Photo by Shiela Whaley from video courtesy of WMC-TV, Channel 5
As they say, it ain’t over ‘til it’s over, and there’s no guaranteeing that the intra-party squabble among local Democrats is. But there is, as of Monday night, a new chairman of the Shelby County Democrats. It is State Representative Kathryn Bowers, elected by a vote of 21-20 by the 41-member party executive committee in a special meeting at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union hall on Madison.
Monday night’s special meeting had been agreed upon by the party’s two warring factons — one supporting the now former chairman Gale Jones Carson, the other backing Bowers — after the two rivals for the chairmanship deadlocked 20-20 at the regularly scheduled party convention on April 12th at Hamilton High School..
But the factions had disagreed seriously about an intervening event, a meeting of May 1st at which Carson, still holding office, had presided over the election of other officers, most of whom were her own partisans. (She had offered some positions to supporters of Bowers, all of whom declined in a show of factional solidarity.) Carson’s contention was that party bylaws called for such an election following the convention; the Bowers faction countered that it was up to the new committee elected on April 12th to set its own schedule.
In any case, the work of May 1st was undone Monday night with the election of Bowers — whose support came principally from the party’s residual Ford and Farris factions, from her fellow legislators and their allies on the committee, and from the new committee’s white minority. Carson, who serves as Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton’s press secretary, had strong support from the mayor’s wing of the party. (Herenton himself had put in an appearance on Carson’s behalf at the party’s pre-convention March caucus at Hamilton.)
A slate of new officers, composed overwhelmingly of Bowers supporters, was also elected as the election of the Carson-approved slate on May 1st was formally rescinded.
Among the highlights (or lowlights) of the evening:
On Monday night, Carson supporter Malcolm Nelson, who had earlier lambasted Bowers backer David Cocke for moving to disapprove the minutes of May 1st (Cocke’s point being to nullify that meeting’s election of the Carson slate), was nominated for an office by a Bowers supporter and was asked if he had anything to say to the committee. He rose and said gravely, “Good evening,” then withdrew. (Later, though, both he and another Carson diehard, Lenard Jennings, seemed uncertain as to whether they should accept such goodwill nominations. Jennings finally allowed himself to be voted on for an at-large post on the party steering committee but went down 13-12 to Jesse Jeff, his fellow Carson supporter.)
As the Old Guard yielded to the New, there were some moments of minor pathos. Freelance journalist Bill Larsha, a committee veteran,, had been appointed by Carson as parliamentarian to succeed Del Gill at the May 1st meeting. As he took his seat on the dais before Monday night’s meeting, Larsha beamed and showed off the proud possession he had armed himself with. It was a vintage, dog-eared copy of Roberts’ Rules of Order, the parliamentarian’s bible, and he pointed to a faded signature on the inner leaf of the volume.
“Look,” Larsha had said excitedly, “this is signed by the last surviving member of the Roberts family!” But when Bowers took over, her first act as new chairman was to depose Larsha, whose tenure in office therefore ended up being measured in minutes, and to rename Gill. Larsha looked forlorn as he gathered up his literary treasure and stepped off the officers’ platform..
At the May 1st meeting, ex-Teamster leader Sidney Chism, a close ally of both Carson’s and Herenton’s, had held out the prospect that if Bowers’ people were successful in both electing her and rescinding the Carson slate of other officers elected at that meeting, then the factions might, as the succeeding months wore on, take turns voting each other out of office.
Chism, who is not a committee member, was not on hand Monday night, but another spokesperson for Carson, Norma Lester, one of the former chairman’s slate, joined Bowers in an appeal to set aside such differences in the common interest of defeating Republicans. But Lester’s proposed remedy — the appointment of a five-member special committee composed of two Bowers supporters, two Carson supporters and a neutral (whoever that might be, under the highly polarized circumstances) to select a slate of new party officers — was rejected, and the election of a Bowers-dominated slate went ahead as planned.
Upon formally taking office, Bowers had given an exhortatory speech in which she promised to establish a paty headquarters, raise $250,000 for the party’s 2004 general election fund, and preside over “not one group but a unified party.” Likening the Shelby County Democratic Party that she foresaw to a locomotive, Bowers urged Democrats at large to climb aboard and declaimed, “It’s going to be a moving train!”
That remains to be seen. On Monday night, in any case, the train left the station without its full component aboard.
