By the time Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Memphis to lead a march in the spring of 1968, city sanitation workers had been on strike for more than a month. After a faulty garbage truck crushed two of them to death, the mostly Black male workers met and organized the strike at Clayborn Temple. Now scenes from the strike have been rendered on the historic worship site’s newly designed and installed stained-glass windows—just one step of a larger multiyear project to restore and reopen the building for the community.
When complete, “we will be a cultural arts center for storytelling, performance, and the cultivation of the social imagination,” says Anasa Troutman, Clayborn’s executive director. Troutman arrived in Memphis in 2017 for what she thought would be a short time, to work on Union: The Musical, a piece about the strike. But the more she learned about Clayborn, the more she felt compelled to stay. Presbyterians had erected the Romanesque Revival temple in 1892 and then sold it to the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1949. Clayborn remained a community cornerstone until a dwindling congregation, economic disparities, and expensive repairs forced the building to close in 1999.
By the mid-2010s, efforts to restore Clayborn had begun to progress thanks to a significant donation. Troutman “jumped in the deep end” of the process, she says. Then the donor changed his mind, instead wanting the building to be sold to a developer. Troutman wouldn’t stand for it. “I called folks around the country and raised money to buy the building”—and another $1.3 million to begin renovations.
In addition to the windows, the Clayborn team has repaired the church’s exterior and is working with Parson Pipe Organ Builders to restore the pipe organ. Local firm Self + Tucker Architects—whose bona fides include Stax Records and the National Civil Rights Museum—is designing the project. By the time Clayborn reopens in 2026, the newly LEED-certified temple will feature a theater, meeting rooms and event spaces, and state-of-the-art lighting and sound systems.
“The history speaks to you when you walk in,” says Jimmie Tucker, a founding principal of the firm and a native Memphian. “And having I AM A MAN Plaza adjacent to the building shows the importance of placemaking for the community”—an element now enhanced by the shining stained-glass windows. During the 1968 strike, tear gas grenades thrown by police damaged the original ones. Experts at Pearl River Glass Studio in Jackson, Mississippi—along with students at Advance Memphis, a job-training nonprofit—worked to restore some of them, and the Clayborn team held a citywide call for artists to submit design ideas for new ones.
Sharday Michelle and Lonnie Robinson won, and Robinson spent more than a year driving back and forth to Pearl River so he and Michelle could learn the process. For Robinson, it’s personal: His grandmother, whose neighbor worked in sanitation, lived near Clayborn. In addition to painting the march scene, Robinson created portraits of Larry Payne, a teenager killed during the strike; union leader T. O. Jones; and civil rights leaders. “Being able to honor the people who did the work locally canonizes them,” Robinson says, “because stained glass has an almost infinite timetable. They put their lives on the line.”
