College President Carol Johnson-Dean took the call announcing the largest endowment the 158-year-old school had ever received: “I literally began to cry.”

Nothing this week has been more distressing than to glimpse the sprouting seeds of a familiar political battle, this time over school openings. It was awful enough to see mask usage amid a pandemic turned into a test of political fidelity. Please, not this time.

In “Bleeding Out,” a senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, writes that "nothing works as well to reduce urban violence as focused deterrence.”

Even as we announce final decisions and protocols, I cannot assure you that it will not change again, because that is how quickly the virus impacts the information we use to make decisions.

A few local, socially conscious judges acknowledged institutional problems with unconscious bias, and they spearheaded the founding of the Center for Excellence in Decision-Making.

Mayor Jim Strickland has been in a no-win situation with the City Hall occupation, especially being a white mayor in a predominantly African American city. And while the ending of the protest was not ideal, history shows it could have been a lot worse.

The team name in question, of course, is Redskins. It has been a standing insult to our country’s first peoples since the team was created in 1933. 

At Ora Alexander’s homegoing, only family could gather. But that was OK. Ora had already touched the lives of so many people she’d simply met in passing.

Italians didn’t deny COVID-19 and science itself. They didn’t lie about the number of cases. They didn’t point fingers at each other, or promote false cures, or stigmatize and demonize care and caution.

Several takeaways from Thursday's COVID briefing and the rise in cases. Among them: We're not as bad off as Florida, but we're bad enough that local and CDC officials are alarmed.

We cannot undo the past. But we most certainly can learn from the mistakes of the past.

At Memphis, head coach Ryan Silverfield is encouraging his assistants to have real conversations with players about real things and for players' voices to be heard. Assistants John Simon and Anthony Jones have taken that to heart, while also wondering what lies ahead for their own children. 

Public safety includes not taking actions that risk turning up the city’s temperature at a volatile time. In those moments the mayor needs to be an agent of restraint.

It began as a poem written during the War of 1812. A century later “The Star-Spangled Banner” was our unofficial national anthem. Today, without the social injustice conversation that accompanies it, we might barely notice it at all. 

The good news about the Memphis mask ordinance so far: People aren't really freaking out about it. The bad news: Too many seem to be simply ignoring it.

"While the MPD has some ways to go before it is fully reflective of the communities it serves, do we really believe that officers brought in from outside counties or states will improve any situation?"

"Nuance and process are the boring but essential virtues we need to make good decisions about matters like state flags, Confederate monuments and public holidays."

We should be as bold and bullish about our contemporary black music as we are about all of our claims to fame, from FedEx and Holiday Inn to historic music attractions to dry rub ribs.

A funky triangle bounded by Park, Lamar and Airways would be the first shopping center where things would start to change, where black and white Memphis would mix and mingle, where Memphis would start to look like Memphis.

A house fire led a Ridgeway student to consider dropping out to aid her family. A Peer Power mentor says, "She was just one step from leaving it all behind."

A study released this month found that men are less likely to wear masks in public than women. 'Men more than women agree that wearing a face covering is shameful, not cool, a sign of weakness, and a stigma,' one of the study’s authors said.

KIPP gave up on their students, families, faculty and staff after only a few years of operation. This was a financial decision that is inequitable to the historic Alcy Ball community in South Memphis.

Police in places where law enforcement has higher status have taken a knee in solidarity with citizens demonstrating in the streets. These departments have also used much less force against civilians.

Our rising coronavirus rates pre-date the protests – they correspond to our general loosening of restrictions and specifically to Memorial Day – and there’s no specific tracing evidence at the moment that ties cases to them. 

A year ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court gave the green light to the new owners of Kimbrough Fine Wine & Spirits. But their victory may be Pyrrhic.