Tag: black

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Cover Feature News

Chez Chumney

Carol Chumney ended her campaign for city mayor at 10 o’clock Thursday night, in the same aggressive spirit that distinguished her term on the Memphis City Council. Promising to “work with Mayor Herenton any way I can” in her concession speech, she nevertheless took the opportunity to launch a final volley at the city leadership, saying, “We have sent a message that Memphis deserves better.”

The parting shot at Mayor Herenton rallied the crowd of more than a hundred close supporters and volunteers gathered in the Peabody’s Continental Ballroom, most of whom hadn’t seen their candidate in person since the election results were announced on television. For many, it was clearly a cathartic end to a long and exhausting day.

Earlier, as the first few precinct reports trickled in by word of mouth, the mood at Chumney’s election night party was buoyant, if slightly tense, and continued to remain so even as the early returns showed Mayor Herenton with a significant lead. But by the end of the night, with the outcome all but certain, any trace of that early hope had given way to sore discontent.

“I’m disappointed in the people of Memphis,” said longtime Chumney supporter Zenia Revitz. “I can’t believe that they didn’t open their eyes and see what’s going on in this community.” Her reaction may have best captured the mixed emotions felt by those present, as she quickly qualified her remark by adding, “So far, that is. We’re only at 50 percent,” referring to the number of precincts still uncounted. No one at the event was willing to fully give up the chance of a turnaround until it became unmistakably clear that none would come.

Another strong supporter, Joan Solomon, summarized what many at the party saw as a flawed election process, stating, “Everyone who voted for Morris was voting for Herenton.”

A Rasmussen poll commissioned by WHBQ Fox-13, taken just days before the election, showed that in a two-way race against Herenton, either Chumney or Morris would have won with a comfortable majority. Together, the two candidates provided the embattled mayor with the chance to win a fifth term with 42 percent of the vote.

The message of the Chumney campaign was strongly populist, and as such, their election strategy was centered around volunteer support. Noting in her concession speech that she was “outspent probably about two to one,” the councilwoman credited “hundreds of volunteers” with a large measure of her success. Campaign manager Charles Blumenthal was also quick to praise the campaign’s unpaid workers, calling the operation “a well-oiled machine,” adding that out of 14 full-time staff, only four were paid.

Indeed, it was a different campaign from what one usually sees in Memphis. It began with little money and very little financial support from the business community. What fund-raising momentum there was didn’t come until the final month of the race. Chumney’s largest donations came from labor unions and trade associations, with most of the city’s old money going to Herman Morris.

Also remarkable was the fact that compared with the two other major candidates, few current or former elected officials endorsed Chumney, with only two notables present at the election night event. State representative Mike Kernell, long an ally and friend of Chumney’s, was there, along with freshman Shelby County commissioner Steve Mulroy, who appeared with her onstage. Otherwise, the rest of her support appeared to come from family, friends, activists, and more than a few political neophytes.

While there were more whites than blacks at Chumney’s final campaign stop, Chumney was pleased by the support she received from predominantly black neighborhoods. “There were some [African-American] precincts where I was running at 30 percent,” she said. “It made me feel good.”

After the loss, Chumney was upbeat but expressed disappointment in the low turnout: “The people who didn’t vote should be kicking themselves because this was their chance to make a change.”

Ineligible to run for mayor and City Council at the same time, Chumney is out of public office for the first time in many years. After finishing the remainder of her council term, she said she plans to return to her private law practice, but she was otherwise undecided on any future political plans.

“Who knows?” she said. “We’ll see what the future holds.”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Post-Election, Herenton Settles Accounts With Pollsters, Ford, Morris Et Al.

CREDIT: jb

“The press had it all wrong. So did the pollsters. I said all along it was
mathematically impossible for either Chumney or Morris to beat me.”

That was Mayor Willie Herenton on Monday afternoon, holding court in his outer
office and still basking in a fifth-term victory that was all the sweeter
because it exceeded expectations. Everybody else’s expectations, that is. “I
knew I won early voting,” Herenton said.

And he had another theory about the mayoral voting that ended with him on top
with 70,177 votes, some 13,000 more than his closest competitor, Councilwoman
Carol Chumney. The mayor thought that too much analysis had been wasted on the
battle for white votes between Chumney and the third-place finisher, former Memphis
Light, Gas & Water head Herman Morris. Pundits and reporters alike had neglected
to factor him into that contest-within-a-contest, Herenton insisted.

Yes, on election night Herenton had inveighed against “haters” in a euphemistic
way reminiscent of former congressman Harold Ford Sr.’s condemnation of “East
Memphis devils” from his own post-election platform in 1994.

To be sure, whites had been virtually absent from Herenton’s victory celebration
at the Cook Convention Center, and no one was likely to forget the mayor’s
frequent campaign references to conspiratorial “snakes” and past trickery by the
white power-establishment, nor his persistent declarations that the 2007 mayoral
contest was about “race and power.”

Yet he was now willing to insist that he had been a serious contender for the
white vote all along. Nay, more — that his success with white voters is what
made the difference in this year’s race.

“I’ve been analyzing the returns,” the mayor said, “and I don’t think I got
70,000 African-American votes. I think 10,000 whites voted for me.”

If that was true, and had the lion’s share of those 10,000 votes gone instead
for Chumney, she might indeed have won — an argument that might fuel a
conspiracy theory about managed polls that the runner-up’s camp seems to be
taking seriously.)

Herenton himself has an eye for conspiracy. He sees the aborted visit by Ford
Sr. to a climactic Herenton rally — one that ended in a widely publicized
no-show by the former congressman — in that light. Having missed the rally, Ford
might at least have made a public endorsement of his candidacy. “But he couldn’t
even do that!” Herenton said.

Noting that longtime adversary Ford had made an early-voting trip into Memphis
on the eve of that rally, the mayor said, “I’m convinced he came down here just
to cast a vote against me!” And he promised: “I’ll have some things to say about
him [Ford] later on.”


THE DRUG TEST ISSUE

Another
sore point with Herenton was Morris’ frequent challenges for the mayor and the
rest of the field to join him in taking a drug test. The mayor vanished into his
inner office temporarily and returned with several pages showing the results of
a test, taken for insurance purposes back in June that demonstrated negative
findings in such categories as HIV, cocaine, alcohol, and tobacco.

He asked me to withhold specific figures, and I will. But it was clear — on this
medical accounting, at least — that the mayor had earned a clean bill of health,
in every sense of the term. As he said, he looked to be in terrific shape for a
67-year-old man. Even his blood pressure, as he pointed out, was within range.
“See?” he said, smiling. “You people in the press can’t even give me high blood
pressure!”

The mayor made a special point concerning when the report had been done. “Look
at the date: June 26th! That was before [Morris] started that nonsense about
drug tests. Some people advised me to show these results, but I had no intention
of dignifying him with a response, as if I owed him an answer on something like
that!

“Nothing goes in my body stronger than aspirin. Oh, I’ve admitted I like a red
wine — a Merlot. But that’s it,” he concluded.


ON FIXING THE CITY

By now,
Herenton had been joined by former city CAO and current MLGW overseer and Plough
Foundation head Rick Masson, who, like his ex-boss, seemed to be floating on the
kind of post-election high that needs no drug to activate.

Masson said nothing, but his facial expression alternated between the watchful
attentiveness required of any good subordinate and the kind of smirk that ought
to be outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

Herenton turned to the issue of his election night remarks, the bitterness of
which had been unmistakable. “I’m okay now. I got that out of my system,” he
said.

He recalled being at the airport recently when a white man came over —
strutting, to hear the mayor tell it:

“He said [Herenton imitating a peremptory voice]: ‘Mayor! When are you going to
start trying to fix our city?’

“I looked back at him and said, ‘And when are you going to start helping me?’ He
didn’t have anything to say to that.”

The mayor’s message seemed to be that he’s ready to listen whenever his critics
want to start talking — so long as it’s a real dialogue.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Herenton: A Winner Again — But Still in Need of Unity

CREDIT: Preston Lauterbach


BY
JACKSON BAKER |
OCT 6, 2007

Willie Herenton, Memphis’
African-American mayor, easily won reelection to an unprecedented fifth term
Thursday in a city election whose outcome was strangely anti-climactic given
advance hoopla from recent polls that seemed to promise a tight three-way
race.

Sorely tested for the first
time for the first time since his first mayoral race in 1991, the ex-Golden
Glover, who was undefeated in the ring as a youth, maintained his
unblemished record as a political campaigner, as well.

With all precincts in,
Herenton had 70,177 votes, or 42 percent of the total. He was followed by city
councilwoman Carol Chumney, with 57,180 votes, or 35 percent, and former
Memphis Light Gas & Water head Herman Morris, who garnered 35, 158 votes, or
21 percent.

In the end, Herenton – whose
vote came almost exclusively from the city’s black voters – seemed to have
made the case that the race was between himself and Chumney, a white who had
played scourge and gadfly to his administration for the last four years.

A rush to the polls of some
75,000 voters, a record, in the two-week early-voting period was oddly
counter-pointed by a smaller-than-expected turnout on Election Day.
Ultimately, the same demographic inner-city base that prevailed for Herenton
in his historic 1991 win over an entrenched white incumbent, Dick Hackett, was
at his disposal again. Demographic trends have since accelerated, and an
estimated 65 percent of Thursday’s voters in a city now firmly majority-black
were African-American.

A Head Start in the Early Vote

Late in the campaign, as polls showed her within a
percentage point or two of Herenton, a confident Chumney had proclaimed,
“We’re winning early voting, with fifty percent of the vote,” That turned out
to be well short of the mark (Herenton netted an estimated 41 percent of early
votes). Chumney’s expectations were as unrealistic in their way as the
consistent claims of former Shelby County Commissioner John Willingham, the
most prominent of the also-rans in a 14-strong field, that he had a dual base
among Republicans and black Memphians that would propel him to
victory.

Willingham, a white, a maverick, and a conservative,
proved to have no base at all, finishing with less than 1 percent of the vote.
His possession of an endorsement from the Shelby County Republican Party
gained him virtually nothing, as Chumney, who served 13 years in the
legislature as a Democratic state representative, captured most Republican
votes in a city where the terms “Republican” and “white” have a significant
overlap.

It seemed clear that the latter of those two
descriptors played a profound role in the outcome of this election, as it had
in Herenton’s first race in 1991. Third-place finisher Morris, the
mustachioed, reserved former head of Memphis Light Gas & Water, the city
utility, spent most of his time competing with Chumney for white voters and,
though African-American himself and, for that matter, a stalwart of the NAACP
and a veteran of the civil rights struggle, fared no better among black voters
than she did. His failure to gain traction in the inner city was owing to
several factors – ranging from his decidedly bourgeois image to an apparent
reluctance among black voters to let themselves be divided.

The Ford No-Show

An interesting sidelight to the campaign was an all-out
publicity campaign by the Herenton campaign last weekend promising
reconciliation between the mayor and his longtime inner-city adversary, former
congressman Harold Ford Sr., now a well-paid consultant living in Florida.
Ford, said a variety of well-circulated handbills, had joined “Team Herenton
’07” and would appear with Herenton at a giant rally at the mayor’s South
Memphis church. That would have been a reprise of the ad hoc collaboration
between the two rivals that most observers credit for Herenton’s bare 162-vote
margin of victory in 1991.

In the event, Ford was a no-show at the Tuesday night
rally, and the eleventh-hour embarrassment for the mayor was doubled by the
former congressman’s disinclination, when contacted by the media, even to make
a public statement endorsing Herenton. The whole affair lent an air of
desperation to the Herenton campaign effort but turned out to be no big deal.
If anything, it reinforced the general impression of precipitant decline for
the once legendary Ford-family political organization – beset by convictions,
indictments, and other tarnish and with its current star, Harold Ford Jr.,
having decamped for Nashville and the Democratic Leadership Council.

David Cocke, a former Democratic Party chairman and a
longtime ally of the Ford political clan, supported Chumney but foresaw the
Herenton victory, putting it this way late in the campaign: “Most people do
not vote on the basis of ideas or issues. They vote from the standpoint of a
common cultural experience.” And from that standpoint Willie Herenton, a
onetime Golden Gloves boxing champion who contemptuously dismissed the visibly
mature Morris as a “boy” trying to do a man’s job, had first dibs on the
street cred.

Still, the former schools superintendent is also a
seasoned executive who in his four terms to date had brought about extensive
downtown redevelopment and earned a good working relationship with the Memphis
business establishment – one, however, that had begun to fray around the edges
in the last year or so due to a rising crime rate (only last week FBI
statistics showed the city to be Number One in that regard in the nation) and
fluctuating economic indicators.

At some point in 2008, either on the August general
ballot for two countywide offices or on the November ballot for state and
federal offices, the Charter Commission impaneled by Memphis voters last year
will almost certainly include a provision limiting the mayor and members of
the city council to two four-year terms each. A similar provision in a county
referendum more than a decade ago prevailed by a whopping 84 percent majority,
and results of that sort can be anticipated from next year’s city
vote.

But in the meantime Willie Herenton, who had earned the
unofficial title “Mayor for Life” from friends and foes alike until doubt
crept into that consensus toward the end of his latest term, will be
grandfathered in. He may indeed end up serving indefinitely or may, as many
expect, quit his new term midway, making way for his longtime friend and
sometime campaign manager, Shelby County Mayor A C Wharton, also an African
American. Wharton’s easygoing presence and appeal across both racial and
political lines made him the subject of a widely based draft movement in the
weeks leading up to last July’s withdrawal deadline.

The two mayors had dinner together on the eve of that
deadline, after which Wharton, who had made a show of considering a run,
withdrew from consideration – diffidently but conclusively. That outcome has
given rise to persistent rumors of a deal between the two chief executives, in
which an early exit by Herenton would permit not only Wharton’s succession in
a special election but some sort of stratagem to create a de facto
consolidation between city and county governments. Herenton had served notice
in this campaign year that he intended one last major push for his long-held
goal of consolidation if reelected.

Consolidation Still on His Plate?

When then Nashville mayor Bill Purcell addressed the
Memphis Rotary Club this past summer, he provided some backup for his Memphis
counterpart, who had introduced him, telling the assembled business and civic
leaders that Metropolitan government had been “the smartest thing that
Nashville ever did” and that, if Memphians wanted a government that was too
big, too expensive, and too political, they should keep things just the way
they are. Acknowledging the rivalry between the two Tennessee metropolises,
Purcell quipped that the status quo suited him just fine.

In his victory speech Thursday night, Herenton was
ambivalent on the matter of unity. Even while savoring his victory and
counting his blessings, he expressed what appeared to be sincere hurt over his
unpopularity among white voters – a source of tut-tutting to some Herenton
detractors, a redeeming sign of vulnerability to others. “I’m going to be nice
tonight,” Herenton he had said early on, “but there are some mean,
mean-spirited people in Memphis. These are the haters. I know how to shake
them off,”

Maybe so, maybe no. In any case, he made a pass at
being conciliatory. Looking ahead to restoring relations with the business
community and stemming white resentment (and population flow outward), and
perhaps also reflecting on a newly elected city council which will have a
majority of new members, the mayor said, “Memphis has some major decisions to
make. We have to decide if we want to be one city…or if we want to be a
divided city.”

Thursday’s election results reinforced a sense of
division. “This city is still highly racially polarized,” said John Ryder, a
longtime Memphis Republican figure who co-chaired the campaign of third-place
finisher Morris. “The man in the middle got squeezed,” Ryder said. He was
referring to his candidate, but his remark clearly had more general
application.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

End Notes

First, the good news: The Memphis municipal election of 2007 involved some of the more interesting cross-cultural campaigning, in both the racial and the political senses, that we can remember in recent political history. In particular, white candidates made more

overt appeals to black voters than has been customary of late. A high point (if that is the right term) was the extravagant public claim of also-ran candidate John Willingham, a white Republican, that he was the candidate of black Memphians and had no fewer than 13,000 African-American votes locked up early on.

In this case, the very claim — not the reality of it — was the message.

Now, the bad news: The Memphis municipal election of 2007 involved some of the more flagrant appeals to racial divisiveness that we can remember in recent political history. In particular, Mayor Willie Herenton, who knows better, made several calculated appeals to racial solidarity based on the dubious assumption that there are, on the white side of town, any number of ongoing plots against black political power.

In this case too, the claim itself is the message.

Much money has been spent by the various campaigns on TV and print advertising, yard signs, and other appeals to voters. This, too, has a high side and a low side — inasmuch as the truth content of such communications has been ambivalent at best. (Poor Rickey Peete. Besides a bad conscience and the likelihood of prison time, the tarnished councilman has to live with the fact that his name is now proverbial — having been coupled, rightly or wrongly and sometimes with a bare minimum of justification, with this or that candidate in attack ads.)

Then there are the polls — sometimes commissioned in the interests of specific candidates and sometimes not — and under suspicion of being so even when such is patently not the case. The Flyer itself has neither paid for nor commissioned any polls — though we were the first media outlet to release a key poll by Berje Yacoubian late in the mayoral campaign. This fully annotated sampling was promptly doubted by partisans of the major candidate who did less well than his two opponents.

And, sure enough, another poll came along in another news outlet showing a wholly different configuration. For the record, yet a third major poll, commissioned by a TV station, was released this week, and it conformed quite closely in its results to the poll that ran in the Flyer.

Who’s right? Early readers of this space will still be wondering — as are we — though many will be looking at it ex post facto and will already know how things came out.

In any case, we rest easy with the fact that, in several of the City Council races, talented and able candidates were abundant, and we presume that voters had enough information at their disposal to be able to sift the real from the shoddy and to make the proper decisions.

We can only hope that such a presumption is not itself presumptuous.

Categories
Opinion

A “Momentous” Decision

The most powerful force in the universe is not gravity, earthquakes, or tsunamis. It is American parents bent on getting their children into the school of their choice.

This force — abetted in Greater Memphis by cars and roads, separate city and county school systems, private schools, and the proximity of Mississippi schools — is the reason why the latest federal court desegregation order on Shelby County schools is doomed to fail.

To paraphrase a famous quotation, U.S. district judge Bernice Donald has made her ruling. Now let’s see her make it stick.

At least Donald acknowledged the elephant in the living room: The new Southwind High School between Germantown and Collierville will be, if not this year then next year or the year after that, a virtually all-black high school. As her ruling says, it is expected to have an 88 percent or higher black enrollment on the day it opens this month.

Overall, the Shelby County school system is 34 percent black. There is some nuance and a lot of historical context in Donald’s 62-page order, but the gist of it is that racially identifiable schools are a no-no in the system, and individual schools should more closely mirror the system demographics, plus or minus 15 percent, in both their student body and their faculty.

Courts can rule all they want about public schools, and for a year or two they can dictate the demographics of schools. But parents and politicians are free agents. The people’s court is going to challenge and eventually overrule the federal court. This is especially true in Memphis when a suburban school starts out as a county school and becomes a city school via annexation. In 1980, Shelby County built Kirby High School. It was majority white. Memphis took it over in 2000. Last year, it was 1 percent white. In 2000, Memphis and Shelby County jointly opened Cordova High School, which is now a city school. Its white enrollment declined to 41 percent in 2006-’07, from 60 percent in 2004-’05.

Southwind High School is in the Memphis reserve area. Memphis School Board members approved the site and will eventually take it over. Last year, the Memphis City Council and the Memphis and Shelby County Office of Planning and Development did everything but pull the trigger on the so-called southeast annexation. It failed mainly because council members Tom Marshall and Dedrick Brittenum recused themselves.

Marshall was the architect of the annexation plan. He is still on the council until the end of this year. He is also chairman. He told the Flyer this week he expects the council to take up annexation after the October election. If and when it does, he says this time he will vote for it.

If Memphis annexes Southwind High and selective (i.e., not-gated) nearby neighborhoods — even if it delays the effective date for a few years — then the county school system has to recalculate its racial math. Hundreds of black students and a sprinkling of white students will shift from the county system to the city system.

History suggests that the harder Donald pushes to eliminate racially identifiable schools, the more “churn” she will produce from the people’s court. In 1971, another Memphis federal judge ordered forced busing to desegregate schools. Within three years, nearly 30,000 white students left the system and Memphis had the largest private-school population in the country. Today, more than 95 percent of the 115,000 MCS students attend racially identifiable schools because there are fewer than 9,000 whites in the system.

In her ruling, Donald said the county school district “does not yet merit a passing grade,” and she called the school board’s compliance track record “decidedly mixed.”

In some ways, her historical analysis is generous. She could have pointed out (but did not) that the county board, with no district seats, was all-white until a couple of years ago and that its former superintendent allowed a single real estate developer, Jackie Welch, to pick most of the school sites. In other respects, however, her ruling is naive. It ignores the reality of school choice broadly defined to include magnet schools, separate city and county school systems, private schools, and DeSoto County schools. In the long run, there is nothing that Donald or any federal judge can do to eliminate racially identifiable schools.

The ruling overlooks something else. The Shelby County schools have grown from black flight as well as white flight. In 1987, the system was only 14 percent black compared to 34 percent today. The neighborhoods in the southeast annexation area are primarily middle class. Residents include former Shelby County mayor Jim Rout.

Southwind High School is mentioned only once in the ruling, so it’s impossible to say how much it weighed on Donald’s decision. Appointed by Bill Clinton in 1996, she is the lone black judge on the federal bench in Memphis. Like her judicial colleagues, Donald, a native of DeSoto County and graduate of the University of Memphis, does not grant interviews about pending matters and lets her rulings speak for themselves. What can be said, however, is that Southwind High is a far cry from the dilapidated schools with no air-conditioning and third-hand textbooks of the 1960s and ’70s — a period the ruling describes in great detail, for whatever reason.

Most parents will probably skip the history, arithmetic, and the 62 pages and get to the bottom line: What does it mean for my house, my neighborhood, or my kid?

Donald’s order calls for a special master — a “neutral expert” in desegregation issues — to be picked within 30 days. The county school board is supposed to achieve full compliance, as determined by Donald and the special master, by 2012. Apparently, Southwind High School will be allowed to open this month as a “racially identifiable”county school that doesn’t meet the county guidelines. After this year, it’s anyone’s guess.

With positive leadership and a focus on excellence instead of race, Southwind High has a chance to be a very good school. Instead, sadly, it has already been called a dumping ground by one neighborhood leader.

Donald writes about “the momentous, irreversible nature of this court’s pending decision.” But it could be momentous in a different way than she thinks.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

It’s a Rap

“Back in the days our parents used to take care of us/Look at ’em now/They even f*****’ scared of us.” — Notorious B.I.G., “Things Done Changed”

Let it never be forgotten that, in the beginning, hip-hop documented the disintegration of the community that created it. It did not cause this disintegration.

The messy dissolution of the civil rights movement. The crack epidemic. Government disinvestment. White flight. These are the things that ravaged urban communities across the country. In the beginning, so-called gangsta rap merely reported from the rubble.

But, over the past decade or so, it’s become impossible for even thoughtful fans of the music not to acknowledge how this relationship between culture and community has evolved. In recent years, too much hip-hop has at best exploited and at its too-frequent worst exacerbated the problems it once merely detailed.

Now topics such as gun violence, drug dealing, and the degradation of women have become rote accoutrements for many emerging rappers, akin to ripped jeans and frizzy hair for ’80s metal bands, albeit with a real-world downside for artists, listeners, and innocent bystanders alike.

As Memphis celebrates the 50th anniversary of Stax, it’s unbearably easy to see the juxtaposition between a music that served its community and one that largely preys on it. Things done changed.

“You scream obscenity/But it’s publicity that you want.” — Geto Boys, “We Can’t Be Stopped”

This is an important topic, but the reason it’s on the minds of Memphians is a little Don Imus and a lot Commercial Appeal columnist Wendi Thomas, who raised a familiar stink last month about local rappers Three 6 Mafia performing at the Beale Street Music Fest. This felt like a publicity ploy for the CA, one made worse by the ridiculous sidebar — a call to action against Memphis In May — that accompanied Thomas’ April 22nd column.

If the paper itself, as opposed to Thomas as a columnist, wants to confront this topic, perhaps it could start by grappling with the cultural content of the music in its arts coverage, something the paper’s music writers have long shied away from.

I find myself feeling very protective of hip-hop these days, but less in opposition to detractors such as Thomas — whose outrage I sympathize with but who, for my tastes, is too uninterested in aesthetics and too willing to conflate “lewd” with truly brutal — than to white defenders of the music whose arguments fit too neatly with what I suppose our president would call “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” These defenses range from naive comparisons of the most heinous rap lyrics to old-time rock-and-roll transgressions to condescending dismissals that are usually a variation on “What do you expect? It’s rap music.”

“I started thinking, how many souls hip-hop has affected/How many dead folks this art resurrected/How many nations this culture connected.” — Common, “The 6th Sense”

The notion that art merely reflects reality is a liberal truism. But it isn’t always true. I think the culture that people consume — especially young people — has a significant impact on their attitudes and behaviors. It’s an active, not just reactive, force. It matters. It’s important.

I love hip-hop: At its peak, it was every bit the rival of the Harlem Renaissance or the soul explosion of the ’60s as a cultural movement, and even now the cartoon idea of hip-hop that most non-fans (and too many alleged fans) carry around with them vastly understates the diversity and richness of the genre. But hip-hop has taken a damaging turn over the past decade, one whose negative impact on real lives is so momentous that it demands to be addressed.

So I’m glad this conversation is taking place regardless of how it got started. I just wish the debate would expand beyond the finger-wagging opponents, targeted artists, and profiteering apologists who dominate the discussion. The people who most need to engage in this dialogue are hip-hop fans themselves.

The largest audience for rap music now, according to most studies, is white — people who generally do not have their reality reflected by the music, if the music reflects any kind of reality at all. These listeners would be wise to investigate their own attraction to the music; their own investment in a cultural model — the black man as badass outlaw hero — that robs the subject of his humanity and feeds the submerged, in many cases unrecognized, battery of racial biases that white listeners bring to the music.

There’s a parasitic relationship here that listeners need to think — and talk — more about. That’s a start.

Chris Herrington is the Flyer‘s film and music editor.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Blue Crush

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Thirty-four turned out to be Mario McNeil’s unlucky number. The 34-year-old African-American man and a friend headed to a favorite hangout, Divine Wings and Bar, the afternoon of March 16th. As the men entered the restaurant, an assailant opened fire on them. According to eyewitness accounts, the gunman jumped into the passenger seat of a Chevy Lumina and sped off. McNeil’s friend survived the attack. Paramedics rushed McNeil to the emergency room at the Med, but McNeil died as the result of gunshot wounds. He was the city’s 34th homicide victim of 2007.

Justin Fox Burks

Operation Blue Crush targets crime hot spots around the city and uses police resources to reduce illegal activity.

Police describe the suspect in the shooting as an “unknown black male.”

The vast majority of murders in Memphis are of the so-called black-on-black variety. The annual number of these crimes has grown from 83 in 2004, to 99 in 2005, to 106 in 2006. These totals account for 65 to 70 percent of all homicides in the city each year.

The Memphis Police Department (MPD) made a staggering 102,000 arrests last year. Yet the homicide statistics as a whole, and the black-on-black murders in particular, have swelled. MPD has instituted a new, technologically sophisticated strategic tool. Now Memphians will see if a new system of crime-fighting can suppress an old problem.

The city has battled its bloody image for over a century. An editorial in the October 10, 1870, edition of the New York Sunday Mercury included the line “to those desirous of shuffling off this mortal coil, to those weary of life, but who have not the courage to shoot or hang themselves, we recommend a trip to Memphis.”

In the early 1920s, a statistician for the Prudential Life Insurance Company named Frank Hoffman dubbed Memphis “murder-town.” Mayors Rowlett Paine andS. Watkins Overton financed research and publications debunking both the claim and Hoffman’s annual rankings of America’s bloodiest cities. While the mayors found plenty of caveats to attach to Hoffman’s numbers, neither could dispute the high total of homicide victims in the city.

Unable to solve the problem of violence, the city’s public-relations efforts turned to consolation. A headline in The Commercial Appeal in September 1928 spoke directly to the fears of a violent, racially split city: “Few Negroes Kill Whites.”

Justin Fox Burks

Richard Janikowski

That trend has held firmly. The stubbornness of residential segregation and the nature of crime in general, and of homicide specifically, have kept interracial murder rates relatively low in Memphis. MPD statistics list 15 homicides involving white victims and black suspects in the three years from 2004 to 2006.

Public attitudes on the issue of black violence in Memphis can be difficult to gather. Reporters asking questions tend to put folks on their best behavior. In the relative privacy of online communication, however, observers of black violence in Memphis speak openly.

An article on WREG.com entitled “Black on Black Crime Growing in Memphis,” which included homicide statistics for the first half of 2006, was posted on the American Renaissance Web site last year. American Renaissance is a self-described “publication of racial-realist thought.” Readers of the site are able to leave comments about articles posted. The responses to the black-violence article revealed a wide range of reactions to the problem.

One post reflects a misperception: “[B]lack on white crime is actually more common … nobody ever even mentions black-on-white crime.”

Another says, “It’s because of the stats like this that the locals near Memphis call the place ‘Memphrica.'”

Many commenters left messages similar to this one: “Well, white folks certainly DO have a stake in this, but how is it their responsibility? How is the weight on them? What are they supposed to do, walk around the city waving their fingers sayin’, ‘Now, now — don’t you go killin’ nobody.'”

Another sums up the frustration with standard — albeit disempowering — explanations: “It’s been said before but deserves to be said again. You can’t put all the blame on poverty, that’s way too simple.”

Richard Janikowski chairs the criminology and criminal justice department at the University of Memphis. As the architect of the much-ballyhooed operation Blue Crush, Janikowski hopes to bring Memphis policing strategy from behind the curve to the cutting edge.

Blue Crush is the local version of data-driven policing programs like CompStat in New York City and I-Clear in Chicago. MPD implemented Blue Crush operations beginning with a pilot program in August 2005, and the program went citywide last October. “The entire guiding principle behind Blue Crush is to get the right resources into the right place at the right day and right time,” Janikowski explains.

“There are criminologists around the country who say that the only way to cure crime is to cure all social problems,” Janikowski says. “This is the old ‘root causes’ thing. The lesson of the last two decades is that we can affect crime without affecting the root causes. Police make a difference. We can use innovative techniques to suppress crime.”

Blue Crush takes a geographic approach to fighting crime. It locates concentrations of offenses in a given area and charts the day, time, and nature of offense. “We track arrests … and look at Part I crimes [murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, motor vehicle theft, and arson], the most serious offenses, reported to the FBI,” explains Janikowski, though Blue Crush does not target homicide.

The program also does not track the race of an offender. “[Ethnicity] doesn’t directly figure in the data,” Janikowski says. “The reality is that [with] arrests in Memphis, just like nationwide, the overwhelming number identified in criminal activity are young African-American men.

“Geography trumps ethnicity,” he says.

Justin Fox Burks

Larry Godwin

The Blue Crush program generates weekly crime reports that identify hot spots — zones of heavy criminal activity within a precinct — to MPD, which then focuses resources on where police are most needed. Police inspectors — the rank of most precinct commanders — can decide the day, time, and tactics to launch a Blue Crush operation on a hot spot. Patrolmen credit Blue Crush with getting the proper number of officers on the street during operations.

Blue Crush also supplies MPD with the finances necessary to keep extra manpower in the hot spots. Officers work Blue Crush operations on their days off and earn overtime without costing the city. “Because we are the university, we have access to grants. Part of our job is to push the edges,” Janikowski explains.

The hot-spot approach feeds off of criminal psychology, which, as Janikowski explains, is not unlike regular human behavior.

“We tend to go to work the same way every day, go to the places we know and are comfortable in,” Janikowski says. “Offenders are the same way. They’ll offend in the neighborhood they’re used to.”

Janikowski has taken the geographic approach to reducing crime in Memphis due in part to some of the city’s unique historical and demographic features.

Urban renewal and the abandonment and reclamation of downtown in the past half-century have shaken up the city’s residential and criminal patterns. “As public housing closed down, we dispersed people,” Janikowski explains. “Offenders became more mobile than they used to be, and crime has expanded into areas that weren’t necessarily targeted before.”

While the idea that Memphis crime is expanding its horizons may not reassure residents, Janikowski insists that the situation aids crime-fighters. “The advantage to having offenders operating where they aren’t comfortable is that that’s when they make mistakes and get caught,” he says. “A group started doing robberies in Collierville. They robbed a woman in her driveway. Collierville PD got them because those fools got themselves lost in the subdivision.”

Susan Lowe

On the scene: an MPD officer at work fighting crime.

Every Thursday morning, high-ranking officers from each of the city’s police precincts gather at Airways Station to discuss the results of the previous week’s Blue Crush operations and announce plans for the next.

Director of Police Services Larry Godwin and 20 lieutenants, majors, and inspectors from across the city sit at a horseshoe-shaped table that faces a screen and podium. The scene recalls DC Comics’ Justice League of America, albeit with more guns and less colorful costumes. Another 50 police personnel sit at rows of tables to observe. One officer likens it to a scene from the TV series The District.

Janikowski welcomes a couple of guests to the meeting, pointing out that they can help themselves to a cup of coffee “and — of course — there are donuts.”

Godwin kicks off the meeting with a general address. He’s nothing if not concerned with the public perception of his officers. After receiving complaints about cops talking on cell phones while on duty, he urges greater discretion. “I could pull up beside an officer on the phone [in his car] and put a bullet in the back of his head, and he’d never know it,” he told those gathered at the meeting.

After Godwin’s address, those in the horseshoe take turns giving PowerPoint presentations from the podium detailing statistical breakdowns of particular crimes in their respective precincts. They flash graphs and tables on the screen. They compare the given week to the three leading up to it, as well as the same week in the previous year. If certain tactics fail to suppress a problem in a hot spot, they try something else. “Precinct commanders have to decide where police will operate in their precincts based on the [Blue Crush] data packages they receive. They know their area. They’ve got to decide how to best use their resources,” Janikowski says.

Crime does go down in the hot spots. The question remains whether or not Blue Crush reduces crime across the board.

Through these snapshots of weekly Part I crimes in the city, one learns that residential burglaries occur in nearly epidemic proportions. If “epidemic” seems too strong a word, ask yourself if 82 new cases of avian flu in a month in Hickory Hill would alarm you. Residential burglaries outnumber every other crime in virtually every precinct in the city.

Blue Crush in action deploys combinations of visible patrolmen to suppress criminal activity and plainclothes officers to gather intelligence on the street. Though officers are generally pleased with the extra manpower that Blue Crush operations mobilize, some wonder if full-time undercover officers could enhance results.

A white officer joked that he and his partner going plainclothes had little to no effect in their predominantly black precinct. He mocked the idea of two whites driving around asking groups of young blacks, “Got any dope?”

Street cops have other concerns. Some say that attrition in their numbers from retirement and relocation outpaces the number of new recruits. One officer said that he counted only 40 graduates from the MPD training academy since Mayor Willie Herenton’s call for an expanded force last fall. (The idea of a new publicly funded football stadium is unpopular among those who have not received a pay raise in two years.)

Janikowski explains that increased efficiency and proper usage of resources could address some of the force’s manpower issues. “Blue Crush is reengineering the entire police department and restructuring things,” he says.

“The TAC unit [the Memphis equivalent of a SWAT team] does barricade and hostage situations and dignitary protection. The rest of the time, they’re working out and shooting, and they look really tough while they’re waiting to get called out. They’re the best trained, in the best shape. Give them warrants each day to go and chase some folks. This has been happening over the last six months,” Janikowski explains.

While the issue behind much of the city’s crime is easily identifiable, it remains difficult to solve. “If I was going to pinpoint a particular problem, it would be gangs, because it relates guns, drugs, robberies, and burglaries,” Godwin says.

Janikowski adds that predominantly African-American gangs drive crime statistics disproportionately. “The gangs are making their money in the drug market, in guns, and in stolen goods,” he says.

Godwin notes some incremental progress: “About eight months ago, we locked up 55 known gang members. That doesn’t sound like a lot when you’ve got 5,000 gang members [in the city]. But when you’re hitting the upper echelon in those gangs, it puts them in turmoil.”

Janikowski, however, says that Memphis gangs are highly fluid institutions with high turnover rates and no hierarchy. “They’re not these solid, corporate structures like the Mafia. Even gang allegiance changes. Some guys have tattoos from the Gangster Disciples and Vice Lords,” he says, adding that they show resilience to arrests, deaths, and defections from within the organizations. “They’re like any other employer. When they lose an employee, they hire another one,” he says.

Gangs’ modi operandi feed the police strategy for fighting organized crime. “We embed undercover officers in the gangs,” Godwin says. “I’m a firm believer in the undercover program in the gangs. I don’t think going around in a car that has ‘gang unit’ written on it is going to get you into the gangs and get you those good arrests. You’ve got to be one of them. You have to buy the guns, buy the drugs, and watch them deal in prostitution. Then build cases that way and make them stick.”

“Good arrests” for the police are federal crimes, since state-level convictions seldom result in more than half of a sentence served.

“We get a lot of information from being embedded [in gangs]. We’re living with them. It’s like any other rumor mill. You hear things within the gangs. We start to try to verify those things and substantiate whether or not it’s a possibility that a hit is coming down here,” he says, adding: “I’m all for reaching out to gangs and saying, ‘One of your members was shot. Let the police handle this instead of retaliating.’ I wish we could reach out more and make that arrest before the other gang can retaliate.”

Which brings us back to unlucky 34. The proverbial word on the street says that an organized crime outfit wanted Mario McNeil dead. McNeil was, by various accounts, a devoted father, a small-business owner, and a singer in his church’s choir. Those mourning McNeil’s murder left 15 pages of remembrances on his online obituary guestbook.

Whether McNeil’s murder was the result of gang activity or a random act of violence against an innocent, his story is symptomatic of an old problem that could prove immune to new cures.

“There’s no magic bullet. I think that is something that the media tries to feed [people]. ‘If we had this, it would solve it,'” Janikowski says.

No one disputes the prevalence of black-on-black violence in Memphis. The numbers don’t lie. MPD strategy, however, is, technically speaking, color-blind.

“We don’t address [black violence] in any way different from any other crime. We look at areas. Some of those may be predominantly African-American [parts of the city], but we address them all the same. A crime is a crime to us,” Janikowski says.

The future of crime-fighting might also be impacted by this year’s Memphis mayoral election. Though Herenton stands firmly beside Godwin, mayoral candidate Carol Chumney promises to devote fresh energy to the issue of crime. Though Janikowksi favors the long view of crime statistics and advocates patience with the progress of any crime remedy, Chumney says that Blue Crush should be scrapped if it isn’t working.

“Nothing’s immune to politics,” Janikowski says. “As it becomes ingrained in the police department, as the public sees effects over time, it’s going to be the way we do business in the future. It may not be called Blue Crush, but this idea of data-driven policing is here to stay.”