Thursday, October 1, 2009
Memphis Goes National
Post-racial politics or keepin' it real?
Posted by John Branston on Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 4:00 AM
In a Monday editorial titled "Sucker Punch," The Washington Post said the Herenton-Cohen 2010 congressional race "gets ugly" and Willie Herenton is "jumping into the gutter with low-road tactics that divide rather than enlighten."
The editorial took Shelby County commissioner and Herenton supporter Sidney Chism to task for saying the 9th Congressional District seat "was set aside for people who look like me. It wasn't set aside for a Jew or a Christian. It was set aside so that blacks could have representation." The Post says "someone forgot to tell the district's free-thinking voters" who sent Cohen to Washington in 2006 and 2008.
Or maybe them big-city Yankee editorial writers ought to take off their rose-colored glasses. Chism got sucker-punched for plain speaking. If his statement is not literally correct, it is essentially correct, and history backs him up.
Whatever it is today, Memphis was no racial utopia in the events leading to the tangled creation of the 9th district.
Race has been at the core of every major Memphis redistricting, annexation, and runoff-election decision for at least 50 years. The 9th is the only district in Tennessee located within one county and the only one ever to have a black representative. It was eliminated in 1973 based on the 1970 census.
In the 1974 congressional election, white flight from school busing, the Watergate scandal, and a big increase in black voter registration allowed Harold Ford Sr. to beat a white Republican opponent by only 774 votes out of 135,000 votes. A tweak of the district lines here or there and it might have been different. The district was recreated as a majority-black district with a preponderance of Democrats in 1983 based on the 1980 census.
Prior to Ford's election, it was common knowledge that in a racially mixed city like Memphis, elections could be rigged in favor of white candidates by carefully drawing district lines, selective annexation, and runoff elections. In 1966, civil rights pioneer Vasco Smith, who died this week, said, "We don't stand a ghost of a chance in this town when it comes to running at large." Eventually, the federal courts agreed and, in the process, officially acknowledged the impact of racial bloc voting. In 1991, at the urging of the U.S. Justice Department, a judge in Memphis struck down runoff elections for the specific reason that they penalized black candidates in mayoral and at-large city council elections. Which was what blacks had been saying for decades.
The immediate beneficiary, of course, was Herenton, who won the 1991 election with 49.4 percent. An indirect beneficiary was Steve Cohen, who won the 2006 Democratic primary with about one third of the vote before winning the general election with 60 percent.
The former mayor and educator knows better than anyone the impact of race on elections, annexations, housing patterns, and public school enrollment. As a principal and superintendent, he witnessed white flight from the school system and did what he could to slow it down by supporting optional schools. He also took the heat for closing several black schools.
He believed in integration, and he knew public support would dissipate for an all-black system. In one of his first interviews as mayor in 1992, he told me the same thing about the city as a whole, if it went the way of Detroit, and he correctly predicted that white enrollment in the schools would drop below 10 percent. It is now 7 percent.
Herenton the unifier has been forgotten by most people, including, it often seems, himself. His horrible decisions and word choices had a lot to do with it.
In an interview quoted in The New York Times, which like The Washington Post has taken a fancy to this story, he said "to know Steve Cohen is to know that he really does not think very much of African Americans" and that Cohen "has played the black community well."
Cohen fired back in a letter to the Times published last week, noting that he was reelected in 2008 with nearly 80 percent, foreshadowing, he wrote, the election of Barack Obama.
"We've come a long way in Memphis, and ours is a story of post-racial politics."
We'll see, and the national media will be watching.
Comments (7)
Showing 1-7 of 7
I am not impressed with Cohen's staff. They arent as helpful as they should be and some are borderline rude. And, Herenton is intellectually lazy. He is interested only in what benefits Herernton and has no curiosity about what lies outside his constricted circle of interests
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From what I understand (of course from people who are unwilling to go on the record), the 9th District was created because nobody else wanted to have Memphis blacks in their district. It was created as a majority black district, not because anyone wanted to give blacks a break, but rather because nobody involved with redistricting wanted anything to do with the problems associated with Memphis' inner city at the time. When I find SOMEONE willing to speak on the record about this, I will submit my story to the Flyer. If nothing else, I am fairly certain that the 9th District absolutely was not formed out of some egalitarian spirit of equal opportunity for the races.
I also think it is unhelpful to conflate the creation of the 9th District with the consent decree that gave us the weird superdistrict system we have now. Those were two entirely separate events, and as near as I can tell from my blogger's basement fortress, the result of completely different motivating factors. Please understand that I'm not trying to attack your piece (which I mostly agree with), but the wording makes it sound like those two things were alike. They were not alike at all.
That said and out of the way, I do think Memphis has entered a sort of neutral zone where race is concerned. I wouldn't call it post-racial, but I would call it post-Civil Rights Movement. We are living in a moment when people in Memphis are fed up with being manipulated over race. This isn't some wonderful golden age, and we aren't going to see mulatto unicorns farting diversity rainbow flags in Court Square, but we do have a unique opportunity here to change course and move forward as one city that hasn't been present in my lifetime.
good points! i do have one complaint:
"mulatto unicorns farting diversity rainbow flags in Court Square"
thanks for another image it will take weeks of therapy to remove from my brain....
throw the bums out:
I'm with you.
I have little use for either candidate.
I'd vote for (almost) anybody that ran against those two idiots.
I'm in the 9th District too. So, if (almost) anybody wants to run, you've got a sure vote with me.
Thanks John Branston for keeping it real.
I voted for Cohen in his first run for congress. His opponents, with no vision for change, were simply unimpressive. Beside, I had a strong aversion for racism in myself as well as others. The racism disease is characteristic of the flu; it make one sick. I was desperate for a fresh start, a breath of fresh air. No one, absolutely, no one is more sick and tired of the race issue than I am.
On the second round Cohen nor his opponents were impressive. Again, it was a lack luster campaign, with no promises and no request; we didn't asked for anything and nothing was promised. I skipped that box and voted for neither of the candidates.
Now, coming into the third term I will vote but not for Cohen. It is true; he IS a pandering politician AND a player on African Americans. We all know what panders do for the common good: no more than a pimp does for his ladies, nothing! The voters get pimped, the industrial captains, "The Big Mules" get rich and the congressman aims to get re-elected.
The apology for slavery without any interest in an acceptance speech is a case in point. Congress gets all of the credit and the people, like the ladies of the evening, get nothing of substance and the pimp, like the congressman, get a free ride.
That after-hour-stroke, at the mid-night hour, endorsement of Obama for president, just a few hours before the election poles opened, ditto, nada. Hanging out with the Detroit player, the professor and Mary Ann and giving out awards to Ben Hooks who actually was THE main man who lead the, 'A white man can't represent the district' movement, DITTO!
We might not know grammar but Herenton knows THE needs of African Americans, in side and out. Knowing our needs is of no consequence for Cohen. If we don't ask he won't tell. He is and will always be who he says he is: 'I am White, I am Jewish and I am a male..." Had he truly known our needs he would have galvanized all of that power he commands and used it to helped us change this culture of poverty that we live in continuously since the nation's birth.
Herenton had close to eighteen years as Mayor; Cohen had twenty years or more as a State Legislator: they're almost even. Cohen has had two terms in congress, he's two up. It's Herenton's turn. Having said all of that, I'll bet my money on the bobbed tail nag; somebody else can bet on the bey. "But don't be cruel..." Let race come last.
Maia A Locke
Cohen may be a goofball, but people who are seriously considering putting a divisive megalomaniac like Herenton in Congress are masochists plain and simple.
THE needs of the African Americans is the same as THE needs of the white folk, Maia. THE needs of ignorance and selfishness is to what Herenton panders.
I've been all over the world and every person on this earth wants the same damn thing. They want to feed their children, have the opportunity to be educated and make a living. It all boils down to that. And every single nook and cranny on this earth has has some damn power hungry political machine standing in the way of these basic needs.
Herenton is one our power hungry political machines on our little corner of this terra firma.
He's a creep. So is Cohen. And it has nothing to do with Jewishness, blackness, maleness or whiteness.
Pimps serve their purpose. May I propose we get one to protect us from these malevolent Johns?
"We might not know grammer..." You might know grammer if you had a mayor for umpteen years that understood what THE needs were. Of ALL Memphians.
Progress beyond your ignorance, please.
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