Lynne Jordan Turley’s life was about harmony and empathy.
Through her passion for the piano and her desire to make music a part of Memphis’ schoolchildren’s lives, Turley, who died April 22 at age 79, helped to create the first music program for the Memphis City Schools in 1963.
Through her empathy for Black people and their struggles against discrimination and invisibility, she incorporated Black folk music into that curriculum and allowed that struggle to move her from teaching to activism when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed April 4, 1968.
“The day he was killed, it was a very emotional experience,” Turley said in a 2006 Rhodes College interview. She was teaching at Lincoln Elementary School, which was all-Black in 1968. The school has since closed.
Rolling Stone Why Dolly Parton Doesn’t Deserve a Nashville Statue Yet
A bill proposes erecting a likeness of the country-music legend at the Tennessee state capitol, but any new statue should honor a black leader
By Richard E. Aaron/Redferns/Getty Images
No one can dispute the artistic, humanitarian, and philanthropic legacy of Dolly Parton. Her $1 million donation last spring to Vanderbilt University to develop a Covid vaccine has all but helped save the world. But a recent proposal to honor the Sevierville, Tennessee, native with a statue on the capitol grounds in Nashville is premature.
To be sure, the controversial and odious bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest the Confederate Army general and Ku Klux Klan leader that currently rests inside the rotunda needs to go. But a statue of Parton, an Instagram tourist magnet though it would be, isn’t the path forward.