The faces of green

The hopeful skeptic in me was the part most drawn to The Dream Reborn conference hosted by Green For All last weekend in Memphis. So once I arrived, I stuck to what I deemed the practical path, sessions with titles like "Show Me the Money" and "Green-Collar Job Training Programs: Examples and Models" that would delineate exactly how to make this green economy happen.

Although I didn't attend sessions explicitly linked to civil rights, in other ways the conference kept true to its implied promise that it could effectively and sincerely link the green collar jobs movement to the one personified by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The decision to hold the conference on the 40th anniversary of King's death -- in the very city where he was gunned down -- spoke volumes for the weight organizers had hoped the conference would carry.

The faces of green

King references and quotes, though often inspiring, were expected. What I found more potent was a simple glance around the room. Organizers had hoped 70 percent of attendees would be people of color, and eyeballing the plenary sessions, it appeared that they were dead on.


The audience was dappled with faces that looked white, Latino, black, American Indian, Asian, and plenty of others who reminded me that you can't always tell by looking. Young people who looked about college age were everywhere, faces not normally associated with large-scale economic policy change or with the ongoing civil rights work that is still so often tied to the efforts of a leader 40 years dead.