About 50 family, friends and fans gathered at Caritas Village one day last week to say goodbye to Rev. Randall Mullins and his wife, Sharon Pavelda. They are moving to the Seattle area.
“This isn’t a funeral,” Sharon, a licensed “death midwife,” reminded everyone with her characteristic comforting directness. “We’re not dying. We’re just moving.”
Randall, a United Church of Christ minister and cancer survivor, smiled and pressed his palms together prayerfully and playfully. Everyone laughed and the party was on.
It was a fitting time and way to honor a couple who spent the last decade of this city’s second century bringing people together to commiserate and commemorate.
Last week marked the city’s 200th birthday. It also marked the anniversary of the 1917 lynching of Ell Persons – the first to be memorialized by the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis.
Randall and Sharon launched the project early in 2016, with help from retired professors Tom Carlson and Margaret Vandiver, and retired oceanographer George Grider.
Their goal is to locate and memorialize the site of every post-Civil War lynching in Shelby County.
The project was inspired by Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative, which is seeking to identify the location of every lynching in the South from 1877-1950.
“We cannot heal the deep wounds inflicted during the era of racial terrorism until we tell the truth about it,” Stevenson said when he spoke in Memphis in 2015.
Randall and Sharon were there. That work became their ministry. They have been joined by hundreds of others from the National Park Service to the local NAACP, retired business leaders and high school students, preachers and politicians, activists and academics.
The Institute for Public Service Reportng Memphis