“Action Is In Our Name”

MICAH brings people together to change Memphis for the better.

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The Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope (MICAH) may be the biggest Bluff City organization you’ve never heard of. The Reverend Dr. Stacy Spencer, founder of the New Direction Christian Church in Hickory Hill, says MICAH grew from the grassroots four years ago.

“It was 2016 when Darrius Stewart was shot in the front yard of my church, my youth campus,” he says. “That disturbed me to the point where I really wanted to do something about it. I got with a group of pastors and we started to talk about stopping the violence in our city. And then maybe a year later, we had a group from Nashville to come here called NOAH [Nashville Organized for Action and Hope] who talked to us about starting a social justice group in Memphis to hold our city leaders accountable.”

Spencer calls MICAH “an organization of organizations. … From those six people in the basement, we’re now up to 60-plus churches, mosques, synagogues, nonprofits, and labor unions.”

He quotes Jesse Jackson: “‘We must experience the resurrection in the same place where there was a crucifixion.’ For me, having been born in 1968, I find it not coincidental that I’m a native of Kentucky, but I’m in Memphis because I want to experience the resurrection of the city and the place where Dr. King was crucified.”

“The thing that keeps us together are three guiding issues, which are economic equity, educational equity, and intercultural and immigration equity.” — Reverend Dr. Stacy Spencer

Though Spencer is the titular leader, MICAH is not a traditional, hierarchical organization. “The thing that keeps us together are three guiding issues,” he says, “which are economic equity, educational equity, and intercultural and immigration equity.”

On June 15th, as people spurred into action by the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police took to the Memphis streets, Spencer and Janiece Lee, MICAH’s vice president, backed by a cheering crowd of more than 100 people, taped MICAH’s Justice and Equity Charter for Memphis and Shelby County to the fence surrounding City Hall. The document outlined specific steps to address issues of police accountability, criminal justice reform, economic inequality, and corporate responsibility.

MICAH’s focus is to create a more equal and equitable Memphis through systemic change by leveraging collective action on a broad scale. Together, the organizations that make up the coalition represent more than 30,000 residents of Shelby County.

“Collective action works much better than individual action,” says Ernie Hilliard, co-chair of the Immigration & Intercultural Equity task force. “You can get so much more done together than each organization can separately. Think about it. These are voters. These are the ones that put our elected officials in office. And that’s where the power comes from, by way of getting extra leverage.”

Talk to MICAH’s officers and you’ll hear again and again the sense that they are following a calling. “I’m in this work because I don’t think that there’s any place else to be right now,” says Lee. “I just don’t think that my faith allows me to sit by when people are treated unjustly.”

Memphis churches and nonprofits have a reputation for being among the most generous and effective philanthropic forces in the country. But that doesn’t always have the salutary effect that one might imagine, says Meggan Kiel, the group’s organizer and interim executive director.

“You drive around Memphis and you see a church or a place of worship on every corner, sometimes four to a corner,” says Kiel. “We hear about the levels of philanthropy in our city, but then you read the poverty reports every year, and you see that it keeps getting worse. The faith community is doing so much direct service, but not really looking upstream to ask, what are the systemic issues? How can we apply our faith and our values to look upstream? What is causing us to have so many diaper drives, to give away so many turkeys at Thanksgiving? We shouldn’t be celebrating doing more each year. We should want to do less. We should want to decrease the need.”

To achieve their goals, Kiel says MICAH first concentrates on amplifying voices.

“When an organization comes on board with MICAH, the first thing we do is a one-on-one training, so that there can be a listening campaign,” she says. “We always start with listening. Our issues didn’t come from the top down. They came from the bottom up. We had an issue convention exactly two years ago in June 2018 at Lindenwood Christian Church. At that point, we had about 40 or so partners. Each congregation or organization did their own listening campaign, and they caucused like a political convention.”

MICAH’s frontline troops are the task forces designed to tackle the organization’s three-pronged goals. Samantha Bradshaw is the co-chair of the Economic Equity task force. “My passion is for the inner city of Memphis, because I am a product of the city and I wanted to be able to give back.”

Bradshaw’s task force has tackled the issue of redlining, a practice of soft discrimination where banks are reluctant to lend in Black communities. MICAH’s approach is to cultivate relationships with organizations and then hold them accountable to keep their promises through open meetings, as they did with First Horizon bank.

“What we found in Orange Mound is that a lot of people are looking for small business loans,” she says. “So we’re holding First Horizon to the ground to make sure that they are reinvesting these dollars back into the communities that they neglected to give loans to. They committed to us publicly that they will give us reports on a yearly basis of what loans have been given, and what loans they are looking into, as well as hiring a community person who will be totally responsible for this area.”

MICAH was instrumental in getting Shelby County government to commit to paying all of its employees a $15/hour minimum wage. “We advocated on behalf of them, and are also making sure that they have adequate paid sick leave and family time leave. All of these things will help with economic equity in the community,” says Bradshaw.

“We cultivate relationships with decision-makers and hold them accountable — business leaders, organizational leaders, community leaders, and just people who understand that all of us play a role in moving things along and moving the needle in Memphis.” — Ruth Abigale Smith

Access to transportation is a major issue for people trying to lift themselves out of poverty — and transportation is an area where Bradshaw says Memphis lags behind other cities. “I had an internship, and I had to use the transit system to get to the job I had been hired for. I currently work in corporate America, but I know what it feels like not to have adequate resources, or even the way to get at those adequate resources. … It took me going to other cities and just vacationing there to find out I can pay $3 and get from one side of Chicago all the way to the other side of Chicago.”

Hilliard, who runs a prison ministry with Hope Presbyterian Church, has been busy during the COVID-19 pandemic advocating for increased testing and safer conditions for incarcerated persons. “Part of our objectives with our criminal justice work here is to do systemic reform, looking at systemic racism and systemic injustice, across the board,” he says. “It’s a tough slog. The whole matter of criminal justice reform is something that is long overdue. It’s something that is so necessary.”

Ruth Abigale Smith, MICAH’s lead power analyst, says MICAH’s public meetings are the lifeblood of the movement. “We cultivate relationships with decision-makers and hold them accountable,” she says. “Obviously, elected officials and key folks in government, but not just that — business leaders, organizational leaders, community leaders, and just people who understand that all of us play a role in moving things along and moving the needle in Memphis.”

MICAH’s last public meeting in September 2019 attracted nearly 2,000 people, says Lee. “They were hugely successful. … We got those officials into that space of the public meeting, where we make a very public ask of them, and had them commit yes or no. So that then in the future, we can hold them accountable, because they’ve had to do it in that public setting.”

This year has seen a surge in public activism, Lee continues. “We have seen a tremendous increase in interest in partnerships from both individuals and organizations. I think that people know that change is coming, and they’re trying to figure out what that looks like, and how they can be a part of it.”

MICAH is not just interfaith and racially diverse, but also attracts young people like Youth Council Chair Ximena Villa, a ninth-grader at White Station High School. “My parents, ever since I was little, were activists, and they always involved me in their social work for social equity,” says Villa. “So, this is one of the ways that I follow in their footsteps, and this is one of the ways where I see what’s wrong and what’s right with my community. I seek justice and opportunity for all the people in my community.”

MICAH’s members seek systemic change, but their methods are surprisingly simple, says Kiel. “Our systems benefit from lack of relationship across differences in Memphis, whether it’s race, or whether it’s geographical, or generational, or whatever. … Our community organizing philosophy is one-on-one conversations. It’s not revolutionary. It’s getting to know our neighbors.”