Michael Hooks Jr. – Memphis Flyer

The de-annexation bill that was temporarily stalled in the state Senate on Monday of this week was, as this week’s Flyer cover story (p. 14) documents, the subject of concerted resistance activity on the part of Memphis legislators, city council members, and representatives of the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce.

Many of the same legislators were part of another never-say-die effort, this one mounted by the House Democratic Caucus, which got behind an effort by House Democratic leader Craig Fitzhugh (D-Ripley) to enable a non-binding resolution for a statewide referendum on Governor Bill Haslam‘s moribund Insure Tennessee proposal.

That proposal, which would have allowed some $1.5 billion in federal funds annually to further Medicaid expansion in Tennesee, has been so far bottled up by the Republican super-majority in the General Assembly. And Fitzhugh’s resolution itself was routed off to the limbo of legislative “summer study” as a result of a procedural gambit employed by Representative Jeremy Durham (R-Franklin), who was formally ousted from his House leadership positions recently because of allegations involving improper activities involving interns and female staffers.

Memphis representatives Joe Towns, Larry Miller, and G.A. Hardaway were among those speaking on behalf of reactivating Insure Tennessee legislation at a press conference last week in Legislative Plaza.

• Ninth District Congressman Steve Cohen began the week as a part of the entourage that accompanied President Obama on his history-making trip to Cuba, where the president furthered the official Cuba-U.S.A. relations he reopened last year.

The trip was the second one to Cuba for Cohen, who also was part of a delegation accompanying Secretary of State John Kerry to the Caribbean island nation in 2014. The Memphis congressman obviously went to some considerable effort to get himself involved with both missions. Why Cohen’s more than usual interest in the matter?

Well, first of all, the congressman has long advocated a normalizing of relations with Cuba, which became estranged from the United States during the height of the Cold War when Cuban ruler Fidel Castro instituted what he termed a communist revolution and cozied up to the Soviet Union, then a superpower antagonist to the U.S.

Cohen has favored rapprochement and an end to the still-active trade embargo on political and economic grounds, pointing out that the Cold War, at least in its original form, is long gone and that American enterprises, in Memphis as well as elsewhere, stand to prosper from improved relations between the two countries.

And there is the fact that, when Cohen was growing up, his family lived in Miami, the American city closest to Cuba and one containing a huge number of exiles from that nation.

But there’s more to it than that —as those Memphians know who were privy to an old AOL email address used by Cohen, one that employed a variant on the name of former White Sox baseball star Minnie Miñoso, who happened to hail from Cuba.

The backstory involving Cohen and Miñoso was uncovered this week for readers of the Miami Herald by reporter Patricia Mazzei in a sidebar on Obama’s trip to Cuba.

Mazzei related the essentials of a tale familiar to those Memphians who were readers of a Cohen profile that appeared in the Flyer‘s sister publication, Memphis magazine, in 2001. After noting that the young Cohen, who had always aspired to an athletic career himself, had been afflicted by polio at the age of 5, Mazzei goes to observe: “His parents, lifelong baseball fans, took young Steve, hobbled with crutches, to see Mom’s hometown Chicago White Sox at a Memphis exhibition game. Steve made his way near the field to plead for autographs.

“That’s when a pitcher, Tom Poholsky, handed him a real Major League baseball. It wasn’t from him, Poholsky told him. It was from an outfielder who couldn’t give the boy the ball himself because this was Memphis, in 1955, and the outfielder was black. The first black White Sox, in fact.

“His name: Minnie Miñoso. A native of Perico, Cuba.”

The young Cohen was struck by the fact that Miñoso, who for obvious reasons became something of a personal idol for him, had been so inhibited by restrictions that were part of an outmoded way of life, and his lifelong emotional attachment to the great Miñoso, who died only last year, ensued.

“I learned from Miñoso about civil rights, and I learned from Miñoso about Cuba, and I learned from Miñoso to be nice to kids,” Cohen said to Mazzei, who disclosed also that the congressman had toted a Miñoso-embossed White Sox baseball cap to Cuba on the Kerry trip with the aim of getting it to current Cuban president Raúl Castro.

He brought several more such caps with him to hand out here and there on the current presidential trip.

Jackson Baker

Roasted, toasted, and pleased about it all at a Democratic fund-raising “roaster” last Saturday honoring: (l to r, seated) Shelby County Commissioner Walter Bailey, former state Senator Beverly Marrero, and former City Councilman Myron Lowery. Standing is longtime former public official Michael Hooks, who applied the barbs to Bailey. The affair was held at the National Civil Rights Museum.

Yes, that smaller image is who you think it is.

In her candidacy for the state House of Representatives seat made vacant by the death this summer of longtime incumbent Lois DeBerry, Kemba Ford called on a once-familiar political presence for backup.

In her basic campaign handout, Ford used a background image of her father, former state senator John Ford, and she proudly cited his name in campaign speeches. During a recent forum, candidate Ford told the audience, “I have a direct line to someone who walks the walk and talks the talk.”

She went on to invoke not only the name of her father but that of his brother, former U.S. representative Harold Ford Sr., to reinforce her connection to the well-known Ford political clan.

Opinions differ as to whether John Ford, a major presence in the Tennessee General Assembly before his conviction in the Justice Department’s Tennessee Waltz bribery sting, is prohibited from restoring his rights to run for office again or was grandfathered in before the passage of post-scandal legislation that would bar such activity.

In any case, the former state senator, who is now employed at his brother Edmund Ford‘s funeral home, professed in a recent conversation to have no such ambitions. He was, however, pleased to do what he could to help the electoral efforts of his daughter. That meant, among other things, telephoning friends and allies and asking them to assist, financially and otherwise.

As it happens, John Ford is not the only former senator to play a role in the just-concluded special election campaign. Former state senator Roscoe Dixon — who, like ex-Senator Ford, was caught up in the Tennessee Waltz scandal and, like him, recently was released from prison — was an active campaigner for candidate Joshua Forbes.

Dixon, who is active in the NAACP and often appears before local legislative bodies in support of that organization’s goals, made an effort to be a substitute panelist for the absent Forbes at an earlier candidate forum sponsored by Democratic members of the state legislature but was forced to withdraw when candidate Terica Lamb complained.

Nor is Dixon’s volunteer activity his only involvement with the public realm. He is a principal in CAATS, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center which recently received $1 million in funding from the Memphis City Council for capital improvements in its treatment facility.

Yet another former state senator convicted in the Tennessee Waltz affair, Kathryn Bowers, has taken an active part in several political campaigns and has volunteered on a few civic projects since her own release.

One more Tennessee Waltz figure, former Memphis City Schools board member Michael Hooks Jr., has made a full reentry into the mainstream. Hooks operates a construction management and consulting company that provides assistance on capital improvement projects locally, including several funded by city government.

Hooks has also been involved in several local political campaigns, figuring prominently in the 2011 reelection campaign of Mayor A C Wharton. And he is an active member of the Memphis Rotary Club.

All of these Tennessee Waltz figures — having, as the saying goes, paid their debt to society — have recovered some degree of their former influence and seem determined to resume some gainful place in the social and civic mainstream.

Time will tell to what degree they succeed, but they all have their well-wishers.

(See “Political Beat Blog” for a rundown on the aforementioned special House District 91 Democratic primary, which concluded on Tuesday.)

• State senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) has evidently, like Ernest Hemingway before him, some sense of what the snows of Kilimanjaro are like. In a recent email to supporters, he conveyed news of “a 5-day hike to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, which at 19,341 feet, is the tallest mountain in Africa.”

Kelsey went on to posit a moral to this story: “The lesson it taught me in persistence is one that will prove helpful in continuing the fight for opportunity scholarships for low-income children in Tennessee.”

What are called “opportunity scholarships” in Kelsey’s lexicon are referred to as “school vouchers” by others, particularly the opponents of the senator’s several bills over the years to extend public education funds to private institutions. In his newsletters, Kelsey refers to such opponents in Tennessee as “those who view the local school district as an employment agency rather than an education agency.”

Governor Bill Haslam, the head of state government and the titular head in Tennessee of Kelsey’s party, would not ordinarily be classified that way, and Kelsey presumably didn’t mean to be referring to Haslam in the aforementioned description of his legislative adversaries.

Yet it was Haslam who pointedly obstructed Kelsey’s last effort to pass a voucher bill. Early in the 2013 session of the General Assembly, the governor had approved a modest pilot effort toward establishing a voucher system, one that would provide modest-sized vouchers for 5,000 low-income students currently enrolled in schools certified by the state as failing.

That was not enough for Kelsey, who counterposed a bill that would have greatly expanded the amount of vouchers and made them available to children in families making as much as $75,000 a year.

Finding Kelsey unwilling to compromise, and with time running out on the session, Haslam made it clear that he did not want alternate voucher legislation of the scope proposed by Kelsey put forward.

The co-sponsor of the Kelsey bill, state senator Dolores Gresham (R-Somerville), got the message and professed a willingness to back off, as did Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, who had preferred a stronger voucher bill. Kelsey, however, remained intent on going forward.

The result was that the governor put his foot down and called for his own measure to be withdrawn, while announcing it was too late to work out any other version, and the session ended with no voucher bill at all.

In the newsletter, Kelsey finds inspiration in his struggle up Kilimanjaro: “Persistence pays off! Over and over during my hike up Kilimanjaro, my guide repeated, ‘po-le, po-le,’ which means ‘slowly, slowly’ in Swahili. He knew that climbing the mountain too fast would lead to altitude sickness and would leave me short of my goal. …

“Persistence pays off! Once I finally reached the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the views from above the clouds made all the hard work worthwhile. I hope that I will have a similar experience with opportunity scholarships in 2014.”

The senator concludes his account with these lines from Hemingway’s classic “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”:

“There, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.”

There’s a problem with the analogy, though: Mt. Kilimanjaro figures in the Hemingway story as the unachieved goal of the character Harry Street, who lies dying at the foot of the mountain and, at the end of the story, perishes without having attained his goal. Indeed, Kilimanjaro is treated as the very symbol of the unattainable.