photograph courtesy deborah d. douglas
“I have this thing I do when I move someplace new. I go outside to a particular place and I look around, take my time really looking around and noting whatever detail I can see in the landscape around me. And then a year later I go to the exact same spot and I look around to see what I see, and I always see so much more.” — Deborah D. Douglas
So much of life — of empathy and understanding — can be summed up simply as learning to see more. As a Memphian, I have sometimes taken for granted the depth of culture and history that surrounds me every day. On such occasions, I am grateful for reminders. One such reminder comes in the just-released U.S. Civil Rights Trail: A Traveler’s Guide to the People, Places, and Events That Made the Movement (Moon Travel) by Deborah D. Douglas, award-winning journalist and educator, first managing editor of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, and a contributor to the recently published 400 Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain.
I spoke with Douglas about her new book, and her path to writing it.
“Any Opportunity to Write”
At an early age, Douglas started on the path that would, one day, lead to writing the U.S. Civil Rights Trail. Born in Chicago in 1967, she moved to Detroit with her mother. “I started school there after the riot, so that imprinted itself on me,” Douglas says, referencing the Detroit race riots of 1967 and laying the early foundation for a passion for justice. “[My mother] was born in Memphis and raised in Covington. So at a certain point I moved to Covington to go to school.”
At first Douglas wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. The other girls, she remembers, all wanted to be Diana Ross, but she set her sights on a slightly less glamorous goal. “I liked the news anchors on television, and I really liked reading. I also happened to notice that adults did a poor job of listening to each other,” she explains. “So I just made an equation in my mind and decided to be a journalist because it would allow me to be pretty and smart, read books, and actually listen to people.
“Any opportunity to write, I took it,” Douglas continues. “When I was in seventh grade in Covington, we had a student newspaper, the Bulldog Reporter. So I wrote for the Bulldog, and I was on the yearbook staff at Covington High School. It was rigorous journalism.”
She says the experience gave her an early taste of what most journalism students aren’t exposed to until undergraduate classes. Another blessing in disguise came in the form of one of her first assignments: covering the Future Farmers of America. “I’m really a city girl,” Douglas admits, but, she says, there were lessons to be learned from that assignment. “It was good for me to be forced to report on something in which I had no innate interest. That’s really the point — to get to know the world.”
If the job is to get to know the world, Douglas was on the path to doing so. “I graduated and went to a minority internship program, so I moved to a different paper every four months. I went around the country — Kansas City, the Detroit suburbs, Connecticut. And then I ended up interning in Memphis.”
Douglas graduated from high school and enrolled at Northwestern University. Her rise continued as she honed her skills, interning with different publications throughout her academic career — landing herself a front-page story before she’d even graduated. “I interned for the Chicago Sun-Times,” she says. “That summer, actually, I went to a journalism conference in St. Louis on a 45-minute flight. My plane wasn’t landing and after going back and forth between the two airports in Chicago, they finally admitted they didn’t have any landing gear and we were stuck in the air. So they had to do a belly flop, a kind of controlled crash, and I got a front-page story out of it.”
If the job is to get to know the world, Douglas was on the path to doing so. “I graduated and went to a minority internship program, so I moved to a different paper every four months. I went around the country — Kansas City, the Detroit suburbs, Connecticut. And then I ended up interning in Memphis.”
The young journalist did a four-month internship at The Commercial Appeal, which had a hiring freeze at the time, so Douglas went to work next for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi. “I ended up going down there and writing for a few years.” Eventually, she made her way back to the Chicago Sun-Times. “I was the library director, then I moved to the editorial page, became the editorial page editor, and I got a column.”
Though that was the nothing-but-the-highlights whirlwind tour of Douglas’ career, it helps set the stage.
“The Story Is Righteous”
photograph courtesy deborah d. douglas
Years later, with more accolades to her name, Douglas was again in the Bluff City. “I was in Memphis a few years ago, at The Commercial Appeal, and I met with Wendi [Thomas]. I had always known about her, but I didn’t know her personally. I got to meet her for the first time, and we fell into this easy discussion about all these issues related to economics and injustice. It was just a real wonky kind of conversation, and not the kind of thing that you can talk about with just anybody. But to talk to a fellow journalist about all of these esoteric things that I really care about was just so refreshing.”
Is that, I ask Douglas, how you joined the MLK50 team? She explains that the move was more organic than planned. “We were in each other’s orbits,” Douglas continues, speaking of MLK50 founder Thomas. “So when she launched MLK50, early on she invited me to write a story, which I really enjoyed. I covered for her while she was on a reporting assignment out of the country. So I coordinated the team that covered the rally around the Confederate monuments.
“It was the runup to the 50th commemoration of MLK’s assassination, and it just made sense. Memphis is one of my homes. The story is righteous.”
Douglas has since returned to Chicago, where she took a break from working on a cover story for Chicago magazine to chat on the phone. Her work in pursuit of righteous stories continues, in part with the U.S. Civil Rights Trail guide.
“It’s a Mini History Book”
The book intersects with everything I care about right now,” Douglas says. “Travel South, the agency that supervises this, has made it an official trail. That designation was completed in 2018, so this is new. This book is the only book that covers the official civil rights trail.”
The guide is packed with information. “When I started out writing this book, I thought, ‘Okay, this is going to be a travel guide,’ but it ended up being so much more,” she says. “It’s a mini history book. It’s really either an introduction to the civil rights movement, or a refresher for the civil rights movement.” Douglas interviewed people who were present at watershed moments. But she also makes room for Black joy — and to celebrate African-American contributions to the national culture.
“This book covers a mid-century movement, but sometimes it’s necessary to go back to the 1940s or ’30s to get the proper context,” Douglas explains. “It was really important to me to touch these people because they’re up in age. I just wanted to amplify them as respectfully as possible and include their stories in this book.”
One such powerful moment comes in the Selma section in an interview with Joanne Bland, who was 11 years old on Bloody Sunday when a 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery ended in state-sponsored violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge (as Douglas points out, still ironically named for a Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan member, despite a popular movement to rename the bridge for the late civil rights leader and House Representative John Lewis). “Before we could turn to run, it was too late,” Douglas quotes Bland as saying. The book is filled with equally moving moments — trials and struggles alongside triumphs and celebrations.
The “Memphis” in the Movement
Turning to the Memphis section is a reminder of the wealth of history here, from journalist Ida B. Wells to the brave children who made up the Memphis 13, the pioneering first-graders who, in 1961, desegregated four all-white Memphis schools. The National Civil Rights Museum is listed as a highlight, of course, as well as the I AM A MAN Plaza and the Withers Collection Museum & Gallery (a personal favorite of mine if only for two photos — one of activist Fannie Lou Hamer holding aloft her hard-won voter registration card, and another of Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke holding hands).
“You never really understand how structure is dictating your life. In this case, it was an opportunity for us to engage with Black joy. But it was Black joy that came at the expense of segregation and lack of opportunity.”
Also mentioned, though, are Payne’s barbecue restaurant, just a 10-minute walk from my apartment; Soulsville Music Academy, where I taught Wordsmith preparatory classes my last semester of undergrad; Memphis Rox, where I used to exercise pre-covid. People I’ve interviewed, businesses I’ve frequented without thought — walking in Memphis is walking among history, a record of our country’s great failures and triumphs. It’s easy to forget, or to consider moments in isolation, forgetting the ways each intersects and defines our lives’ trajectories.
Southern food, though, is anything but forgettable. “The food, to me, is my favorite thing in that book,” says Douglas. “Because I love Southern food, I love soul food. There was never a chicken wing I didn’t want to eat,” she says, the smile on her face audible in her voice. “I love going to Chef Tam’s [Underground Café]. I really love Chef Tam’s joy for food. You can tell she just loves what she does.”
Douglas made sure to include rural stories as well, with one example being Shelby’s neighboring Fayette County. “So much of the attention about the movement goes to the cities. When I was growing up in Covington, I did the whole small-town thing,” Douglas says, explaining that she was on the cheer squad, and that the basketball team and cheerleaders would get excited about away games in Fayette County. There, they saw Black cheerleaders “with a lot of rhythm and sass” as opposed to the more traditional stiff movements often seen in cheer routines.
Of course, Douglas explains, that “rhythm and sass” was the legacy of segregation; Fayette County schools weren’t fully desegregated until a consent decree in 2014. “I didn’t know that segregation was so entrenched there,” Douglas says. “You never really understand how structure is dictating your life. In this case, it was an opportunity for us to engage with Black joy. But it was Black joy that came at the expense of segregation and lack of opportunity.”
“This Is Ongoing”
One thing about interviewing journalists is they have a way with words. It takes some of the pressure off, as they know how to sum up their story. “This is ongoing. We’re all learning this together. We all have to unravel some stuff,” Douglas says. “Also, as an African American, I know our community has absorbed a lot of information that doesn’t really serve us well. Part of our deprogramming is sort of [brushing] off the stories that don’t serve us, and really standing in our power.”
