Marie Feagins, the controversial former schools superintendent, whose firing last year by the Memphis-Shelby County School Board would cause convulsions in both local and state politics, is about to stir further disruptions.
Most immediately, the Shelby County Commission has scheduled a vote on Monday on whether to override County Mayor Lee Harris’ veto of the commission’s recent action to realign all nine school board seats for next year’s county ballot.
The commission’s realignment decision, which narrowly passed, was heavily influenced by outrage in the community over the Feagins firing, which was largely the work of the board members elected in 2024. Those members would see their four-year terms put on the line two years early if the realignment comes to pass.
Though other motives of various kinds were involved, the county commission’s realignment vote, which conformed to legislation passed in this year’s General Assembly enabling it, was essentially an outgrowth of the Feagins controversy.
The number of county commissioners known to favor an override of Harris’ veto is seven. An override eould require eight votes, and that fact lays much of the responsibility for the outcome on Commissioner Mickell Lowery, now considered a leading candidate in the forthcoming 2026 county mayor’s race. Lowery was absent for the commission’s earlier vote on realignment, and his vote on the override could be crucial.
Much of the support for Feagins that materialized in the wake of her ouster came from within the African-American community, but much of it, too, was on the part of conservatives, largely white, who approved of Feagins’ dramatic budget economies and her reassignment of school administrators to classroom teaching. (Hence, the attempt at remedial action by the GOP legislative majority in the General Assembly.)
There is enough ambivalence (and enough residual passion) in the Feagins support base that Lowery’s vote on the veto override could have an impact on his mayoral race, in which he is considered neck-and-neck at this point with Councilman JB Smiley, who has been something of a Feagins antagonist.
But Feagins could affect the county mayor’s race even more directly. She has been asking around among well-known political donors about the possibility of getting their support for a mayoral race of her own.
Events have already made it obvious that Feagins is a hot-button personality, but it may be that she is more notorious than charismatic. In any case, it is difficult to imagine what her essential political identity is. Her firing activated a surge of sympathy among Republicans in state government and with conservatives in general, who saw her as someone willing to take on established local bureaucracies, but it is unclear whether that somewhat circumstantial connection is durable enough to generate dependable support among local GOP regulars, who are, after all, a numerical minority in Shelby County.
But, as previously noted, the supporters who turned out in such impressive numbers to protest her firing at school board meetings and elsewhere were overwhelmingly African-American and presumably more used to voting Democratic than otherwise.
Much, then, would depend on whether Feagins, should she choose to run, would do so in what promises to be a fairly crowded Democratic primary, where she would be one of two female candidates (the other being the already launched Criminal Court Clerk Heidi Kuhn), or as an independent or, even conceivably, as a Republican.
Bylaws of both local parties requiring a history of party voting (which Feagins lacks) would seem to preclude her running in a party primary. But she could appeal the issue.
In any case, a candidacy by Feagins would almost certainly be disruptive of normal expectations.