Tag: Boss Crump

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Opinion Viewpoint

Church and Crump and the Myth of Black Political Elitism

Robert R. Church and “Boss” Crump were once viewed as political allies. On the surface, they looked like oil and water, but, for years, they operated like a match made in heaven.

Or so it seemed.

Robert R. Church

Church, a Republican, was the South’s first black millionaire. Mayor Crump, a white Dixiecrat, was a political provocateur who willed power over Memphis well through the 1940s.

Author Preston Lauterbach’s essay, “Memphis Burning,” describes how their “bipartisan, biracial coalition” ultimately “controlled Memphis politics and elected most of its officials.”

We see a similar longing for this perceived political utopia in the current electoral landscape. We see polished and seasoned politicians (and a few younger aspirants) angling allegiances with unlikely allies — black democratic congresspersons aligning with Republican Governor Bill Lee; black county commissioners and city council persons yielding to the likes of University of Memphis President David Rudd, FedEx CEO Fred Smith, major real estate moguls, and the like.

Wait. Something seems rather one-sided here.

Boss Crump

It seems that the reach across the aisle is only coming from one side.

In this framework, black political elitism is always hamstrung by an invisible hand of a white economic monopoly. Check the campaign pledges of the most notable elected officials and there we find commonality in donor-ship. This means that what most of us view as black exceptionalism is, actually, black tokenism — a few people of color who have proven themselves to be nonthreatening to the establishment and political status quo.

This tokenism has cultivated a generation of people aspiring for office who long more for assimilation than liberation. Too many black people aspire to (and obtain) positions of influence at the expenses of empowering the masses. They don’t want a more equitable society. They want to be in closer proximity to power. They want triumphalism — a better seat on the bus of injustice and inequity. And they will exploit social justice talking points to obtain it.

A bipartisan and biracial coalition might be possible, but there is no true partnership if only one side makes all the compromises.

If, for instance, white power brokers were sincere about equitable relationships, they’d be on the front lines advocating for equitable access and inclusion in the political process. However, when it comes time to increase voter turnout, “mum’s the word.”

What we are left with is a group of aspiring Robert R. Churches being contained by a group of 21st century Boss Crumps. This matrix is the source of black folks’ political apathy. We can point to the decades of black symbolic leadership that didn’t yield much fruit in our perpetually impoverished neighborhoods. And it is hard to point to progressive and productive leadership when out of 150 of the most populated cities in the country, Memphis was 136 in how well it is run, according to the website wallethub.com.

If we continue this path, we’ll end up like that deceptive dynasty between Church and Crump.

Lauterbach goes on to detail how “short-lived” that “period of biracial cooperation” was. He writes, “In the late 1930s, Boss Crump turned on his counterpart. In the span of a few years, the Democratic machine banished Bob Church, seized his property, broke the family fortune, and dismantled his Republican organization, crushing the most vital arm of black enfranchisement in the city.”

Doesn’t that sound familiar? Past is prologue.

Black political elitism is a myth in Memphis if there is no massive political movement of everyday people (that centers black citizens) to support it. And what the myth of black political elitism has done is bind up our political imagination prohibiting black people from seeing what is possible.

What is possible is the ushering in of a more just, progressive, and equitable class of leaders. A group that gleans the support of the elders and inspires the next generation to become more optimistic about their involvement. The municipal elections this October could very well hold the key to the black political independence of the next 25 years. It’s about time we recognize what Dr. Martin Luther King called, “The fierce urgency of now.”

Dr. Earle Fisher is the Senior Pastor at Abyssinian Baptist Church and founder of #UPTheVote901.

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Book Features Books

Otis Sanford’s From Boss Crump to King Willie.

Between the two giant pillars of Edward Hull Crump, the white Mississippian who established an enduring political dominion over Memphis in the early 20th century, and Willie Herenton, the five-times-elected black mayor whose seeming invincibility concluded that century, lies a tumultuous story worth telling.

And Otis Sanford, the former managing editor of The Commercial Appeal and now holder of the Hardin Chair of Excellence in Economic/Managerial Journalism at the University of Memphis, tells it with accuracy and grace in From Boss Crump to King Willie: How Race Changed Memphis Politics, hot off the University of Tennessee Press.

In a way unusual for a work of history, this book reads like a novel — its facts accounted for both in concise summaries of events and circumstances and in key moments that are rendered as scenes.

Among the latter is an account of how a chance encounter in 1991 between then Congressman Harold Ford and the Rev. Ralph White at a Union Avenue video store resulted in White’s church, Bloomfield Baptist Church, becoming the venue for Ford’s long-postponed “summit meeting” to determine the identity of a consensus black candidate for mayor.

Sanford follows up that revelation with choice reportage of the upstairs meeting at the church involving Ford, Herenton, and disappointed contender Otis Higgs while an auditorium of Herenton supporters, whose energetic wall-to-wall presence had basically called the congressman’s hand, waited impatiently in the church auditorium to hear Ford’s inevitable anointment of Herenton as the people’s choice.

Sanford’s book is a textbook case of how to handle the black-and-white realities of Memphis’ political evolution with appropriate shadings of gray. His narrative concludes before the lengthy period, after Herenton’s ascension to power, of the often grim public and private struggles for preeminence between the African-American mayor and the African-American congressman stemming from the implicit rivalry of these two monumental egos.

But that feud, after all, belongs to a different historical era, post-1991, which has been intermittently post-racial. Consider the overwhelming white support for A C Wharton, an African American, first as Shelby County mayor and, in 2009, as Herenton’s immediate successor as Memphis mayor, or Steve Cohen’s serial victories over black opponents in a 9th Congressional District that is at least two-thirds African American in population, and the comfortable win of Jim Strickland, another white, in 2015 over Wharton in a city whose increasingly black complexion is unmistakable.

Consider the consistent ability of white Republican candidates to prevail over black Democrats in all the Shelby County elections that have taken place in the 21st century, a period when the county at large, like the city, has had a majority-black electorate.

From the standpoint of Sanford’s narrative, such anomalies might be regarded as signals of a modus vivendi between the two dominant races, of a political balance of sorts that required both the deconstruction of white supremacy and the liberation and triumph of an erstwhile black underclass. A viable new order may somehow have been achieved, though undeniable inequalities of various sorts persist and just plain differences endure.

Sanford’s story is one of transformation — from an urban landscape under the domination of Crump, a de facto plantation boss whose quasi-benevolent attitude toward a black population enabled both his own immediate power and the stirrings of that population’s own ultimate abilities and ambitions.

The giant-sized convulsions that belong to the intermediate stages of this saga — the strikes and assassinations and political showdowns — are not overlooked. They are covered in satisfying detail, as are the more nuanced encounters between winners and losers in the chess games of our political history.

Sanford, whose astonishing objectivity as reporter and analyst continues to be featured in his weekly columns in the Sunday CA, knows not heroes and villains. His characters, both black and white, are presented with all the roundness and complex motivations they owned as real live people.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Shelby County and Memphis “In the Zone”

In what amounted to a quickie course in “City/County Planning for Dummies,” Josh Whitehead, director of the joint Office of Planning and Development (OPD), treated members of the Rotary Club of Memphis to a dissertation on

Tuesday that happened also to contain a few history lessons.

Whitehead sketched the history of planning organizations in Shelby County, from 1921, when, as he put it, we “asked the General Assembly” for permission to establish the first urban zoning body in Tennessee and perhaps anywhere. There were other steps along the way to the full-blown regulatory authorities we possess today in the form of the OPD and the Land Use Control Board, along with such associated bodies as the Landmarks Commission and the Downtown Memphis Commission, the entire network overlaid (at least in theory) by the county’s Unified Development Code.

These days, as Whitehead pointed out, the General Assembly has its own paraphernalia of codes, commissions, and regulations related to who can build what and where and when that can happen — all this gauged to the population base of a given area. To some extent this over-arching legal infrastructure is consistent with what prevails in Shelby County and to some extent it isn’t. There has been at least one judicial decision holding that private acts, of the sort that created the zoning apparatus of Memphis and Shelby County, outweigh the requirements of public (i.e., statewide) acts on a given zoning matter. The disconjunction, as Whitehead points out, can make for some nice paydays for members of the legal profession.

But that’s only half the problem. Even within the writ of local zoning authority there are numerous irregularities — some planned, some given special dispensation by zoning bodies or the courts, some inherited, and some patently illegal. And there is the contemporary phenomenon of “planned developments,” whereby proposals are allowed to circumvent zoning rules via the concurrence and consultation of regulatory bodies and local legislative entities.

By and large the whole mish-mash was made to seem like blueprints for the most complicated Rube Goldberg device ever undertaken (especially when Whitehead, in his presentation at Rotary, flashed a slide showing, from overhead, a section of Midtown and the myriad of overlapping, color-coded zoning classifications that governed that relatively limited piece of turf.

For those of us who, for business or pleasure, wander into deliberations of the Memphis City Council or the Shelby County Commission or any of of the several smaller jurisdictions in the county, not to mention those of the zoning bodies mentioned above, Whitehead’s lecture was an impressive reminder of just how complicated zoning matters are and how much balancing of established regulations and competing interests is required to make decisions that, on the surface, would seem deceptively simple.

There was a time when it was otherwise — especially in that lengthy pre-World War Two period when Shelby County more or less did what it wanted, for better or for worse, and pioneered, essentially unchecked, in the art of urban planning. That was back in the heyday of “Boss” Crump, who governed Shelby County and also, as Whitehead noted, “ruled the state.”

Things are more complicated now but also more flexible. That’s the nature of trade-offs.