Tag: AC Wharton

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Politics Politics Feature

What Strickland Will Do

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Jackson Baker

Mayor-elect Jim Strickland

To the surprise of many observers, Councilman Jim Strickland, an acknowledged underdog when he declared as a candidate for mayor last January, won election last week with a 20-point edge on incumbent Mayor A C Wharton. At 42 percent, Strickland’s share of a larger-than-expected dissenting vote was clearly the predominating one when compared to those of Councilman Harold Collins (18 percent) and Memphis Police Association president Mike Williams (16 percent). 

So does the mayor-elect regard himself as having a mandate?

“Yes, to implement my platform” a relaxed Strickland agreed in the course of an interview in his law office on Monday.

Strickland will take office, along with a newly elected city council, on January 1st. In the meantime, his first task, to be completed this week, is the naming of a transition committee. There will be “two or three” co-chairs of that committee, he said, and they will assist him in naming a staff to help run the city.

As for that aforesaid platform, it was made clear during the campaign, within the winner’s incessantly reiterated triad of bullet points. In every speech, public statement, interview, and ad, Strickland essentially limited himself to promises of remedial action on public safety, blight, and accountability of public officials.

Wharton pitched to millennials and talked up bike lanes and futurist blueprints. Collins advocated a crash program on behalf of high-tech jobs. Even Williams evolved rapidly from his original incarnation as a one-issue candidate (restoration of lost employee benefits) and proposed strategies involving solar panels and transportation reform.

With the regularity of a metronome, Strickland stuck to his triad of safety, blight, and accountability. These are all valid problem areas — or would seem to have been so regarded by the voters, but they are all arguably managerial, even housekeeping, matters.

Strickland thinks otherwise. “I disagree with people who say all that’s not a vision,” he said on Monday. “You have to have an effectively run city government. To create a community that’s more inviting to people and businesses is so meat-and-potatoes that some people don’t consider it a vision. I just disagree. I think it is a vision. When you’re one of the most violent cities in America, number one in unemployment, with a poverty rate of 30 percent, doing the basics is important. If city government were a football team, you’d say it doesn’t block and tackle very well.”

And there was one important component of his legislative persona that Strickland left unsaid during his campaign — his longstanding history as a budget-cutter and apostle of fiscal austerity, as the councilman who in 2010 generated this headline: “Strickland Proposes City Employee Pay Cut.” 

These were inconvenient matters to remind voters of at a time of palpable public resentment of benefit cuts and reduced core services. To be fair, Strickland later rethought the pay-cut idea, but — unlike Collins, who seems to have split that part of his core protest vote with Williams — he signed on to most of the other economies that Wharton would ultimately embrace (and pay the political price).

There is a reason why Strickland, who some 20 years ago served a term as Shelby County Democratic chairman, had virtually wall-to-wall support this year from the city’s Republican voters and other conservatives and why GOP rank-and-filers from the county’s suburban municipalities were always to be found at his fund-raisers and rallies.

To those who might wonder, however, Strickland still considers himself a Democrat — “I’ve always voted in Democratic primaries. I never have voted in a Republican primary” — though he says he is unlikely to be running for any future office as a party nominee of any kind. His ambitions, he contends, are limited. “This is it,” he says of the office he has just won.

“Those who thought crime was not an issue lost.”

Apparently, safety-blight-accountability was a sufficiently nonpartisan platform to work with voters across the board, and the first two points of that triad had figured large in polls commissioned by chief Strickland strategist Steven Reid, resonating strongly even — or perhaps even especially — with inner-city blacks, whose encounters with violence and environmental squalor have been long-standing.

(To give David Upton his due, that veteran Democratic operative — neutral in this campaign — has always maintained that concern over the crime rate has been more significant and politically charged in the inner city than elsewhere.)

Though only a handful of African Americans had been among the white throng at Strickland’s Poplar Plaza headquarters opening in July, and an early Commercial Appeal poll had the District 5 councilman in single digits with blacks, Strickland was, in the late stages of the race, doing significant under-the-radar outreach, and he was privately claiming to have as much as 20 percent of the black vote. (It will be interesting to see how closely a demographic accounting of the final vote totals will come to bearing that out.)

And, to be sure, Strickland did espouse some new wrinkles, mostly incremental in nature. He suggested using private funds to help reformed felons pay for expunging their records, liaising with Boys Clubs and Girls Clubs, and offering financial incentives — residential PILOTs, he called them — in the form of tax breaks for people to buy a home in the inner city, rehab it, and live in it.

“Another thing is that it can take a city or county three or four years to foreclose on a piece of property with a tax debt. That’s too long,” Strickland contended. “We need a shorter time than that.” The legislature has to be talked into making both of those ideas possible.

“Then I’d like to expand a program I created enabling citizens to serve as reserve code-enforcement officers. That’s not being implemented very enthusiastically at present. I’d also like to talk with county government about better cooperation on simplifying code enforcement. We’ve got a city fire code, a city residential code, and a county commercial code. Maybe we could consolidate them.”

Strickland sees law enforcement as his most pressing matter, as well as the key part of what he sees as his vision.

“Last November, we did a poll to see if Mayor Wharton could be beaten. And we polled the issues that were near and dear to my heart, including crime. We found that being tough on crime was a popular stand, to both races. Harold Collins was as tough on crime as I was. He used the term ‘terrorism.’ There’s a small minority in Memphis who don’t think crime is an issue, and they lost.

“We lost a little less than 400 people. In 2014, the Wharton administration told me we lost 158 police officers. We normally lose 100 a year in natural attrition. We lost 58 more than normal, which is concerning, but it’s not 400.

“But, aside from quibbling about numbers, we do have a serious problem hiring and retaining police officers. I propose a series of steps. Number one, we’re going to be honest and open with the unions. We’ll open up the books and let them look at them. The Wharton team has told us for a year and a half that we could not afford the lifetime health insurance. The employees have a suspicion that money is there for lifetime health insurance and has been used elsewhere. The only way to counter that argument is to open up the books and let everyone see what we can afford and what we can’t afford. I want to learn the answer myself.

“Two, we need to do a better job of recruiting new police officers. When I got on the council eight years ago, one of the first things we did was try to hire more police officers. We went then from 2,100 to 2,400 police officers by changing the area in which they could live — Memphis to Shelby County — and we went through a big recruiting period, with TV ads.

“We’ve got to come up with funds in the city budget to increase the pay of police officers.”

Strickland reserves the right to impose rigid curfews on youth in cases of flash-mob flare-ups like the violent outbreaks that plagued the city in late 2014. “[Former Councilman] Rickey Peete passed a curfew law 10 or 15 years ago, but it’s not enforced. It’s a stair-step program, pegged to age. If you’re 14 years old, you need to be home at 10 o’clock.”

Reinstituting a full-fledged program of civilian reserve (PST) officers to handle traffic investigations and other nonviolent matters is another step Strickland intends to take. “That’s an additional expense, but it gives you more police officers on the street. And I want to bring the animal control officers from the city shelter into the police department, for two reasons: One, I think you get better oversight from the police department than the shelter; and two, I think you’d get more efficiency, because, right now, a wild dog call can go to either the police department or the shelter. Put them under one roof, and there’s more efficiency, and you can send out animal control officers, which frankly are less expensive, and the police officers can patrol the streets.

“We need a new director of Animal Services, by the way. I want to hire one of these national, certified animal-advocate groups to come in and do an evaluation of the shelter and also help us hire a director.”

There is the matter, too, of who will serve as police director. During the campaign, the three other major mayoral candidates — Wharton, Collins, and Williams — all indicated they would continue the employment of Toney Armstrong, who has a year to go before exiting the department via the early-retirement (or “drop”) program. Strickland was the only candidate who avoided committing himself.

“I think Toney’s a good man,” Strickland said. “It’s too early to say what I’ll do. That’s one of the things I want to talk to him about. If I wanted to go outside the city and recruit a police director, would that person want a full four years to institute their program? Or would three years be acceptable? And I think Director Armstrong would know that.”

“We will restructure government.”

As he sets about naming a staff (which he promises will be “impressive and diverse”), Strickland says he will employ the same “less is more” philosophy that he employed in picking a campaign staff. “We had lots of volunteers, but we had just two paid staffers, Kim Perry and Melissa Wray,” he said. He also had the services of campaign consultant Reid, to whom he gives significant credit in planning a strategy that led to victory. 

As noted above, the one major fact of his council experience that came in for minimal expression during that campaign was Strickland’s reputation as a budget-cutter and advocate of economic austerity. “I think people already knew that about me,” Strickland says by way of explaining his downplaying of the issue. “As a whole, people cared about the other issues more. I think you’ll see more serious cuts, by the way. We’ll have fewer employees, especially in upper management.” Having often decried what he described as over-billeting and cronyism in Wharton’s administration, Strickland will do some judicious pruning and consolidation of the city roles.

“We will restructure government,” he promises.  

Holdovers? There could be some, he acknowledged. Gone from his conversation on Monday was the sharp polemics of his mayoral campaign. He paid tribute to outgoing Mayor Wharton and the incumbent’s CAO,  Jack Sammons. “They’ve both been very gracious and forthcoming in the conversations I’ve had with them.”

Strickland made clear he intends to take seriously the third point in his triad of campaign issues — that of employee accountability. Were there already check-points to measure performance in office? Strickland was asked.

“I would argue they are spotty,” he said. “I’ll be meeting with Doug McGowen, who runs the Mayor’s Innovation Delivery Team, to go over what work he’s already created. We ought to have measurements on how long it takes to process 911 calls, for example, and we should hold people accountable to a definite set of standards.”

There are more details to be worked through but, consistent with the bare bones of Strickland’s campaign appeal, the syllabary of the new mayor’s agenda will be a lean one, limited by the relative scarcity of available resources and focused on a few carefully chosen target areas.

The real change is the fact of Strickland himself, a bluff, hearty, good-natured but competent and calculating man whose mayoral ambitions had been of long standing but whose pathway to power and margin of victory both remain something of an astonishment — with the latter fact allowing him whatever mandate he can make of the means at hand.

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Politics Politics Feature

Old Country, New World

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

PARIS — Some clichés have outlived their usefulness. One of them is the myth of French rudeness. I just returned from a whirlwind tour of four countries — Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, France— on a bucket-list trip I contracted for back in the spring, before I realized how close to the end of the election season it would fall. (I know. I know.) 

In any case, most of the trip took place in French-speaking Europe, and most of that was in La Belle France itself. Not once did I utter a syntactically complete and correct French sentence to a native of the country, and seldom did I even attempt it. (Well, make an exception for “Où est la toilette?”)

Moreover, I was in a group that had its share of American-style rowdies. But no French person — clerk, waiter, or citizen — was anything but kind and responsive and willing to try to navigate across the language barrier in our direction. 

Nor was there anything goose-steppy or overbearing about the Germans our group encountered in Munich, or elsewhere in the swaths of Bavaria or western Germany we traversed. Even as reports of newly indigenous German pacifism indicate, and just as the song says, this country ain’t gonna study war no more. 

A stark reminder of the reasons for that was evidenced in the human and architectural tableau that occurs every afternoon in Munich’s downtown square of Marienplatz, where a crowd, composed of both locals and visitors (the latter drawn last week from an estimated 6 million of diverse nationalities in town for the ongoing Oktoberfest), gathers at 5 p.m. in front of the city’s medieval city hall structure.

As the bells chime out the time, what follows is a mechanical musical template involving two sequential levels of drama enacted by painted wooden figures in the building’s belfry — the higher of which shows a pair of jousting knights, while the lower sets in motion wooden figures of celebrants dancing in glee as the slumping of one of the knights on his horse indicates that the trouble above is all over.

The cheers that issue forth from the massive crowd in the square are clearly for the depicted revelry and not for the little show of combat that preceded it. Ain’t gonna study war no more.

Off to the right of Marienplatz is a tall, yellowish building with long, cone-shaped spires that make it look simultaneously medieval and futurist and which somehow has the look of a movie prop rather than a truly functional structure. And, indeed, one is told that this is the site of the old city hall, totally destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II and replaced by a concrete facade with squares painted on to simulate the building’s original stones.

Munich wishes above all to manifest its ancient traditions of Gemütlichkeit — hence, the massive annual carnival of Oktoberfest (the original one so named, mind you, and one that dwarfs all imitative festivals, in Memphis or elsewhere).

The city is doing its best to live down its reputation as an erstwhile Nazi capital, of sorts. It was here that an ex-solider named Adolf Hitler attempted to begin a putsch against the newly established Weimar Republic in 1923, and it was here that Hitler, after release from a slap-on-the-wrist prison term, established his party headquarters, biding his time until the international Depression in the early 1930s generated enough new chaos for an already traumatized people to see his iron-hand rule as a last, desperate way out.

We know the story, and, believe me, so do the Germans. They maintain Dachau, the suburban retention facility that became the new regime’s first concentration camp, as an object lesson for themselves as well as for the steady train of international visitors that come to see it.

As for the erstwhile headquarters building of the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party that served as the site for the signing of the fateful Munich Agreement of 1938 and that, against all odds, survived the war intact, it has been converted into a Hochschule für Musik, a conservatory.

As for the prospect of tensions between Islamic immigrants and long-term inhabitants of the predominant ethnicity anywhere in Europe, I offer only two images, admittedly incomplete, to suggest the spectrum. 

There was the kids’ soccer team in Munich, taking a break from practice at an ice cream store, with one of the players, a swarthy lad with the name Mohamed identifying him on his jersey, joking at ease with his blondish teammates. So there can be, and is, some acceptance.

And in Paris, warily patrolling the edge of a large throng gathered in front of an ongoing mass and communion at Notre Dame Cathedral, were members of a SWAT squadron, making their presence felt as a clear warning to any would-be militants of the sort that famously have staged murderous raids in the recent past and have begun to cast the faint shadow of fear on the edifices and attractions of the City of Light. So there can be, and is, apprehension.

               

• MEMPHIS, Tennessee — I know the foregoing, strictly speaking, isn’t political in the way that readers of this column expect. Nor is it explicitly relevant to the issues and possible outcomes of the pivotal city election that is just concluding.

And yet, there are legitimate points of reference. Ethnic pre-judgments — whether uttered afresh by Donald Trump or whomever or merely passed sotto voce through the medium of voters’ habits — will have played a role in the results here in Memphis. There is a reason why demographic categories exist in all legitimate polls of likely election outcomes.

There is a “white vote,” and there is a “black vote,” and both categories are spoken of freely and taken stock of in the estimations and planning sessions of all serious campaigns. 

When, after this week, we look at the results of the 2015 races for mayor, city clerk, and at-large Memphis City Council races, it will be truly revealing to gauge the strength of habitual ethnic voting patterns vis-à-vis the impact of economics or a myriad of issues that transcend race.

Was there a significant impact from the last-minute revelations of a lucrative contract (now canceled under pressure) that was bestowed on Deidre Malone, Mayor A C Wharton‘s campaign manager, to promote the city’s new police body cameras?

With four mayoral candidates all drawing significant votes from various constituencies, where will vote splits have mattered most decisively — in the “black vote” that Wharton needed a commanding share of to prevail? Or within the ranks of voters anxious for change and uncertain as to which of three challengers to give their votes to?

Within that choice lie two different outcomes, and how the choice will have been made is one key to the mayoral outcome, as, for that matter, will have been the relative turnouts of major voting blocs.

If there is a single undoubtable given in the mayor’s race, it is in the nearly monolithic vote that Councilman Jim Strickland, regarded as Wharton’s leading challenger, was expected to receive from white voters. Strickland was doing his best to court disaffected black voters, as well, and the results will demonstrate whether that effort, perhaps abetted by the aforementioned “September Surprise,” came to something or nothing.

Both Councilman Harold Collins and Memphis Police Association president Mike Williams seemed to be making late converts. To what result?

What was the voter takeaway from the Lipscomb Affair? That’s another enigma.

How effective was the unprecedented outpouring of money by the two leading mayoral candidates and by a few candidates, hitherto political unknowns, for council positions?

As we speak, all these questions are about to be answered.

Meanwhile, suspense will continue in the several expected runoffs in single-district Council races, not to be decided until November 19th.

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Cover Feature News

Memphis Decision 2015

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Change is in the air. That is a given. That’s the message of the slight but obvious up-tick in early voting statistics over the equivalent period four years ago. That is what the pollsters and pundits are telling us as they assess the chances of prevailing for this or that candidate for mayor in the 2015 Memphis city election, which is just two weeks away, on October 8th. 

So will the race for City Court Clerk, unique on the ballot for its lack of any real bellwether content, and so will those for the six of the 13 City Council seats selected by voters at large, the results of which races may well turn out to have long-term significance indeed.

The change of direction may not be obvious then. There are seven other City Council races decided by geographic district. These are discussed on page 12, and several of these may persist in uncertainty for six more weeks — until the runoff date of November 19th.

But meanwhile, we’ll likely have a good sense of the shape of our future from the election of our next mayor. The next mayor could be the same mayor we already have, of course — A C Wharton, who signaled change when he came into City Hall via the special election of 2009. Back then, his supporters were chanting his slogan of “One Memphis,” to define the shift from the mayor he succeeded —  Willie Herenton — a great change-maker himself when he narrowly won election in 1991 as Memphis’ first elected black mayor, and an ambitious reformer until four complete terms and a portion of another finally wore him down into resignation (both figurative and literal).

Has the time come, after only six years in office, for Wharton to pass from the scene as well? Manifestly, he doesn’t think so, but the voters might. A dozen private polls, formal and informal, suggested that possibility, including a public one, done by Mason-Dixon for The Commercial Appeal that was taken very seriously in its prognosis of a tight race, that being almost a toss-up between the mayor and his closest challenger, Councilman Jim Strickland.

Strickland, a two-time budget chairman who made his reputation as a champion of austerity, has been running for mayor in his mind ever since his election to the council on his second try in 2007. His thinking was sped up by a snarled and straitened city fiscal situation that drew a pointed rebuke from State Comptroller Justin Wilson in 2013 and in the last year forced service reductions and severe cuts in employee benefits and pensions. 

The remedy Strickland has proposed is less a new vision than a prescription for tightening up and cracking down. Mindful of the violent flash mobs of 2014, he calls for tougher containment action against teen perpetrators. He wants Blue CRUSH writ large and would lobby, too, for elevating repeat domestic abuse to the status of felony. He would rid the city of blight, and he talks of stricter and more transparent accountability standards for public employees.

In the election-year environment, Strickland has downplayed his erstwhile fiscal concerns, perhaps in view of public uneasiness regarding cuts in employee benefits and many resignations in the ranks of the city’s first responders.

This latter concern is very much on the minds of the two other serious challengers for mayor — Councilman Harold Collins and Mike Williams, the president of the Memphis Police Association, on sabbatical for the duration of this election campaign. Both have made restoration of the lost benefits, in whole or in part, a centerpiece of their campaigns.

Collins and Williams also say they would pursue strategies on behalf of citizens trapped on the lower economic rungs, building prosperity from the ground up. Collins questions the value of what he calls the “$9 and $10” jobs resulting from the city’s current industrial recruitment policy and insists on a crash program to provide well-paid high-tech jobs to keep the city’s youth from seeking greener pastures.

Williams has talked of slowing the quest for big industry — and the tax abatements that go with it — long enough to upgrade city government’s core services, and to focus on helping smaller businesses survive. He has evolved his campaign from what many assumed would be a concentration on the lost-benefits issue alone into a wider-ranging consideration of matters like solar energy and a revamping of the city’s MATA bus service.

The challengers offer competing versions of change, and the mayor himself has focused on a revised urban future for Memphis — pitching to millennials and touting new parks and greenways and up-by-the-bootstraps programs and boasting of his ability to latch on to funding from outside the city, meanwhile promising more new and shiny treasures like the Bass Pro Pyramid.

In the course of their campaigns, these candidates have set forth four distinct and divergent pathways to the future.

Jackson Baker

ßL to R: Harold Collins, Jim Strickland, Sharon Webb, A C Wharton, and Mike Williams

There have been several mayoral debates this campaign year, most of them involving the core four — Wharton, Strickland, Collins, and Williams. Here, as one example of their approaches, are excerpts from their statements at a Sierra Club/League of Women Voters forum held on Monday night, one that focused entirely on environmental concerns. 

(The quoted remarks are from their summations except that of Strickland, who had to leave early. His opening remarks are excerpted from instead.)

Strickland: “I’m running for Mayor because, in general, I want to clean up Memphis. … I have sponsored the volunteer code enforcement officer position [for individuals] to work with code officials and clean up their neighborhoods and other neighborhoods in the city. I have led the effort to create a grant program [to rehab] tax-dead properties. I want to work on a residential PILOT program, a tax incentive to help repopulate the inner city. We need to bring people into this city. We’re not growing in population; we’re not growing in jobs. I ask for your support.”

Collins: “The choice is really, really clear: [Will we be] a cleaner city, a better city? Is our transportation system antiquated or up-to-date? Blight has caused a decline in our population and increased apathy among our citizens and crime hotspots in our city. We should not continue down this road any longer. [We need] real choices, real change, a sense of urgency to deal with these problems. These are not election year problems. We have heard these now for six years, or maybe even 13 years.”

Williams: “We need a master development plan, and then we need to do smart development. … We need to tear down or repurpose certain properties in our city. … Since we are the 22nd largest city in the United States, we need a transportation system that is commensurate with that. To say that we’re going to stop developing or bringing in businesses to property that is available is nonsense. It’s time for new, innovative ideas.”

Wharton: “I’ve had the courage to stand up and lead in the face of tremendous opposition. I revived Shelby Farms Park. [There are] the bike lanes; everybody loves them now. … There are those who had questions about the conservancies, who now embrace conservancies. And I will do even more. We have to dream big, of bike lanes across the Mississippi River, along the levee, of bike lanes throughout our city, and programs to get the bikes for the children there, taking children all over the state to see our parks. They’ll come back here. That’s the vision I have for the city. Let me continue that.”

There they are in one brief snapshot: Strickland as technocrat; Collins as alarm-sounder; Williams as evolving planner; Wharton as self-styled futurist. All of them are rounder characters than that, of course, and one of them will guide us into the next age of Memphis. There are two more weeks to check them out, and we’ll doubtless have some more to say about them between now and October 8th.

Jackson Baker

Council races attracted more than the usual amount of attention this year. Here a crowd at Trinity United Methodist Church followed a debate involving seven candidates running for an open 5t6h District seat.

Meanwhile, here are summaries of the at-large City Council positions that will be resolved for sure on Election Day.

Super District 8, Position 1: This, like all the Super District contests, is winner-take-all, as a result of the 1991 ruling by the late federal Judge Jerry Turner that banned runoffs in at-large races — a category that, besides the mayor’s race and that for City Court Clerk, includes the two super-districts, each of which encompasses roughly half the city’s population.

Super District 8, predominantly African-American, encompasses the city’s western half, including the city’s inner-city core.

“In so many words or less,” as Position 1 incumbent Joe Brown would say, he should have easy going against unsung opponents George Thompson and Victoria E. Young, Super District 8, Position 2: Janis Fullilove, notable for her firebrand advocacy of inner-city concerns, notorious for her penchant for getting into embarrassing scrapes, and somewhat beloved by (most of) her council mates for all that, is equally well-situated to prevail against opponents J. Eason and Isaac Wright.

Super District 8, Position 3: Now here’s a race — or at least a contest with the potential to be one. Mickell Lowery, son of the seat’s longtime possessor, the venerable Myron Lowery, has had abundant fund-raisers and significant shows of support resulting from them, and appears to be in good shape against opponents Jacqueline Camper and Martavius Jones.

Neither is a pushover, especially not Jones, who cut quite a figure as a pivotal member of the old Memphis School Board and was as responsible as anybody for the MCS charter surrender that led to the oh-so-temporary city/county school merger. But, once again, as with his near-loss last year to Reginald Milton in a County Commission race, Jones is running more or less on his own, without much money or a support network, as such.

Super District 9 basically encompasses the eastern part of the city and has a larger preponderance of white voters.

Jackson Baker

Super District 9, Position 3 seat, make their pitches to picnicking Democrats Steve Steffens (left) and Joe Weinberg.

Super District 9, Position 1: You can’t fault Robin Spielberger, who has been ubiquitous in her cost-conscious campaign for a council seat and has picked up any number of across-the-spectrum endorsements in the process. And you can say about as much for Charley Burch, the perpetually youthful federal air traffic officer who is also, like Spielberger, challenging the seemingly entrenched incumbent, Kemp Conrad.

Spielberger and Burch are so into it that their intensity has boiled over into an ongoing quarrel over the placement of their signs, with Burch claiming that Spielberger has uprooted a key sign of his and replaced it with hers. (She denies it, blaming an errant supporter.)

Conrad is seen by both of his challengers (and by supporters of CLERB, for his sponsorship of a delay in council consideration of the police-review agency) as a symbol of the establishment. Conrad, who has generous support from business interests, probably wouldn’t quarrel with that idea. His incumbency and a visibility sure to be enforced by sufficient advertising (which he can afford) in the campaign’s latter days give him a major edge.

Super District 9, Position 2: Who is Philip Spinosa? Between now and October 8th, you will have seen him — or images of him — on your TV set in well-produced commercials and, if you reside in the sprawling District 9 area, in your mailbox in equally well-produced mailers. Now that early voting has started, you have a fair chance of seeing him greeting arrivals at this or that polling place. (That’s if Spinosa follows the example of Reid Hedgepeth, who won election to the council in 2007 by following that formula.)

Where you probably won’t see the youthful FedEx sales executive, who — thanks to the generosity of the city’s business elite — has a massive campaign treasury, is in a public forum in a give-and-take situation alongside four rival candidates.

Each of those others has a story to tell. Pastor and former school board member Kenneth Whalum, a self-styled “gadfly,” is a declared foe of the status quo and an apostle for a newly configured municipal school district. He heads an informal “education slate” composed of council candidates in other races. Paul Shaffer, an official of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, has a working-class outlook and good name recognition in union circles and among democrats at large. 

Stephanie Gatewood is another former school board member with a record of involvement in numerous causes. And Lynn Moss, a Cordovan, belongs to that stable of disaffected Memphians who are running hard for rank-and-file causes like restored employee benefits, saving the Mid-South Coliseum, and, in her case, for the right of de-annexation.

Spinosa’s financial edge, blue-ribbon sponsorship, and ongoing advertising blitz all give him an edge in a winner-take-all format. Although Moss gave him at least nominal opposition for the official Shelby County Republican endorsement, Spinosa also ended up claiming that credential.

Super District 9, Position 3: The aforementioned Hedgepeth has served on the council quietly and, in the judgment of many, effectively — faithfully representing the point of view of the business community, but suggesting development projects of his own and backing those of his colleagues, including those dear to the hearts of inner-city residents, like the Raleigh Springs Mall renovation.

Hedgepeth’s proudest moment came in 2012, when he broke his customary silence to make a powerful and probably decisive statement in favor of adding “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the language of the city’s workplace-protection ordinance. That action won him the endorsement this year of the Tennessee Equality Project, even though one of his two opponents, Zachary Ferguson, the director of Youth and Young Adult Ministries at St. John’s United Methodist Church, is openly gay.

The other candidate, Stephen Christian, a Nike employee, is, like Ferguson, a political newcomer whose horizons may be somewhat down the line.

The well-financed Hedgepeth, whose campaign signs rival those of Spinosa and Morgan in omnipresence, should finish well ahead.

City Court Clerk: This is another non-runoff race, and it would be strange indeed if Kay Spalding Robilio, who logged 30-odd years as a judge, first in City Court, then in Circuit Court, did not end up with a comfortable plurality.

Not that her opponents are slouches. What they amount to en masse is an unusually concentrated collection of African-American candidates with governmental experience or name recognition or, in most cases, both. And that’s the problem. There are so many of them that they will inevitably slice up and splinter each other’s vote totals (such is the demographic fact of life, like it or not), leaving Robilio, a white female still well-regarded and liked in the community at large, well in the lead.

Robilio was basically pressured to resign her Circuit Court judgeship in 2013 at a time when she was charged with misconduct by a state ethics board for personally investigating facts pertaining to a child custody case in her court. The reality is that, while such a breach of the canon might — and did — appear serious within the legal community, it is not the sort of offense likely to seem especially scandalous to a lay public.

Meanwhile, several of Robilio’s opponents have had their own bumps in the road. But, again, their main drawback as aspirants for the clerkship is that they will seriously reduce each other’s vote totals. For the record, they include: County Commissioner Justin Ford; current councilwoman and former school board member Wanda Halbert; and former councilman and Juvenile Court Clerk, Shep Wilbun.

In addition, Thomas Long II bears a name so close to that of his father, the outgoing clerk, as to be seriously confusing, and William Chism Jr.‘s last name will remind voters of former county commisioner and interim state Senator Sidney Chism, who still remains a political broker of note. Antonio Harris, a longtime employee of the clerk’s office, can tout his experience there, unique in the field.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Wharton, Strickland Remain Close in Mayoral Race

With three weeks to go, the race for Memphis mayor is still a coin-toss affair. By most reckonings, incumbent Mayor A C Wharton and City Councilman Jim Strickland are running virtually neck and neck.

That circumstance was confirmed by a recent Mason-Dixon poll, published in The Commercial Appeal, which had Wharton at 30 percent and Strickland at 25 percent, with City Councilman Harold Collins and Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams at 12 percent each. Arguments promptly raged as to the nature of the sampling, but the general picture seemed clear enough. And so were candidates’ responses.

Strickland’s support among white voters and along the Poplar Corridor in general was obvious and unlikely to diminish much, if at all, by election day. If anything, came the word from his camp, his standing in the poll was low-balled. Strickland, who has certainly not forsworn the black vote but was lagging there, accelerated his appearances at African-American churches and other predominantly black venues to augment his prospects.

Wharton was maintaining a plurality among black voters, who constitute almost two-thirds of the eligible electorate, and was in the low double-digits among whites. The mayor kept pitching to his strength and was emphasizing support from fellow office-holders and established sources, including The Commercial Appeal, which gave him its endorsement.

Collins and Williams, meanwhile, maintained they were within striking distance and were working hard to present themselves as the change agents of choice in an environment in which voter discontent was obvious, both anecdotally and as measured in the polls.

The four principal mayoral candidates will participate next Tuesday at noon at the University Club in what could be the climactic mayoral forum in what has been a series of them this year. The forum is sponsored under the joint auspices of the Rotary Club of Memphis and the Flyer.

• Politics is politics, and education is education, but all too often, especially in Memphis and Shelby County in recent times, the two have merged. 

Everybody in Shelby County surely got their fill of education politics per se during the the city/county school merger controversy that raged from December 2010 to August 2014, when the six suburban municipalities of Shelby County got their independent school districts up and running, more or less.

But what’s this? Here, in its entirety, is an item reported in the current issue of the Nashville-based Tennessee Journal:

“The Memphis-Shelby County Education Association claimed through its attorney Wednesday to have seceded from the Tennessee Education Association and the National Education Association. Relations had been tense since Keith Williams, a former M-SCEA president whose term ended in July, was hired last month as the new executive director. 

“Ken Foster, the director for 15 years, was ousted. TEA has notified teachers it has set up a new ‘TEA West’ office to serve them, and that despite actions of M-SCEA leaders, they are still members of TEA and NEA. According to a TEA email, TEA West was established ‘after M-SCEA leadership refused to allow NEA officials to conduct an audit, broke the agreement of the Memphis-Shelby County [schools] merger, forced out the long-serving executive director, and now has claimed to disaffiliate from TEA-NEA.'” 

For the record, the Keith Williams mentioned here is the same Keith Williams who is considered one of the main contenders in the race for the District 3 City Council seat being vacated by Harold Collins, now a candidate for mayor.

Williams’ pugnacity as an opponent of the charter surrender that was voted on by a majority of the old Memphis City Schools board on December 20, 2010, was rivaled only by that of then board member Kenneth Whalum Jr., now a candidate for the Super District 9, Position 2 seat.

As previously indicated in this space, Whalum is running as the unofficial head of a like-minded “education slate,” and, unsurprisingly perhaps, Williams is one of the six members of that slate he has endorsed.

By all accounts, the other major candidate for the District 3 seat is Patrice Robinson, who served alongside Whalum on the old MCS board and was a member of the majority which cast the fateful vote to surrender the MCS charter.

Robinson — who has been running hard in the current District 3 race, holding one meet-and-greet affair per week — previously tangled in the race for the District 9 Shelby County Commission seat now held by Justin Ford, who was able to eke out a win in that winner-take-all race.

Unlike that race, this one for city council is subject to a run-off if no one candidate is able to win a majority, and, inasmuch as the field includes five other candidates — some with name recognition from previous races of their own — it is not impossible that this latest showdown between Williams and Robinson will have another chapter beyond October 8th.

The other active contenders for the District 3 seat are Tanya Cooper, also an educator and the daughter of state Representative Barbara Cooper; Kevin Mott; Sherman Kilimanjaro; and Coleman Thompson. Rhonda Banks is listed on the ballot as a candidate, but she has suspended her race and is now supporting Robinson. • Runoffs, if they should be called for in the District 3 race or in any of the other six district races, will not be held on November 8th, as originally scheduled and announced as a runoff date, but on November 19th. This is according to a new clarification by the Shelby County Election Commission of state election law, which calls for runoffs to occur no sooner than 30 days from the posted election day and no longer than 45 days.

The clarification happens incidentally to avoid the awkwardness of holding an election on a date, November 8, which falls on a Sunday.

 

• Meanwhile, one de facto “runoff” election has already been held — that for the chairmanship of the Shelby County Commission. The commission’s original vote for chairman was held a month ago — on August 10th, when East Memphis Republican member Steve Basar won the election by a single vote.

Then, in a bizarre turnabout, one hour after the election, Memphis Democrat Eddie Jones, who had abstained for most of the ballot rounds that day before casting what had turned out to be the decisive vote for Basar, unexpectedly asked for a reconsideration ­— i.e., a revote on the matter.

Parliamentary protocol allows for such a reconsideration if the person seeking it was a member of the prevailing side on the original vote, and Jones, who had in the meantime had several sotto voce conversations with another chairmanship contender, Millington Republican Terry Roland, qualified.

After a vote which narrowly approved reconsideration, another vote was held, in which — thanks largely to a spoiler candidacy by Collierville Republican George Chism — neither the now un-elected Basar nor Roland could prevail, and a new election was called for this week, to accommodate Jones, who said he would be unable to attend the intervening commission meeting on August 14th.

Come Monday, and the new election was the first order of business after the commission’s approval of a consent agenda. With interim chair Van Turner presiding (outgoing chair Ford’s term having formally terminated), new nominations for chairman were called for, and the same three candidates as before — Basar, Roland, and Chism — were put in nomination.

Tellingly, Roland was nominated this time by Jones. In the end, after two ballots, Roland won election on the basis of five Republican votes, including his own, and those of two Democrats, Jones and Ford.

As a preamble to Monday’s rescheduled chairmanship election, several citizens, representing Democratic, Republican, and perhaps independent constituencies, had appeared before the commission, challenging its members to cast their votes on some basis other than deal-making.

Whatever degree of public cynicism that may have represented, victor Roland, whose election was a springboard of sorts for the county mayor’s race he intends to run in 2018, sought to be reassuring. Before the vote, he promised “from my heart” that, if elected, he would “break my neck” on behalf of his colleagues of all persuasions. After the vote, he professed to be humbled.

Basar — who, besides his two recent setbacks, had suffered an unanticipated loss to Ford in last year’s chairmanship vote ­— was sounding philosophical even before Monday’s vote was taken. “Déjà vu all over again,” he said.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Master Debaters, Near and Far

Boring, boring, boring, boring, TRUMP!, boring, boring, boring, TRUMP!, boring, boring, boring, boring, TRUMP!, boring, boring, TRUMP!

That was the most concise analysis of last week’s GOP presidential candidate debate that I read. And that was on Twitter. It was a lot like the final episode of True Detective, except you’d replace “TRUMP!” with “KA-BLAM!”

The candidates spent most of the debate trying to convince viewers that they would be the best man to control American women’s uteruses, and denying any possibly sensible positions they’d held in the past. I fully expected Chris Wallace to end the debate by saying, “Final question: Which of you is the absolute batshit craziest, and why?”

The aftermath of the GOP debate was almost as much fun as the debate itself, as The Donald seemingly shot himself in the foot with misogynist comments about Fox moderator Megyn Kelly, who had the audacity to ask Trump about his many past mysogynist comments. Pundits immediately proclaimed that Trump had jumped the shark and that his campaign was over, unless he apologized.

Trump, as anyone who has observed his career could predict, didn’t apologize, and instead ramped up his rhetoric another notch. Naturally, his lead in the polls grew and Fox groveled, withering under Trump’s verbal assaults on the network.

I fully expect Trump to pull out a bunch of bills at the next debate and “make it rain” on the other candidates. What could it hurt at this point? He’s the Teflon Man.

It was a big week for debates, with Monday night’s Memphis mayoral forum coming just on the heels of the GOP’s extravaganza. Five candidates — Mayor A C Wharton, Jim Strickland, Harold Collins, Mike Williams, and Sharon Webb — vied to impress Memphis voters with their rhetoric and political acumen.

Well, except for Webb, who appeared to have wandered onstage by accident. As one person tweeted: “I’m sure Dr. Sharon is a sweet woman with a great heart, but this is not her element.” That would be correct, if by “her element,” you mean Earth. Prediction: You will not read or hear the term “Webb-mentum” in the next few weeks.

Each of the other four candidates made some points and took some shots at their opponents. Wharton gave as good as he got (and he got fired upon more than Detective Ray Velcoro in that True Detective finale).

I still think the race is going to come down to Wharton and Strickland, based primarily on the fact that they are by far the best-financed, and that beating an incumbent in a field split four ways is tough without serious cash. I don’t think race-based voting will be much of a factor. Memphis voters have shown time and time again that when it comes to city-wide races, crossover voting is the rule rather than the exception, especially when party affiliation is not a factor.

One thing is certain: This fall in Memphis will not be boring.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Spreading Blessings

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Monday’s televised debate involving five Memphis mayoral candidates may have a significant effect on public attitudes toward the contestants. It certainly gave them all greater currency.

As almost all the initial media coverage indicated, the central event of the forum was a one-on-one verbal slugfest between Mayor A C Wharton and Councilman Jim Strickland, whom Wharton and most observers regard as the the major challenger to the mayor’s incumbency.

But each of the other candidates involved — Councilman Harold Collins, Memphis Police Association president Mike Williams, and former Memphis School Board member Sharon Webb — had an opportunity, as well, to define themselves to a general audience that, for the most part, has been unfamiliar with them.

Collins and Williams, both of whom proved to be articulate and knowledgeable about the issues confronting city government, probably enhanced their vote potential.

Webb’s case is harder to evaluate. In her favor is the fact of being the only woman in the race, coupled with a likable presence and a way of making the case that “it’s time for a woman to take over” that is both eloquent and passionate. Detracting from her prospects, though, is her obvious unfamiliarity with city issues, the same weakness that caused her to draw a blank in a TV debate the last time she ran for mayor in the special election of 2009.

The exchange of attacks and insults between Wharton and Strickland clearly provided the most intense moments of the forum, which was televised by WMC-TV, Action News 5, and was co-sponsored by the Memphis Association of Black Journalists and the League of Women Voters.

Oddly, for an incumbent facing a challenge to his reelection, the mayor was the more aggressive in seeking out points of difference, and his assertiveness was nicely complemented with periodic references to the value of experience and a show of wit — as when he dubbed Strickland “Dr. No” for favoring clamps on police funding as budget chairman.

Contrasting that with Strickland’s emphasis on public safety as a campaign theme, the mayor said, “I think candidate Strickland ought to be introduced to Councilman Strickland, because they are two different people.”

Strickland responded by putting the blame for a reduced police presence on budgets prepared by the mayor, and he showed some polemical skill of his own in attacking redundancies in Wharton’s administration, by suggesting that the mayor was trying to be “Noah,” making allowances for two of everything.

Strickland and Wharton also quarreled over their relative support for summer jobs for youth, with each claiming credit for what appeared to be different programs in different eras.

While the bickering between the two may have shed some light on areas of city government, it also drew out both men as able combatants, with the normally easy-going Wharton showing some unaccustomed swagger — as well as the kind of agility that allowed him to co-opt emcee Joe Birch’s introductory description of Memphis as “a city on the move” as a motto for his administration.

Strickland, meanwhile, seemed to flourish under the mayor’s goading, which forced him away from his usual bullet-point recitations — that can turn into rote — into some impressively vigorous improvisations.

The Wharton-Strickland duel also gave Collins and Williams some good moments, allowing Collins, for example, to appear statesman-like in commenting on the “Tom and Jerry Show” aspects of the scrap, while Williams, commenting on the exchange of accusations between Wharton and Strickland on police issues, made the plague-on-both-their-houses observation that the city’s active police force had shrunk from 2,500 to 2,000 on their watch. He was enabled thereby to tilt the police debate away from self-serving arguments about benefits into the realm of public safety.

Collins, too, had a telling retort to the mayor’s experience factor, adding Wharton’s seven years as Shelby County mayor to the six he has served as mayor of Memphis and contending that those 13 years have not netted much for the community.

All things considered, the debate did not occasion any major breakaways in the direction of a particular candidate. If anything, it tended to equalize things, in the direction of all-have-won-all-must-have-prizes.

But there are several more mayoral forums planned, all of them — like the one Monday night — good free-media opportunities for the less well-endowed candidates to catch up to the ones with bankrolls.

• In a bizarre turnaround, the Shelby County Commission elected a new chairman, Steve Basar, as its first order of business Monday, withdrew the honor an hour later in a reconsideration vote, then decided to defer further action on the chairmanship until next month.

Basar, a Republican member who served as vice chair of the commission last year, suffered his second consecutive disappointment. He had expected to be named chairmen last year, only to lose out to Democrat Justin Ford when Basar’s GOP colleagues withheld their support from him.

This one had to feel all the more crushing, since Basar had believed himself to be the chairman-elect and was clearly savoring the triumph, until the reconsideration vote was called for by Democrat Eddie Jones, whose vote for Basar on a final ballot had originally broken a deadlock in Basar’s favor.

Jones offered no explanation for his change of heart, though Basar would note to reporters afterward that “you saw who was sitting next to each other.” Basar sat on one side of Jones; on the other side was fellow Republican Terry Roland, who had also sought the chairmanship and served notice that, given another shot at it, he was prepared to try again.

In deference to Jones, who will be absent at the commission meeting of August 24th, the next chairmanship vote will take place on September 14th, with current vice chair Van Turner, a Democrat, presiding. As County Attorney Ross Dyer noted on Monday, current chair Justin Ford’s term will run out at the end of August. The unexpected — and unprecedented — circumstance of Monday had its roots in the shifting alliance structure of the commission, which, ever since last year’s post-election reorganization, had drifted into a quasi-party-line division in which six Democrats, plus Republican Basar, had been one faction, with the other faction consisting of five Republicans plus Ford, who won his chairmanship with GOP support.

Jackson Baker

Former Chattanooga congressman Zach Wamp was in Memphis on Monday, convening a meeting at Owen Brennan’s Restaurant of supporters of the presidential candidacy of Florida Senator Mario Rubio. Here, Wamp consults with Rubio’s West Tennessee chairman, Germantown state Senator Brian Kelsey.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Roundabout to a Dead End

Last Friday, the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) announced that it would delay its planned closure of the I-55 “Old Bridge” over the Mississippi River for at least a year while it conducted “further studies” on the economic impact of the project.

“Over the past several weeks, we have heard from residents, business owners, elected officials, and other stakeholders in Memphis and in Arkansas, and we understand there is a significant level of concern over a full closure of the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge,” TDOT Commissioner John Schroer said. “We want to take the opportunity to address those concerns before moving forward with construction.” In other words, back to the drawing board.

I don’t want to say there were a couple high-fives given in the Flyer office, but we were pretty pleased that our efforts to raise civic consciousness on this ill-advised plan bore some fruit. Reporter Toby Sells covered the project extensively, and we vigorously editorialized against it. The Commercial Appeal, on the other hand, editorialized in support of the closure project and ran a couple of soft, pro-TDOT articles.

Mayor A C Wharton was also seemingly clueless about the project’s potential to devastate the local economy, offering tepid, boilerplate support for TDOT’s bridge closure plan.

Whoever the next mayor is, whether it’s Wharton or one of the candidates running against him, it’s essential that he get actively involved in helping to ensure that this TDOT project has as small a negative impact as possible on our tourism business, our transportation and distribution industry, and the booming Bass Pro Pyramid. Memphis business and political leaders need to be proactive and not let Nashville bureaucrats determine our future. They need to join with officials on the Arkansas side — who should get most of the credit for stopping the closure plan — and begin working with TDOT to craft the least painful alternative.

To that end, easy access to downtown (and Bass Pro) via northbound I-55 to Riverside is critical. That means the proposed “roundabout” also has to be off the table. Replacing a free-flowing four-lane entrance to (and exit from) the city with an intersection that forces all north-south traffic to interact with Crump Boulevard traffic heading onto and off the bridge is not progress.

But for now, we’re content to enjoy a victorious first step — stopping what TDOT officials said less than a month ago was the absolute “final plan.” No further changes were possible, they said. In response to which, I’m happy to quote Arkansas state Senator Keith Ingram, who said, prophetically: “TDOT probably didn’t think the Overton Park expressway was going to be stopped, either.”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Few Surprises in Memphis Election Filings

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The probable lineups for various races in the forthcoming Memphis city election have been set for so long — most of them long before last week’s filing deadline — that it was interesting indeed to see some surprises develop before the stroke of noon on Thursday.

• There were no real surprises in the mayor’s race. It remains the case that of the 12 candidates who qualified, only four can be considered viable: incumbent Mayor  A C Wharton, Councilmen Jim Strickland and Harold Collins, and Memphis Police Association head Mike Williams. Wharton and Strickland are, at this point, in the first tier all by themselves.

In any case, the four mentioned candidates, by a general consensus, seem to have been settled on as the four contestants in a series of forthcoming forum/debate events, though all mayoral  candidates and candidates in other races, for that matter, have been invited to Thursday night’s Sierra Club environmental forum at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library. 

There was a genuine surprise in the council District 2 race, however: Frank Colvett‘s last-minute entry after the unexpected withdrawal of incumbent Bill Boyd presents voters with a likely showdown between party-affiliated entries. Colvett, president of GreenScape in Memphis, a custom design firm, is a longtime Republican activist who has served as state party treasurer and has been an active member of the Northeast Shelby Republican Club. He has already lined up backing from several GOP heavyweights.

His major opposition will probably come from newcomer Rachel Knox, who made a name for herself as an audience participant in Memphis City Council debates, especially on behalf of employees facing reductions in their benefits. Knox seems to have solid backing from Democrats, both grassroot and establishment, and is riding a wave of recent fund-raisers, but District 2 traditionally favors Republicans.

There are three other candidates in the race: Detric Golden, who switched from the mayor’s race; Jim Tomasik, who has run partisan races as both a Republican and a Libertarian, and this time is running on a de-annexationist ticket; and Marti Miller.

• Despite the up-to-the-brink aspect of it, there was no great surprise in the filing-day withdrawal of Justin Ford from the mayor’s race. Virtually from the moment of his first announcement, the youthful Shelby County Commission chairman had deported himself less like a real candidate and more like someone exploring the best way to maximize his name identification without committing himself to the serious effort of a campaign. In the vernacular of sport, Ford never made a football move.

The question is, does Ford’s switch to the race for city court clerk mean that a real race can be expected of him for that office? That race already features quite a few name players. Besides one Thomas Long, son of the incumbent, there are Shep Wilbun, a former City Council member and Juvenile Court clerk who has kept his name active; Wanda Halbert, who is just coming off a relatively long incumbency on the council; and, in what may be the real surprise in this race, Kay Spalding Robilio, who was a Circuit Court judge for a quarter century before resigning from the bench last year.

The clerk’s race is a winner-take-all, so even someone like the relatively unknown William Chism Jr., whose last name — a familiar one in local politics (Democrat Sidney, Republican George) — got him the Democratic nomination last year for Probate Court clerk, can hope for a lottery-like score.

• Did the district attorney general’s office stonewall a request by veteran political figure and twice-convicted felon Joe Cooper to have his citizenship rights restored in time to file for the Super District 9, Position 2 seat? Cooper alleges that is the case, and both the D.A.’s office and the state of Tennessee seem to have corroborated their opposition officially in responses to recent court hearings.

In any case, the D.A.’s office professed not to be able to have an attorney present for a hearing on Cooper’s case before Judge Robert Childers in Circuit Court early last week, and Cooper was forced into the expedient of seeking an injunction in Chancery Court for a stay on the filing deadline that would apparently have applied to all candidates in all races.

At that Thursday hearing, not two hours before the filing deadline, Chancellor Jim Kyle told Cooper that he could not rule on the case unless Cooper had actually filed a petition that had been denied. Subsequently, Cooper paid his filing fee at the Election Commission and submitted a petition that had two signatures, 23 less than the 25 required. It will be up to the Election Commission to rule on its admissibility.

Cooper has been campaigning, one way or another, for months. He had engaged professional consultants and had begun putting up campaign signs. To the question of why, in all this time, he hadn’t bothered to acquire at least 25 signatures on a qualifying petition, he answers to the effect that the state had advised him he could not legally do so before having his rights restored. And, for whatever reason, his court challenge on that point waited until very late in the game, indeed.

Though Cooper was talking of strategies ranging from a crash campaign to present signatures to the Election Commission to the launching of appeals to the state attorney general’s office or to the U.S. Justice Department, he acknowledges that his chances of getting anywhere, at least for this election season, seem remote. 

Meanwhile, state Representative G.A. Hardaway is working on a long-range solution to problems of this sort. Hardaway, who made it clear he was not endorsing Cooper but had made himself available as a potential witness for Cooper in Circuit Court, said he would file legislation in the 2016 General Assembly that would automatically restore a convicted defendant’s citizenship rights upon completion of his sentence, putting the burden of subsequent challenge on the state. Even without Cooper, the Super District 9, Position 2 race will not lack from drama. IBEW union leader Paul Shaffer will have significant support from Democrats, while the well-funded Philip Spinosa can count on solid backing from Republicans. Two former School Board members, Stephanie Gatewood and Kenneth Whalum both have appealed to existing, somewhat diverse constituencies. And the two remaining candidates, Tim Cook, who has some name recognition from previous races, and Lynn Moss, who is running on the same de-annexationist platform as Tomasik in District 2, can hope that lightning will strike in this winner-take-all race, which as an at-large position, has no runoff.

Other city races will be briefly previewed next week.

Two memorial events highlighted the weekend. On Saturday, former President Bill Clinton delivered a eulogy for Circuit Court Judge D’Army Bailey before a large crowd at Mississippi Boulevard Baptist Church. In his remarks, Clinton paid tribute to Bailey’s chief creation, the National Civil Rights Museum, as an institution whose power would never die.

Clinton concluded with these words: “This man was moving all his life. … He moved. To the very end he moved. And God rest his soul.”

A smaller ceremony was held Saturday at the chapel of Elmwood Cemetery for Pierre Kimsey, producer of several well-watched public affairs programs at WKNO-TV, including Behind the Headlines. One of the features of that event was the showing of several Emmy-winning feature shorts produced and directed by Kimsey.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Into The Sunset

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The once — and seemingly future — gravesite of General Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife is on a promontory at Elmwood Cemetery called Chapel Hill. Dominated at its apex by a statue of Jesus, the hill slopes down on its western side to a grassy area containing several graves adorned with the name “Forrest,” — four of them in a row belonging to his brothers, all of whom, according to the stones’ modest inscriptions, served as cavalry officers for the Confederate States of America. In front of these modest markers is a plain grassy area that appears vacant and undisturbed — but that is somewhat misleading, for this earth has been turned more than once, the last time, some 110 years ago, in 1905, so that General Forrest and his wife, Mary, could be disinterred and reburied a mile and a half north, under a splendid bronze statue of the general on horseback. And there it has remained, the centerpiece of an urban park named for a man who was regarded for many decades as a local hero of heroes: Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose military tactics are so highly regarded that they are taught at West Point, whose exploits were countless, and whose valor was marked by the many horses that were shot out from under him in battle.

Jackson Baker

The Forrests would occupy the space in front of the general’s brothers at Elmwood Cemetery.

A month ago, during the whiplash of worldwide revulsion that followed the gunning down in Charleston, South Carolina, of nine African Americans engaged in bible study by a delusional white youth who embraced Confederate imagery, the rebel battle flag began being hauled down from its official places everywhere, as a symbol of an idea whose time had not only come and gone but had clearly become toxic.

And, as Southerners, dazed and horrified by the tragedy like everyone else, looked closer at a venerated Confederate heritage they had long taken for granted, it began to dawn on many that the poison may always have been there. As they read the published manifestoes of the secessionist states, one after another of them proclaiming as their casus belli the need to defend white supremacy and the God-given right to subjugate blacks, the rhetoric of those forefathers could not be cleanly disentangled from the recent ravings of the lunatic Dylann Roof.

Nor could absolution from the legacy of this racial hubris be conferred on the persona of General Forrest — a slave trader before the war, a commander accused during the war of responsibility for the massacre of black Union troops trying to surrender at Fort Pillow, and the documented founder and first Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan after the war.

All this was hard to explain away, although the general’s defenders certainly tried, as the Memphis statue increasingly became a provocation — not only to the city’s African-American population, now a political majority, but to business interests and civic-minded folk who saw the official veneration of Forrest as an embarrassment and a hindrance to civic progress.

Mayor A C Wharton responded to the outrage in Charleston by calling for the expedited removal of the statue and gravesites from what was now called Health Sciences Park. It was the culmination of a process that had long been building.


• Anti-Confederate sentiment first flared in Memphis in earnest in 2005. The Forrest statue was directly assailed by a group of African-American dignitaries, including Shelby County Commissioner Walter Bailey and the Rev. LaSimba Gray, while the Center City Commission (now the Downtown Memphis Commission) petitioned the City Council to consider renaming not only Forrest Park but Jefferson Davis Park and Confederate Park downtown.

Influential businessman Karl Schledwitz, a trustee of the University of Tennessee, whose medical-school buildings surround the park property, made the first proposal for an outright removal of the statue and the return of the Forrests’ remains to Elmwood Cemetery. City Councilman Myron Lowery made a more modest suggestion to add a monument to Ida B. Wells and perhaps other heroic black figures and to give the park a different name.

Justin Fox Burks

Myron Lowery and youthful demonstrators at the general’s statue last week.

In the middle of all this ferment, the Rev. Al Sharpton came down to add his two cents. But then Mayor Willie Herenton held a news conference to denounce “outside agitators” and scotch what he considered the wild talk of name changes and tampering with monuments. The mayor did propose transferring maintenance of Forrest Park to UT, however, and, after all the fuss, that change was made.

Further defusing the situation had been advice from then state Senator Steve Cohen. Minutes of the climactic meeting of the Center City Commission in 2005 record Cohen’s position this way: “There have been things that have offended him as a minority, but he has learned to overcome those personal offenses and see things in a bigger light. … He asked for the board to reconsider this issue and not pass it forward, for it will do no good and will only do harm.”

In the end, the then Center City Commission’s resolution for name changes of the downtown parks, spearheaded by then chairman Rickey Peete and board member (later director) Paul Morris, was ignored by the council, as well as by the Chamber of Commerce, the Landmarks Commission, and the Convention & Visitors Bureau. Even Bailey would say, “I think we’re at a point where until such time as we see some concern by our city leaders, we have to continue to pause.”

An extended pause did ensue, during which, in 2009, over objections from Bailey, state Representative G.A. Hardaway, and others locally, Forrest Park was added to the National Register of Historic Places. That was something of a coup for N.B. Forrest Camp 215, the local unit of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which had submitted the nomination to the National Register and which had been assisting in routine maintenance of the park for years.


• Things had cooled off and settled into something of a détente between contending parties until 2011, when the Sons of Confederate Veterans, confident that the moment of danger had passed, arguably overplayed their hand.

Lee Millar, an officer of N.B. Forest Camp 215, had written a letter to Cindy Buchanan, then city parks director, proposing to place a new sign with the name “Forrest Park” on the Union Avenue side of the park. Millar had signed his letter, however, not as an officer of the Sons of Confederate Veterans but as chairman of the Shelby County Historical Commission, a post he held at the time.

Buchanan responded with a letter that said, in part, “We appreciate the commission’s offer to provide this important signage for one of the city’s historic parks. … The proposal to create a low monument style sign of Tennessee granite with the park name carved in the front was reviewed by park design staff and found to be appropriate in concept … similar to the monument style signage placed by the city at Overton Park.”

The letter directed Millar to meet with Mike Flowers, administrator of park planning and development, to follow through on the construction and installation of the sign. Copies of Buchanan’s letter were apparently sent to Flowers and then city CAO George Little.

That is as far as the process went, when N.B. Forrest Camp 215 (not the Shelby County Historical Commission), apparently acting on the strength of Buchanan’s letter and dispensing with the suggested further meeting with city officials, raised $9,000 — enough to pay for a large granite sign saying “FORREST PARK.”

The sign sat there for some weeks until its presence was brought to the attention of Little, who insisted that the sign was unauthorized — as, from his point of view, it was: no city permit having been issued.

Little had the sign removed early in 2013, and the simmering crisis was reignited. It was fired up even further when, amid a new groundswell for changing the names of the three Confederate-tinged downtown parks, two state legislators — state Representative Steve McDaniel of Parkers Crossroads and state Senator Bill Ketron of Murfreesboro — rushed into passage HB553, a bill declaring that “[n]o statue, monument, memorial, nameplate, or plaque which has been erected for, or named or dedicated in honor of …” [the bill then names a seemingly complete list of America’s wars, including the Civil War] “… located on public property, may be relocated, removed, altered, renamed, rededicated, or otherwise disturbed.”

The bill went even further, prohibiting name changes to any “statue, monument, memorial, nameplate, plaque, historic flag display, school, street, bridge, building, park preserve, or reserve which has been erected for, or named or dedicated in honor of, any historical military figure, historical military event, military organization, or military unit” on public property.

Though the bill created obstacles to altering the status of the general’s statue and the downtown parks and provided grounds for litigation that still exist, it also inflamed sentiment on the Memphis City Council, which saw this maneuver as an outright transgression by the legislature against local sovereignty. The council’s reaction was further stoked by counsel Allan Wade’s statement that McDaniel and Ketron had been acting on a suggestion by Millar.

Councilman Shea Flinn referred to “the ironic war of aggression from our northern neighbor in Nashville,” while Councilman Harold Collins said, “We will never let the legislature in Nashville control what we in Memphis will do for ourselves.”

Thereupon the council, hesitant to act in 2005, voted 10-0, with three abstentions, for name changes in three downtown parks: Forrest Park would become Health Sciences Park; Jefferson Davis Park would become Mississippi River Park; and Confederate Park was renamed Memphis Park.

And there matters stood until the awful events in Charlleston June 17th.


• Wharton’s demand for the removal of the statue and graves from what was now Health Sciences Park followed quickly upon the atrocity, and council chairman Lowery’s authorship of a resolution to return the remains to Elmwood and an ordinance to remove the statue was announced almost immediately afterward. Unlike the cases of 2005 and 2013, there was no hint of a contrary view on the council.

A quantum leap in consciousness had occurred in Memphis, as elsewhere. In South Carolina, Governor Nikki Haley and a suddenly compliant legislature agreed to lower the capitol’s ceremonial Confederate battle flag. In Mississippi, official action was begun to remove Confederate imagery from that state’s flag.

Justin Fox Burks

A protestor taunts a Forrest loyalist.

On July 7th, Lowery’s proposals were approved unanimously by the council.

The issue was spoken to succinctly on that Tuesday night by, of all people, Bill Boyd, the venerable survivor of the old white-tinted South Side who can, as he did that night, cite the fact that Marcus Winchester, the first Mayor of Memphis, was his great-grandfather, and who had offered words of praise for Forrest in the parks-naming debate of 2013. 

Defenders of Forrest, a handful of whom testified before the council, deny Forrest’s complicity in the massacre of surrendering black Union troops at Fort Pillow in 1864, and maintain that the general was not really the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Or that, if he was, it was not a viciously intended organization with racist terror at its core. Or that, if other sorts allowed it to become that, Forrest expeditiously dissociated himself from it. Or whatever.

Justin Fox Burks

Children wonder what all the fuss is about.

Boyd made allowance for all these attempted exculpations in his remarks, but, as he noted, they all ignored the one fact of Forrest’s life that was undeniable: that he made his living before the war as a slave trader. That was something Forrest did of his own free will, for personal gain, said Boyd. Slavery was the stain on him, it was the stain on the Confederacy, and there was no defending it. And that was why Boyd was willing to see the general’s statue and remains removed from a place of official honor in downtown Memphis.

And that is why city government and state government and regional and national sentiment, across ideological and party lines, are all moving so deliberately and definitively to distance themselves from the likes of General Forrest and the whole panoply of the Confederacy — that once vaunted “heritage” now seen as a cover for what had been racial despotism.


• Not everywhere and by everyone, however. As the fates would have it, General Forrest’s birthday celebration occurred on schedule this past Sunday, with a formidable and impressive display of Confederate colors and a large and devoted crowd of celebrants. The turnout dwarfed a modest demonstration of youthful anti-Forrest protesters held earlier in the week. Ironically, a proclamation in General Forrest’s honor from Governor Bill Haslam was read to the appreciative crowd. State law requires such a thing, Forrest’s birthday being one of six recognized state holidays. The governor, who has since advocated the removal of a bust of General Forrest from the state capitol, had penned the required accolade in early June, pre-Charleston.

The keynote speaker at Sunday’s celebration was one Ron Sydnor, an African American from Kentucky who serves as superintendent of Jefferson Davis State Historic Site there. He spent an hour providing biographical details about Davis, concluding with a story involving a congenial time spent together by the Confederate president and the “wizard of the saddle,” then a city alderman and, like Davis, involved in the insurance business in Memphis.

After Sydnor’s address, which was warmly applauded, came the ceremonial laying of wreaths at the base of the Forrest statue and a musket salute to the general by members of “the 17th Mississippi and 51st Tennessee Infantry, C.S.A.”

Jackson Baker

The general’s supporters at his birthday celebration Sunday.

But clearly, as they say, events are now in the saddle, despite the efforts of Forrest’s defenders, who have included esteemed deceased Memphis novelist/historian Shelby Foote, who in his monumental trilogy, The Civil War, lionized Forrest and discounted tales of his misconduct at Fort Pillow. If and when Nathan Bedford Forrest comes to rest again in his family plot at Elmwood Cemetery, he and his wife, Mary, will be reburied in their old vacated spot, immediately to the right of the graves of Foote and his wife.

The writer, as renowned a chronicler as Forrest was a warrior, was given his pick of sites at Elmwood, and this is the spot he chose.

That is one last tribute that, come what may, cannot be taken away from the general. 

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

On the Cusp

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Let the record show that Harold Collins, the city council member whose mayoral candidacy is one of the key variables of the 2015 election season, was able to sport the first prominent campaign signs around town.

And Collins’ reported second-quarter financial receipts of $48,812, giving him a total on hand of $61,405, support the idea that his candidacy is feasible, depending on developments in the roughly two-and-a-half months remaining in the city election period. (That’s when, as conventional wisdom has it, people actually start paying attention.)

As will be seen, Collins’ financial assets don’t begin to compare to those of the two presumed mayoral frontrunners (incumbent Mayor A C Wharton and Collins’ council colleague Jim Strickland) or to a couple of unusually well-endowed council candidates, for that matter. His candidacy, of necessity, will focus more on grass-roots activity, especially on his home ground of Whitehaven, one of the areas with a voter population large enough to be one candidate’s base (or the source of another’s swing vote).

From that standpoint, the early campaign signs are a good omen.

And let it be said that Kenneth Whalum, Jr., the New Olivet pastor and former school board member whose will-he or won’t-he attitude toward a mayoral race has made him the great unknown quantity of 2015, had scheduled to announce his plans for 2015 on Tuesday night at Church Park, well after this column must deadline for the week. We’ll catch with up the news online.

In April, Whalum drew petitions for mayor, for city council District 5 seat, and for the council’s Super District 9, Position 2 seat. The fact that he finished a close second in the 2014 Democratic primary for Shelby County mayor, even while being out of the country during the final weeks, has given his announcement a certain suspense value.

Memphis Police Association’s Mike Williams, who filed last week, has, at the very least, a niche following among aggrieved city employees, and especially among fire and police employees. He has a tight but active support group, but his reported second-quarter receipts of $6,204 make his race an uphill battle.   

County Commission chairman Justin Ford has also filed, as has James Harvey, his predecessor, but it remains to be seen how serious their candidacies are.

There is no doubting that Wharton and Strickland are still the big dogs in the race, certainly financially. Strickland raised $140,521 in the second quarter, while Wharton raised $129,700. Each appears to have $400,000 on hand, and their campaign treasuries are still growing. One possible caveat regarding those figures: The mayor has committed more money to date than has Strickland.

The possible relevance of that fact became obvious on Saturday, as Strickland and an aide braved 100-degree weather to go door-knocking on Walnut Grove, looking in particular for places to locate yard signs on that highly visible thoroughfare. Strickland got reasonably good feedback from the homeowners, but he won’t have the signs ready for delivery until August 1st.

Wharton continued last week with a series of modest-sized fund-raisers, located in upscale areas where he faces competition from Strickland. One of these was at Waterford Plaza, where he spoke to a group of women supporters and delivered one of those point-by-point surveys of city projects at which the mayor is both glib and convincing. He also addressed his concern that opponents portray him as “the Grinch” for having to impose austerity measures in response to intractable budget problems.

Thursday is filing deadline for city positions, with the withdrawal deadline a week later. Then we’ll know for sure what we’re dealing with.