by Jackson Baker
or a while,
it appeared that the boycotters were boycotting their own boycott. After
word was passed (from the law office of Commissioner Walter Bailey)
that the six black Democrats on the Shelby County Commission would be holding
a press conference outside the Shelby County building on the Main Street
Mall to announce their plan to boycott the commission, reporters quickly
gathered. And waited.
And
waited. For more than an hour after the supposed press conference time of
11 a.m. Meanwhile, they tried to reason out what was happening. Was the
boycott going to be of that afternoon's planned regular meeting of the commission
only? Or of the commission's meetings from that point on? And, most importantly,
what was the boycott based on? What presumed outrage or indignity or trespass
against due process?
To be sure, there had often been bitter division between the commission's two factions: seven white Republicans and six black Democrats. And, during the activist chairmanship of Democrat Julian Bolton in 1996, the two sides had deadlocked horrendously on two matters: the question of racial disparity in the awarding of county contracts and the question of how and by whom a future county school board would be elected. (Arguably, the African-American commissioners won both of those head-on clashes, although U.S. District Judge Jerome Turner would declare their plan -- for all-county voting on a board for the suburban schools -- unconstitutional.)
Even as recently as the commission's last meeting, earlier this month, there had been a serious difference of opinion -- on the issue of whether judicial partisan primaries should be permitted next year in Shelby County. That vote -- enabled by legislation in Nashville -- permitted a two-thirds majority of the commission to nullify any would-be party primary vote for judges in 1998; the resolution -- backed by all six Democrats and two Republicans -- would fail, however, by a single vote.
But it had been widely expected in the immediate aftermath of that vote that a move to reconsider it would be made at Monday's meeting; after all, within minutes after the last meeting ended, GOP Commissioner Linda Rendtorff had signalled that she might shift her vote, which had been the decisive one to keep the scheduled party primaries intact, to the side of the primary opponents -- thereby providing the needed two-thirds majority.
Unbelievably, however, no one on the commission and no one among the judicial primaries' many declared foes (including the vast majority of Shelby County's elected judges) even bothered to contact Rendtorff. Not Bailey, who ostensibly was leading the battle against judicial primaries (and who had provided the swing vote for Rendtorff when she got the commission's nod in 1995 to succeed the late Mike Tooley as commissioner). Not Bolton, last year's firebrand leader. Not Shep Wilbun. Not Michael Hooks. Not James Ford. Not even the gentle Cleo Kirk, so often the voice of compromise in commission matters.
And so Rendtorff -- who was getting plenty of reinforcement from Republican cadres -- would let it be known that her vote to keep judicial primaries had hardened.
Maybe, the reporters gathered in front of the county building Monday theorized, the outcome of the judicial primary vote was the proximate cause of any boycott that would be announced. But naaaaah, it was finally decided. There had been no procedural hanky-panky before or during the commision's vote, the voting had been undeniably fair, and two Republicans had crossed over to join the petitioning side. Moreover, the only reason the matter had come to the commission for a decision in the first place was that a Democratic member of the legislature -- Kathryn Bowers, who was an African American, to boot -- had sponsored a bill allowing for a nullification by a two-thirds vote of the body.
So the judiciary primary issue couldn't be the causative factor of the boycott, could it? And the other chief irritant to the Democrats' city-dweller constituents -- the recent rush by suburban communities to take advantage of a new legislative loophole which allowed their easy incorporation -- was not even scheduled to come before the committee. So that couldn't be the Democrats' casus belli, could it?
Wrong. And wrong. As the sweltering reporters would find out when the Democratic commissioners emerged from the air-conditioned county building and the press conference finally began, shortly after noon and roughly an hour after it had been scheduled. (The delay had two apparent causes: Michael Hooks' tardiness, and a desire to be live for the noon TV news shows.)
As Bailey intoned a prepared statement -- starting over once to coincide with introductory live remarks by one of the television reporters -- it developed that, in fact, the suburban annexation-incorporation issue, as well as that of the judicial primaries, figured as a stated cause of action for a boycott that would begin immediately and last indefinitely.
So did: "the failure of Shelby County to have a minority procurement program, the budget process (including lack of funding for our schools), and Shelby County school-board elections." Bailey continued, "When coupled with an excessive amount of recusals due to conflicts of interest, it appears that Shelby County government may be operating in response to the needs of the few as opposed to the concerns of the majority of our citizens."
That line struck not a few observers as odd. Win, lose, or draw on any given issue, the commission was as carefully calibrated to represent all factions of the community as several years of internal debate and a federal court decision could make it. The "majority" of Shelby County citizens were -- by the same kind of scant majority as the commission lineup reflected -- white and, it would seem, increasingly prone to have Republican sympathies.
The manifesto's next line was perhaps closer to the point: "Whether it is partisanship or race, or both, Shelby County government is moving in a direction contrary to the well-being of the community at large."
In other words, majority shmajority, the commission's numerically predominant faction could still be wrong. It was both partisanship and race that created the wrong tilt, Bailey said when asked. Actually, it was more partisanship than anything else, said Hooks.
What was learned afterwards was that Bailey had devised the boycott strategy in response to what he and others perceived to be a cityside losing streak, and at least part of its thrust may have been aimed at Shelby County Mayor Jim Rout, whose stance on the pending incorporation issue was, to some minds, ambiguous at best. (Rout was also scheduled to be challenged to a firmer position on the issue by a midweek press conference involving, among others, Memphis city councilman E.C. Jones, who is -- perhaps not coincidentally -- a likely Democratic candidate for sheriff next year.)
But there was very likely a rebound effect. Chairman Mark Norris had no problem at all, when talking with reporters after the Democrats' announcement,
in assuming the role of a conscientious and pained moderate. "This is a disservice to the people," he said, a statement that was echoed by the other Republicans, one way or the other. When it came time for the regular 1:30 p.m. commission meeting time, Norris was joined onstage in the county building auditorium by five fellow GOP members. Out of town was GOP Commissioner Pete Sisson, whose absence meant that the commission lacked a quorum.
Norris dutifully instructed the commission sergeant-at-arms to conduct a search of the building's lobby and the adjacent area for any sign of the absent Democrats. When this bit of sham was over, he duly noted the absence of a quorum and proclaimed that the commission would be in adjournment until August 25th. By then, he explained later, "everybody will be through with his summer vacation." Meaning, Sisson would be back, and the Republicans -- with or without the Democrats on hand, and the occasional recusal notwithstanding -- could conduct business.
What Bailey and the other Democrats were counting on, of course, was that such regular meeting attendees as local developers and members of the joint city/county Office of Planning and Development, among others, would be off-put enough meanwhile to take out their frustrations on the commission powers-that-be.
It seemed not to have occurred to Bailey that he and his fellow Democrats might be tagged -- fairly clearly and unequivocally -- not only as the culprits in the shutdown but potentially as sour-grapes saboteurs of the democratic process itself (small-d). A crowning irony was that, on the national political stage, Newt Gingrich's congressional Republicans had squandered their collateral with the American public on the eve of an election year by doing something remarkably similar.
* If county government and politics happened to be in crisis, city government and politics weren't exactly experiencing a summer idyll.
Mayor W.W. Herenton and the city council were fighting a rear-guard action against the spectre of multiple incorporation by suburban communities. The council and mayor agreed on a strong action indeed -- the denial of utilities to any new suburban community that sought to incorporate. The council also voted, in effect, to punish several New Town wannabes whom the city already services by cutting their water -- and other utilities -- off.
Meanwhile, this week's meeting of the Shelby County Election Commission would determine whether the communities of New Berryhill, Independence, and New Forest Hills could hold incorporation elections in September, as they petitioned to do.
Last week, the commission's Democrats and Republicans deadlocked 2-2 on the issue and postponed a decision until the state Election Coordinator could be heard from on several issues -- including the city of Memphis' objection that its pending denial of utilities would invalidate the petitions of the three communities.
Jim Strickland, in presenting the city's case to the Election Commission, noted that state municipal incorporation law requires that would-be cities present a "Plan of Services" and that the three petitioning communities had each named Memphis as their supplier of utilities. Ergo, he argued, their plans were obsolete, and therefore so were their petitions.
Former county commissioner Charles Perkins, meanwhile, said that the team of lawyers he headed now represented all three of the petitioning communities. Perkins, a resident of the New Forest Hills community, took credit for being the prime mover in local incorporation efforts. "I didn't know anything about it until I happened to be looking over the [legislative] code," Perkins said of his discovery that a stealth bill moved through the General Assembly by Lt. Gov. John Wilder provided a virtually painless and instantaneous mode of incorporation for new municipalities.
At the time Perkins was serving as a lobbyist in Nashville for Shelby County. He would resign that position, but not until his bona fides had been challenged by a variety of observers who wondered how he could both serve the county's interests -- especially where tax revenues were concerned -- and lead an incorporation effort for the new communities.
"There was no conflict of interest whatsoever," Perkins said. "I don't work for the city [of Memphis] and I didn't lobby for this bill. I didn't even know about it." Perkins described the issue for the suburban communities as being "about control, not about taxes."
The
reissue this week of William Bradford Huie's 1970 book He Slew
the Dreamer (Black Belt Press, 255 pp., $14.95) will do much to clarify
for the rest of us just how it was that the case for and against James
Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr., fell into such a muddle.
"The murder of Martin Luther King in 1968 was not the result of a conspiracy," the late author tells us, via a prologue to an earlier 1977 reissue. "A Negro-hating, habitual criminal named James Earl Ray, alone and unaided, killed Reverend King expecting to make himself a hero. So there was no conspiracy; Ray wasn't hired, directed, or used.
"Now, however, there is a conspiracy in this case. [A]n effort is being made to convince Americans and especially young Americans that the murder was arranged by agents of the U.S. government. "
So what else is new? As Ray's would-be legal champions fall out amongst themselves (with William Pepper, Wayne Chastain, and Jack McNeil upstaging and battling and seeking to oust each other and with veteran conspiracy-seeker Mark Lane trying to enter the case from the wings), and as the momentum for a new trial for Ray seems increasingly to be a spent nickel -- even in the broad-minded court of Criminal Court Judge Joe Brown -- a widespread belief persists out there in the world that Ray got a bum deal and that there has to be more to it.
The Huie book -- reissued through the joint efforts of the author's widow, Memphian Martha Huie, and a friend, Wayne Greenhaw -- does succeed in making it clear that at the time of Dr. King's assassination Ray was a petty professional criminal whose moral inadequacies and need for recognition and passable tactical smarts and 1968 itinerary all made it possible -- nay, probable -- for us to regard him as a lone assassin in the slaying. But the book also makes it clear that Huie's own brand of what Greenhaw calls "checkbook journalism" may have corrupted the case -- in the public mind, if not legally -- to the point that there is reason to doubt that Ray got clear justice when he was talked into pleading guilty to the assassination in 1969.
Both of Ray's early lawyers, Arthur Hanes of Birmingham and Percy Foreman of Texas, seemed to have become more interested in their share of Huie's publishing payoff -- parts of which were supposed to go to Ray, too, but mainly didn't -- than in making the case for their client.
Still, the book is indispensable reading for anyone who needs to be lessoned in the essentials of the King/Ray case. Worth the purchase price all by itself is the author's revelation that the first person to make the currently fashionable case against FBI/CIA/presidential conspirators was the late and unlamented racist demagogue J.B. Stoner.