Reality Winner/Social Media via REUTERS

Reality Leigh Winner, a federal contractor charged by the US Department of Justice for sending classified material to a news organization, poses in a picture posted to her Instagram account.

The government contractor felt the secretly copied information was explosive. Perhaps it would be the subject of important congressional hearings. But leaking it to the press might also result in something else – life in jail.

Is this about Reality Leigh Winner, the National Security Agency contractor charged this week with leaking a document on Russian hacking to The Intercept? Nope. Daniel Ellsberg, the ex-RAND employee who lit a ferocious national controversy on the Vietnam War by leaking the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971.

Leaks have roiled Washington since long before President Trump took office. The current administration seems particularly prone to insider leaks about the internal politics of the White House. But there have been important, clandestine leaks of US secrets since the nation’s founding. They’ve annoyed lots of Oval Office residents. Mr. Trump is not alone.

What motivates the leakers? Perhaps that’s a key to understanding the persistence of the practice. From the outside, leakers sometimes seem a bit like rigid do-gooders.

That’s often not the full story, though: dig in a bit, and many are revealed as complicated people driven by personal, as well as ideological, factors. Understanding the motivations for leaking can provide important context for the sensitive information leakers divulge.

“It’s a mix,” says David Greenberg, a professor of history and journalism at Rutgers University, of leaker motivations. “Sometimes it’s a sense of doing good. Other times it’s a sense of helping themselves.”

Right now little is known about Ms. Winner’s particular impulses. Winner, a Georgia resident, allegedly provided The Intercept – a publication established to report on material provided by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden – with a US document describing a Russian cyberattack on a US company that provides technical support to state voting agencies.

It’s possible Winner was driven by a dislike of Trump. Social-media accounts associated with her name express animosity toward the administration and its policies.

But that's an incomplete picture: The Texas-raised Winner is also an Air Force veteran who served her country as a gifted linguist.

“She’s a patriot, and to see her maligned and slandered in the media is very disheartening,” said her stepfather, Gary Davis, on CNN Tuesday. 

Leakers face media's double-edged sword

It’s true the media can shine a harsh, distorting light on a leaker’s activities. It’s also true that without the media there wouldn’t be leaks at all.

Take Teddy Roosevelt. As perhaps the first president of the modern era, he started the US on the path to the powerful, centralized executive branch we know today. He leaked constantly to reporters, according to Prof. Greenberg, author of “Republic of Spin,” a history of presidential image management. TR was trying to control how he was portrayed in the press. He was astounded – and angry – when the press didn’t always shape the leaks in the way he wanted.

Then there was Edward M. House. A longtime key adviser to Woodrow Wilson, House was declining in influence when the end of World War I rolled around. At the Paris Peace Conference, House began leaking to US reporters as a means of regaining a role in the secret negotiations. Some journalists later wrote that strolling through the gardens of Paris in the company of House was the only way they could find out what was going on.

“Those who find themselves blocked on the inside turn to reporters. It’s a common dynamic in politics,” says Greenberg.

Jail time is rare

It’s also a dynamic that’s quite visible today. In the Trump White House, with its competing factions, advisers leak to reveal and influence the process. That’s why there are so many insider stories about who is up and who may be on the way out – and what upcoming executive orders Trump may sign.

In a larger sense, this is just how the government works. At all levels, from the West Wing to Capitol Hill to the lower levels of executive branch departments, leaks are a means of internal communication. Washington might grind to a halt without them.

“As a matter of reality there are leaks every day on all sorts of subjects. Some come from the top. They are part of the way the government functions,” says Mary-Rose Papandrea, a law professor and associate dean for academic affairs at the University of North Carolina School of Law in Chapel Hill.

Leaks of classified information are illegal. But for most of US history the number of leak prosecutions has been relatively small, given the number of leaks that occur, says Prof. Papandrea, who has written extensively about government secrecy and national security leaks.

That number began to rise under the Obama administration. With Winner, the Trump administration now has its first leak case. Will there be more? Trump’s harsh rhetoric about leaks seems to indicate that might be the case.

“The looming question is, what is the Department of Justice under Attorney General Sessions going to do?” says Papandrea.

Are leaks justifiable?

Another question that might be apropos is, are there good leaks and bad leaks? In other words, are there leaks where the information is important enough, and the public interest is enough at stake, to justify the action?

That is what Ellsberg believed, and what drove him to copy thousands of pages of the Pentagon Papers, a secret government report on the history of the involvement of the US in Vietnam. In one of the most famous acts of classified leaking in US history, Ellsberg passed this information on to The New York Times.

After the Times began publishing articles on the Pentagon Papers in June 1971, the Nixon administration won an injunction in federal court forcing cessation of publication. Ellsberg then gave The Washington Post its own copy of the papers. On June 30, the Supreme Court voted 6 to 3 that the government had not met the heavy burden of proof of injury required to restrain the press prior to publication.

“Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government,” wrote Justice Hugo Black for the majority.

Ironically, Ellsberg had not meant to facilitate a historic leap for freedom of the press. He had mostly hoped to spark congressional hearings on Vietnam. Those didn’t happen. He’d also thought the Pentagon Papers would cause the public to heap blame on the Democratic presidents who preceded Nixon for dragging the US into the mess. That didn’t happen either.

He also thought he would face a heavy penalty.

“You know, 7,000 pages, I’ll go for life,” Ellsberg said in an oral history recorded for the Nixon Library in 2008. “I thought this won’t be a year or two or five years. I expected to go to jail.”

That didn’t happen either. The government case against him was dismissed after the exposure of illegal White House efforts against him, such as an attempt to break into his psychiatrist’s office.

The other famous leaker of the Nixon era was “Deep Throat.” A source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post, he was immortalized as the man who met reporters in a dark parking garage and told them to “follow the money.”

In reality, “Deep Throat,” revealed shortly before his death as FBI associate director Mark Felt, was motivated by more than altruism. He was also piqued. Nixon had passed him over when picking a new FBI chief following the death of J. Edgar Hoover. Felt thought he had deserved the job.

“There are a huge range of motivations for people to leak, from admirable, to somewhat less than admirable,” says Papandrea of the University of North Carolina School of Law.

Tasnim News Agency/Reuters

Members of Iranian forces are seen during an attack on the Iranian parliament in central Tehran on June 7, 2017.

Gunmen and suicide bombers attacked two of the most significant symbols of the Islamic Republic of Iran Wednesday, killing 12 people in Tehran as they raided the parliament building and the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran’s 1979 revolution.

The so-called Islamic State (ISIS) claimed responsibility, even as the hours-long battle in parliament was still under way. ISIS broadcast video of one casualty on the floor as gunmen fired and shouted in Arabic, “Do you think we will leave? We will remain, God willing!”

Despite its critical role bolstering local forces to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Iran has been virtually immune to the insecurity and ISIS attacks that have plagued the region, from Libya to Afghanistan.

But the shocking nature of the attacks – the first of their kind in the Islamic Republic for years – raises the question of whether and how they will affect Iran’s threat perception and anti-terror calculations.

Much will depend on how Iran perceives who is responsible, with many Iranians connecting these attacks to recent anti-Iran statements from regional rival Saudi Arabia, which they deem to be a primary backer of ISIS.

Yet questions are being raised, too, about how these two sets of attackers managed to evade Iran’s attentive counter-espionage apparatus and tight internal security. The four gunmen who raided parliament were reportedly disguised as women. One of the two suicide attackers at the Khomeini shrine, one of whom succeeded in detonating a bomb, reportedly was a woman.

Rally around the flag

Security officials said a third “team” was captured prior to Wednesday’s attack.

Analysts say one result will be a rally-around-the-flag reaction that sets aside the years-long controversy over the expenditure of Iranian blood and treasure in the battlefields of Iraq and Syria.

“The immediate impact will be the enhanced popularity of Iran’s counter-terrorism policy in the region,” says Hassan Ahmadian, a Middle East specialist at Tehran University.

“The people now feel more the linkage that the government has been speaking about, that ‘If we don’t fight them there, we will be fighting them here in Iran,’” says Mr. Ahmadian. “It was important, and it is now more important, to show the linkage between its policy in Iraq and Syria and national security inside…. It gives Iran’s arguments a more robust base.”

In a statement shortly after the attack, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) held Saudi Arabia and the US complicit due to support for “terrorists,” and said that it “would not leave unanswered the shedding of innocent blood.”

The attack comes at a time of especially virulent rhetoric between Shiite-majority Iran and the Sunni kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

On May 2, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi defense minister and son of King Salman, said “we will work so that the battle is on their side, inside Iran, not in Saudi Arabia.”

Riyadh summit

Two weeks ago, Saudi leaders hosted what it portrayed as an anti-terrorism summit, attended by President Trump and the leaders of dozens of Sunni Muslim states. The IRGC spoke of that meeting between Mr. Trump and “backward [Saudi] leaders who support terrorists,” and declared that the ISIS claim of responsibility proves “they have a hand in the bestial attacks.”

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, speaking in Berlin, denied any involvement by Saudi extremists.

The Riyadh summit had two main purposes: to consolidate the Sunni Arab front against ISIS, and to isolate Iran. Splits in that Saudi-led alliance have since spilled over, however, with a vigorous Saudi-led campaign this week to excommunicate the natural gas-rich sheikhdom of Qatar, for backing Iran and allegedly funding terrorism. Those are charges Qatar denies.

Taking advantage of that split may be one diplomatic result for Iran’s relatively moderate President Hassan Rouhani, who was reelected May 19 on a platform of openness and dialogue with the West.

“The terrorist incidents in Tehran today will, no doubt, strengthen the will of Islamic Iran in the campaign against regional terrorism, extremism, and violence,” Mr. Rouhani said.

Work with partners

Soon after the Tehran attacks, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif flew to Turkey, where parliament is fast-tracking a bill to enable Turkish troops to deploy to protect Qatar’s ruling family. In Syria, Turkey's policy has often been the polar opposite of Iran's, by supporting anti-regime rebels.

But Turkey has been targeted by numerous ISIS attacks, and both sides have been exploring together diplomatic solutions to the Syria war.

Iran “will do a calibrated response, which is going to take some time to work out. They are not going to decide, right now today, about having a bomb go off in Riyadh – it’s just not very clever,” says Mohammad Ali Shabani, the London-based editor of Al-Monitor’s Iran Pulse.

“What you [will] see is efforts to attack US and Saudi influence in places like Iraq and in Syria – not in physical attacks or rhetorical attacks – they are going to work closer with their partners, with the Turks, with the Russians, that is going to be their response,” says Mr. Shabani.

Mr. Zarif’s message to Turkey is likely to be about working together to solve the crisis over Qatar, and in Syria to “mop up the mess once and for all,” he says. Iran will “use the opportunity to say, ‘Both of us are victims of the same group. We don’t only have shared interests, we have shared threats as well.’”

Such diplomacy may resonate with Iranians more after Wednesday’s attack, analysts say, even as it boosts support for Iran’s military efforts abroad.

“The shock now is observed, and I think gradually people will recognize that we are not that safe, that we have to support those people who are fighting those terrorists,” says Ahmadian, at Tehran University.

“The popularity of the war on terror will rise in Iran,” he says. “That is something counter-productive for ISIS, if it was hitting Iran to stop it from the fight.”

Brendan Toomey easily held his local council seat for the Labour party in this former mining town in southern Wales for nearly two decades – winning four elections in a row.

But when he went canvassing this spring ahead of the local elections in early May, he says he noticed fewer people answering their doors, even those of his past supporters. “You could see them watching the telly,” he says. “You do get a little concerned at that point in time.”

Ultimately he lost his seat as leader of the Merthyr Tydfil council – a blow not just for the bespectacled former official and firefighter, but for a party whose identity is wrapped up in this town. Labour’s founder Keir Hardie held his seat as MP here until he died in 1915. Labour, in fact, has counted on these valleys as a stronghold “for as long as anyone can remember – and further back than that,” as Mr. Toomey puts it.

Old assumptions have been turned on their heads, especially when it comes to social-democratic politics in Europe. One shock poll in early May showed that the Conservatives could win Wales in snap elections June 8 – for the first time in over 150 years. Now Labour has regained the lead here.

But Labour’s unsteady footing points to the pressures that the center left is under Europe-wide, from Wales to North Rhine-Westphalia. Many see a strong demand for a leftist ideology – one of the reasons that a race predicted to be a Labour collapse when Theresa May called it in April is no longer a foregone conclusion. But the party is still searching for a path forward to prove its ability to respond to changing economies, globalization, and, now, security.

“Almost every [center left] party in continental Europe is struggling both electorally and politically,” says Patrick Diamond, a former policy adviser to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and co-chair of the Policy Network. “So it appears there is something structural going on, which is not just to do with short-term factors, but that seems to be making the center left weaker.”

‘We carn do it, see’

British Labour is uniquely divided under its left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn, but it is certainly not alone. The Socialist party in France eked out just 6 percent of votes in May’s presidential elections, leading one-time Socialist presidential hopeful Manuel Valls to declare his party “dead.” In southern Europe, social democratic parties have bled support to upstart parties on the far left. Even where they are competitive, center-left parties are scoring their worst in decades, sometimes in history, from Germany to the Netherlands.

The pressure has been mounting under structural change – de-industrialization, globalization, and technological advancement – that has hurt the left’s traditional bases. Many former blue-collar workers are struggling with temporary contracts, focusing on making ends meet, not organizing. The left, either in power or as junior partners in coalitions, has been punished electorally for austerity policies they’ve had to implement after the financial crisis. And “third way” politics under Tony Blair, so successful in the 1990s, have failed to convince voters in an era of low growth.

In Britain, Brexit has further frayed party loyalties. Wales, which despite its dependence on European Union funding and understanding of itself as a Labour bastion, voted with parties on the right that led the charge to leave the EU a year ago.

Traditionally Conservatives had been so reviled in Wales that the party label was used as an insult, says Alex Williams, who won a local council seat in Bridgend for the Conservative party in May. But he says stigmas, deeply held since the union-busting era of Margaret Thatcher, are breaking down. Men like pub worker Pete Lusted, who has voted Labour his whole life, a legacy handed down from his father, are unsure who they'll vote for in this election. Emboldened, Ms. May even stopped on the campaign trail in Bridgend last month. “The new generation, my generation, are not affected necessarily by [Thatcher's legacy],” Mr. Williams says.

Still, it doesn’t feel like politics as usual for many locals. In Merthyr Tydfil, Jonathan Richards, a retired general practitioner and community leader, is at a health center named after Labour founder Mr. Hardie on a recent day. He says he was shocked by Councilor Toomey’s loss, and was doubly so by polls showing Conservative headway here. It’s part of an upheaval in identities following the Brexit vote. “Whilst people may vote Labour, they may [also] read the Daily Mail,” he says, referring to the British tabloid, “so they are not globalist in their outlook.”

Lesley Hodgson, who heads Focal Point, a community organization in Merthyr Tydfil that welcomes newly arrived citizens, says she has watched painfully as resentments in the town, which was built with immigration in the Victorian era, have grown over fears that newer immigrants, mostly from Portugal and Poland, will generate more unemployment. She says she sees people looking for mooring as political certainties have eroded. “I think people are confused at the moment, they really don’t know where to turn.”

Electoral choices have been driven by resentments in an area that’s lived through the demise of coal mining and steel making and the subsequent factory closures. As a poet, Mike Jenkins explores the mood through the voices of local characters. In his latest book of poems “Sofa Surfin,” written in the vernacular of the South Wales Valleys, he says the piece “Too Bloody Weak” sums up the frustration that has punished mainstream politics. “We carn do it, see,” it starts, “there’s no way we’d survive on ower own.” [Editor's note: The original version mischaracterized the inspiration for Mr. Jenkin's poem.]

An opportunity to regroup?

Mr. Jenkins, a Welsh speaker whose daughter is a politician for the Welsh independence party Plaid Cymru, says he’s been emboldened by the winds of change. While it has strengthened politics he finds repugnant, like the anti-immigration sentiment behind Brexit, it could also open space for new politics.

“I know a lot of people find it scary but I’m quite excited by it all to be honest,” he says. “Labour has had their time, it’s not the future.”

While new polling points to Labour resilience in Wales, Roger Scully, a political analyst at Cardiff University, says that the initial scare served to jolt Labour, a party that has effectively enjoyed one-party dominance for nearly a century, out of complacency. “We are certainly immediately seeing the Labour party working a lot harder,” he says.

And it’s also led to some self-reflection. In some ways, Toomey sees Labour, and social democracy generally, as a victim of its own success. Much of what they’ve historically championed, like minimum wage or workers' rights, is simply written into law today. Yet he has asked the Welsh Labour party for a statistical analysis to understand his own loss. “Because otherwise we’ll just be navel-gazing forever and not know where we’ve gone wrong and maybe not being able to put right what’s gone wrong,” he says.

He feels buoyed by results showing a boost for Labour ahead of June 8. On the campaign trail, Corbyn has exceeded expectations while May has seemed aloof. Conservatives were forced into a U-turn on social policy that dragged on their lead. It is unclear how the string of terrorist attacks in Britain will sway the race. The right is generally stronger on security, and May gave a forceful speech after Saturday’s attack in London saying “enough is enough.” Yet Corbyn hit back, questioning cuts in policing under her watch as home secretary and saying the country can’t be protected “on the cheap.”

A hard situation

No matter how well Labour fares, it will be difficult to reconcile the two wings of the party moving forward. On the one hand, centrists like Mr. Diamond argue that a hard left turn under Corbyn is not the way to realistically win a national election. “I’m not saying that I think you can just go back to the ‘third way,’ ” he says. “But I think you have to start from that position, which is basically how do you reconcile economic efficiency with social justice.”

For others, Corbyn’s pledges for higher taxes and increased social spending takes the party back to its origins. His supporters feel vindicated by the turn in polls and the growth in party membership to about half a million today, many of them young Brits. “I think it is fair to say that the Labour party is in a kind of crisis but it is actually a very creative crisis,” says Martin Wright, a professor of British and Welsh history at the University of Cardiff. “We are seeing for the first time in a generation a genuine ideological choice within British politics.”

Ms. Hodgson is one Welsh resident who has been reinvigorated by the new Labour leadership. A party lifer, she left it in disgust over Blair’s invasion of Iraq. It was only a decade and a half later when Corbyn took over that she rejoined because she simply believes in his “sense of right and wrong.”

She says Merthyr Tydfil needs to stop “harping on its post-industrial past,” same as the Labour party needs to adapt to the era. That might seem ironic, she agrees, since Corbyn is charged with taking Britain “back to the ’70s.” But for Hodgson, it makes sense as a path forward.

“I think we can take the best of the past,” she says, “and use it to inform the future.”

Andrea Morales/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Cleo Smith works his route as a sanitation worker through South Memphis. Mr. Smith has been with the Memphis city sanitation department since 1968.

Cleo Smith just celebrated his 50th anniversary at work – one heavy with memories.

During his first year as a city employee, he and 1,300 other black sanitation workers walked off the job. They wanted fair pay, safe working conditions, and the respect they believed was due grown men.

The strike drew the attention of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Here, Dr. King found a town where most white residents interpreted the absence of roiling protests as proof that no racial tension existed, despite the poverty and persistent discrimination that held black residents on the margins.

King also encountered a segregationist white mayor, Henry Loeb III, who refused to recognize the union or negotiate with its leaders.

“The issue is injustice,” intoned King at Mason Temple on April 3, 1968. “The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers.”

Mr. Smith was there to hear what would be Dr. King’s last speech. The next day, the civil rights leader was gunned down on the Lorraine Motel balcony.

“Memphis became pitch black. I never will forget that,” Smith remembers. “The lights were on, the streetlights were on, but there was a darkness that came over Memphis.”

Twelve days later, public pressure forced Mr. Loeb to surrender. The workers would get small raises and union recognition. But in the decades that followed, some feel that what King called the “fierce urgency of now,” which gripped much of the black community, faded.

AP/File

Tennessee National Guard troopers in jeeps and trucks escort a protest march by striking sanitation workers through downtown Memphis, March 30, 1968.

Smith sees it in the shrinking crowds that show up for the union’s annual parade on the anniversary of King’s assassination. Some years would draw 500 or 600 marchers, but this year’s parade had fewer than 150.

Too many of the younger workers “don’t have any interest in what Dr. King stood for,” Smith, 75, says. “If they had any interest, they would have kept the dream alive.”

Resurrecting that fervor is part of what keeps Smith, now a sanitation crew chief, on the job. Plus, the city never gave sanitation workers a pension, he says, so he can’t afford to retire.

A 'fierce' urgency, faded

In a noisy locker room in a squat city building, before roll call sends sanitation crews into the streets, Smith waves a few co-workers to his side and pulls out a flyer for an upcoming union election. ASFCME Local 1733, he says, will fight to get them better retirement benefits and protection from hazardous waste.

The men, young enough to be Smith’s sons or grandsons, look at the paper long enough to be polite. “I’m here because I’m in a fight for the younger people,” he says. “I want them to enjoy the benefits we fought for.”

Smith, 75, is one of a small fraternity of strikers who still work for the public works department. In 1968, white men occupied the department’s top jobs. Today, almost all of the sanitation workers are black.

As the 50^th anniversary of King’s assassination approaches, Memphis, whose name means “place of good abode,” and whose population is more than two-thirds black, has turned introspective. Laboring under the stain of King’s assassination and poverty rates that are among the nation’s highest, civic leaders are eager to put a positive spin on the city’s progress.

Recently, a handful of new nonprofit poverty-fighting efforts have surfaced aiming to help low-income residents achieve a better future. Still, the question remains for Smith and other residents: Since King came in pursuit of economic justice – what has Memphis done with his sacrifice?

When King was killed, the poverty rate for black Memphians was 60 percent. Echoing nationwide trends, poverty rates for blacks are falling. But still, 30 percent of the city’s black residents and 47 percent of black children live below the poverty line.

Smith, who quit school in the third grade to sharecrop on an Arkansas farm, has secured a fairly stable life for his family. He makes a nickel more than the $16.65 starting hourly wage for crew chiefs. With overtime, he makes a little more than the city’s median income of $36,455.

“If Dr. King came to Memphis today, he would do like Jesus did when he went into the temple,” he says as he steers a garbage truck down South Memphis streets. “He overthrew the money tables… and drove them out.”

“The thing that would make him angry is the way that they’ve taken the things that he fought for, instead of making it for the better, they made it worse,” Smith says. 


Here, he indulges in a bit of hyperbole. By any measure, working conditions are far better and safer now.

In 1968, sanitation workers carried metal tubs, often with holes in the bottom, to collect garbage. The liquid refuse would run down their shoulders and soak their clothes. Once, a bus driver refused to let Smith on because he was so dirty. For their trouble, the workers were paid so little they qualified for food stamps.

Today, hydraulic arms share the hard work, gripping plastic rolling trash bins and dumping the contents into the truck. The city provides workers with protective equipment. Still, Smith says, they come across biohazardous material, including improperly disposed needles and old toilets.


Black sanitation workers had already planned to strike before King came to Memphis, but they’d intended to walk off during the summer when piles of trash sitting in the heat might motivate the city to negotiate.


But on Feb. 1, 1968, Echol Cole and Robert Walker were crushed in a malfunctioning truck. Within days, Smith and 1,300 coworkers walked off their jobs.

Do city efforts go far enough?

Today, the city says it pays all adult employees at least $12 an hour, above living wage for a single adult.
 But attempts at further systemic change in Memphis, a largely liberal city in a conservative state, have been stymied by a Republican-controlled state legislature and Republican governor.

In 2013, the Tennessee state legislature overruled a Memphis living wage ordinance. Tennessee is one of five states who never established a minimum wage, so the federal rate prevails. A 2016 bill that would have raised the state’s $7.25 minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2018 didn’t make it out of committee.

At the local level, the city of Memphis has focused on reducing violent crime and adding amenities like bike lanes to attract professionals to a city where population growth is flat. But this approach, some civil rights activists complain, ignores yawning wealth disparities.

For every dollar in wealth the average white family in the United States has, a black family has just five cents. Research shows black families are far less likely to own a business that white families, and what black-owned businesses there are have struggled in both the public and private sector. Between 2010-2014, black-owned businesses in Memphis received just 3 percent of city prime contracts, according to a 2016 disparity study. The private sector is worse: In 2012, the most recent year for which federal data is available, 0.83 percent of business receipts citywide went to black businesses, a 23 percent decrease from 2007. 

Since being elected in 2016, Mayor Jim Strickland has worked diligently to increase spending with black-owned businesses, but the city’s goals are broad, also covering businesses owned by all minorities and white women.

Equality demands intentionality, and intentionality requires race-specific goals, argues Julie Nelson, director for the Government Alliance on Race and Equity, which works with municipal governments and agencies to craft such policies.

“Racial inequalities are not random,” Ms. Nelson says, but were “created over the vast majority of our country’s history – everything from who’s a citizen, who can vote historically, who can own property, who was property.”

One example: All five of the states that don't have a minimum wage were once slave-holding states.

That past shows up in the present everywhere, she says. Employment is a good example. “You’ve got people of color clustered in low-paying jobs.… The jobs where the white people are clustered tend to be the higher paying jobs.”

Andrea Morales/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Cleo Smith gets ready to start his route as a sanitation worker through South Memphis. Mr. Smith has been with the Memphis city sanitation department since 1968, when he participated in the landmark strike that brought the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city.

What's being done

Across the city, veteran black-led groups such as the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center and the reproductive justice organization Sister Reach – plus newer organizations such as the Coalition for Concerned Citizens and the Official Black Lives Matter chapter – tackle economic justice at a grassroots level.

At the same time, others, with the benefit of deeper pockets and stronger connections to traditional philanthropy, have started their own poverty-fighting initiatives. One is Slingshot Memphis, which aims to disrupt poverty by applying investment principles to social problems. Modeled after New York’s Robin Hood Foundation, Slingshot will measure how effective local nonprofits are.

For example, Slingshot might ask: Is the return on investment in job training for adults greater than an investment in early childhood education? 
“We’re putting a dollar value on interventions,” says Justin Miller, CEO and founder.

In February, low-income neighborhoods in North Memphis were among six sites chosen nationwide to receive $1 million planning grants through the Strong, Prosperous and Resilient Communities Challenge (SPARCC). The first-time grant is funded by the Ford, Kresge, and Robert Wood Johnson foundations, among others. The three-year grant will pay staff as they convene a “collaborative table” of residents equipped to lobby for equitable development. 

LITE Memphis, a four-year-old program housed at the University of Memphis, wants to turn black and Hispanic high school students into entrepreneurs. They coach teens to develop a business idea, help them find paid internships, follow them through college and then help them find capital to start their business. 
The program is only four years old, so they don’t have graduates yet, but executive director Hardy Farrow knows how he’ll measure success.

“By the time they’re 25 and they launch a business, I want them to be just as profitable and have just as many employees as a similar white-owned business with a same timeline of existence in the same industry,” Mr. Farrow says.

But two larger-scale efforts may come closest to King’s vision of economic justice: the Fight for $15 movement and MICAH, a multiracial convening of congregations named after an Old Testament prophet.

Although the black church played a critical role in the 1968 strike – raising money for and distributing food to striking sanitation workers, trying to negotiate with the mayor and serving as home base for protesters and organizations – in recent years, its voice has been muted.

Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope, or MICAH for short, wants to change that, by organizing faith communities to remake public policy, not people. MICAH, which will focus on education, criminal justice reform and poverty, will follow the Gamaliel community organizing model, which fosters political action among local community and faith leaders. Gamaliel’s first executive director, Greg Galluzzo, counts as his best-known mentee former President Barack Obama, then an organizer in Chicago.

With demands for an hourly wage more than twice the federal standard and a union, Fight for $15 organizers joined with the Movement for Black Lives in April, on the 49^th anniversary of King’s death.

With the Talladega College marching band keeping time, workers from across the region marched from City Hall to the National Civil Rights Museum, which sits on the grounds of the Lorraine Motel.



“The only reason you come to the place where the martyr’s blood was shed is to hear the blood speak and to recommit and re-consecrate ourselves to the unfinished business of the martyr,” said Rev. William Barber, a leader of the Moral Revival movement.

During his life, King insisted on solutions that required a commitment from the government, just as he did when planning the Poor People’s Campaign. His assassination almost derailed the campaign’s momentum, but activists’ efforts in the following months, including thousands who marched on Washington shortly after King’s death resulted in the expansion of free food distribution programs in 200 counties.

Still, at 13.5 percent, the national poverty rate is higher now than in 1968, when it was just under 13 percent. Last year, Memphis relinquished its spot as the poorest large metropolitan area in the nation. It’s now second. 

An uncertain legacy 

On the night before his assassination, Dr. King asked the crowd gathered at Mason Temple for what would be his final speech to persevere.

“We’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end,” he said. “Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point in Memphis. We’ve got to see it through.”

But at this point, the sanitation worker Smith, who is also a Baptist preacher like Dr. King, isn’t optimistic about the future of low-wage workers in Memphis. His hope is in a higher power.

“I don’t think we’ve had a raise in the last nine years,” Smith says. “I heard this morning that they [the City Council] were talking about giving us a 1 percent raise.... That will be eaten up by insurance and taxes.” 

His union, Local 1733 is negotiating a new contract with the city, however. One item on the table is retirement benefits.

Doug Struck

Fishing for Elvers in Maine

The rains had slacked with the tide, and a full moon glimmered smoky through the clouds. At 1 a.m., Julie Keene tucked her red hair under a baseball cap, pulled waders over her cammies, and invaded the Union River to see if she had caught elvers.

She only needed seven more pounds to hit this season’s limit. And then she could quit the sleep-starved life, cramped in a cheap motel, cooking on a hotplate, drinking too much coffee, living in the same clothes for days.

“I could go home and get some sleep,” she said wistfully. The first of her two nets tonight was a bust, nearly empty. “My fault … shoulda checked it an hour earlier,” she muttered as she picked her way down a rocky slope toward her second net. Adam Boutin, her partner of 23 years and a fellow fisherman, loped easily over the rocks and got to the net first.

“Got some,” he drawled, with a Mainer’s economy.

Keene swished into the cold water, untied the funnel of the net and peered in with her headlamp. Inside were nearly two pounds of writhing, translucent baby eels – elvers. 

Two pounds would bring her $2,665 at the dealer later that morning.

She did a little dance. “Not bad! Not bad!”  

Keene is a veteran elver fisher, one of only 425 Mainers, aside from native tribes, who can legally harvest the mysterious juvenile eels. The two-inch long fish, called “glass eels” for their colorless bodies, wiggle by the millions on the nighttime tides – invisible to most – from the ocean near Bermuda up rivers and streams all along the Atlantic Coast.

What Keene and her companions catch are flown live to China where they are raised for grilled eel and sushi.

Even scientists don’t know much about this secretive fish – exactly how and where they go, and how many of them there really are.

But plenty of others have noticed the soaring price for elvers, and tried to get into the game, one way or another. Federal and state agents recently concluded a four-year investigation they called “Operation Broken Glass.”  Undercover agents posed as fishermen selling illegal eels, and prosecutors charged dealers and fishermen with breaking the law in eight East Coast states.

To some, the turmoil that has washed over elver fishermen in recent years reads a lot like a morality play about the dangers of sudden riches. Elver fishing was once a quirky pastime that gave rural Mainers a few extra bucks and a break from spring clam digging. But as the worldwide demand for eels grew and supplies shrank, it has become a big-money business, with struggles over quotas, fights over fishing rights, and even fisherwomen like Keene packing pistols – just in case.

“Now there’s good money in this, and they talk about closing us down,” says Darrell Young, head of the Maine Elver Fishermen’s Association. “To be honest, I think there’s a bit of jealousy that a guy like me with no college education could be making $200,000 a year.”

Ben Garvin/The Christian Science Monitor/File

Called 'liquid gold' by some fishermen for prices that can go for $1,300 a pound, elvers can only be legally caught in Maine if you have one of 425 highly sought permits. Poaching has become rampant, and federal agents launched an investigation.

'He's been a father...'

Twelve people already have pleaded guilty. But in Maine, the stage lights will be on the federal trial of the patron of elver fishing, William Sheldon, 71. Many here doff their cap to Mr. Sheldon as the man who helped create the elver business in the state.

“He’s been a father to most of the fishermen around here,” says Mr. Young. “We’ve learned how to fish by Bill Sheldon. He’s given hundreds of people eel nets. We still love him.”

Still, Young acknowledges, “it didn’t help us none – biggest buyer in the state of Maine running up and down the East Coast,” doing what federal agents call poaching. “I was pretty upset with him.”

Sheldon is facing federal charges of coaching fishermen in South Carolina where to catch fish illegally, buying elvers from states where the fishing is banned, and with doctoring paperwork to export black-market eels.

“The biggest thing to look out for is if a local cop or a warden should stop you,” Sheldon told a wired undercover agent, according to a search warrant request filed in federal court in Bangor.  “I could get in a jam if I knew that eels that you’re selling me are coming from another state.”

“It ain’t half as bad as what’s been written,” Sheldon told a reporter for the Monitor, while he wrapped up purchases for this spring’s season. With charges pending, he is still a licensed buyer, still driving his big Ford pickup truck with the license plate EELWGN. “I am going to go to court and have my day in court.”

From the Sargasso Sea to Maine's rivers

Eels have been unseen travelers in rivers for millions of years. Aristotle called them earth worms, and thought they emerged spontaneously from the muck. In North America, mature eels were caught by the thousands by native Americans and colonists. The Iroquois in New York still have a prominent Eel Clan, and their ancestors honored spirits in the migratory eel multitudes.

No one has seen eels spawn, but scientists think the American eel is born in a Western Atlantic gyre between Bermuda and the Bahamas called the Sargasso Sea. For up to a year, the larvae drift and swim on currents that take them to coastlines from Greenland through the Caribbean to French Guiana.

At about two inches long, the larvae become “glass eels” or elvers, and wriggle up waterways. They don’t pick a specific river, like salmon, but seek fresh headwaters. Small but determined, tiny elvers wriggle through wet grass and can mount six-foot dam walls, climbing atop each other like Navy plebes scaling the Academy obelisk.

They live in fresh water from three to 30 years, hiding in the mud and bottom rubble of lakes, lagoons, and streams. They are then called “yellow eels” until they finally become silver, and their eyes change. They begin to weave snakelike downstream to salt water, and then to the Sargasso Sea, often thousands of miles away, to spawn and die. Fifteen eel species, all close cousins, work their way in similar stealth up and down rivers throughout the world, from Europe to New Zealand.

'Do you have elvers?'

Mature eels were caught for food, but there was little value in the nearly-weightless elvers. For Mainers, that began to change after 1974. Sheldon, now a target of the government, ironically worked for the state as a fresh college graduate. He recalls, “Tokyo sent us a letter and said, ‘Do you have elvers? We want them.’ ”

He learned that Maine rivers were thick with young eels on spring nights, and wrote a pamphlet on how to catch the fish, keep them alive, and transport them to the airport.

The elvers caught in Maine are flown live to China, raised to foot-long lengths, and mostly exported for sushi and barbecued eel. Japan eats an estimated three-quarters of the global catch, culminating in the traditional grilled eel dishes on the summer holiday Doyo-no-ushi-no-hi, which means Day of the Ox.

Some eels return to Maine. The Shinbashi Restaurant, just 2,000 feet from elver nets on the Union River in Ellsworth, touts its Dragon Roll sushi – crab, avocado, and eel that likely traveled to China and back – for $11.95.

As with every wild fish prized for sales and profit, arguments flare over how many are lurking under the surface. Elver fishermen used to haul a lot more prey out of American waters. For five of the years between 1974 and 1981, the US eel catch topped 3 million pounds. The catch plummeted in the mid-1980s, to 700,000 pounds in 2002.

The reason for the drop still is unclear, and hotly debated. A benchmark 2012 Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission study called the fish “depleted” in US waters. It blamed the gang of usual suspects: overfishing, pollution, development, dams in rivers that stop fish migration, climate change, food scarcity, and disease. Fishermen remain skeptical of the conclusions, suggesting natural fluctuations and undercounting are a more likely explanation. They say the rivers are full of elvers.

Indeed, the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared in 2007 and again in 2015 that the American eel population was stable and should not be listed under the Endangered Species Act. Canadian authorities call the species “threatened,” and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature added the eel to its respected “Red List” of endangered species in 2014.

“How many times do we have to beat that back?” complains Randy Bushy, who both fishes and buys elvers for export. He sits in a bare office in Steuben, Maine, fielding a stream of cellphone calls asking what he’s paying today for elvers. A .22-calibre pistol hangs on his belt – a holdover, he says, from when buying elvers was a cash business and he routinely carried tens of thousands of dollars at night on isolated riverbanks.

“You have one female eel, and she’s got 22 million eggs in her,” he said. “There’s no way a scientist can figure out that it’s endangered.” 

“We have to manage a balance,” responds Toni Kerns, director of the Interstate Fisheries Management Program of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. “We set these regulations to have a balance of commercial harvest so folks can get out there and make a living, and leave a certain amount in the water for the population to continue and grow. If we take them all now, we won’t have any for the future.”

The drop in the catch, and the scientific alarms, brought action. Most states allow only grown eel fishing. Other than Maine, only South Carolina issues 10 elver permits on just one river. Maine capped its licenses and set an annual cap on their catch, divided among the license holders.

As fish stocks fell – Japan fished out its native species by the 1990s, and Europe banned exports of its eel species in 2010 because of dwindling numbers – American eels turned suddenly precious. The prices, as low as $24 a pound in 2001, averaged $2,171 per pound in 2015, according to the Maine Department of Marine Resources. This year, they have hovered at about $1,300 a pound.

The lure of those prices was strong, acknowledges Keith Whiteford, a biologist with the Department of Natural Resources in Maryland, where the fishing is illegal. Twice he has found his scientific survey traps looted of elvers. “If I could make $10,000 dollars in one night, I might be tempted to take my chances.”

Maine fishermen chafe that authorities have not yet raised the quotas, despite what they say is an abundance of elvers. The quota, 9,616 pounds this year, was nearly filled by mid-May, with three weeks left in the season.

“There are plenty of eels. Just let us fish out the season,” says Young.

'The brook was ... like a blanket'

After scraping their nets for a tenth of a pound one night, a pound or two the next, Keene and her partner Boutin hit their limits with a sudden run of elvers in early May. They took down the 30-foot wide V-shaped nets, put away the magnetic swipe card that the state now uses to track their catch to the thousandth of a pound, and checked out of Jasper’s Motel in Ellsworth, their home for a month.

Two weeks later, while Keene was planting a garden at her house near Lubec in the northeast corner of Maine,  Boutin helped a relative set a net for the last of his quota on a small brook off the Penobscot River near Bangor. They propped the net up with sticks in mid-afternoon, and came back well after dark.

It was a quiet little stream – they didn’t expect much of a catch. But the funnel sock was stuffed with 15 pounds of elvers. Boutin played his flashlight over the surface of the water. 

“The whole brook was just like a blanket,” he says, amazed. “You’ve never seen so many.”

Women are seen inside the parliament during an attack in central Tehran, Iran, June 7.

Analysts are still weighing the potential repercussions in the Middle East of the June 7 terrorist strikes in Iran. If Islamic State (ISIS) is behind the attacks, as the group claims, that may influence the wars in Syria and Iraq, tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia, or ISIS’s competition with Al Qaeda. But one aspect of the assault in Iran is worth noting: One of the attackers was a woman, according to the Fars News Agency.

Hundreds of women have joined ISIS since 2014, but none has had such a prominent role as in the Iran attacks. As more terrorist groups use female jihadists, several Muslim countries are trying to raise the role of women in Islamic life – as spiritual guides. The hope is that women, either as teachers or preachers of moderate Islam, can prevent the radicalization of young people, either men or women. 

These efforts are only a few years old but they are worth noting as a possible antidote to women becoming terrorists. Morocco has already trained more than 400 women since 2006 to work in mosques, schools, and other institutions. Turkey has been increasing the number of female preachers since 2003 while Egypt decided earlier this year to appoint as many as 200 female imams. 

While women leading men in prayer is still forbidden in most Muslim countries, China, with some 21 million Muslims, has long had female preachers. And Indonesia, which is home to the highest number of Muslims, has a long history of women as preachers. In April, it held what may have been the first “congress” of female Muslim clerics. The event attracted participants from several countries. 

Giving authority to women in religious leadership has changed many religions for the better. It promotes equality based on the idea that all are equal before God. Within Islam, women trained as spiritual guides might be better able to reach would-be recruits of groups like ISIS. If successful, such efforts could not only reduce the number of recruits but change life for women in many Islamic societies.