We all saw the demonstrators in the plaza in front of the
federal building last week, their signs and shouts accusing the government of
both racial and political bias in its prosecution of Roscoe Dixon.

Racial, in that former state senator Dixon and most of the
others accused in the Tennessee Waltz scandal are African Americans. Political,
in that most of them are Democrats. And a little conversation with one of the
protesters, a friendly enough gentleman, fused those two categories together
into a third: Ford Democrats.

The idea was based on the fact that Dixon, state senator Kathryn
Bowers, and (to say the least) Dixon’s former Senate colleague John Ford were
prominent among those caught in the FBI sting. These were all members of the
diminished but still influential political constellation that was brought into
being 30-odd years ago by former Congressman Harold Ford Sr., who now resides in
Florida and intervenes in local affairs only once in a while.

One of those occasions, under way as we speak, is that of his
son and political heir, Harold Ford Jr., squeaky-clean and scandal-free and
currently attempting a U.S. Senate race from the springboard of the 9th District
congressional seat he inherited from his father back in 1996.

Though there is still a rough cleavage in inner-city Memphis
politics between forces loyal to the Fords and those partial to Memphis mayor
Willie Herenton, the old rivalry lacks the fire. It is well understood that
Harold Jr. aspires to national prominence, not local, and that even a defeat in
the Senate race would not consign him to mucking about in the trenches of local
ward politics.

Yes, there are members of the extended Ford family in this or
that political office, and a new generation of hopefuls running for yet others,
but the simple truth is that “Ford Democrats,” pending the outcome of that
Senate race, are not so much a political force as they are a faction — one of
three more or less co-equal ones — in the Shelby County Democratic Party of
today.

It is doubtful that the FBI, or the U.S. attorney’s office,
either, is interested in mixing it up with the Del Gills of the world to
determine the pecking order of that embattled satrapy.

To what, then, do we owe the preponderance of Ford-faction
African-American Memphis Democrats in the ranks of Tennessee Waltz indictees?
Racism? Innate disposition? Political targeting?

Answer: none of the above. One need look no further than Barry
Myers, the Dixon factotum whose motor-mouthed extravagance in the FBI’s
surveillance recordings — even more than his testimonies, past- and
future-tense, for the government — is crucial to the shaping of the Tennessee
Waltz’s cast of characters.

When “L.C. McNeil,” the pseudonymous FBI agent posing as vice
president of the bogus electronics firm E-Cycle Management, asks the counsel of
Myers, an early contact, about likely collaborators in pushing the firm’s
legislation in return for payoffs, it is Myers, not the FBI or the TBI or the
U.S. attorney’s office, who determines the identity of the eventual stingees.

He scornfully advises the agent to stay away from “the white
boys” when several white legislators, mainly Republican ones, are mentioned. But
he’s an equal-opportunity excluder; he also steers the agents away from the
likes of Joe Towns, an independent-minded black Memphis Democrat, whom he
dismisses as a “nonentity.”

Myers is insistent that “E-Cycle” confine the spread of its
lucre to a relatively small group of legislative intimates. These, he assures
the presumed E-Cycle executives, are the “niggas” you can trust. It’s our thing,
he tells the agents, or, as one would say in Italian, cosa nostra.

There, rather than through some imagined predatory scheme of the
federal government’s, is the likely explanation of how the subjects of the
Tennessee Waltz sting ended up being profiled. There may be further organized
protests, but the most effective appeals on these defendants’ behalf are more
likely to be heard in courtrooms than in public plazas.