I’ve been fortunate to join the MLK50 reporting and photography team as managing editor of a year-long  project covering the economic realities of the majority-black city of Memphis leading into the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. there at the Lorraine Motel.

Conceived by Neiman alum Wendi C. Thomas, the first black woman to write a metro column in the paper of record, The Commercial Appeal, this project looks between the lines at stories that affect marginalized communities, such as the quest for a living wage and structural impediments of justice, jobs, transportation and education.

With a combination of original reporting or shared reports from innovative journalism initiatives such as Reveal (Center for Investigative Journalism), The Conversation and the Kaiser Family Foundation, we publish stories that center the common man and woman and child as a matter of course not happenstance.  Our project is slated to run till April 4, 2018, the day King was shot to death.

I have been thrilled to lead a all-female, multicultural team covering everything that matters in the public conversation on agency and the marginalized, including stories about black wealth creation, black health access and the quest to remove Confederate statues standing in taxpayer-funded spaces in Memphis. Our team took to the street Feb. 12, 50 years to the day black sanitation workers went out on strike to protest low pay and dangerous, abusive working conditions as #Fightfor15  and the new Poor People’s Campaign centered national action in Memphis, sending in busloads of workers.  In addition to planning and editing, I’ve written about a black-owned investment fund, Preserver Partners, based in Memphis and  looked Inside America’s comfort with Confederate symbols, to name just two stories.