Introducing Obama gives Dean a leg up in life

In 2011, Christopher Dean shared the stage with President Obama, BTW's principal
Alisha Kiner and then-Memphis City Schools Supt. Kriner Cash. (Photo by Wiley Henry)

When you add favor, good fortune and opportunity, you get Christopher Dean, the Booker T. Washington High School (BTW) senior who was catapulted into the national spotlight in 2011 after his heartfelt introduction of President Barack Obama, who delivered the school’s commencement address at the Cook Convention Center.

Dean has since parlayed that opportunity into good fortune, which followed him to Lane College, a historically black college in Jackson, Tenn., and to the White House and The Commercial Appeal, Memphis’ daily newspaper, to work as an intern. 

What Dean leaned at the White House was kind of other-worldly compared to the rough and rugged streets in South Memphis, a community grappling with poverty, high teen pregnancy, escalating HIV/AIDS cases, and gang infestation. So he learned survival skills quickly

“I did my best anyway, and I competed to the highest level there is. There’s nothing that can take that away from me,” said Dean, 24, crediting BTW’s principal Alisha Kiner for steering him in the right direction and drawing out of him the true spirit of a “Warrior,” the school’s mascot.

He learned a lot working with White House staffers on “Ban the Box,” a bill that gives applicants convicted of a crime a fair shot at a job; “My Brother’s Keeper,” a White House initiative focusing on building bridges of opportunities for young people; and “Let Girls Learn,” also a White House “initiative, but aimed at helping adolescent girls attain a quality education that empowers them to reach their full potential.”

Dean stood out among the 155 graduates that year at BTW – not only because of the chance encounter with Present Obama, but because he beat the odds. South Memphis is as rough as a community can get. His father was shot 20 times in a gang shootout when Dean was five, which left his mother with four children to tend to in the projects.   

Gangs were aplenty. Dean grew up among them and befriended Gangster Disciples and the Crips. “Growing up in South Memphis didn’t show me things that I wanted, it showed me things that I didn’t want,” he said. “Everybody around me was doing the same thing. I was determined to be different.”

Dean’s determination to be different was fueled long before meeting the president. “I knew the attention would fade. I wasn’t going to try to live off his name,” he said. “It’s a hunger in my stomach that’s not for food. It’s for success. It’s for surviving.”

If the president had not chosen BTW to visit, Dean said he still would have found a way to make it out of the ghetto unscathed. “I would’ve found a way to get out of here,” he said. “It wasn’t because I introduced the president and went to Lane (college), I was planning to go to Lane.”

Dean will never forget rubbing shoulders with the president of the United States. Neither would his family, friends, strangers, and those who wished him God-speed. “They call it 15 minutes of fame for a reason,” he said. “It’s not all shiny lights like people believe.”

It wasn’t all for naught, either. Now that Dean has graduated college – in April of this year – he’s back home creating documentaries, which he’d done as an intern for The Commercial Appeal. He also lives in a two-bedroom house and cuts his own grass.

“I lived in an apartment my entire life,” said Dean, whose ultimate goal is to create documentaries and spread happiness. “This is all I ask for. I don’t want to be famous. I want to do what I love to do and be happy doing it.”

Privatizing trash pickup dishonors sanitation workers

    Honor had been 43 years past due, but President Barack Obama made it a point on April 29 to show eight surviving members of the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike what they meant to the nation and to him personally.
    After their White House visit and induction into the U.S. Department of Labor Hall of Fame, the University of Memphis followed Washington's lead and hosted a local induction ceremony on June 4 in the Michael D. Rose Theatre for the city's original 1,300 sanitation workers, both living and deceased.
    Three days earlier, Memphis City Council member Kemp Conrad, a Republican representing Super District 9, Position 1, took the sanitation workers back to 1968 when he introduced a lame proposal in council chambers to privatize the city's trash pickup.
     Conrad said he is trying to save the city $20 million to help close a budget gap of $60 million. But the idea didn't bode well for sanitation workers, nor members of AFSCME, Local 1733, the union that fought "tooth and nail" for better wages and better working conditions for sanitation workers.
    The bitter struggle, they recalled, brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis, where he'd seen "the Promised Land." His death ushered an end to the strike and forced the city to meet the sanitation workers' demands.
    Now the city is looking for savings to balance the budget. New revenue sources should be sought to pare down the deficit, but Conrad's proposal would, in large part, dishonor the sanitation workers and ignite a powder keg similar to the 1968 strike.
    
Kemp Conrad's proposal...

    While Conrad seeks to prop up a limping government on one end of the spectrum, his plan, while laborious in research, could cause the other end of the spectrum to fall in terms of collateral damage: jobs would be loss.
    A private contractor would make 950 stops a day versus 450 for Memphis, the councilman figured. There are approximately 500 permanent employees in solid waste, but if a private contractor gets the job to dispose of the city's waste, 300 sanitation workers would be tossed aside and laden with economic instability.
   The councilman's plan also includes a $7-8 million fund to buy-out 107 employees with 35 or more years of service. Nine have been with the department since the 1968 strike. Those employees would be paid to retire if they choose not to work for the new contractor.
    Conrad hopes to implement his plan in an effort to curtail spending. Revenue streams may be drying up in some cases, but the councilman's bold initiative, though clearly thought out, is thoughtless to those who could be whacked by the budget ax.
   "We have a spending problem, not a revenue problem," Conrad wrote in a June 2 email addressed to a "fellow Memphian." Bold leadership and a durable plan is needed, he wrote, "not one more year of kick the can."
    While I agree with Conrad that bold leadership is needed and that a durable plan should be implemented, I cringe at the thought that the employees who would be affected by the councilman's plan would be essentially kicked to the curb after forcing the city to meet their demands in 1968.