As of last week, the City Council — after lengthy deliberations that ran way past the May 22nd date for pulling candidate petitions — finally mustered enough votes to declare district lines for the forthcoming city election.
And, basically, it’s a case of Meet the New Lines, Same as the Old Lines.
Which is to say, the council districts for the October 5th election conform to the same map that was redrawn for a special election in District 4 last November. Then-incumbent Councilwoman Jamita Swearengen had resigned the District 4 seat after winning election as Shelby County Circuit Court Clerk. She was succeeded by her sister, Jana Swearengen-Washington, who won the special election.
Shot down during the council’s regular meeting last week was a proposed new map that had garnered significant support and would have made major alterations, especially on the city’s eastern perimeter, where District 5, an area largely white in population that bridges Midtown and East Memphis, would have been reshaped to become even more accommodating to whites, including conservatives, while adjoining District 2 would have become Cordova-based and majority-Black.
The new plan was put forth by Darrick Harris, a community member of the council’s ad hoc reapportionment committee. A late-breaking shift of previously undecided council members against it left the old map in place when Councilman Chase Carlisle subsequently moved for “same night minutes,” a parliamentary device which sped up the process of formalizing the vote.
Some supporters of the defeated new map were outraged by the outcome. One of them was Lexie Carter, chair of the Shelby County Democratic Party. Carter had anticipated the creation of a specifically Cordova district in the manner of last year’s County Commission reapportionment. She indicated that she intended to file a protest at the council’s meeting next week, when, reportedly, the body will consider a final tweaking of boundaries.
Carter also defended her action and that of the local Democratic executive committee in recently withdrawing from what had been the party’s long-running litigation against several proprietors of sample ballots at election time, especially those who used the word “Democratic” or party images on their products.
“Let’s face it, that has always been part of the process,” she said of the balloters, who traditionally have charged fees of candidates wishing positions on their sample ballots, which were widely distributed, especially in the inner city.
• Meanwhile, the list of claimants to the District 2 seat continues to grow. Former Councilman Scott McCormick has drawn a petition for it, and Jerri Green, senior policy advisor to County Mayor Lee Harris, has confirmed her interest in the seat. Green, a Democrat, gave Republican state Representative Mark White a close run in 2020 for the District 83 state House seat.
Davin Clemons, a former Memphis policeman and the co-founder of Tri-State Black Pride, will apparently once again be an opponent of incumbent Councilman Edmund Ford Sr., having drawn a petition for Ford’s District 6 seat. Clemons ran against Ford in 2019 with the endorsement of Harris and said this week he hopes to have the county mayor’s support again this year.
As was the case four years ago, that race will likely reflect to some degree the ever-simmering antagonism between Mayor Harris and County Commissioner Edmund Ford Jr., the councilman’s son.
