An eyewitness account of terror on Bourbon Street

 

Newlyweds Jeremy and Brittany Curtis were celebrating the
New Year on Bourbon Street in New Orleans when terror  
struck. It nearly cost them their lives. (Courtesy photo)

MEMPHIS, TN – A man’s body was contorted in a way that you wouldn’t think was humanly possible. It was a heap of mangled flesh. 

Then there was a guy on the other side of the street bleeding from his head as panic ensued all around. He was talking but laid out flat.

A woman was lying on the pavement, not moving. She was either unconscious or dead. Others lay motionless and strewn along Bourbon Street. It was a scene of human wreckage.

It was pandemonium in New Orleans on New Year’s Day. Revelers moved as quickly as possible to avoid the threat of death, including Jeremy Curtis, who pushed his wife, Brittany, out of harm’s way as the white Ford pickup truck barreled their way.

“He had to have been going at least 60 mph,” said Curtis, who arrived in the Crescent City on Dec. 28 with Brittany to enjoy the festivities, the bells and whistles, leading up to the New Year’s celebration. 

A former Memphian now living with his wife and four-year-old son, Preston, on the outskirts of Washington D.C., Curtis, 33, and his wife, 34, were traumatized and now trying to cope after such a horrific experience.

Jeremy is a 2009 graduate of Fairley High School in Memphis. Brittany graduated in 2008 from Whitehaven High School. He’s a healthcare consultant; she works in public health for the government.

Their story is like other survivors who witnessed the carnage and having trouble processing it. What Curtis was focused on in that hellacious instance when “bodies were flying in the air” was that he had to save his wife.

“I pushed Brittany out the street onto the curb,” he said. “Then I stepped onto the curb myself.”

He recalled a young girl getting hit and landing right in front of him. “She and I locked eyes,” he said. “She looked so scared and I was in a state of shock.”  

Curtis said he closed his eyes to the melee and couldn’t fathom what was happening. The truck had barely missed the reveling couple and left behind a breeze that he could almost feel. 

“When I looked,” he explained, “I saw him crash into this white and orange equipment.”

There was silence afterward, Curtis said, though only for a few seconds. “We just thought it was a drunk driver at that point. We didn’t think it was, as they [FBI] called it, a terrorist attack.”

The threat had to be extinguished. “I remember seeing the police running to the truck,” he said. “The next thing we heard were two gunshots and then a bunch of gunshots.”

The driver of the pickup truck was shot and killed by the police.

Curtis did what he’d done before. After his instincts kicked in once again, he jumped on top of his wife to shield her from the gunshots. “I didn’t let her get up. I just started dragging her to this bar.”

The frantic couple wasn’t allowed to enter the bar. After being turned away, they moved quickly, he said. “We went down to the next door to a strip club called Rick’s Cabaret.”

He said management was closing the doors. But that didn’t stop the couple from pushing their way into the adult nightclub.

“I kind of forced it open and threw my wife in. Then I jumped in after that,” said Curtis, trying to keep from getting shot. “The wreck was only about ten or fifteen yards away from us.”

After forcing their way into the foyer of Rick’s Cabaret, before gaining entrance to the bar itself, Curtis made a point to check on Brittany to make sure she wasn’t shot, that she was okay.

“I’m yelling and telling them there’s an active shooter outside,” he said, assuming “they didn’t know what was going on outside.”

It was business as usual, he determined. They were still partying, still drinking, and the strippers were still stripping. They were impervious to what was happening outside on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. 

Rick’s Cabaret is a two-story establishment promoted as an upscale gentleman’s club. There are no windows on the first level, Curtis observed. “My wife and I were in the back of the club freaking out.”

He wasn’t sure if management knew what was going on. If they did, he believed, they wouldn’t have acted so nonchalant. But then someone came down from the second level “and told us that it was bad.”

At that point, Curtis said the lights popped on. “The police were at the door and told us we had to come out right now. They created a route for us with their bodies. They told us not to look back.” 

Curtis looked anyway. He noticed the carnage, the pain and suffering, when they were being rushed off Bourbon Street. They didn’t stop until they got to the Q&C Hotel and Bar New Orleans, where they were staying, about a 15-minute walk.

He described what he’d seen on Bourbon Street as a war zone, something you’d see in a horror movie. At least 14 people were killed and dozens were injured in what the FBI is calling a terrorist attack.

Jeremy and Brittany Curtis are newlyweds. They were looking forward to celebrating their first anniversary on Jan. 14. But then terror struck. What they witnessed on New Year’s Day has been unforgettable.

“We didn’t get back to our hotel until around five o’clock,” said Curtis, pinpointing the time of the attack at a little after three in the morning.

The couple has reached out to their marriage counselor for a recommendation to help them cope with the trauma they’d experienced on that bloody day on Bourbon Street. 

“She’s connecting us to one of her colleagues who specializes in trauma therapy,” Curtis said.

Copyright 2025 TNTRIBUNE. All rights reserved.

Historical Marker Honoring Fort Pillow Massacre Vandalized

 

Vandals toppled this historical marker at Memphis
National Cemetery, which honors the U.S. Colored
Troops massacred at the Battle of Fort Pillow on
April 12, 1864. (Courtesy photo)

MEMPHIS, TN – A historical marker commemorating the “massacre” of hundreds of U.S. Colored Troops who fought in the American Civil War at the Battle of Fort Pillow in Henning, Tenn., was vandalized on Aug. 7, 2024, at Memphis National Cemetery, 3568 Townes Ave.

Dr. Callie Herd was livid when she was notified by the director of the cemetery that vandals had decapitated the marker. But then she couldn’t believe that someone would be so brazen that they would seek to destroy history.

The historical marker was erected to call attention to the colored troops who were “killed or mortally wounded” on April 12, 1864. Many of them, Herd said, were buried in more than 100 unnamed graves at the cemetery.

“I don’t know if it was unintentional or if somebody was actually trying to break it,” said Herd, an educator, senior programmer for FedEx, and vice-president of the W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Group Inc.

The historical marker was first unveiled in 2018 during a ceremony sponsored by the W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Group Inc., an umbrella organization advocating for responsible social entrepreneurism and activism via the arts, media, and education.

With support from the Memphis chapter of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), Joe Williams, whose great-great grandfather, Peter Williams, survived the massacre, the unveiling was one of the signature events for Juneteenth that year.

Herd and her son, Ronald C. Herd II, first began honoring the victims of the Fort Pillow massacre in 2016. He is the president of the W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Group Inc. The colored troops were lost to history until the Herds decided to tell their story.

But all is not lost. Herd solicited help to pay for a replacement marker. Shelby County Commissioner Henri E. Brooks, who represents District 7, and Commissioner Mickell M. Lowery, representing District 8, answered her call. 

“So those two raised the funds for us to redo the marker,” Herd said. “She (Brooks) didn’t think that it should be repaired, but redone.”

Herd said the people whom she had contacted were devastated at the thought of the marker getting destroyed. It was Brooks, she noted, who encouraged her to file a police report with the Memphis Police Department.

Since the damaged marker bears the seal of the Bureau of Colored Troops (1863-1867), U.S. Army Artillery, Herd filed another application, this time with the Shelby County Historical Commission at Brooks’ behest.

“By it being destroyed, it helped us to get the seal that we wanted from the start,” Herd said. “That way it’s validated as a historical landmark rather than just us doing it by ourselves.”

The language on the marker reads in part: “Eyewitnesses reported that black soldiers were killed despite putting down their weapons and surrendering in what the North deemed a massacre.”

The word “massacre” elicited a debate in some circles. Should it be used to describe many of the “179,000 African-American soldiers who fought to free the country from the scourge of slavery?” 

“It was a massacre,” Brooks contends. “If it (language) is not accurate, it’s not history.”

Herd said the replacement marker has been approved and the paperwork has been started. Someone told her, she said, that the marker will take about six or seven months to complete.

“We want to reinstall the marker on Juneteenth of 2025,” she said. 

Brooks said without reservation that if the replacement marker is damaged again or destroyed, she’d replace it again and again.

“Remember Fort Pillow” is inscribed on the historical marker in a bold font. Herd hopes the cemetery will continue to honor the U.S. Color Troops long after she’s gone.

Copyright 2024 TNTRIBUNE. All rights reserved.

Christmas Parade in Raleigh Ushered in Holiday Spirit

Sandy Cheeks, who belted out a rap song during the 
opening of the Christmas Parade in Raleigh, mixed it up 
with young parade-goers who seemed to know the lyrics  
to her song "Booty Club."

The Raleigh Egypt Marching Band and their majorettes were
one of several marching bands and high steppers performing in
the Bluff City Christmas Parade. (Photos by Wiley Henry)

MEMPHIS, TN – Sandy Cheekz was in rare form Saturday (Dec. 14, 2024) morning when she belted out one of her popular songs before a bevy of listeners who braved the inclement weather and amassed along both sides of Austin Peay Highway to watch the Bluff City Christmas Parade in Raleigh.

Donning rain gear, in some cases, with a few umbrellas hoisted over their heads, men, women and children assembling near the grandstand waited patiently for the procession of parade participants to file past them in their snazzy outfits — but not before Cheekz finished singing “Booty Club.”

Lil’ Rounds, a finalist on the eighth season of American Idol and another one of Memphis’s musical sensations, performed a number herself prior to Cheekz’s cheeky rap song to kick off the Christmas parade.

“In the history of the Raleigh community, I’m the first person to plan a parade and to have them (Memphis Police Department) shut the street down,” said Dr. Telisa Franklin, the parade organizer and reputed businesswoman.

While the slight drizzle coated the parade route down Austin Peay Highway, parade-goers and the organizers refused to allow the weather to dampen their holiday spirit. Franklin said she was determined to pull it off — come what may.

“I wanted to give the community an opportunity to showcase themselves,” Franklin said. “It was everything for me. I came for the children,” she added, “which models what my theme is: ‘I Came for the Community,’ That’s what it’s all about.”

About 40 schools, organizations, businesses, ministries, clubs and more geared up for Franklin’s fourth annual Christmas parade. She rolled out the first Christmas parade in the Hickory Hill community in 2021. Parade-goers watched happily while participants strutted their wares. During the subsequent years, they were just as fervent.

This year, Memphis Mayor Paul Young lauded Franklin and her fourth Christmas parade during the ribbon cutting ceremony to usher in a new era for the Raleigh community. 

Austin Peay Highway — where the hustle and bustle of commerce along the stretch are prevalent and widespread — was once home to The Raleigh Springs Mall, just north of Interstate 40.

The enclosed mall first opened in 1971 and was once teeming with business from walk-in traffic and more. But then in the early 2000s, the mall had reached the end of its lifespan. After multiple court challenges, the city of Memphis razed the property to make room for The Raleigh Civic Center. 

Shelby County Commissioner Charlie Caswell and State Rep. Antonio Parkinson, both sponsors of the Christmas parade and both longtime community activists in Raleigh and Frayser, pointed out from the grandstand that more development is underway for the proud community.

Memphis City Councilwoman Rhonda Logan, who represents District 1 on the City Council, and Memphis City Councilwoman Michalyn Easter-Thomas, representing District 7, rounded out the list of parade sponsors.

Parkinson, representing District 98 in the Tennessee General Assembly, was one of the parade’s two grand marshals. The other one was Memphis Shelby County Schools board member Stephanie P. Love, who represents District 3.

Caswell, representing District 6 on the Shelby County Board of Commission, served as host alongside Franklin and DJ Q, a community leader and reportedly the youngest disc jockey at HOT 107.1 FM, a “Tru (sic) Hip-Hop” radio station.

Franklin said this year’s Christmas parade was just as nice or better than the other three. She said she was content just to see the eyes of the children “light up” when school bands marched, blew their horns, and thumped their drums while majorettes danced to the beat.

Also on view were immaculate corvettes and other dainty vehicles rolling slowly down Austin Peay Highway and tossing candy and other goodies to children, who ran into the street and along the sidewalk to scoop them up. 

To Franklin’s delight, the parade participants made the children’s day just a little brighter this holiday season. 

Copyright 2024 TNTRIBUNE. All rights reserved.

Stage play conjures up memories of a once troubled life

Wanda Faye Taylor-Wilson, played by Sequoia Watson, crumbles
to the ground after smoking tainted dope. Earlier, she'd thought
about drowning her daughter, Kenisha James, in the bathtub,
played by Hailey Summerall. (Photo by Wiley Henry)

MEMPHIS, TN – A two-hour stage play depicting the life of a once troubled woman conjured up memories that seemed all too real to Wanda Faye Taylor-Wilson, who watched herself being played by actors with grit and emotional fervor.

Written and directed by Taylor-Wilson, the play, entitled “Lord! Heal My Brokenness,” was shown Oct. 5 at Scheidt Family Performing Arts Center on the University of Memphis campus.

The stage play is a kind of biopic or an honest interpretation of Taylor-Wilson’s life — from dysfunction to topsy-turvy to a drug-laden world of dope pushing and promiscuity. 

Some scenes invoked painful memories, she said, particularly the one where her stepfather, played by Paul Vance, violently assaulted her mother, Linda Thomas, whom Angela Rogers was able to play with relative ease. 

“I was about seven years old,” recalled Taylor-Wilson, now 50. “I begged him not to hurt my mom. He started fighting her in the living room and then dragged her to the bathroom. He broke her arm after slamming the toilet seat down on it.”

Helpless to do anything other than watch in fear, the young Wanda Faye couldn’t protect her mother from her stepfather’s violent rage. “That’s when I really cried,” said Taylor-Wilson while watching the scene unfold.

“I was very emotional,” she added.

Thomas sat in the audience watching Rogers play her as a battered wife. “It didn’t bother me at all,” she said quite frankly. “That was a long time ago, and I put it in the back of my mind.”

But then while Thomas’ ex-husband was rampaging through the house in the scene and inflicting pain on her, she said, “I did all I could to protect my daughter.” Now she’s proud that Taylor-Wilson was able to let it go.

“She didn’t let it affect her life,” Thomas said. “She turned it all around.”

Indeed, but not before Wanda Faye found herself heading down a meandering path of destruction at gallop speed.

Sequoia Watson appeared in latter scenes playing Wanda Faye, the young adult, who grew up in both LeMoyne Gardens and Cleaborn Homes public housing, returned to the ‘hood, and grappled with homelessness. 

Then she started selling drugs, night clubbing, drinking, battling addiction, running afoul of the police, and got pregnant. “I smoked dope up until the ninth month with both of my daughters,” she said unabashedly.

Wanda Faye’s life was topsy-turvy, had gone completely off the rail. Then she found God at 21. That scene was called “Hope Changes Everything.”

Watson said she had one month to remember her lines. “I got the script a month before the play,” she remembered. “It was challenging. I’d never played a huge role, but I pushed my way through it.”

She’d had roles in several plays before Taylor-Wilson had asked her to join the cast. “Wanda said I was the perfect person to play her as an adult,” said Watson, 37, an educator, author, coach, professional model and dancer, and a businesswoman. 

“I felt honored,” she said. “I just wanted to deliver the message.”

A total of 35 cast members delivered the message — each one playing their part in telling the whole story of young Wanda Faye’s struggle to survive and succeed against the odds.

Kenisha James, her oldest daughter, will never forget the bathtub scene. She’d heard her mother speak candidly about it many times before watching it play out in front of her eyes.

James was five when her mother, hearing a voice within, demanded she drown her baby. Whatever stupor had her bound surrendered to a superior spirit that led her to remove her daughter from the tub and out of harm’s way.

“I think about it often,” said James, now 35. “There’s a sense of sadness and there’s a sense of relief. Anybody would feel sad knowing that a parent had thoughts of killing them.”

She continued: “But then I’m relieved that she didn’t throw away her life. If she had, she wouldn’t be able to continue impacting lives like she’s doing at the shelter. Her legacy would have ended earlier.”

Taylor-Wilson is the president/CEO of Ladies in Need Can Survive, Inc., a 501(c)3 transitional home for troubled women who, like her former self, struggled with drugs, homelessness, and trauma.

Proceeds from the play benefited LINCS.

“You don’t have to stay in your trauma,” said James, a licensed esthetician and owner of a spa and wax studio in Clarksville, TN. “If my mom didn’t have a desire to be better, my sister and I wouldn’t be our best selves.”

Both James and her sister, Charmecia James, 30, had bit parts earlier in the play and watched it from the audience once they’d finished.

Taylor-Wilson, who is married to Derrick Wilson, said there is a way out of trauma. “I feel that sharing my story will provide hope to individuals who may be going through what I went through.” 

YWCA grateful for $100,000 truckload of goods

 

Dr. Pam Chatman (left), the CEO of BossGiving,
nd Gwendolyn Turner, who runs a Memphis
YWCA shelter, show off some of the items — 
more than $100,000 worth — that Chatman
donated to the facility. Photo by Wiley Henry

MEMPHIS, TN – A local women’s facility recently received a generous donation of household items from Amazon and electronics worth more than $100,000 — thanks to BossGiving, a philanthropic organization.

Delivered by an 18-wheeler in early April, the sizable haul was unloaded at the YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association) of Memphis, where survivors of domestic violence are given a safe place to stay unbeknown to their abusers.

The donation also includes support for a Women Crisis Transportation Assistance program.   

“All that I tried to do and wanted to do was help victims of domestic violence,” said shelter coordinator Gwendolyn Turner, whose initial plan to start her own shelter was nixed due to extenuating circumstances. 

But a silver lining would eventually materialize in the form of a key position at the facility.

“God so fixed it that He laid it right here in my hand. Everything that I wanted to do is right here,” said Turner, now in a better position to help women on the lam from their abusers.

More help would arrive, however, after a visitor touring the facility suggested that Turner get in touch with Bolivar County, Miss.-native Dr. Pam Chatman, the CEO of BossGiving.

During a tête-à-tête, Turner and Chatman found common ground. Both women love God, both had overcome domestic violence, and both resolved to help others take back their lives.

“We started talking about the goodness of the Lord,” said Chatman, and decided to bless Turner for what she’s doing at the facility and thank her for helping those who cannot help themselves.

Like Turner, Chatman grappled with a form of domestic violence. “For 17 years of my life, I was degraded every day. So why not be a blessing to women that are going through to say, ‘Look at me. Look what God has done for me.’”

Chatman said God cleaned her up and changed her life. “Then He gave me a gift of speaking to tell my testimony,” she said. “I’m truly honored today to do the Lord’s work.” 

A retired news director who last worked for WABG-TV in the Mississippi Delta, Chatman promised God that if He’d remove her tormentor, she’d continue to serve Him for the rest of her life.

She kept her promise after serving 25 years altogether in television. “About 10 or 15 years, we’ve been giving,” she said. “We started out small and now we have graduated to this large scale: $100,000 trucks [filled with a plethora of items].”

BossGiving, a non-profit, is supported with private funds, including support from the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi.

The donation to the YWCA is part of BossGiving’s mission to empower and uplift communities by providing “nutritional and essential items needed to support a selective spectrum of women and children.”

Memphis is the first leg of a national tour, said Chatman, also known as “Boss Lady.” Next month it’s Atlanta, GA, then Dallas, TX. From there it’s Alabama and back to Knoxville, TN.

“The journey that I will continue to take every day of my life is all about giving, all about serving,” said Chatman. “I started out using my own money buying 18 wheelers to give to small communities that didn’t have grocery stores, that have high numbers of poverty, that had a lot of low-income families with children.

“I’m from the Mississippi Delta. We’re talking about poverty. I wanted God to use me so I may be able to help people on a large scale,” she said. “We do clothes. We do trucks of food. We do household items.”

To determine who gets help, Chatman said she works a lot with child protection services, a lot with counties and supervisors, youth courts, and other nonprofit agencies that deal with families and children.

“These are seeds, and God is going to do exceedingly and abundantly what you have planted in this administration,” Karen Todd, a YWCA board member, conveyed to Chatman. 

“We are so grateful.”  

MLK III reflects on his father’s life and legacy

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was slain 56 years 
ago. His son, Martin Luther King III, was in
Memphis on April 4 to commemorate his father. 
Photo by Wiley Henry

MEMPHIS, TN – While addressing a dense crowd in the courtyard of the National Civil Rights Museum on the evening of April 4, Martin Luther King III wasn’t sure if he could keep his composure if he was still speaking at 6:01 p.m. That’s when an assassin’s bullet ended the life of his father, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

King, his wife Arndrea Waters King, and the Reverend Dr. Dorothy Sanders Wells were in Memphis on that day to commemorate Dr. King during a ceremony at the museum entitled “Remembering MLK: The Man. The Movement. The Moment.”

“Dad was killed this day…this is Thursday…56 years ago at 6:01 p.m., just 30 or so minutes from now,” said King, clearly welled up with emotions.

“This is a challenge to stand here at the spot that my father walked out of the room here behind me and lost his life,” said King, who was 10 years old in 1968 when tragedy struck his family and turned their lives topsy-turvy.

“He didn’t see me graduate from high school or from his beloved Morehouse College. He didn’t get the chance to meet my wife, or our daughter (Yolanda Renee King), or so many other things,” said King, chairman of The Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, a nonprofit progressive think tank founded in 1961. 

Arndrea Waters King also said it was difficult for her family to stand next to room 306 and deliver remarks about her father-in-law, whom she has never met. Nevertheless, her reflections were just as heartfelt. 

“We’re here today to remind America that the Dream is alive, that love is alive, that hope is alive,” she said. “We’re here to remind America that no matter how difficult the days are, how dark it may seem, those words still ring true that Martin Luther King Jr. reminded all of us on April 3, 1968.”

Dr. King didn’t make it to the mountaintop, she said, referencing his prophetic speech at Mason Temple Church of God in Christ on the eve of his death. “But he ignited in each and every one of us a vison and a dream.” 

Arndrea Waters King is president of the progressive think tank. She said it is up to each one of us in 2024 to do our part in making Dr. King’s global vision of “The Beloved Community” a reality for all of God’s children.

“We’re here today because we’re a strong people. We are a mighty people. We’re here today to remind America that we will continue to stand until all the triple evils of racism, bigotry, poverty, and violence are things of the past,” she said.

Wells addressed the issue of Dr. King’s life and legacy through the prism of a pastor. Dr. King was a Baptist preacher who once pastored Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala.

“It was with a pastor’s sense of justice that Dr. King employed us to follow the commandments that have been given to us by our creator so that all would be well with us to love God, to be truthful in all of our dealings, to eschew violence,” said Wells, rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Germantown, TN.

Wells noted in Micah 6:8 in the Bible that we should “…do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God,” and added that all children should be judged “not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character, which is the essence of our creative being.”

Meanwhile, King asked a pointed question: “What is wrong with society that chooses to remove someone who was only promoting love?”

He concluded by saying that we haven’t learned anything from his father’s teachings. “Dad told us we must learn nonviolence or we may face nonexistence,” he said.  

 Copyright 2024 TNTRIBUNE. All rights reserved.

Bill Pickett Rodeo rides into Memphis

These children from the Frayser community in Memphis 
were provided free passes to the Bill Pickett Rodeo in 2023.
Courtesy photo by Abundant Earth Global

MEMPHIS, TN – Nearly 50 children in Memphis will get an opportunity to attend the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo on Saturday, April 13, at the Agricenter ShowPlace Arena, 105 S. Germantown Parkway in Cordova, TN. 

Thanks in part to a generous donation to Abundant Earth Global, a community development corporation seeking to end poverty in the Frayser community through education, the children will attend the rodeo for free.

“One of our associates that supports our Abundant Earth Success Academy, Mr. George Summers, wanted to work with us to see if some of our students wanted to go to the Bill Pickett Rodeo,” said Edith Ann Moore, board chairperson of the CDC.

The Abundant Earth Success Academy was a 9-week pilot program the CDC offered in 2023 on Saturdays to enhance the reading, math, and music skills of children in first through the fifth grade. 

However, some of the children that attended the academy and now attending the rodeo live in the 38127 zip-code area of Frayser, a thriving low-income community where Abundant Earth Global is located at 847 Whitney Ave.

“Last year was our first outing,” said Moore, also a minister and former Shelby County commissioner. “We had 15 children and their parents. We took them to the rodeo. Also, we gave them lunch at McDonald’s before we went. That’s what got it started.”

The rodeo features Black cowboys and cowgirls performing calf roping, bull riding, bronc riding (bucking horse), bareback riding, and bulldogging, where a cowboy or cowgirl drops from a horse and wrestles a steer to the ground.

Two shows are scheduled for 1:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Tickets can be purchased online at billpickettrodeo.com or you can call Miss Kitty for more information at 901-487-4722.

Bill Pickett (William M. Pickett) was a Black cowboy, rodeo performer, and actor who was born in Jenks Branch, Texas, on Dec. 5, 1870. He died in Ponca City, Okla., at the age of 61.

The Bill Pickett Rodeo is celebrating 40 years and bills itself as “The greatest show on dirt.” Some kids have never been to the rodeo, said Moore, or may not know anything about Bill Pickett. 

But they are interested nevertheless, she said. “What it does is give them something to look forward to the next opportunity, to do something, and to go places. It instills discipline.” 

The rodeo may be a bulldogging experience for the children, but the CDC’s overall goal is to “end poverty through education and ingenuity,” said Moore, who along with her daughter, Ester B. Moore, have been working diligently to bring the CDC’s goal to fruition. 

The CDC was launched in 2018. Ester B. Moore is a co-founder and executive director. Lee Eric Smith Sr., a multi-media journalist, is also a co-founder of the Memphis-based non-profit.

“The idea came from wanting to grow food,” said Ester Moore, who taught tomato classes for the University of Tennessee Agricultural Extension. She also taught farming classes.

“We got started in the agriculture and kind of farming framework,” she said. “So, we started growing from the house and decided we were going to teach other people in the community how to grow.”

After a year of so she decided she’d spend most of her time educating people, such as “introducing new words and definitions, and going over fractions…how to measure.” Then she approached the board. After a little retooling, education became the CDC’s driving force. 

“Of course, education covers many different areas,” she said. “Now we have our own building, our own land, and a couple of project houses we’re looking to fix up that we got from the land bank.” 

Ester Moore said the team is moving full steam ahead. “We are growing a community, but you can’t grow a community unless you grow the people in the community.”

To make a financial donation, contact Abundant Earth Global by email at AEGCDC@GMAIL.COM or call 901-209-9411. 

Copyright 2024 TNTRIBUNE. All rights reserved.