For some years, Carol Chumney, the former state legislator, City Council member, and, perhaps most memorably, city mayoral candidate, has been reminding all and sundry that she was compiling a book that would, in the parlance, tell all.
Talk of that sort is common among members of the public class, but the awkward fact is that this is not New York or Washington. Memphis is a smaller market.
This is not even Nashville, with its key location at the nexus of state government and its ready point of reference to state figures who go on to make national reputations.
These have been facts of life that have rendered publishing ambitions of the sort advanced by Chumney for conversation rather than completion. (Exceptions acknowledged for memoirs and studies relating to the undeniable and profound importance of Memphis as a roots locale of the several streams of popular music that have changed the world.)
Yet there are stories of the public sphere here, Chumney’s being a case in point, that need a larger telling, and the new age of social-media opportunities is making it possible to give them proper scope.
Chumney has done it! — telling her tale in a self-published 608-page volume available from Amazon in hardback ($31.95), paperback, and an instantly accessible Kindle edition. Entitled The Arena: One Woman’s Story, it reviews with admirable specificity her own life and times (with equal emphasis on both of those terms). Chumney believes, with considerable included evidence, that she has stood for genuine advances in democracy and in the transparency of public business and in the responsibility of public figures to further such advances.
She also sees herself as the exponent of the long imminent, but still incompletely achieved, shattering of the “glass ceiling” that, until our own semi-woke times, has prevented women from achieving their full potential in public life. She does her share of taking and telling names in this narrative — involving the whole roll call of important contemporaries. A great deal of her focus is on her races for office, including the one for Memphis mayor in 2007 in which she came within 7 points of unseating longtime mayoral incumbent Willie Herenton, and might have done so had there not been a third candidate in the race, lawyer and NAACP eminence Herman Morris.
Nor does she overlook the warp and woof of public policy, which she examines at great length — ranging from her genuinely groundbreaking efforts in child-care reform as a legislator to abuses and oversights in city government that she made her focus on as a municipal figure. Much, of course, is ex parte, but all of it is revealing. Chumney soldiers on, currently on the issue of voting reform.
