Tag: D’Army Bailey

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Politics Politics Feature

Matters of Tenure on the Shelby County Commission

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Jackson Baker

Walter Bailey

No suggestion at Monday’s regular meeting of the Shelby County Commission could have been treated with more courtesy than the request by long-serving Democratic member Walter Bailey for an ordinance to amend the County Charter so as to eliminate all reference to term limits for county officials.

And no suggestion had so little chance of passage as Bailey’s ordinance, which, on the first of three readings, gained the votes of only three members — Bailey and fellow Democrats Justin Ford and Van Turner — on the 13-member body. 

The ordinance allows for a public referendum of county voters, and that provision allowed several members to abstain from voting on the premise that they would meanwhile consult their constituents, but this was largely a face-saving mechanism for Bailey and perhaps for themselves.

The fact is, as a number of commissioners say privately, and as David Reaves said out loud on Monday, most members of the current commission would not have been able to run successfully for their seats on the body if term limits had not been imposed.

In arguing for the ordinance, Bailey noted for the record that members of Congress and the state legislature are not bound by term limits and that the imposition of them on the commission arbitrarily deprives the public of needed experience on the part of members. Bailey himself, a member of a distinguished political family that included his late brother, author/civil rights icon D’Army Bailey, is the longest-serving member of the commission and, as he put it last week in committee, where his ordinance was first vetted, maybe the longest-serving public official in the state. He won office first in 1971, has served as chairman twice, and has served continuously, with the exception of four years, from 2006 to 2010, when the charter’s then-new term-limit requirement caused him to step down temporarily.

He is now serving his second term since being returned to the commission in 2010 and faces another mandatory withdrawal from service. • More local backdrop for the 8th District congressional race: As indicated last week, a victory by Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell in the crowded Republican primary field would occasion some frenetic maneuvering on the part of the county commissioners, inasmuch as Luttrell would thereby vacate his county position, opening it up to a reappointment process.

Luttrell, if  victorious in the congressional race, would presumably resign his mayoralty sometime between the general election in November and his January swearing-in in Washington. Meanwhile, the commission would have selected a new chair in September, according to its normal schedule. And whoever is chair when Luttrell ceases to be mayor automatically becomes interim Shelby County mayor for a maximum of 45 days, after which the commission will select a new one by majority vote.

As Commissioner Mark Billingsley of Germantown reminded his colleagues with copies of a handout he distributed Monday, the county charter makes no provision for an election to fill a vacancy in the mayor’s office “until a successor is elected and qualified at the next countywide election allowed by the state election laws.” Hence, whoever is selected by the commission upon the completion of the interim mayor’s service will serve as a fully pledged county mayor until the county general election of 2018.

There is no doubt that current commission chairman Terry Roland, a Millington Republican, wants to be the next county mayor. His intentions of running for the position in 2018 have been clear for months, and, in case anyone should forget the fact, he announces it periodically during meetings of the commission. (Roland pointedly did so at last Wednesday’s committee sessions and did so again at Monday’s regular commission meeting.)

It now appears, however, that Roland sees no need to seek reappointment to a second consecutive term as commission chairman in September (as numerous commission chairs have done in the last several years, with former member Sidney Chism, a Democrat, having brought off the trick). Roland is content to allow things to take their natural course in September, with Democratic member Turner the favorite to become the next chairman.

But Roland is certain to be front and center as a candidate for appointment as mayor when the commission convenes, sometime early in 2017, to serve as a successor to Luttrell through the election of 2018. And word has it that he believes he already has most of the votes in hand to overcome other candidates, including possible opponent David Lenoir, the county trustee, who intends to run for the office in the regular 2018 election cycle. Another possible contender for the commission’s mayoralty selection would be GOP Commissioner Steve Basar, whom Roland bested for the chairmanship last year in a hastily called revote after Basar had held the position for roughly an hour.

All of this would be moot, of course, should someone other than Luttrell win the congressional race. There are five other Shelby County Republicans in the field — Basar; radiologist/broadcast executive George Flinn; state Senator Brian Kelsey; County Register of Deeds Tom Leatherwood; and former U.S. Attorney David Kustoff.

And Jackson businessman Brad Greer must be delighted at the prospect that so many Shelby Countians in the race, dividing up the local vote, creates the real mathematical possibility of his winning. (Something like that happened in the 7th District congressional race of 2002, when Kustoff, then city council member Brent Taylor, and then County Commissioner Mark Norris split the Shelby County vote, allowing for an easy victory by Marsha Blackburn of Williamson County, who still represents the 7th District.)

Outlook on Convention Delegates

Some 400 Democrats betook themselves to First Baptist Church Broad last Saturday to make themselves eligible for formal Shelby County conventions on Saturday, March 19th, that will select from this pool of eligible members the delegates to the Democratic National Convention at Philadelphia this summer.

Yes, there will be two conventions on March 19th — one to be held at First Baptist Broad that will determine the identity of the delegates and alternates who will go to Philadelphia to represent the 9th Congressional District; and another, to be held the same day in Jackson, that will determine who goes to the national convention to represent the 8th Congressional District, which takes in a generous hunk of eastern Shelby County.

At both locations, the delegates to be selected will conform to the pattern of the two districts’ voting in last week’s “Super Tuesday” presidential primary in Tennessee, with the lion’s share of delegates and alternates going to Hillary Clinton, who won the primary vote handily, and a handful going to Bernie Sanders. 

In the case of the 9th District, that would be six delegates and one alternate for Clinton, with one delegate apportioned to Sanders. In the case of the 8th, it’s four delegates for Clinton and one for Sanders. Insofar as the math permits, the delegates are apportioned, half and half, by gender.

For the record, Clinton beat Sanders statewide by a two-to-one ratio. The ratio in Shelby County, whose African-American demographic (generally very supportive of Hillary Clinton) is higher, was four to one: Clinton, 66,465; Sanders, 15,985. 

The Democratic Party’s ex post facto process for selecting delegates differs from that of the Republicans, which required would-be delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland to file for election on the Super Tuesday ballot on behalf of the specific presidential candidate they chose to represent. The chief vote-getters on each list became convention delegates in a ratio proportionate to how well their candidates did in head-to-head voting.

For the record, Donald Trump won 39 percent of the statewide Republican primary vote; Ted Cruz won 25 percent; Marco Rubio, 21 percent, Ben Carson, 8 percent; John Kasich, 5 percent. (Results rounded off.)

The preliminary delegate list released last week by the state Republican Party did not include the apportionment for Shelby County, but the county’s GOP primary results went as follows: Trump, 30 percent; Cruz, 29 percent; Rubio, 26 percent, Kasich, 8 percent, Carson, 6 percent, and “others,” 2 percent. (Again, results rounded off.)

If all of this appears to be a mite complicated, that’s because it is. Updates will be provided by the Flyer as they are received.

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Politics Politics Feature

County Commission Election Next Week

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Even as candidates for city office gird for an October 8th election, which is still weeks away from its stretch drive, another election of some possible consequence is just around the corner.

On Monday, the Shelby County Commission will elect a chairman to serve  for the 2015-16 period, and, while other commissioners are quite likely considering their options in case of deadlock, at least two members of the commission — Steve Basar and Terry Roland — are more or less publicly running.

Both, interestingly enough, on a 13-member body which has a Democratic majority of one, are Republicans. Basar, however, is a de facto Democratic candidate, hoping to gain through an active coalition with members of the other party an office which he believes himself to have been unfairly deprived of by members of his own party.

A year ago, Basar, an East Memphis Republican who was then serving as commission vice chair, confidently expected elevation to the chairmanship as a matter of course.

For the first several years after the commission became subject to partisan elections in the mid-1990s, the tradition was to elect a chairman from one party in a given year, along with a vice chairman from the other. At the end of that year, the vice chair would be formally elected to become chair for the next year, in a routine whereby the succession to chairman was essentially foreordained, and the commission’s chairmanship was, by what was termed a “gentlemen’s agreement,” rotated by party annually.

That was the format which Basar expected to apply to his own case when a newly elected commission met to select a chairman after the conclusion of the August 2014 county election.

But Basar encountered a body which contained five new members, and the once-predictable rites of succession to the chairmanship had been jimmied and could no longer be depended on.

That all began with the election for chairman in 2011, when then Republican vice chair Mike Carpenter, who had angered his GOP colleagues by what they considered too close a collaboration with the commission’s Democrats, failed to get Republican votes, and Democratic chairman Sidney Chism parlayed the resulting deadlock into reelection for a second consecutive term.

From that point on, even as the principle of rotating chairmanships seemed to have reasserted itself to some degree, there was always an element of suspense in the matter of electing a chair, as well as a fair amount of intrigue.

When Republican Mike Ritz succeeded Democrat Chism as chair in 2012, he in effect became chief strategist for the Democratic majority’s opposition to independent suburban school districts and ran afoul of his GOP colleagues, as Carpenter had done previously.

In 2013, as Chism had done before him, Ritz sought a second consecutive term, but once again the Republican minority coalesced around what they considered a sympathetic Democrat, James Harvey, who won with their support. And, in 2014, GOP members continued with what had seemingly become a strategy of supporting a compliant Democrat over a fellow Republican, backing eventual winner Justin Ford over a stunned Basar.

In the wake of his defeat, Basar entered into a coalition with the commission’s Democrats on key vote after key vote, beginning with their efforts to limit Ford’s chairmanship powers last fall, and continuing through this year’s budget negotiations.

Basar still wants to be commission chairman, though he has also offered himself as a possible successor to Paul Morris, who is stepping down as chairman of the Downtown Memphis Commission.

Meanwhile, Roland makes no bones about it: He wants to be Shelby County Mayor, is essentially already running for that office, which is up again in 2018, and clearly believes that becoming commission chairman would give him a leg up on that race.

Roland hails from Millington, was elected to the commission as a GOP firebrand, and can still comport himself that way, depending on the issue. But he has made an obvious effort to mute his partisanship and work across party lines. He led the effort to put the commission on record as supporting Governor Bill Haslam‘s Insure Tennessee proposal, and the successful resolution to rename the Shelby County Courthose for the late civil rights icon D’Army Bailey was proposed by Roland.

• Meanwhile, on the Wednesday agenda of the commission’s general government committee is the still simmering issue of the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue and Forrest graves in what was formerly Forrest Park (Health Sciences Park).

Again before the commission is a resolution sponsored by Commissioner Walter Bailey that would put the commission on record as supporting the Memphis City Council’s ordinance to remove the statue, which was due for a second reading at this week’s council meeting. The commission’s resolution supporting the council’s intent was deferred from the committee’s July 22nd meeting.

Any action by the commission would be purely symbolic, inasmuch as only the council has authority regarding disposition of the statue. But whatever the commission does would definitely have an effect on public opinion during what is expected to be a lengthy course of litigation over the issue.

The city council’s sentiment has so far remained unanimous for removal, but indications are that reservations by suburban members of the county commission could make for controversy.

The commission’s budget committee is likely to get into something of a thicket, too. Budget chair Heidi Shafer wants the commission to take up the issue of establishing a staff or hiring an individual to perform for the commission the same kind of independent vetting service over financial matters that the Congressional Budget Office does for members of Congress.

Shafer and other members of the commission, on both sides of the party line, were plainly vexed by seemingly disparate accountings issued by the administration of Mayor Mark Luttrell and County Trustee David Lenoir, respectively, on the actual amount of an end-of-fiscal-year surplus.

There is a strong and bipartisan sentiment on the commission to assert the body’s independence vis-à-vis the administration, as was also indicated recently by the commission’s open exploration of the prospect of hiring its own attorney, at least for ad hoc matters.

• It was neither the most surprising action nor the most momentous one of the 2015 Memphis election season, but the joint endorsement of Councilman Harold Collins‘ mayoral campaign on Monday by the Memphis Fire Fighters Association and an independent firefighters’ group was another sign of an apparent recent surge of support for Collins.

The councilman from Whitehaven was fairly universally judged to have acquitted himself well in a four-way mayoral forum last week put on by several local women’s groups at First Congregational Church.

And, though Collins’ financial receipts still lag behind those of Mayor A C Wharton and Councilman Jim Strickland, they have been significant enough to suggest the possibility that talk of a two-man mayoral race between Wharton and Strickland may have been overdone — or, at any rate, premature.

The opening by Mayor Wharton on Sunday of a Whitehaven-based headquarters on Elvis Presley Boulevard, to complement another headquarters on Poplar Avenue (to be inaugurated this coming Sunday), is a clear indication that the mayor has a two-front war on his hands.

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Editorial Opinion

Fresh Approach at National Civil Rights Museum

After the month we’ve had here in Memphis and Shelby County, with raging debates as to the future of our civic monuments, with a city election heating up that may well determine the shape of our future, and,

finally, with D’Army Bailey, one of our certified local heroes, being laid to rest with a eulogy from the 42nd president of the United States, Bill Clinton, it was wholly appropriate that we should hear a prognosis from Terri Freeman.

Some will wonder: Who is Terri Freeman? She may not be a household name yet, but she will be — the newest president of the National Civil Rights Museum (NCRM), succeeding such legends as Bailey, Benjamin Hooks, and Beverly Robertson. The last of Freeman’s household furnishings arrived Tuesday, the very day she addressed members of the Memphis Rotary Club with her review of the museum’s past and her vision of its — and our — future.

Freeman, whose most recent job was that of president of the Community Foundation in the D.C. area, is a veteran of capital campaign drives, but, as she pointed out on Tuesday, the NCRM’s most recent capital campaign had been completed just as she arrived. So, with a newly renovated facility at her disposal and what would appear to be a sufficient annual budget ($6 million, most of it raised from private donations), her main task would seem to be that of  articulating the vision alluded to above and executing it.

And what a vision — one aspect of which is downright mind-boggling, considering what most people’s ideas of civil rights are (i.e., a struggle for human rights that took place roughly 25 to 50 years ago) and what their idea of a museum is (i.e., a place where memories and artifacts of the past are stored for inspection and inspiration).

To be sure, Freeman did not neglect the function of the National Civil Rights Museum as either a place to celebrate history or one to gather instructive and revealing exhibits. Neither duty will be shunted. But what is most thrilling about the prospectus for the NCRM that Freeman revealed was her idea for the kinds of programs that should be featured by the NCRM, which, as she envisions it, will invite the discussion of “difficult questions in a safe space.”

As she spelled out the formula, it was: “No agenda. No right. No wrong. Just a place for dialogue.”

Just imagine that formula being applied to subjects ranging from, say, the currently vexing queston of civic monuments or economic strategies that might make demands of our local power structure or schools and taxes or whatever other problems are currently confounding us.

It’s very close to what the ancient Greeks strived to do in their public forums (sometimes at great risk, as we recall the fate of Socrates), and it is an idea that evokes the very purposes of a democracy. Bring it on, Terri Freeman, and welcome to Memphis!

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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.

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Editorial Opinion

D’Army Bailey

D’Army Bailey

Along with the sadness that came with our learning on Sunday that the great D’Army Bailey had died of cancer was, first, surprise, because the eminent lawyer/actor/author who was elected a Circuit Court judge last year for

the second time in his life, had been an active presence in the world right up until the end — participating, for example, in a spirited forum in April at the University of Memphis law school on the subject of the 1968 sanitation strike and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

But, after we had digested the reality of Judge Bailey’s passing, another more soothing thought occurred to us: If there was one factor that motivated D’Army Bailey in life, it was the twin pursuit of equality and justice, qualities that fused into a single idea in his mind, and in the mind, also, of his brother Walter, a longtime county commissioner — the two of them forming a tandem over the years dedicated to the eradication of every vestige of discrimination in either the private or the public sphere.

We took some satisfaction, then, that before he died, D’Army Bailey had seen the beginnings of final success for a cause that was important to him, and which was a continuing preoccupation for his brother Walter — the de-sanctification, as it were, of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest as a symbol of the racist past. Bailey had to know that the Memphis City Council had voted unanimously to remove the statue of Forrest on horseback from a park that no longer bore his name.

D’Army Bailey was a gentle, sensitive man, at home in any company, though his pursuit of justice had forever embroiled him in controversy. A graduate of Booker T. Washington and Clark College, Bailey migrated after graduation from Yale Law School to the San Francisco area, a hotbed of revolutionary ideas in the 1970s. Once there, he pitched into the ferment, got himself quickly elected to the Berkeley City Council and almost as quickly was subjected to a recall election that forced him out. He returned to Memphis to practice law with his brother, but the zeal to pursue human justice was still with him, and, in the course of time, that zeal became the energy that allowed him to midwife into being the National Civil Rights Museum on the Lorraine Motel site of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination.

Though he had ample helpers, both in and out of government, the museum was his idea, his creation, and it will be his monument to the world.

He also left for posterity two books on civil rights and charming, credible appearances in several movies, including The People vs. Larry Flynt, which was filmed here in Memphis, so we will still have traces of him in action to cherish.

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News News Feature

The Roots of Protest

Poverty is a form of violence.

It holds millions in bondage, locked into neighborhoods stripped of public or private investment, trapped in low-wage jobs. Often, this violence is state-sponsored via policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor, who are often brown and black. So it is a short walk from national protests against police brutality to calls for economic justice.

Rookie activist Tami Sawyer wants to help people in Memphis — the poorest large metro area in the nation — make that journey. In the past two weeks, the 32-year-old St. Mary’s alumna organized two die-ins — one outside the National Civil Rights Museum and another on Beale Street. These and dozens of similar protests nationwide were sparked by deaths of two unarmed black men — Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island. In both cases, a grand jury failed to indict the white officers who killed them.

But the fury on display at protests and on social media is not directed solely at a warped criminal justice system. It is the entire game that is rigged.

“We can scream, we can yell, we can cry on TV,” Sawyer said, “but it will fall on deaf ears. We don’t have economic power.”

For proof, look at last week’s report from the Pew Research Center. Although the economy is recovering, the black-white wealth gap is now at its highest since 1989. In 2013, the median household wealth of white families ($141,900) was 13 times greater than that of black families ($11,000).

African Americans make up 14 percent of the country’s population, but black-owned businesses bring in just 0.5 percent of the nation’s receipts.

It is difficult to amass wealth when just two generations ago, black people were shut out of some trades, red-lined out of more desirable neighborhoods by racist lending policies, and banned from state-run colleges funded by their tax dollars.

With little inter-generational wealth, black people are more likely to be unemployed and, regardless of household income, live in neighborhoods where property values are falling. These poor neighborhoods are more likely to be hyper-policed, which puts black people at greater risk of encounters that could be defused by smart policing or that could end in death.

That’s an oversimplified version of how the criminal justice system functions in a larger machine that devalues black lives. (For the complete account, read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.) But in this context, it makes sense that the Ferguson grand jury decision, announced the Monday before Thanksgiving, spawned the #BlackOutBlackFriday shopping boycott. (Black Friday sales were down 11 percent, but pundits were loathe to credit hashtag activism.)

Sawyer supported the boycott but wondered about the long game. “You’re going to boycott on Friday, but when Cyber Monday comes up, you’re going to go spend money with Best Buy,” she griped.

Her Instagram page became a photo gallery to encourage people to shop with black-owned businesses on #buyblackfriday and beyond. “At the end of day, we don’t make it anywhere, if our own people don’t support it,” said Sawyer, who does employee development for government agencies.

Her vision of economic empowerment grew last week after a chance encounter with D’Army Bailey, a retired judge, attorney, and activist. At a black-owned coffee shop/office space in Uptown, Sawyer talked strategy with a man she’d met through the die-ins.

Bailey sat at a nearby table, eavesdropping. Then he interrupted. “He said, ‘Besides lying in the street, what else do you have planned?'” Sawyer recalled.

He was brusque, but she listened. “He said go to the county commission meeting and see what they’re debating today.”

She did. On the agenda was the economic impact plan for Graceland, which calls for $125 million in public investments to build a private hotel on the property and create 282 jobs.

“The jobs aren’t spelled out,” Sawyer said. “Are they going to be low-wage? Are they going to be middle-income?”

Those questions weren’t asked at the meeting. The lone vote against the plan came from Bailey’s brother, Walter.

“Being aware of how the money in this city is spent is important,” she said. “Our freedom as a culture ties into our economic freedom.”

Her next protest is planned for Christmas Eve, outside Graceland.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Museum Politics

Not all the politics going on just now is electoral. Some of it has to do with fundamental realignments in the body politic itself. A case in point: the escalating furor in Memphis’ African-American community over the future of the National Civil Rights Museum.

At issue is whether the museum continues to be a publicly funded institution or a private one supported by corporate donations, fund-raising drives, and special programs. Now that the state’s initial commitment has ended with the retirement of $5 million in construction bonds, the current board of what is officially called the Lorraine Civil Rights Museum Foundation has the option to buy the property for the nominal turn-over price of $1.

A number of community activists, with Circuit Court judge D’Army Bailey, the museum’s founder and former president, in the vanguard, are up in arms over the prospect — seeing such a transfer of authority as a “sell-out” to white-dominated corporate interests.

All of that boiled over in a forum held Monday night at the Beale Street headquarters of the public workers’ union AFSCME.

Although D’Army Bailey was the soul of discretion at the forum, speaking only to clarify technical points, sympathizers and relatives thundered against the would-be privatizers, exalting museum founder Bailey as a martyr in the process.

At least one African-American state legislator came under attack, as did such venerable figures in Memphis civil rights history as Maxine Smith and Benjamin Hooks.

After listening to more than an hour’s worth of passionate rhetoric in favor of continued state control of the museum, state representative Gary Rowe attempted to change the subject to various self-help stratagems that he said were available to members of the Memphis African-American community.

Rowe cited as an example some $30,000 raised by his own Black United Fund of Tennessee and went on to say, “I’m willing to put my money on the table.” Speaking generically of the Tennessee General Assembly and state government at large, Rowe said, “They don’t respect us because we’re always asking for something. We’re always begging.”

Rowe then left the meeting and the building and, though his ears may well have been burning, was spared direct knowledge of the volatile reaction to his words.

State representative Joe Towns, who moderated the meeting, took issue with Rowe’s sentiments, reminding members of the audience they were taxpayers and saying, “You don’t have to beg for your dollars.”

That was just a warm-up for some of the firebrand rhetoric to come. Local radio personality Harold “The Navigator” Moore launched into a philippic against board members as “honchoes, black and white” whose primary loyalty was to corporations, not “the people.” Moore said he had marched with Dr. King just before his 1968 assassination at the Lorraine Motel site itself and went on to say: “I was there when D’Army Bailey was assassinated as chairman of the Civil Rights Museum.”

That reference was to a rebellion by a board majority against Bailey, deposing him as chairman not long after the museum was opened to much national fanfare in 1991. The Rev. Hooks took his place after the coup, which Bailey and many others attributed to influential board member Pitt Hyde, CEO of AutoZone.

Rising to speak in Moore’s wake was D’Army Bailey’s nephew Jay Bailey, a lawyer active in the burgeoning “community control” movement.

Jay Bailey escalated the rhetoric further, reciting the names of current board members and pointedly referring to Smith and Hooks, both former luminaries of the NAACP, as black leaders who had “historically been controlled by corporations.”

A few speakers later, blogger Thaddeus Matthews ratcheted up the attack even further, saying of Rowe, “He works for us. He should be taking the people’s agenda to Nashville.”

Matthews said, “If the Lorraine Motel is our Calvary, then we may have to fight for it” against adversaries that include “black folks selling us out.” Rowe, he said, was “another sell-out Negro” concerned, among other things, with protecting the interests of his neighbor, longtime museum director Beverly Robertson.

A bemused and noncommittal spectator through all of this was Dale Sims, Tennessee’s state treasurer and a member of the state Building Commission, the high-level body that will make a decision whether the museum should continue to receive state funding or be turned over to the foundation board.

What the commission can’t decide is the root issue here: Who speaks for the black community — and its legacy?
Jackson Baker is a Flyer senior editor.