Links to connect to black organ donors through ‘Be the Match’ event

The Commercial Appeal

April 8, 2014

Organ donation has been a hard sell in the black community, but progress is being made, said Kim Van Frank, executive director of the Mid-South Transplant Foundation, the federally designated organ procurement organization serving West Tennessee, East Arkansas and North Mississippi.

“Back in 2007 — this was an ‘aha’ moment for our organization — we had a 27 percent authorization rate for donation when we approached African American families, and this last year in 2013, 59 percent of the African American families we approached said ‘yes’.”

Education and outreach are credited for the increase, and this month — April is “Donate Life Month — The Links, among other organizations, are extending that outreach.

The “Be the Match” drive, sponsored by local River City Chapter of The Links, Inc., will be held from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. Saturday at LeMoyne Owen College, 807 Walker Ave. And on April 26, the Mid-South Transplant Foundation will hold its “Linking Hands for Life” concert at the Levitt Shell in Overton Park.

The global network organization Be the Match is a leader in bone marrow transplantation, research, support and resources. Chapters of The Links, a women’s volunteer service organization that seeks to enrich and ensure the cultural and economic survival of African Americans, across the country have joined with historically black colleges and universities, and Be the Match, to raise awareness about the need for donations.

At LeMoyne-Owen, there will be a live radio broadcast, and “all the colleges in the Shelby County area will participate through their Greek letter organizations, so we’re hoping to have a pretty sizable crowd,” said Carla Stotts-Hills, president of the Links River City Chapter. The Sickle Cell Foundation will be on hand to conduct screenings for sickle cell and the American Red Cross will distribute blood drive materials.

Organ donation is of particular interest to African Americans in Memphis due to the high rate of kidney transplants in the area. Leading factors of kidney failure — high blood pressure and diabetes — affect the black community in disproportionate numbers.

In West Tennessee, Van Frank said, “82 percent of those waiting for a kidney are African American. Nationally, it’s 34 percent African American, so we have a tremendously higher number here waiting on a kidney.”

As of mid-March, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ Organ Procurement and Transplant Network reported that at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis there were 692 people of all ethnicities awaiting organ transplants. Of that number 544 were African American and 527 of them were awaiting kidneys.

And at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, “Most of the patients on the kidney transplant list in our centers, almost three-fourths, are African American,” said Dr. Satheesh Nair, professor of medicine at the center and director of Transplant Hepatology at the Methodist University/University of Tennessee Transplant Institute. “If our donor population increases, it benefits us directly.”

.Donor recruitment is difficult but crucial, Van Frank said. “It’s a rare opportunity that someone has to be an organ donor; it’s about 2 percent of the population that are ever going to die in a manner that allows them to be a donor. Currently, we only have 33 percent of those with drivers licenses in the state of Tennessee that are actually signed up to be a donor, and we’ve been striving to make that number 50 percent for the last four years and, basically, we have made little progress in that.”

Organ, blood and tissue donation isn’t as simple as asking, however. It requires education and, in some cases in the African American community, a battle against long-held faith and beliefs . . . (read more)

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Renovated National Civil Rights Museum opens

National Endowment for the Humanities

April 7, 2014

On a crisp, cool spring day, hundreds crowded in front of the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis, Tenn., to hear politicians and activists herald the grand reopening of the National Civil Rights Museum.

The cause for celebration was the $28 million renovation of the museum first opened in September 1991, on the site of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in 1968.

While many were responsible for raising the capital towards the total goal of a $40 million endowment launched in 2008, longtime museum president Beverly Robertson on this day singled out the National Endowment for the Humanities and its commitment to the cause of civil rights education in America.

An NEH Challenge Grant awarded in 2010 for $750,000, was meant to build long-term endowments. Such grants are intended to support the continued strength of humanities institutions by encouraging fundraising for permanent endowments and capital improvements. The grants also stimulate non-federal giving by requiring a three-to-one match.

A $352,000, grant for the period of 2009 to 2014 was awarded for the renovation of the Lorraine Motel Permanent Exhibits. The official description states it was “ . . .  for the implementation of a new 14,500 square foot permanent exhibition for the history of African American efforts to gain freedom and equality, and the interpretation of the Lorraine Motel historic site at the National Civil Rights Museum.”

“One of the really distinctive things about our review process is that proposals are peer reviewed,” said Karen Mittelman, Director of Public Programs for the NEH, regarding how such grant projects are decided upon. “We convene review panels of experts in the field, so it would have been museum curators and directors, and civil rights scholars that reviewed this and they tell us that it’s worthy of support. I will say that the NEH panel that reviewed the proposal for the new exhibits … gave the project the highest possible ratings, excellent across the board, and that’s very unusual.”

The new exhibits include more than 40 new films, oral histories, and provide increased interactive options for museum goers, bringing the story of struggle and the fight for human rights into the 21st century. Despite such technological advances of touch screen displays and multimedia presentations, the tour begins where it all began, with the exhibit “A Culture of Resistance: Slavery in America 1619 – 1861” and its replicated slave ship’s cargo hold. Here, visitors are encouraged to crouch down into a space the size and shape that men and women abducted from their home would have been forced to inhabit for months during that journey across the middle passage.

It is humbling, and the exhibit on the slave trade is a reminder of the economic circumstances that begat such a shameful chapter in our nation’s history. But it is also the sort of full-scale storytelling the designers and museum curators hoped to instill in the renovation. It’s the telling, not just of the 1950s and 60s-era civil rights moments that so many are familiar with, but from the very beginning and an up-to-the-minute conditions . . . (read more)

 

 

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Love and death at the river’s edge: The story of Alice Mitchell and Frederica Ward

Elmwood Cemetery

2014 Writer-in-Residence

April 4, 2014

On the banks of Memphis on January 26, 1892, where cobblestones from an Illinois quarry had been laid not long before to facilitate commerce flowing into the city via the Mississippi River, visitors disembarking a river boat might have expected to see throngs of people coming and going. There would have been men groaning beneath the weight of cotton bales being loaded on and off barges while others, dressed in all their finery, waited to board vessels of the Lee Line, bound for Vicksburg or New Orleans. On a bluff above the activity, construction of the Cossitt Library being built of red sandstone and taking on the shape of a modern-day castle, would have impressed and awed the new arrivals.

What they wouldn’t have expected, what no one could have imagined there on a day filled with the excitement of travel and the thrum of the masses, would have been the murderous scene played out before their eyes. It was on that day at 4 p.m., on the railroad tracks at the bottom of the Customs House Bluff overlooking the cobblestones, that 19-year-old Alice Jessie Mitchell cut the throat of 17-year-old Frederica Ward.

These young women weren’t strangers to each other, they’d been schoolmates at the Higbee School for Girls at Beale and Lauderdale. But they were more than friends. In a time when such things were kept behind closed doors, whispered about in hushed voices, if at all, Alice and Freda, as she was known, were lovers.

The two had elaborate plans to run away together to St. Louis where they would live as husband and wife with Alice dressing the part and taking the name “Alvin J. Ward.” They’d discussed it, they’d dreamed of it all along, and an engagement ring had been exchanged. But Freda’s family had moved upriver to Gold Dust, Tenn., and when her sister, Ada Ward Volkmer, became aware of the affair, she wrote a letter to Alice ending it.

Freda came to Memphis the next winter with another sister, Josephine, to visit a family friend, Mrs. Kimbrough. During their stay, Alice had developed a habit of driving her buggy back and forth in front of the house on Hernando Street to catch a glimpse of her former love. On the day Freda was to leave Memphis, Alice followed her and her sister from Kimbrough’s house to the top of the bluff where they began the descent to the river on foot. Alice came up behind Freda, reached around her body and slashed at her throat with a straight razor. Leaving Freda bleeding on the train tracks where bystanders gathered her up to rush her to a doctor, Alice made her way back to the top of the bluff and home to 215 Union Street, where she told her mother what she’d done . . . (read more)

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