In Gratitude and Transition
By Dr. Curtis Ladrillo Chamblee

As I prepare to leave Memphis and begin the next chapter of my journey, I want to take a moment to reflect on my time as the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute editor of Uplift Memphis, Uplift the Nation. To be clear, this is not a farewell, it is a thank you. A thank you to the work, to the community, and to the quiet lessons that shaped me far beyond what can be measured in hours or deliverables.

When I stepped into this role, my commitment was clear: to amplify stories, engage public memory, and ensure that communication was not just about visibility, it was about care. I had the honor of curating public-facing content, building a digital calendar that uplifted cultural milestones, community voices, and overlooked histories. Each post from Ida B. Wells’s exile from Memphis, to holding space for authors after the 2024 election, to reflecting on the Tyre Nichols verdict, was created with intention. Whether we were asking how we find joy or naming the weight of injustice, the work was always rooted in presence.

I will not romanticize everything. The work was not always easy. But I will say this, I am leaving at peace. Not because every door was open, but because I made room anyway. Not because every idea was embraced, but because I helped leave behind a framework for what thoughtful, community-centered communication can be. That is what I am most proud of.

I want to thank the students, staff, and collaborators who made the work meaningful. The ones who asked questions, shared feedback, and brought joy into the process. The ones who reminded me that even behind a screen, there is always someone listening. Always someone learning. Always someone feeling seen.

As I transition out of this role, I am excited to pass the baton to Paola Cavallari, who will carry the Forum forward with fresh vision and care. I know the work will evolve, and that is exactly as it should be. Growth does not erase what came before, it builds on it. My hope is that the foundation I helped lay will continue to support the kind of storytelling that not only informs but inspires.

To those still within these walls, keep going. Keep asking what the work is really for. Keep holding space for complexity, for memory, and for one another. And most of all, keep remembering that communication is not just about message, it is about meaning. It is about honoring the voices history tried to silence. It is about writing our presence into the record with care, conviction, and truth.

Thank you to Executive Director Daphene McFerren and the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for the opportunity, for the challenges that sharpened me, and for the lessons I will carry into this next season.

I leave with gratitude in my hands and peace in my spirit.

Until the next chapter, please remember:
Resilience is not the absence of struggle. It is learning how to carry the rain with you,
keep building when the foundation shifts, and still find the spark to set fires.

Dr. Curtis Ladrillo Chamblee

When I stumbled onto UMiami’s campus earlier this year, it was more out of obligation than inspiration. As a fellow in the Communications PhD Program, I was expected to show up, to be present and engage, but my mind was cloudy, and my spirit felt heavy. Earlier that week, I was laid off from the job I’d taken directly after graduating from the University of Florida’s Center for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. In a matter of moments, I had gone from a burgeoning non-profit professional contributing to the lives of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC communities to full-on survival mode. I was panicking, barely eating, distracted, disheartened, and unsure of how to make ends meet. As my peers, faculty, and student mentors offered words of encouragement and support, their words floated past me. I couldn’t help but think, I do not belong here right now. The thought of engaging and participating as a scholar felt like a form of betrayal—like I was abandoning the version of myself who was trying to survive for the scholar I had long suppressed.

This Pride month, I encourage my peers not to succumb to burnout or perpetually grind toward visibility but to embrace rest as an act of personal and political resistance and transformation.

As a care worker, HBCU alum, and Black Feminist scholar living and working in the South, legacies of racism, colonialism, and disenfranchisement remain deeply felt. Our current political climate only sharpens the blade of these injustices even further. Systemic oppression through various forms such as racism, homophobia, transphobia, and capitalism have long denied Black and queer folks to rest, safety and care. We often frame the Black Radical Tradition and struggle for liberation as cultural, intellectual, and action-oriented efforts. We must also make space for another kind of resistance: the slow, deliberate, and deeply necessary practice of rest.

Black feminist thinkers, such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and the Combahee River Collective, teach us that rest is not a retreat but a refusal. A refusal to be consumed by capitalistic notions of productivity. A refusal to abandon the body and soul in the name of performativity. A refusal to conflate worth with exhaustion and labor. This concept of rest as a refusal is a powerful tool in our fight against systemic oppression. It’s a way of saying ‘no’ to the forces that seek to exploit our bodies and minds and a way of reclaiming our humanity and worth.

I move through the world as a biracial, queer, nonbinary Southerner and a proud Spelman graduate. At Spelman, I was taught to equate excellence with relentless effort. In my current work supporting reproductive justice despite a hostile political climate, there have been countless moments where I’ve nearly become unraveled by fear, burnout, and the weight of care. Despite all that Black feminist frameworks have offered me; I internalized the belief that exhaustion was just the cost of the work. That suffering was proof of commitment.

It wasn’t until I lost my job and was forced to stop—forced to slow down—that I began to unlearn that lie. I started to reimagine what it might mean to prioritize my well-being over the performativity of productivity. I have come to understand rest not as a retreat but as a refusal to be rushed out of my own becoming.

Rest is transformative not only as self-care but as community care. When we draw upon Black queer feminist frameworks and mutual aid, we reclaim our time, imagination, and softness as tools for liberation, not as distractions from it. Our activism becomes more sustainable. Our futures more imaginable.

When we prioritize rest, softness, joy, and pleasure, we embody resistance. In doing so, we transform ourselves and our communities. It is in these moments of stillness, however brief, that we create the means to sustain ourselves and our efforts. We regain strength and fortify our sense of hope and purpose. We bloom.

Self-care, once a political imperative for marginalized people, has been co-opted and commodified into a product. The original intention of self-care, as a means of survival and resistance, has been distorted and diluted. But care cannot be bought. Rest cannot be branded.  We must reclaim the true meaning of self-care and rest and utilize them as tools for our collective liberation.

As scholars, care workers, and queer people of color, it would serve us to pause and reconsider how we define resistance. What would it mean to honor rest and softness as political praxis in our work, our bodies, and our relationships?

Prolific Black feminist scholar, lesbian, and ancestor Audre Lorde once wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”  I urge us to take that call seriously. Rest and self-care are not luxuries reserved for the privileged; they are lifelines for those who live and love at the margins.

I do not know what the future holds for me. Like so many queer people of color, I have faced uncertainty that has felt paralyzing. I do know that I am not alone. My friends, family, and comrades inspire me with their dedication to care work and mutual aid which is always informed by great feelings of love and reverence. The unwavering support of my peers and mentors within the Communications PhD pipeline has helped renew my hope and reignite my passion for scholarship.

This Pride, I envision a future where I continue to grow as a queer, Black feminist scholar and care worker grounded in a legacy of resistance that uplifts rest and collective liberation. Although my future is still taking shape, I am prepared for it, and I will meet it with open hands and an unshakable will to dream.

Bio:
Ebonee Brown (she/they) Ebonee Brown (She/They), a Spelman College alum and graduate of University of Florida’s Center for Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Ebonee researches Atlanta’s Trap music genre and intersections of regional Blackness, gender, and performance in popular culture. They are deeply committed to building liberatory futures through storytelling and strategy.

By: Sarah Amira de la Garza
Emeritus Professor, Arizona State University

“We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors.”

“I thank my mothers and grandmothers and all mothers who came before.”

“The trauma of our ancestors is encoded in our DNA.”

“We honor those who inhabited the lands upon which we now stand.”

We offer many invocations and avowals of ancestral acknowledgment, of the conviction of our rootedness and connection to those who lived and survived our collective histories so that we can now, in the present, carry on. I have asked myself so often what these accomplish, if the ways in which we live our lives and make sense of the world and our choices are compartmentalized so that the ancestors, too, are compartmentalized, as in a medicine chest we only turn to when we are ill. It resonates with the form of dual authority of which Aziz Huq writes.

In the May 2025 issue of The Atlantic, Huq writes about the rise of a dual state in the United States of America, similar to those in countries that have experienced or are living the experience of dictatorial, authoritarian regimes of power and control, such as arise in our midst today. Where are our ancestors for us today? How do we hear them, listen, and discern their wisdom such that our actions are inspired and sustained?

These are the questions that I asked myself as a Chicana woman, daughter of the ancestral legacy of the Indigenous peoples of the lands we today call Mexico and the combinations of peoples who came under the flag, sword, and cross of Spain and the Roman Catholic Church. Daughter of immigrant mothers and fathers from Mexico and people who never immigrated but already lived on the lands I call home in far west Texas; I spoke the Spanish of the “conquerors” before learning the language of the southern U.S. slaveholders who were determined to create a place in Mexico where they could continue to own Black human beings to create their wealth and hold up their illusions of superiority. They chose the land of Tejas, which they called Texas, and heaped their brand of colonialism and racism, combined with that of the Confederacy, the United States, Irish Catholicism, and southern Protestant Christianity onto our bodies and minds, already heavy with three centuries of a culture born of territorial conquest and the Spanish Inquisition (Mexico continued to exist under the systems of the Inquisition for almost a century after it was no longer formally in effect). I am a Chicana, and we are a complicated jumble of identities and histories.

This is the nature of the “dual state” of which Aziz writes, but at the level of our spirits and psyches, at the level of our embodied daily lives.

And while Aziz highlights how authoritarian dictatorships employ such a split (between the systems and routines that maintain a semblance of normal daily life and the systems and routines of brutality, chaos, and control aiming to overtake our lives, resources, and our very souls), I would argue that this duality is inherent to the ways we have both been controlled and survived, within iterations of authoritarian systems of social organization, religion, and (in)justice. And this is when I call in, when I call on, the ancestors. This is when an invocation is no longer merely a tradition, a habitualized ritual, memorized words, or polite acknowledgement; this is when we invoke—when we call upon the wisdom that has been waiting in stories, archetypes, god/desses, and history. And we do so—must do so—in order to give the powerful realities that they contain the opportunity to infuse our very beings. The ancestors must be given the capacity to be our living teachers when we awaken the wisdom that arouses our inherent powers as creative human beings, when the powers of hierarchical structures have begun to show they are as real as the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain.

As a Chicana, a woman, I look to find how the power and strength we admire in the women around us in our community is not a feature of personality or having become a celebrity, an influencer, or powerful through accumulation of wealth, but because there has been a tapping into something primal and archetypal and more powerful than our breath itself. And the most important thing we can do is come to recognize this, protect it from the dilution and appropriation that can happen when we turn it into a brand, or a product, or something we attempt to control through social systems. It is organic, a life force—our  life force.

So, I study and learn from our history, not simply to know it, but to open my heart and spirit to the truth within it. We cannot afford to create a “dual state” within our souls and spiritual lives. We see the evidence of this when the teacher Jesus and his words and wisdom from his embodied life on this earth are allowed to exist, but separately from the oppressive distortions of those who would turn it into a form of social control, as during the Spanish Inquisition and contemporary efforts to create a religious state.

How do I do this? By talking to them, by writing letters to them, by praying from the depths of my heart without concern for propriety or form. I take time to read about them, to process what I am learning, to think about how that compares with what I have grown up thinking and believing. By finding the resonance and connections of the features of their stories, their actions, what they symbolize, with what is happening in my own life. I take time to notice when something in me says YES, when there is a recognition that I am finding a source of truth, not something simply to support what I want to argue or do. Sometimes the ancestors (often) will cause me to stop in my tracks, to be humble, to change course, to recognize my own arrogance and how I have sold out to the very systems and cultures that I am critiquing. And then, I share them. I do not lock them up in a closet, on a bookshelf, as a decoration, or on an altar. I use their names, I take time to notice when Coyolxauhqui, whose body was torn into pieces and we see in the moon after her revenge for betrayal—I notice when and how I am fragmented, when my responses are breaking me apart. I notice how Tlazolteutl, the goddess of love and devourer of filth, helps me to see that there is no such thing as “dainty” love for all times. Sometimes our love requires us to “devour the filth” in the world that is hurting us and those in our communities, our loved ones. I remember Tonantzin, Earth Mother, and how she was compressed and forced into an image of Guadalupe, but that her power is not in a church, but on the earth, in every created being and source of life. Tonantzin warns me not to be made a saint or a religious relic.

And then I ask myself, how does this affect how I respond in the world today? And more often than not, there is no one pattern, but it cleanses my shame and fear (it does not remove them) so that they do not cripple or stall me, silence, or disempower me.  Even in nonviolent stillness, they will resonate through my being and keep me true to who I am here to be, not only for myself, but for my people, for all who are part of the world of nature. They teach me that nothing is simple—that is the evil myth of the conqueror and dictator, the oppressor, that there is a simple “one way.” Diversity is their biggest threat, but the goddesses teach me it is not just our strength; it is our nature.

Bio: Sarah Amira de la Garza is Emeritus Professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University, where she worked over three decades in the areas of intercultural communication, performance studies, spirituality/ well-being, and Indigenous methodologies. She is a solo ethnographic performer who has written, performed, and directed across an array of genres and contexts, favoring the art of structured improvisation in the tradition of Teatro Campesino and Chicano/a performance artists. She writes and creates from her home in El Paso, Texas, in the Chihuahuan Desert, home of her ancestors.

Bibliography
Aztecs at Mexilore, Small, independent, specialist, artefact-based teaching team providing in-school interactive history workshops on the Mexica (Aztecs) and the Maya and maintaining an online resource library. Last accessed June 1, 2025, https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/

Burrough, B., Tomlinson, C., & Stanford, J. (2021). Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. Penguin Press.

Chuchiak, John IV. (2012). The Inquisition in New Spain 1536-1820. A Documentary History. John Hopkins Press.

De la Garza, Sarah Amira (2004). Maria Speaks: Journeys into the Mysteries of the Mother in My Life as a Chicana. Peter Lang.

Huq, Aziz, (May 2025). America is Watching the Rise of a Dual State. The Atlantic Monthly.

Kroger, Joseph & Granziera, Patricia (2012). Aztec Goddesses and Christian Madonna Images of the Divine Feminine in Mexico. Routledge.

Between April 3-6, 2025, I attended the 2025 Annual Organization of American Historians (OAH) Conference. I presented my academic work during a graduate students’ lightning round entitled “Emerging Voices in Queer and Trans* Histories and Histories of Sexuality.”  I discussed how police brutality in Memphis, TN, affects Black women and Black queer people, as well as how impacted communities reacted to such violence by enacting racial and social change. The presentation was well-received, and I smiled joyfully, remembering how hard it had been to craft a five-minute summary of the research I had been conducting for the past two years.

OAH was a transformative experience for me. I met scholars who shaped not only my scholarship, but fields like sexuality history (i.e., Dr. John D’Emilio), Black women history (i.e., Dr. Deborah Gray White), and history of police brutality (i.e., Dr. Elizabeth Hinton and Dr. Treva B. Lindsey). However, the most impactful part of the conference was that my brain was functioning again, and my neuroplasticity was almost back to normal.

In the summer of 2024, I was diagnosed with treatment resistant depression. I had already been diagnosed with major depressive disorder almost a decade before, but between Fall 2023 and Spring/Summer 2024, my mental health severely declined. It was one of the hardest times of my life, perhaps the hardest, and my brain became incapable of producing any kind of scholarship. For more than a year, I did not touch my dissertation, because I mentally could not.

The way I describe what I went through to someone who is not as familiar with mental health illness, is to imagine my body as an old car model, with my brain as the battery. They stopped manufacturing the car and its parts decades ago, and it is impossible for me to get any other car, or replace the battery. During those months, my battery slowly but inexorably stopped functioning, until I could perform basic functions like turning the radio or the blinkers on, but it would not drive. It could not drive. I felt stuck, and defeated, because if my brain doesn’t work, then who am I?

I had a therapist not too long ago who challenged me any time I identified my sense of self-worth with my ability to “produce.” She asked me that question over and over, “who is Paola without her brain,” and I could never answer her, because not being able to read and write and research and make connections and and and… was such a foreign thought that I never indulged it. And then it happened. And it was terrifying. I felt like all I had accomplished in 36 years was now meaningless, because I had lost the ability to do more.

Thankfully, I had friends who did not allow me to self-isolate and disappear in my misery, I was able to find a treatment that fixed my battery, albeit slowly. For the first few months of Fall 2024, I could only read and process information for about 1 hour. Then the hours became 2. Then 3. I stopped attending lectures because I could not focus. I have always been a fast reader, but I found myself looking at the same page again and again as my brain retrained itself to comprehend and summarize.

Presenting at OAH and being able to participate in scholarly conversations was a huge accomplishment. I had set a goal for myself: no matter how long my recovery took, I would present. I still tired myself more than I would have before, but my ability to fully engage with other scholars and students still represented an incredible milestone. I felt accomplished, and relieved, and I almost cried a few times out of incredulity and gratefulness. My brain was coming back, and so Paola was coming back, too.

Although I had several friends who supported me, none of them were part of my cohort. I began my PhD program in August 2020, and thus it was hard to form a community of graduate students I could share my academic journey with. Those I became close to were either almost at the end of the program, or they enrolled during my second or third year. I had heard before that graduate school can be an isolating experience, and I definitely felt the disconnect between my peers and me as my depression worsened. Thankfully, my professors understood my situation and have been in my corner, supporting me in any way they could. But it was not until I attended OAH that I realized how much I miss belonging to an academic community.

The exchange of ideas and the passionate discussions stimulated my mental agility for the first time after months of neuro-immobility. I remember talking to a scholar and delineating ways in which to find sources about the topic we were discussing, on the spot, without consulting any kind of literature, instead retrieving information and methods already stored in my brain, something I had not been able to do in so long. I almost broke down in front of him, realizing what I had done. Instead, I smiled and continued with our conversation, comforted.

It is almost June 2025, and I still don’t have an answer to, “who is Paola without her brain?” What I do have, however, is a newfound awareness of the importance of connections during one’s scholarly career. Everybody’s academic journey is different, as everyone’s struggle is different. However, there is solidarity in shared experiences, and the reawakening of my faculties I experienced at OAH made me long for a sense of belonging that can only be found amidst a cohort of graduate students. My wish is for my story to reach someone who might experience a similar struggle, and my hope is for them to find healing and embracement among their peers, so that they can comfortably seek and find the help they need, knowing that they are not alone as they battle with themselves.

Paola—Bio
Paola Cavallari is an Italian history PhD candidate at the University of Memphis, and a cat mom to Muffin and Mouse. She also holds two master’s degrees, one in Public Service from the Clinton School of Public Service, and one in Public History from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Paola’s research focus on the impact of police brutality on BIPOC communities, and on how those communities responded to the violence and enacted change. When she is not working on her dissertation, Paola loves traveling, reading, writing poetry and prose, and cooking for her friends.

When We Gather, We Remember: An Afro-Filipino Reflection on Service, Joy, and Memorial Day
By Dr. Curtis Ladrillo Chamblee

I come from a lineage of service.

As an Afro-Filipino, I was born into a world where duty was not just expected, it was modeled. My father, uncles, and brother all enlisted in the United States Air Force. I followed that same path from 1995 to 1998, raising my right hand and stepping into a legacy that stretched across oceans and generations.

And while I served during peacetime, I knew that the weight of that uniform was never light. Even when the skies were clear, the role carried a deep and complex history, especially for someone like me, whose Blackness and brownness never came off with the uniform. My skin, my name, my very presence were always part of the story.

This Memorial Day, I remember not just the fallen, but the living legacies they left behind. I remember what it meant to serve as an Afro-Filipino man on American soil, under American command, while holding on to a rich heritage shaped by migration, resistance, and resilience. Service was never just about discipline or command. It was about community. And that is what gives me hope.

I think back to a Memorial Day spent on base at Andrews Air Force Base, where the dorms turned into a celebration of life and laughter. That day, we did not gather to mourn, we gathered to remember through joy. It started as a simple barbecue. Folks pulled up with coolers, plates of chicken and ribs, baked mac, lumpia, and potato salad with that one cousin’s secret recipe. And as the music turned up, the games came out. Spades on one table. Dominoes on another. The sound of bones slamming, trash talk flying, and laughter echoing through the courtyard reminded us that being alive and being together was itself a kind of tribute.

There were Black airmen from Mississippi, Puerto Rican NCOs who made sure we were fed, Filipino techs who slid you an extra helping if you said “Salamat.” We were a whole diaspora in uniform. That day, the base became a mosaic of memory, identity, and celebration. And as people flowed in from every dorm and hangar, it felt like we were doing more than throwing a party, we were creating sanctuary. Joy was our resistance. Community was our armor.

These moments shaped me just as much as the drills, the formations, or the creeds. They were formative not just for the man I was then, but for the scholar, teacher, and cultural worker I am today. My commitment to understanding the world, how identity, place, and history shape our sense of belonging, can be traced back to those moments in uniform, when we came together across lines of race, culture, and memory. The Air Force did not just give me structure. It gave me insight into how people carry their stories with them, how they build chosen families when they are far from home, and how shared struggle and shared laughter create unbreakable bonds.
That’s what Memorial Day means to me.

It is a reminder that service does not stop when the uniform comes off. It shows up in how we love, how we build, how we teach, and how we hold space for others. For those of us with complex identities, Afro, Filipino, American, service has always meant more than one thing at a time. It has meant making room for all our languages, all our lineages, and all our losses. And through it all, finding joy anyway.

Today, I honor those who never made it home, but I also uplift those who did, carrying invisible wounds and visible pride. I think of the families who gathered around folded flags, and the friends who keep their stories alive. I think of my fellow airmen, from every corner of the world, who shared ribs and laughter and music with me that Memorial Day in the dorms, reminding me that we serve not just for a nation, but for one another.

In a world that often feels heavy with grief, violence, and division, I still believe in what I learned on base that day which is, community saves lives. That joy is sacred. That stories matter.

And that service, when rooted in love and legacy, can be a force of healing.

So, this Memorial Day, I offer a simple reflection from an Afro-Filipino heart: when we gather, we remember. And when we remember, we rise.

Dr. Curtis Ladrillo Chamblee is an Afro-Filipino veteran, and critical cultural and media scholar whose research and public writing explore the intersections of identity, place, memory, and media. A former United States Air Force airman (1995–1998), Curtis brings lived experience into his work as a teacher and writer, examining how Blackness, Brownness, and belonging shape personal and communal histories. He currently serves as a doctoral candidate in Communication & Film at the University of Memphis and teaches in the First-Year Writing Program at the University of Minnesota. Curtis’s work honors the power of story, the resilience of community, and the sacredness of joy especially among those navigating complex cultural legacies.

The Lynching Sites Project of Memphis
By: Carla Peacher-Ryan

In 2015, a group of people at First Congregational Church had been having a discussion group about race, like all good liberal churches do, when we learned that Bryan Stevenson, of the Equal Justice Initiative, was coming to a fundraiser in Memphis.  Two of our members went and urged us to take up Stevenson’s challenge – to research and memorialize the lynchings that had happened in Shelby County, Tennessee – more than in any other county in Tennessee.

Stevenson’s work regarding lynching grew out of his death-penalty defense practice – he sees the through line from historical lynchings of black people in America to today’s mass incarceration, police killings and the disproportionate impact that the death penalty has on black people, and importantly, how our willful ignorance about, and active covering up, of the history of lynching atrocities perpetuate this cycle.

A research group formed and started meeting in 2016.  We were incredibly lucky to find a person who had spent a large part of her professional life studying lynching, Dr. Margaret Vandiver, who joined us and has guided our work from the beginning.

Our first historical marker was in memory of Ell Persons.  In May, 1917 the decapitated body of a 16-year-old white girl, named Antoinette Rappel, was found at the old Wolf River Bridge near what is now Summer Ave. Suspicion fell on Ell Persons, an African American woodcutter who lived nearby.  Persons was arrested twice, interrogated twice and released twice before being captured a third time and reportedly beaten into a confession.

Upon his capture by a mob, local newspapers announced that he would be burned the next morning.  A crowd, estimated at 3,000-5,000, gathered to watch. Vendors set up stands among the crowd and sold sandwiches and snacks. It was reportedly a carnival-like atmosphere.  James Weldon Johnson, the author of the lyrics of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and then the Field Secretary of the national NAACP, came to Memphis to investigate the lynching and said “I tried to balance the sufferings of the miserable victim against the moral degradation of Memphis, and the truth flashed over me that in large measure the race question involves the saving of black America’s body and white America’s soul.”

In May of 2017, on the centennial of the lynching, the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis held a commemoration ceremony at the lynching site attended by several hundred people, including elected officials and clergy.  Relatives of both Ell Persons and Antoinette Rappel – the teenager he was accused of, but never tried for, murdering – attended this ceremony.

LSP has since installed 3 other historical markers memorializing the lynching of Lee Walker, Name Unknown from 1851, and Wash Henly and another installation is planned in the next year for the site of the People’s Grocery lynching of Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart.  We have held a number of commemorations of anniversaries of lynchings at various sites, including the lynching of Jesse Lee Bond in Arlington in 1939.   We are working to get the Ell Persons lynching site on the National Historic Register and are coordinating with the Wolf River Conservancy for its inclusion on the Wolf River Greenway that is planned to go near the lynching site.  Members of LSP are frequent speakers to school groups, church groups and community groups, and we also conduct tours of the various lynching sites in Shelby County.  We have made or contributed to several documentaries, have a podcast, The Red Record, and have an app with information about our markers and the lynchings in Shelby County.

There are also community meetings on the 2^nd Monday of each month, which have been held continuously for the last 10 years.  The meetings are a time for difficult, courageous conversations and relevant speakers.  For more information, please visit our website at lynchingsitesmem.org

Bio:
Carla Peacher-Ryan is a retired attorney from Memphis, Tennessee, who is recognized for her involvement in social justice initiatives. She gained public attention after uncovering her family’s troubling history related to her great-uncle, Paul Peacher, who was convicted of enslaving 13 Black men in 1936 in Arkansas. She has been a member of the Lynching Sites Project since its inception, and is a former Advisory Board member with the Hooks Institute.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the great civil rights and human rights leader, once urged activists to stay encouraged through both victories and setbacks. He famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Dr. King understood that this arc does not move in a straight line. Often, it lies invisible beneath the surface of despair—until, through resilience and action, it breaks into the light at pivotal moments.

But the arc won’t bend on its own. It is only bent through the tireless courage and determination of leaders and ordinary people who keep pressing forward, even in the face of profound disappointment.

It is with this perspective that I choose to view the May 7, 2025 not guilty verdicts in the state criminal case in Memphis, Tennessee against the former police officers who so brutally beat Tyre Nichols, ultimately causing his death. While these verdicts are deeply painful, I urge Memphians and others to use this moment not to give in to despair — or fall into fear — but to strengthen their resolve and join the ongoing struggle for justice.

As my mother, Fayette County civil rights activist Viola McFerren, often said, “What’s right for minority people is right for majority people.” Protecting the rights of marginalized communities ensures the protection of rights for all. This principle is echoed through generations—by the slavery abolitionists of the 1800s, the civil rights leaders of the 1960s, and today’s advocates working for justice, equality, and human dignity.

Social justice is not without heartbreak. There are days of deep disappointment, like May 7th, followed by moments of renewal that nourish our souls for the road ahead.

This verdict will take time for Memphis—and the nation—to process. And there must be space to mourn. But after mourning, I urge all of us to rise with renewed spirit and courage, to put our backs and hands once more against the arc, helping to bend it toward justice for African Americans, the poor, and all people of color.

Because truly, “what’s right for minority people is right for majority people.”

Daphene R. McFerren
Executive Director
The Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change

May is AAPI Heritage Month, a time meant to celebrate the richness, resilience, and range of Asian American and Pacific Islander identities. And yet, for those of us who live in the liminal spaces between categories, who carry blended lineages and complex migrations, this month often arrives with both pride and a quiet ache.

As an Afro-Filipino scholar, I exist in what feels like an intentional blind spot, too often rendered invisible in both Black and AAPI discourses. I am not a bridge between communities; I am the community. I am what it looks like when the maps are redrawn and the memory refuses to separate. My body is a geography of empire, survival, and cultural convergence.

I carry my father’s melanin and my mother’s Tagalog lullabies. I grew up with lumpia on the plate and Marvin Gaye in the background. I have watched Filipino elder’s light candles for their ancestors, and I have danced at cookouts to Frankie Beverly featuring Maze, and The Electric Slide, while uncles told stories about Malcolm, Martin, and Motown. I have been called “other” in both Asian and Black spaces, and I have learned to name myself when others refuse to.

The Philippines is often treated as an outlier in the AAPI narrative, tropical, colonized, Catholic, too American to be Asian, too Asian to be seen. And when you’re Black and Filipino? That tension doubles. You become something people want to admire but not engage. Curiosity without conversation. Celebration without understanding.

And yet… we are not new.

We are the legacy of migration and militarization.
We are the children of nurses and navymen.
We are the kids who knew José Rizal and James Baldwin in the same breath.
We are the spiritual descendants of both baybayin scripts and hip-hop cipher circles.
We are the in-between, and that in-between is sacred.

Reclaiming a Heritage That Remembers

To understand Afro-Filipino identity is to contend with colonial scars and spiritual survival. It is to carry Spain, America, and the Pacific in your bloodstream while searching for stories that look like your own.

That’s why I honor José Rizal, not just as a Filipino hero, but as a model for what it means to be dangerous with a pen. Rizal was a scholar, doctor, poet, and revolutionary whose words helped ignite a nation’s fight for freedom. He did not wage war with weapons, he used stories. His novel Noli Me Tangere pulled back the curtain on Spanish colonial violence in the Philippines. His follow-up, El Filibusterismo, was a slow-burn call for justice written by a man who knew he might die for telling the truth. And he did.

As a writer and scholar today, I hold Rizal’s legacy close, not as someone who lived in a time far removed from mine, but as someone who walked a similar terrain: empire, expectation, erasure. Rizal dared to imagine a freer world for his people. And I, too, write toward that imagining, not just for Filipinos, but for every blended Black and Brown child who has been told to pick a side when their soul knows it is whole.

What This Month Means to Me

AAPI Heritage Month should include us not as footnotes but as full chapters. We are not just here to add complexity to demographic data. We are here because our lives offer insight into how colonization, racialization, and diaspora have always been intertwined.

To be Afro-Filipino is to understand that identity is not static. It is not a box to be checked on a form it is a narrative you are constantly rewriting against silence. It is hearing your grandmother say “anak” and feeling your mother braid your hair while Stevie Wonder plays on the radio. It is knowing the smell of sinigang and soul food and understanding both are rituals.

As a scholar, I bring this duality into the classroom and into my research. My students don’t just get curriculum, they get culture, reflection, and refusal. I want them to see that knowledge is not neutral. That Blackness and Asianness are not binaries but rhythms that shape how we survive and how we speak. I want my students, especially those who exist at the intersections, to know that they do not have to shrink or fragment themselves to be legible. They already belong.

This month, I honor my Filipino lineage not as an accessory to my Blackness, but as part of the divine complexity that makes me whole. I celebrate not because the world has made space for me, but because I have learned to take up space anyway.

And I write this for every Afro-Asian student still searching for mirrors. For every child of two worlds who was told they had to choose. For every scholar who had to defend their existence before they could even begin their research.

We Are the Continuation, Not the Disruption

Afro-Filipino identity is not a deviation. It is a continuation of centuries of migration, love, resistance, and memory. We are what happens when colonization fails to erase, and when global Blackness reclaims what empire tried to divide.

We are not fragments.
We are full stories.
And this month, we remember that we belong, not because someone included us,
but because we have always been here.

A Final Word for the In-Between

I am the ocean between islands, the bridge between names. What they tried to divide, I carry as one.
They told me to choose a side. I chose to belong to myself.
My blood speaks in blended tongues, history, harmony, and the hush of what survived. This is not confusion. It is convergence.
I am the echo of a mother’s prayer and a grandfather’s fight. I am their unfinished sentence, still writing.

Curtis Ladrillo Chamblee M.A. is an Afro-Filipino scholar and doctoral candidate in Communication & Film at the University of Memphis. His work explores Black masculinity, media representation, and the power of place, bridging ancestral memory with cultural critique. As a co-editor of UpRooted: Autoethnographies of Belonging and Place and co-author on rhetorical fractals and examined Tupac Lyrics using an Afrocentric Lens, Curtis elevates voices across diaspora, legacy, and liberation.

*Adapted from The Most Dangerous Negro in America”: Rhetoric, Race and the Prophetic Pessimism of Martin Luther King Jr. by Andre E. Johnson and Anthony J. Stone Jr.

On April 4, 1968, on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee in front of room 306, an assassin shot and killed the nation’s prophet of non-violence. The previous night, King delivered his infamous I’ve Been to the Mountain Top speech. In the speech, he called his audience to stand firm under the oppressive tactics of the Henry Loeb administration. He also called for them to turn up the pressure in their non-violence resistance. This meant massive economic boycotts.

We don’t have to argue with anybody. We don’t have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don’t need any bricks and bottles. We don’t need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, “God sent us by here, to say to you that you’re not treating his children right. And we’ve come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God’s children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you.

But on the next day, King lay dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Earlier that day he had worked on his sermon for Sunday, April 7. Though he lay dead, his associates found in his pocket the sermon notes he would have preached that Sunday if he had lived. The sermon title: “Why America May Go to Hell.”

Preaching economic boycotts and reflecting on why America may go to hell, may surprise admirers of King. While King today is largely considered one of the greatest Americans to ever
live, during his lifetime—and especially near the end of his life—King was one of the
most hated men in America. In a 1966 Gallop Poll, almost two-thirds of Americans had
an unfavorable opinion of King and the FBI named King “the most dangerous Negro in
America.

One reason for King’s declining popularity was his rhetoric on race. When examining King’s rhetoric, especially during the last year of his life, one would note that several of his speeches highlighted King’s growing understanding of race and racism. During the last year of his life, King’s confidence in American institutions or the American people living up to the ideas and ideals set forth in its sacred documents began to wane.

For instance, in his The Other America speech delivered at Stanford University on April 14, 1967, King called on his audience to see that the movement was heading towards another stage. King grounded this newfound insight on an understanding of racism that had eluded him in the past. He proclaimed, “Now the other thing that we’ve gotta come to see now that many of us didn’t see too well during the last ten years — that is that racism is still alive in American society and much more widespread than we realized. And we must see racism for what it is… It is still deeply rooted in the North, and it’s still deeply rooted in the South.” He closed this part of the speech by lamenting that

What it is necessary to see is that there has never been a single solid monistic determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans on the whole question of Civil Rights and on the whole question of racial equality. This is something that truth impels all men of goodwill to admit.

King’s position on race and racism would become even more pronounced in his speech America’s Chief Moral Dilemma, delivered May 10, 1967, to the Hungry Club. He starts by stating that “racism is still alive all over America. Racial injustice is still the Negro’s burden and America’s shame. And we must face the hard fact that many Americans would like to have a nation which is a democracy for white Americans, but simultaneously a dictatorship for Black Americans. We must face the fact that we have much to do in the area of race relations.”

King continued to address race and racism in his August 31, 1967 speech, the Three Evils of Society. In the speech, King revisited his arguments of racism and the prevailing white backlash. He argued that the “white backlash of today is rooted in the same problem that has characterized America ever since the Black man landed in chains on the shores of this nation.” While not implying that “all white Americans are racist,” he did critique the dominant idea that “racism is just an occasional departure from the norm on the part of a few bigoted extremists.” For King, racism may well be the “corrosive evil that will bring down the curtain on Western civilization” and warned that if “America does not respond creatively to the challenge to banish racism, some future historian will have to say, that a great civilization died because it lacked the soul and commitment to make justice a reality for all men.”

Leading up to the end of his life, King argued that what held America from becoming great was its racism. He further maintained that the movement had to face a resistance grounded in the nation’s racist heritage. Led by conservatives all across the country, the white backlash led King to realize that even with the earlier victories, a majority of white people still were not on board. He began to understand at a deeper level that the principles of the country he lauded and lifted in the past were mythic constructions. Therefore, he called for a moral revolution—challenging the nation’s long-held beliefs of freedom, democracy, justice, capitalism, and fairness.

King determined that the nation was sick and wondered aloud if things could get better. In his last sermon, Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, delivered on March 31, 1968, at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC., King told the congregation that it is an “unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle—the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic.” For King, he realized that it was racism grounded in racist ideas and policies that hindered America from achieving its greatness.

While we do well to celebrate and commemorate the life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., let us remember his challenge to us today. Let us remember that right before his death in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. attempted to dismantle racism; believing that America may just go to hell on
his way to becoming one of the most hated men in America.

Andre E. Johnson is the Scholar in Residence at the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change and Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies at the University of Memphis.

Editor’s Note: This is a re-posting of an original forum essay first published on January 17, 2022. Adapted from The Most Dangerous Negro in America: Rhetoric, Race, and the Prophetic Pessimism of Martin Luther King Jr. by Drs. Andre E. Johnson and Anthony J. Stone Jr. This essay invites readers to revisit Dr. King’s final year and his urgent, often overlooked warnings about racism, economic injustice, and America’s moral crisis.

1955

they rose, so others
could crawl,

with strength they gave
their all.

they crawled, so she
could walk,

imparting lessons,
so others could talk.

unmoving, unshaken,
unbound,

they walked, so I could
run,

through every struggle,
every ill,

i sprint, so she can fly
still

from every corner, every
dream she’ll bear,

a force of nature,
beyond compare,

fully intertwined, this
world, their souls

she’ll fly so more can
soar

2019

Madison Givens M.A. Bio:
Madison Givens is a current PhD student whose research explores the intersections of 20th-century African American history, classical studies, and gender, with a focus on how social movements and revolutions shape collective memory across generations. With a deep commitment to examining the enduring impact of generational trauma, Givens’s work bridges historical scholarship and cultural analysis to better understand the roles of women, resistance, and legacy in shaping Black life and liberation struggles.