Tag: Sidney Chism Picnic

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2023 Sidney Chism Picnic

Host Sidney Chism, here with Police Director C.J. Davis, presided at his annual political picnic on Saturday. (Photos: Jackson Baker)

Saturday saw the latest installation of longtime political figure Sidney Chism’s annual picnic, a fixture on the election landscape for a generation. The event, held at park grounds off Horn Lake Road, draws candidates, observers, political junkies, and kids of all ages. It’s a can’t-miss.

Here are some of the scenes from this year’s picnic, captured before the rains came in early afternoon. Several late arrivals, including a majority of the candidates running for mayor, came, were seen, and hoped to conquer, but are not pictured.

Host Sidney Chism greets District 3 Council candidate Yolanda Cooper-Sutton from his cart.
Mayoral candidate J.W. Gibson at Chism picnic
Mayoral candidate Paul Young greets employees of register’s office at Chism picnic.
District 3 Council candidate Pearl Walker at Chism picnic
District 3 Council candidate Towanna Murphy at Chism picnic
District 3 Council candidate James Kirkwood at Chism picnic
DA Steve Mulroy schmoozing at Chism picnic
Kevin Carter and David Upton at Chism picnic
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Politics Politics Feature

Chism Backs Strickland for Mayor

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Adherents of City Councilman Jim Strickland‘s campaign for mayor are certainly pleased with their guy’s ability to go fund-raising dollar-for-dollar against incumbent Mayor A C Wharton (both candidates having reported $300,000-plus in their first-quarter disclosures). And they’re counting on a good showing for Strickland in both the Poplar Corridor and Cordova, where his message of public safety and budgetary austerity resonate.

But those predominantly white areas of Memphis (to call them by their right name) are probably not enough, all by themselves, to get Strickland over, especially since Wharton has his own residual strength in the corridor and with the city’s business community, where the mayor can hope to at least break even.

There is also the mayor’s advantage in being able to command free media on a plethora of governmental and ceremonial occasions.

Yes, it’s probably true that A C’s support in predominantly African-American precincts ain’t what it used to be, and it never was what you would call dominating, not this year with all the well-publicized cuts in city services. And not with Mike Williams working the African-American community, along with Whitehaven Councilman Harold Collins and Justin Ford, and with the Rev. Kenneth Whalum ready to grab off a huge chunk of that vote, should he make what is at this point an expected entry into the mayoral field.

Still, Strickland needs to grab a share of the black vote to have a chance to get elected. Where does he get it? Well, he’s attending African-American churches on Sunday, one of the well-worn pathways in local politics. So that will help. But probably not as much as the endorsement he got last Saturday at the annual Sidney Chism Community Picnic on Horn Lake Road from the impresario of that event. Longtime political broker Chism early on announced his support of Strickland from the stage of the sprawling picnic grounds.

Time may have tarnished Chism’s reputation a bit, as it did his longtime ally, former Mayor Willie Herenton (an attendee at the picnic), but the former Teamster leader, Democratic Party chairman, state senator, and county commissioner still has enough influence to have basically put Randa Spears over as Shelby County Democratic chair earlier this year. And he may have enough to give Strickland that extra boost he needs to be fully competitive. We’ll see.

Chism, as it happens, is mired in a couple of controversies at the moment. His employment as a “media specialist” by Sheriff Bill Oldham is regarded with suspicion as a political quid pro quo and pension-inflater by several Republican members of the Shelby County Commission, who at budget-crunch time are making an issue of it, along with an Oldham-provided job for former Shelby County Preparedness director Bob Nations.

And Chism may have reignited another long-smoldering situation when he used the bully pulpit of his picnic to attack an intramural Democratic Party foe, Del Gill, who was runner-up to Spears in the party chairmanship contest. Chism did so at first indirectly, on the front end of the event, while he was acknowledging from the stage the presence in the crowd of party chair Spears.

“She’s been catching a whole lot of flak from one crazy person, but I hope y’all put him out of this city, and he’ll be all right.” Chism chose to be more explicit when he returned to the stage after a series of candidates in the city election had made their public remarks.

“I said something earlier,” Chism said. “I said there was somebody who needed running out of town, and that person, I didn’t call his name, but that person is Del Gill. … He ain’t worth two cents. … He’s been lyin’ on me for 10 years He won’t show up and do it to my face, but he lies all the time.”

In a widely circulated email response, Gill returned fire, reminding his readers that he had taken the lead in having Chism censured by the local Democratic Party executive committee in 2014 for allegedly attempting to subvert the sheriff’s campaign of Democratic nominee Bennie Cobb in favor of Republican Oldham.

Chism used his attack on Gill as a platform from which to launch his recipe for Democratic success at the polls: “We’re not going to win any elections in Shelby County until we get into the mindset that we’ve got to get in the middle. If we get in the middle, we can elect Democrats, qualified Democrats.

“I didn’t say you’ve got to be a super-intelligent magna cum laude educated person. I’m saying you ought to be smart enough to know that the people in this country are in the middle.” He urged his listeners to “vote for the right person, and he ain’t got to look like me; just act like me.”

Actually, the two Chism battlefronts — his employment battle with GOP county commissioners and the Democratic Party fireworks — are connected. Such commission critics of Chism as Heidi Shafer and David Reaves, both Republicans, have made pointed remarks in private about what they claim was Chism’s disservice to fellow Commissioner Reginald Milton, a Democrat, in intervening against Milton’s own bid for party chairmanship. And Milton, perhaps unsurprisingly, has expressed his own skepticism about the sheriff’s budget requests.

Shafer and Reaves, along with GOP Commissioner Terry Roland, are also suspicious that Oldham’s wish to have Chism (and other Chism associates) aboard is related to a potential 2018 campaign by Oldham for county mayor, an office for which Roland, for one, has essentially already announced.

Oldham has been mum on the subject of his future political intentions, if any, but it is a fact that the progression from sheriff to county mayor has been made already by several predecessors — Roy “Skip” Nixon, Bill Morris, and current County Mayor Mark Luttrell.

Random notes: The newly elected president of the Shelby County Young Democrats is Alvin Crook, who made something of a stir last year when, in the course of a public debate, he formally endorsed Van Turner, his Democratic primary opponent for a county commission seat.

Crook, who is employed as a courtroom bailiff, says his group will be making endorsements in the city election this year.

Other new Young Democrat officers: Regina Beale, first vice president; Jim Kyle Jr., 2nd vice president; Matt Pitts, treasurer; Rebekah Hart, secretary; and Justin Askew, parliamentarian.

• Two Shelby Countians, state Senator Mark Norris and attorney Al Harvey, were among three Tennesseans who were invited guests of British royalty at Monday’s ceremony in Runnymede, England, commemorating the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta there.

Norris was invited in his capacity as immediate past chairman of the Council of State Governments; Harvey, along with General Sessions Judge Lee Bussart Bowles of Marshall County, represented the American Bar Association.

A sure sign that the city election season is heating up: On Thursday, June 18th, from 5 to 7 p.m., Patrice Robinson, a candidate for city council, District 3, and Mary Wilder, candidate for the council’s District 5, will be holding simultaneous fund-raisers in different parts of town.

Overlapping events of this sort, still uncommon, will at a certain point in the election cycle, become routine.

• In its latest issue, the Tennessee Journal of Nashville takes note of the Tennessee Republican Party’s concerted “Red to the Roots” campaign directed at capturing as many of the state’s county assessor positions as possible next year.

The newsletter also notes that Shelby County Assessor Cheyenne Johnson, a Democrat, will be exempt from the purge attempt, having already won reelection to a four-year term in 2014. Johnson’s being on a different cycle from other state assessors is a consequence of the county commission’s consolidating all county offices into a common election cycle via 2008 revisions to the county charter.

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Politics Politics Feature

Dotting the ‘”I” in Memphis Politics

CREDIT: JB

JB

Sidney Chism and small fan at last year’s picnic.

Attendees at the Sidney Chism political picnic, held two weekends ago at the usual stomping grounds on Horn Lake, would have observed this scribe doing his annual duty there for several hours, and may have since wondered if and when I would publish an account.

For a variety of reasons, I have delayed posting my observations. I do indeed have some, along with a variety of interesting photographs from the event, and I’ll be putting samples of both online shortly, along with snapshots and notes about other aspects of the recent political season.

There has been what the late poet T. S. Eliot would call an “objective correlative” to my wait on dealing with the picnic. On the day of the event, Saturday, June 21st, I was leaving the picnic when my left foot sank deep into a perfectly disguised hole on the property, a good foot deeper than its surroundings but topped with the same deceptive flow of green grass.

I thought I’d wrenched a knee but was able to walk out on my own, and, since nothing except a little soreness occurred over the next few days, thought I must have gotten off light. Last Thursday night, however, after I’d been to two political events (moderating one), I started feeling punk enough to beg off on a third.

Starting about nine o’clock Thursday and continuing through the weekend, the left knee gave me its delayed constituent reaction, swelling up to double its usual size, hollering at me vigorously through the available nerve circuits and stiffening up so as to make me bed-ridden even before I got doctor’s orders to that effect.

I got the knee drained of fluid and shot with cortisone on Sunday, and that seems to have restored me to the ranks of the ambient. Knock knock.

And, being a respector of what may have been a karmic message, I shall delay no longer in shedding some light on what happened at the picnic (though the balance of my observations will be published in the “Political Beat Blog” online).

The most remarkable single circumstance was the apparent endorsement by host Chism of several candidates — two of them outright: Democratic nominee Deidre Malone and, most vociferously, Sheriff Bill Oldham, the Republican nominee for a position also sought by Democrat Bennie Cobb.

It will be remembered that Chism was actually censured some time back by his Democratic Party mates at a meeting of the party’s executive committee for his support of Oldham. Chism was not bashful about giving Oldham his best shout-out at the picnic, and he — the county commissioner who was given so often to denouncing Republicans as marching always “in lockstep” — was now boasting defiantly about his having “friends” in both parties.

On the congressional scene, Chism gave Ricky Wilkins, the Democratic challenger to incumbent Steve Cohen in the 9th district, what seemed to be at least an indirect nod, allowing (or encouraging) event emcee Leon Gray to introduce the challenger with Wilkins’ own billboard slogan, “our next congressman.”            

• The current congressman, Cohen, was conspicuously absent from the Chism event, but he is making his presence felt in other ways.

Undeniably stung by this past weekend’s announcement of a Wilkins endorsement by the Memphis Police Association, Cohen, who early in his career was the legal adviser to the Memphis Police Department, put on a show of force on Monday, backed by almost a score of union representatives trumpeting their own or the Memphis Labor Council’s endorsement of the incumbent congressman, who has normally enjoyed wall-to-wall support from local  unions.

• For the record, there’s been some feedback about that August 2013 letter (see Politics, June 26th) from Imad Abdullah, the then president of the Ben F. Jones chapter of the National Bar Association (NBA), to chapter members soliciting “attorneys of color” to come forth as candidates in the 2014 judicial election with the goal of running “one member per race.”

There were numerous reactions to the premise of that item — especially from current office-holders irked at having to devote a summer to running against what they consider to be premature or unqualified candidates. One comes from Criminal Court Judge James Beasley (who is himself unopposed in this election) in this week’s Flyer Viewpoint, p. 12.

Another came from David E. McKinney, the current president of the Jones chapter of the NBA. In a letter notable for its courtesy, McKinney insists, “I vehemently reject the notion that this chapter is engaged in endorsing judicial candidates in the upcoming election based upon their race or ethnicity.”

And, indeed, as he and others have pointed out, there has of yet been no slate of endorsees released by the Ben F. Jones chapter. One who has made this point was lawyer/congressional candidate Wilkins, who (with Charles Carpenter) was mentioned as follows in Abdullah’s letter:

“Thus, to keep us on an organized path, we have established a separate committee that is co-chaired by Charles E. Carpenter and Ricky E. Wilkins. This committee has been hard at work establishing a mechanism to reach a consensus candidate for each race.”

Wilkins spoke to the Flyer on Thursday and strongly denied that he had been part of any action to prepare a black candidates’ slate for this year’s election, though he acknowledged he had been briefed in general about plans to interest African-American lawyers in seeking judicial office and had responded with encouragement.

Whatever the case, the number of contested races in this year’s judicial election is reasonably high (though maybe not unprecedentedly so), and it would seem that incumbents, for the most part, are getting the better of it so far — at least in the Memphis Bar Association’s lawyers’ poll of judicial candidates, released on Monday.

(Those recommendations are available online at memphisflyer.com‘s “Political Beat Blog” and will be available in their entirety in future print issues.)

• Note to judicial candidate Alicia Howard, who has asked me for a retraction of my report last week, based on public commentary by former Democratic Chairman Van Turner and on a citation from the state Board of Professional Responsibility regarding her erstwhile suspension: 

It is a matter of record that the board in 2011 gave attorney Howard an 18-month suspension for “signing and notarizing her client’s signature to [a] petition without indicating the client’s permission to do so” and for submitting “applications to the AOC [Administrative Office of the Courts] billing for work not performed.” 

Those two findings were the heart of the case against her and the reason why Howard was cited by the board for seven separate breaches in categories ranging from “truthfulness” to “fairness” to “misconduct.”

Howard objected to my saying that she “was held liable for forging a client’s name to a document without authorization” and for “obtain[ing] payment from the state Administrative Office of the Courts under false pretenses.” I will gladly withdraw that attempt at layman’s summary in favor of the Board’s carefully parsed statements quoted above.

She points out also that she “practiced for over twenty years with absolutely no discipline history,” that she “disagreed with certain findings” and accepted “the harsh nature of the penalty” only after “considering the expense of prolonged litigation and the toll on my family and my personal health.”

Howard also contends that 12 months was lopped off her suspension time and that she was able to resume practice in January 2012.

 

• The Master Meal of the East Shelby County Republican Club, which normally has some out-of-county designate as its featured speaker (past example: former Arkansas Governor/TV host Mike Huckabee) got by on local talent this year — the party’s major county-wide candidates on the August election ballot, plus state GOP chairman Chris Devaney of Nashville.

But that was enough to swell the turnout to several hundred at the Great Hall of Germantown last Tuesday night. Included were candidates galore for other races, including not a few Democrats. An omen for what comes next?