A letter from our Civil Wrongs Coordinator

March 24, 2023



Dear Reader,

An essential part of being an effective citizen in a democracy is knowing what your government is up to.

But so many people are busy with their own lives that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with civic matters. This is one of a journalist’s key roles: To be in the rooms you don’t have time to be in. And to translate the most important parts of what’s happening there so you can make informed decisions about who represents you and how those choices shape

your community.  

Laura Faith Kebede

Lately, I’ve been meeting with young adults and teaching them how to do this. As part of our agreement with Report For America I help lead a service project with other Memphis-based corps members to train young people in journalism. We have been meeting with student leaders at The Collective Blueprint, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing socioeconomic mobility for young adults by teaching job skills. 

RFA corps members with Collective Blueprint students

The past couple of weeks we’ve learned about the functions and structure of government in both Memphis and Shelby County. We looked up our local representatives, learned that less than a third of voters turned out to elect the mayor last election, and discovered that the city spends nearly 40% of its budget on police.

Each of the young leaders have asked probing questions

about why things are the way they are in Memphis and what they can do to improve the city and inform their community. In one exercise, I asked a student to describe her day. We were able to quickly identify more than a dozen government-based decisions that impacted her activities before dinner.

It has been a delight to see how they are making all these connections just by learning more about how our government functions and affects so many aspects of our daily lives.

Even if they never decide to take up a career in journalism, these students will be

equipped to ask deeper questions about their community

and advocate for a more equitable future.  

And that is a core responsibility of public service journalism. 

Laura

This fall we launched Civil Wrongs, an investigative audio and print journalism project exploring the legacy of racial injustice in the Mid-South. The inaugural season of this Spring/Fall 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. 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.

Reining In Police Brutality: Our investigation of excessive force within the Memphis Police Department exposed repeated incidents of torture in which detainees were beaten, pepper-sprayed or electro-shocked while in handcuffs, leading authorities in 2021 to reform how they conduct official inquiries into brutality. Now, all confirmed incidents of excessive force are sent to the District Attorney for review, a policy that’s led to the filing of criminal charges against several officers.

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. She recently hosted and wrote WKNO public television’s special “History, Justice and the Journalists” on unresolved civil rights crimes in the Memphis area.  She previously covered education inequities for Chalkbeat Tennessee and local government and religion for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.