Memphis Mayor AC Wharton – Memphis Flyer

Toby Sells

Mayor A C Wharton

This is an open letter to Memphis Mayor A C Wharton. Yes, you’re still the mayor. You will be until December 31st, 2015. That gives you roughly 10 weeks left in office as the leader of Memphis. I’m just wondering what you plan to do in the next 10 weeks.

First, let me say that I have no beef whatsoever with Mayor-elect Jim Strickland. I haven’t met Mr. Strickland yet, and I hope he is wildly successful in making the hometown I love so much a better place. More than anything right now, though, I want to thank you, Mayor Wharton, for doing just that.

I think you have done a fantastic job in your roles as public defender, county mayor, and mayor of the city, despite the odds you have faced. In addition to your passionate work to get guns off the streets, help incarcerated, mentally disabled people get a fair shake, make Memphis a healthier city, and help distressed neighborhoods become thriving centers of commerce, culture, and hope, you have done this with grace, intelligence, and the sharpest sense of both honest concern and a sense of humor. You are one of the funniest people I’ve ever known, and I love that about you. A wit as quick as yours in a politician? Pretty rare.

But I also love your serious side and the fact that you seem to be able to always be at 10 places at once every day of every week. When something bad happens, you are there to try to come up with the answers. When something good happens, you are there to share the moment and pat people on the back for a job well done. You’re an incredible ambassador for Memphis, everywhere you go. Are you perfect? Nah. Nobody is. I don’t know a lot about politics, but I know something about good people, and you are certainly that. I’m proud to call you a friend.

The day after the October 8th election, I read a very disconcerting headline that proclaimed, “In humiliating loss, Wharton has only self to blame.” You’re probably too much of a gentleman to respond to that opinionated, kick-’em-when-they’re-down kind of smear tactic, but I will go on record saying that you have nothing to be humiliated about. It’s politics. Times change. The world keeps spinning. And the 15 million or so people who come here from all over the world every year to experience Memphis will continue to come to one of the coolest cities in the world, a city in which the majority of its residents don’t have a clue what a pilgrimage that is for so many of them.

Because so many people blame you for every single thing that goes wrong in Memphis, I’m going to give you credit here for every good thing that has happened during your mayoral tenure. Your Mayor’s Innovation Team, under your direction, has done wonders for areas like Broad Avenue and Crosstown. Those once-dilapidated, sad places are now so thriving that other cities should be following the revitalization model your team has set forth. While a lot of other people also deserve credit for that, you should certainly take credit, too. The transformations began under your watch. Likewise with Overton Square, one of the best urban success stories in the country right now. Same with the South Main Arts District, Chisca Hotel, Front Street, Soulsville, Beale Street, Cooper Street, and now, finally, hopefully, Clayborn Temple across from the FedExForum. Take credit, Mr. Mayor. A lot of great things have happened in Memphis with you at the helm.

Perhaps the most existentially important things that have happened on your watch are the renaming of the city parks formerly known as Confederate Park, Nathan Bedford Forrest Park, and Jefferson Davis Park, things that baffled those 15 million visitors a year to Memphis — and many of us who live here. That was an awesome accomplishment and proof of progress directed at no longer honoring and paying tribute to slave owners. Yep, it’s that simple.

Which brings me back to my initial question of what you plan to do in these last 10 weeks in office. In the aforementioned newspaper article that declared your mayoral election results a “humiliating loss,” the writer also mentioned that “Everyone’s seen the cranes in Nashville, seen the resurgence so many other cities are enjoying, and wondering why they weren’t seeing enough of it here.”

First off, the reason there are so many cranes in Nashville is that over there they are demolishing historic landmarks as fast as they can to build hideous, generic-looking condominiums. The resurgence of Memphis has been more carefully executed. It’s a bit subtler than Nashville, but then Nashville is more about glitz and glamour.

I would like to see one big crane, though. I remember my heart sort of leaping out of my chest not too long ago, when I read or heard that you, the mayor, personally issued a request that the city remove the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest that still resides in the park on Union Avenue that used to bear his name. I don’t know what the status of that request is now. The crane I’d like to see before you leave office is the one extracting the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest from that park and moving it wherever it is most out of view. The park has been renamed, so why not move it? I would give anything if you could pull that off by the time your term is up. I’d be happy to help.

As this week’s second-quarter deadline for financial disclosures approached, it was a near certainty that Mayor A C Wharton and City Councilman Jim Strickland would lead the rest of the field in funds received by a large margin. The Memphis mayoral contest could not yet be considered a two-man race, but both candidates had defining moments that set them apart.

The horrific events in Charleston, South Carolina, two weeks ago, still resonated and cried out for a dramatic response — in Memphis, no less than elsewhere in an outraged nation. To give him credit, Wharton had provided one last week when he proposed to end a long-simmering controversy and demanded the removal from what is now Health Sciences Park a statue of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest mounted on his warhorse, as well as the graves of the general and his wife.

The statue, which had stood in that prime downtown acreage for a century, would be remanded to the custody of the presumably still-extant Forrest Monument Association, which had originally placed it there, and the remains of the Forrests could be returned to Elmwood Cemetery, the vintage resting place from which they had long ago been disinterred and transplanted to the Union Avenue site.

It would not do, said Wharton, for African-American children to picnic in the shadow of a man who had been accused of numerous offenses on the wrong side of history, including pre-Civil War slave trading, an alleged massacre of black Union troops during the war, and the post-war founding of the Ku Klux Klan.

At the moment of the mayor’s announcement, he appeared resolute and forceful and, most important, sincere. He had caught the spirit of the moment, it seemed, and there seemed to be little downside. Public reaction to the name changes of Forrest Park and two other Confederate-themed parks in 2013 had ranged from enthusiasm to acceptance, with resistance largely confined to memorial societies — such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization that many thought had precipitated that crisis and broken a tenuous truce with an indiscreetly bold (and unauthorized) granite sign proclaiming the name “FORREST PARK.”

The mood of two years ago was nothing compared to the universal revulsion, in Memphis as everywhere else, that came in the aftermath of the horrendous murders of nine African-American members of a bible-study class by a deluded fanatic who wrapped himself in Confederate imagery. The feeling was summed up in a single word: enough!

That African Americans, in particular, could be expected to back the mayor’s action was a given — though it would surely be wrong to suggest that dividends at the polls on October 8th constituted a significant motive. In any case, Councilman Strickland, widely considered Wharton’s main opponent, wasted no time in conferring his approval of the mayor’s proposal. “I’m for it!” he said decisively, just before making something of a watershed speech last Thursday at Overton Square’s Zebra Lounge at a meet-and-greet that targeted black voters.

Jackson Baker

Jim Strickland at Zebra Lounge

Could Strickland, well-financed and known to be strong along the Poplar Corridor and in recently annexed suburbs like Cordova, garner enough African-American votes in a majority black city to be elected? Jerry Hall, the veteran black operative who introduced Strickland at Zebra Lounge, raised the question rhetorically and then answered it: “Hell, yes!” Memphis needed to move beyond issues of race, said Hall. “We need a new direction in City Hall.”

In his speech, Strickland laid out his most detailed recipe yet for that new direction. “We have a tsunami of a challenge on the horizon,” the challenger said, and he gave it a name: population loss. Strickland promised to reverse an exodus that had accounted for a net loss of 12,000 residents in the first decade of this century, despite annexations. He would be a “strong mayor who will run an efficient and effective city government.”

Strickland proposed a three-pronged strategy for establishing and maintaining a safe, clean, and desirable place for people and businesses: 1) drastic reduction of violent crime through resurrection of Blue Crush policing of trouble spots and “zero tolerance”; 2) elimination of blight and repair of infrastructure; and 3) strictly holding officials accountable.

If all that sounded a bit abstract, Strickland floated some new specifics: a privately supported fund that would help allay the costs of expunging criminal records of citizens resuming productive lives; a residential “PILOT” program granting tax breaks for people undertaking urban infill; and publication of city administrators’ performance records.

A bit technocratic, perhaps, but it expanded on Strickland’s reputation as a budgetary maven and gave him a larger theme of general competence to juxtapose against Wharton’s undoubted flair in using his mayoral bully pulpit.

There was still time for other candidates — notably Councilman Harold Collins, County Commission chair Justin Ford, and Memphis Police Association head Mike Williams — to make a move, but with every passing week, the bar gets moved a little higher.

• Meanwhile, the sheer drama of successive news-waves — abetted by a pair of U.S. Supreme Court decisions — kept shifting public attention. The sense of a racial crossroads lingered, but a court decision in King v. Burwell eliminated a threat to the Affordable Care Act and highlighted local and statewide efforts to revive Governor Bill Haslam‘s so-far-stymied Insure Tennessee plan. These included a showcase press conference in Raleigh featuring state Democratic Party chair Mary Mancini with legislative Democrats and local health-care advocates.

And the LGBT community had its rainbow moment, basking in a second SCOTUS decision legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states, and given further mainstream momentum via the endorsement of President Obama, who, having articulated the nation’s outrage and sorrow over the horror in Charleston, was having a major moment himself.

Governor Haslam came to town on two occasions: on Friday to grace the opening of a new Nike distribution center, and on Monday to announce a half-million-dollar grant for tech training and to help Youth Villages celebrate successes in its work with former foster youth.

During both visits, the governor made it clear that he intended to push ahead with Insure Tennessee (though not with an immediate special legislative session) and that the state would comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage. His reluctance on the second score, however, was underscored on Monday with a statement supporting “protection” of pastors who opt out of performing same-sex ceremonies for religious reasons.

Haslam endorsed the idea of removing a bust of General Forrest from the state capitol and said he saw no impediment to Wharton’s plans for Health Sciences Park. Others noted, however, that state law seemed to contain obstacles to the removal of the graves without the express permission of the Forrest family, and state legislation passed in 2013 on behalf of war memorials may complicate any attempt to remove the general’s statue.

“We’ve got lawyers working on it,” Wharton said on Saturday when asked about such obstacles during a drop-in at a Democratic Party breakfast at the IBEW building on Madison.