A letter from our Civil Wrongs Coordinator

June 6, 2023

Dear Reader,

You’ve heard about my University of Memphis class all semester.

Today, you can hear the results of our efforts.

Season 2 of Civil Wrongs is all about the Memphis Massacre of 1866 and how themes of this injustice persist today.

The three-day massacre led Congress to pass the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, yet it is largely unknown today.

Over four episodes, we’ll walk you through what was going on behind the scenes to create such a volatile mix of police brutality, sexual violence, arson and murder. Critically, we’ll explore why

Laura Faith Kebede

so many people don’t know about this crucial moment in American history.

Those of you who came to our “Look Back, Live Ahead” event in April are already familiar with the students’ work, but now you can listen to the culminating podcast.

We invite you not only to listen to this season, but share it, talk about it, and tell us what you think.

It was truly an honor to work with such eager and curious students, who diligently researched why they never knew this history and how it is connected to what they see in American society today.



This season is our attempt to start to answer those questions.

Last fall we launched Civil Wrongs, an award-winning investigative audio and print journalism project exploring the legacy of racial injustice in the Mid-South. The inaugural season of this initiative featured a three-part podcast examining the 1917 lynching of Ell Persons, a Black man burned alive by a Memphis mob, and how that injustice reverberates today in coercive police interrogation tactics and false confession. Laura Faith Kebede won best audio reporting in this year’s Report for America Local News Awards for episode two of the first season. Civil Wrongs is an outgrowth of our collaboration with WKNO, a partnership that’s produced scores of in-depth audio journalism reports, including a special half-hour documentary on the Memphis rape kit scandal as well as reports on nursing home abuse, the pandemic and the victimization of Alicia Franklin.

After the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols by five Memphis police officers on Jan. 7, Memphis was thrust into the national discussion of police brutality. Our journalists have covered the Memphis Police Department more extensively than anyone over the past 30 years. We broke the news that the five now-fired Memphis police officers charged in Tyre Nichols' muder were members of SCORPION, a special MPD unit that patrolled largely minority neighborhoods in unmarked cars and engaged in aggressive "zero tolerance" tactics that led to beatings, high-speed chases and other volatile interactions. The day after our story appeared, the Memphis Police Department disbanded SCORPION. Our coverage of SCORPION and the MPD continues.

The Institute is led by director Marc Perrusquia, who worked nearly 30 years as an investigative reporter at The Commercial Appeal. He’s the author of the 2018 book “A Spy In Canaan,’’ which exposed civil rights photographer Ernest Withers’ secret life as an FBI informant and inspired the 10-part podcast “Ernie’s Secret” and the documentary film “The Picture Taker,’’ to be released on PBS in January.

The Institute’s associate director, David Waters, worked more than 30 years at The Commercial Appeal and another four at The Washington Post. He is revered as Memphis’s best news writer and is beloved for his work exploring faith, child poverty and education

Laura Faith Kebede is a Report for America corps member. In 2023 she won the award for best audio reporting for Civil Wrongs in the Report for America Local News Awards. She hosted and wrote WKNO public television’s special “History, Justice and the Journalists” on unresolved civil rights crimes in the Memphis area. She's covered education inequities for Chalkbeat Tennessee and local government and religion for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.