you understood that I wanted to, and a lot of us, I hope to say all of the table, wanted to do things to make our community better.

But just being really explicit about that from the beginning and believing that journalism can be used as a tool to, you know, to pursue justice.

I like your phrase, Karanja, objective advocacy, because I do think that there is a way to be, to apply the same kind of rigor in your reporting methods and news gathering, but also be very clear.

Things are not the way they should be and they should be better.

And so we kind of start with that position at, at MLK50, that people should deserve, they deserve to make a living wage, a thriving wage on one job, right?

So that, that we start as that is our basis.

So we're not trying to argue that that's where we're starting from.

And so I think it makes your purpose a lot clearer.

It helps provide that context in the story, provide those, those graphs and those details about the African-American condition, poverty rates, employment rates, and do it from a perspective of the most marginalized people.

And we like to say at MLK50, that we're aligned with the people that Dr. King would be aligned with if he were still alive.

So that's workers, we think about sanitation workers, but workers in all senses.

It's people who are marginalized because of their gender identity or sexual orientation or their immigration status, their gender.

And that's just part of our focus.

But we exist in this larger media landscape and we, in an ecosystem and we need each other, I think, to survive, right.

So I don't see us necessarily in competition.

Although if it's a big scoop, we all want to, [laughing] that is still a thing.

But we build off each other, right.

So we're still small.

We don't have somebody who can cover city council.

So yeah, we pay attention to what the CA does.

You know, we pay attention to what other outlets do, what The Tri-State does, and I want every journalist who wants to have a job in journalism to have a job.

So we are all made stronger when the ecosystem is stronger.

- And to the point that Wendi and Karanja especially made, we are professionals here.

We all are trained journalists.

We know what we're doing.

We went to good journalism schools, University of Memphis, Missouri, Butler, I went to Ole Miss, and we bring a level of, of experience having worked at more than one newspaper.

The, the experience of being out there in the trenches covering stuff.

So we know what we're doing, and we bring that to what we are doing right now.

We all worked in the same newsroom, but now we're out there in different parts of this community, still doing the work that we know how to do.

And I think the community is, is really served by this.

We call it, maybe it is fractured journalism to some degree, but I think the community is better served by entities like MLK50 and The New Tri-State Defender, what I'm doing in broadcast and in online.

And again, what The Commercial Appeal is continuing to do.

The community gets the benefit of this because we're out there doing what we know how to do as professionals.

- One thing too, is that bring Wendi in here, because remember before the pandemic, we had a couple of meetings, I think you were the driving force for it, where we got people from the different mediums that I don't remember being in a room with these people before the different news entities.

To look at, how could we work together on stories?

And then the pandemic came in and we, we all got into how are we going to survive, right.

But I think that we know we're gonna make it now.

And so I'm, I'm hoping that maybe we can find a way to get back to that discussion.

That they do it in other cities, you know, where they'll find a topic and then people report it from the different, different mediums and the community benefits from that.

And as you said, everything that you could write about, particularly relative to the African-American community, both in terms of challenges and opportunities is in Memphis, Tennessee.

Okay.

And so we should not only be covering it.

We should be doing it in such a way that we could become a model and why not be a solution to it.

- And obviously there's so much more that we could talk about with this, but we are out of time.

Thank you so much to our panelists.

And thank you for listening to us.

You can go to wkno.org to watch this and other local programs.

Good night.

[bright music] [acoustic guitar chords]