BY
JACKSON BAKER |
JUNE 14, 2007
This week’s published allegations of his involvement in a
blackmail plot against Mayor Willie Herenton are the latest and most
sensational elements of a cascade of controversy swirling about attorney Richard
Fields, whose role in a desegregation case in nearby Jackson has also generated
a storm in that West Tennesse city.
Known for many years as a civil rights attorney, Fields has
been attempting to broaden his involvement in public affairs for several years,
intervening in local election contests by issuing sample ballots favoring his
approved candidates while circulating negative information about candidates he
disapproves of.
As a pro bono attorney, he also worked in harness in early
2006 with a legal team representing the state Republican Party charging
electoral fraud in an effort, ultimately successful, to unseat newly elected
Democratic state Senator Ophelia Ford in favor of her Republican opponent, Terry
Roland. Fields was forced to withdraw from the Shelby County Democratic
Committee after several of its members charged a political conflict of interest.
Fields was subsequently reelected to the local Democratic
committee and survived a renewed attempt to oust him when new party chairman
Keith Norman ruled another member’s motion to that effect out of order. (The
member in question, sometime radio talk-show host Jennings Bernard, has also
charged Fields with having assaulted him.)
Though a longtime Herenton confidante, Fields has been on
the outs with the mayor in recent years and was one of two local figures
(businessman Karl Schledwitz was the other) who commissioned polls earlier this
year showing Herenton’s approval ratings to have sunk in both the black and
white communities.
Published reports on the weblog of Thaddeus Matthews,
followed by a front-page article in The Commercial Appeal, name Fields as
the active party in a purported effort to recruit a former topless-club waitress
to attempt an intimate personal relationship with Herenton. The point, say both
accounts, would have been to create fodder for pressuring the mayor to withdraw
from the mayoral race.
Meanwhile, Fields has been a bone of contention in Jackson,
where, as representative of that city’s NAACP chapter, he has been pressing the
Madison County School Board to make substantial revisions in an existing 2000
school-desegregation plan negotiated by the board with the NAACP.
In a disapproving article of May 29, the Jackson Sun‘s
editorial page editor, Tom Bohs, commended the prior agreement and Richard
Dinkins, now a judge and then the local attorney for the NAACP. Bohs went on:
“[The
NAACP’s] current lawyer,
Richard Fields,
being paid by taxpayers, should be fired. He failed to respond to requests from
the school system’s lawyer. He is late for meetings and he shows up in blue
jeans when he does finally get there. Where did they find this guy? Is this the
image the NAACP wants to project? We’ve got professional educators, lawyers,
elected officials and a hippie lawyer for the other side who doesn’t own a
watch. That might have cut the mustard in the 1960s, but it won’t today. Get rid
of this guy!”