Otis Sanford

Otis Sanford may be as close to a paragon of black success in Memphis and Shelby County as you can find, and as Sanford sees it, the racial situation of Memphis and Shelby County can be measured, essentially, by the historical poles of Crump and Trump. Ed “Boss” Crump had ruled the city with an iron hand for 50 or so years, right up to his death in 1954, a scant few months after Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that was the true beginning of the Civil Rights revolution in America.

And the national influence of President Donald Trump, Sanford believes, has re-introduced certain polarities and squelched what might have been a genuinely “post-racial” period in Memphis history — one characterized by the electoral victories of A C Wharton, an African American, in winning both a county and a city mayoralty and Steve Cohen, a white, in establishing himself in a majority-Black congressional district. Even given the reality of a backlash of sorts, though, Sanford, a native of northern Mississippi, who experienced most of the extreme manifestations of racism practiced in the Magnolia State while growing up, believes that the way is now clear for blacks to succeed, more or less according to the limits of their ability.

“If you do things I have done, play the game the right way, work your way up from smaller opportunities to ever larger opportunities, work hard and learn from your mistakes, and try to understand the community, I don’t see any impediments,” Sanford declares, sitting in a conference room in the Meeman Journalism Building at the University of Memphis, where he holds the Hardin Chair of Excellence in Economic and Managerial Journalism.

Sanford, of course, is the author of the well-received history, From Boss Crump to King Willie. He also is the resident political commentator of WREG-TV News Channel 3 and writes a weekly column for The Commercial Appeal, the metropolitan daily newspaper of which he came within an ace of being the editor. That he didn’t achieve that perch Sanford attributes more to a sense that the powers-that-be at Scripps-Howard, the paper’s ruling chain at the time, wanted to transition from the hard-driving regime of Angus McEachran, his mentor and predecessor, than to any reservations they had about his race.

Noting that the death of Boss Crump, in October 1954, followed so close upon Brown v. Board of Education in May, Sanford says that the origins of a historical sea change were observable already in the late outlook of Crump.

“Black folks didn’t support him like they previously had. His choices had gotten licked in the 1948 election results, locally and statewide and even in the presidential election, where he’d backed Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond,” he says. “And he was chastened by that and learned from it. I believe he understood that the Black community had evolved from a leadership that had to ask him for favors to one which arose mainly from the legal community — Russell Sugarmon, Ben Hooks, H.T. Lockard, Ben Jones — figures who demanded change.”

Crump worked hard to reelect Frank Clement, his last major political protegé, as governor, in the August 1954 Democratic primary, then, worn-out and fully expended, died, ending an era. And, ironically, Clement, like Memphis Mayor Edmund Orgill and other white figures of the time, was suspended in a limbo between a time of white domination and rising African-American numbers and political power, unwilling to swear to the old faith and unable to fully speak to the new, more inclusive one. “Orgill for example, was progressive up to a point, but he was not willing to be a spokesman for desegregation.”

It took Black power itself, assisted by the courts, to break the impasse and usher in a time of relatively even-handed politics — one symbolized by the victory of Harold Ford Sr. for Congress in 1974 and by Willie Herenton for mayor in 1991, as well as by full participation by Blacks in city and county service and pre-eminence in certain fields, like public education.

Sanford sees that wave of outright Black political prominence as having subsided somewhat, and is not entirely regretful. “We don’t need to go back down that road to purely racial politics. Blacks have always been more supportive of whites than whites have of Blacks.”

But he also thinks that sentiment is beginning to crest once again among African Americans for a symbolic figure at the top of some major political office. He sees Cohen enduring in the congressional sphere and Jim Strickland as likely to be re-elected; so that new Black avatar might, by process of elimination, have to be Lee Harris, the likely winner of the Democratic primary for Shelby County Mayor this year, who will doubtless contend against the winner of a three-way Republican battle-royale primary.

And Harris, a crossover type with a smooth professional gloss, is precisely the kind of political figure who will usher in the next phase of Memphis and Shelby County politics, Sanford believes. That is, if the throwback white populism of Donald Trump, evident in such Trumpian figures as mayoral candidate Terry Roland locally and Senatorial aspirant Marsha Blackburn statewide, don’t predominate instead.