photograph by abigail morici
In the Historic Clayborn Temple’s stained-glass windows, visitors see the faces of Larry Payne, T.O. Jones, Cornelia Crenshaw, Maxine Smith, and Rev. James Lawson — all key players in the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike. They’ll see the faces of those who marched in the famous strike, those whose names might not have made their way into history books (absent is the movement’s most famous face, that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), but who made up the Civil Rights Movement, nonetheless, paving the way for future generations.
“It felt important to me that a regular, everyday person could walk by and see a regular, everyday person in those windows and say, ‘Oh, I can do that too,’” said Anasa Troutman, Clayborn’s executive director, at a talk about the windows at Evergreen Presbyterian Church on April 16th, the anniversary of the final day of the Sanitation Workers Strike. “‘I can have a voice too. I can be an agent for change too.’ … The thing about movements that are so powerful is they are made up of everyday people. And they are in our windows; every single one of those faces is an actual, real person. And some of those people, we don’t even remember their names.”
rendering courtesy Self+Tucker Architects
The windows in the Historic Clayborn Temple house Sharday Michelle’s and Lonnie Robinson’s designs side by side.
The stained-glass windows, installed on December 22, 2023, are a major part of the restoration of Historic Clayborn Temple, built in 1891. Since 1968, it has been most famous for having served as the headquarters of the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike. In 1999, when the church’s membership had declined, Clayborn closed and fell into disrepair, remaining vacant for almost two decades. The ultimate goal of the project is to continue the legacy of the strikers’ dedication to the community, by transforming the former church into a performance space, gallery, event venue, and a museum — where all are welcome.
Goals like that take time, though. Even completing the stained glass took two years from conception to installation. “We have these three incredible, humongous stained-glass windows,” Troutman said during her talk at Evergreen. “One of which was about 98 percent original, so we left it alone. It was restored. But the other two have been damaged because of the break in the truss of the building. So, the roof caves in, and the walls get pushed out and the windows crumble. And what that gave us was a wonderful opportunity, because when you’re doing historic preservation, anything that is there, you have to restore, and anything that is damaged or missing, you get to reimagine. And we got to reimagining. …
“How do we allow the building to speak for herself?” Troutman continued. “And how can we integrate storytelling from the very foundation of what we’re doing into the actual fiber of the building? The stories that we choose to tell are very intentional at Clayborn Temple, and they’re very important. It’s almost like we will never reach our mission if we don’t start with the right story. And so when we looked at that building and the possibility of storytelling, it was so, so obvious that our most powerful possibility was in those windows.”
Clayborn solicited ideas from local artists, and a committee selected the work of Lonnie Robinson and Sharday Michelle — Robinson, established in his career in Memphis, and Michelle, a relative newcomer to the arts scene who has since moved to Florida. “The reason why we went with two artists,” Troutman said, “was because we couldn’t choose between the two of them.”
Before the portrait panels were installed. L-R: T.O. Jones, Cornelia Crenshaw, the Rev. James Lawson, and Larry Payne
Lonnie Robinson has painted portraits that hang in City Hall, Hattiloo Theatre, and the Halloran Centre. He’s designed the stained glass for Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church. But this project is different. “It has that history,” he says.
When he submitted his sketch — of the five activists, each in their own panel, and of the strikers marching in an almost heavenly procession — he was thinking of those in his family who came before him. “My parents were active in the movement,” he says. “My grandmother and mother both were active in the sense that I know they participated in at least one of the marches. They were aware and supportive of the story in their own way. I know that was part of how I wrote the story, is through them and wanting to really be a part of it through that.”
And art has always been Robinson’s way of participating in the world, even since he was 4 or 5 years old. “I remember my mom said to me: ‘It’s a responsibility. You got to give.’”
These windows are, in a way, giving back, immortalizing the strikers and leaders in a way that was once reserved only for holy figures — this is stained glass in a sanctuary, after all. As the artist puts it, the portraits are “almost like a level of canonizing these people because of what was sacrificed on their part.”
photograph by lonnie robinson
Lonnie Robinson hand-created each of his panels, using reference photos and a new-to-him process of infusing stained glass.
T.O. Jones, Cornelia Crenshaw, Maxine Smith, and Rev. James Lawson all proved pivotal in the strike. Jones became head of the local chapter of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, and helped organized the strikes. Crenshaw was a well-known community activist. Smith was the longtime director of the local branch of the NAACP. Lawson, pastor of Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, established the Committee on the Move to Equality, and invited his good friend, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to Memphis to help with the protests and lead the march on City Hall.
Larry Payne, one of the five commemorated, sacrificed his life at only 16. After one of the marches downtown, he was killed by a Memphis police officer. “This was really a way of making their legacies more profound,” Robinson says. “And to be a part of that was a big thing for me.”
“Being told the story of Larry Payne and having a really poor reference photo — it was a copy of a copy of a copy and then still being able to do enough that his family was happy with the piece," he says. "That was really my goal — that their families would be happy with the commemorative.”
At the talk at Evergreen Presbyterian Church, Vasco A. “Smitty” Smith III, Maxine Smith’s son, spoke briefly about seeing his mother in Clayborn’s window. “I marched from Clayborn Temple many times as a kid, and I’ve never been there since that time,” he said, but when he returned to see his mother’s image, he became emotional.
“There are a lot of images of my mother, but when I saw this — by far the best. … I know it sounds corny. It comes out in the art. And I’m sitting here in awe about the process. But for him to make such a wonderful likeness with a difficult medium over a long period of time. It’s the fact that he brought out her spirit, soul, feeling, personality. … All the work you’ve done, I mean, it’s amazing.”
Indeed, for this project, Robinson had to learn to work with stained glass, specifically the arduous and time-consuming infused-glass process. Unlike faceted glass, which is cut and chipped and arranged side by side, Robinson says, infusing glass is almost like drawing. “That means we’re doing glass on glass, and we’re putting that in a kiln, and firing it, and infusing it all together. Then we have to do that three or four times.
“I had to become a stained-glass artist. I knew that I wanted to learn this medium. This is something I wanted to be able to put in my portfolio.”
All of the glass work was done at Pearl River Glass Studio in Jackson, Mississippi, but it was important to Troutman that Robinson and Sharday Michelle learned the medium. A big sticking point has been the I AM A MAN Plaza, right outside the building — “It’s so beautiful. We love it so much,” Troutman says, but the artist who designed the sculptural piece is not from Memphis nor is he Black.
“And when I asked the folks who made the decision about why there was not a local artist and why the artist was not Black,” she says, “what I got as an answer was, ‘There are no Black artists in Memphis who can do public art, scaled work.’ And so when we started to look at the windows, I had to reverse-engineer. Like, how do I make sure that some white guy from Spokane is not making our windows?
“And so when we met Andrew Young, who is in charge of Pearl River Glass, my negotiation with him was: I will give you this job, but when you leave Memphis, there have to be Memphis Black artists who know how to do this work.”
And now there are.
photograph by lonnie robinson
The Rev. James Lawson, one of the national leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement, died earlier this year, at age 95.
Recognizing the current moment and looking to the future is as much a part of Clayborn’s mission as reflecting on the past. While Robinson’s stained-glass panels exalt the past, Michelle’s portray protest signs of the present and the future, with lilies, often a symbol of rebirth, flanking them, as if to suggest that through these notions of dignity and Black abundance Memphis can be reborn into a new kind of Eden.
When taken in totality, the stained glass captures a renewed sense of hope, a hope that once propelled a movement and will inspire the next. As Robinson reflects, “I’m proud that we were able to capture the essence of such a historical event in time. I told my son I really wanted to have work that he could show his kids. I feel like I’m getting there. I want to have more, but I’m proud that this work will certainly be there for him to do that.”
The next phase of the Historic Clayborn Temple Restoration Project is expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2024 or first quarter of 2025 and will focus on the interior structural elements, including the church sanctuary and original pipe organ. At the end of June, Congressman Steve Cohen announced that $2,500,000 had been awarded to the project as a part of the federal Transportation and Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Act.
rendering courtesy Self+Tucker Architects; exterior photograph by abigail morici
