Sanford, a political columnist for the Commercial Appeal and a commentator for Local 24 News, introduces his book with a charming account of his boyhood and the attraction a city like Memphis had for a young man from a Panola County farm in northern Mississippi. Sanford’s narrative captures the tense, anxious hours leading up to the historic announcement that the city had its first black mayor. Pleasant, at one point even interrupting a TV interview that Mr. One might have forgotten just how close the election was-Herenton won by a mere 142 votes-and how much drama there was as election night wore on in accounting for 8,600 absentee votes and seven boxes of votes that came in late, with Harold Ford, a Herenton supporter, making repeated phone calls and visits to the election commissioner, O. Apparently, Hackett took black support for granted, politicking almost exclusively to white constituencies in the 1991 campaign. Just four years earlier, Hackett had received 20 percent of the black vote-the largest percentage for a successful mayoral candidate in a generation. Herenton over the incumbent Dick Hackett. That became most obvious in 1991, when Memphians elected Dr. Sanford’s themes is the repeated failure of white politicians to recognize the growing influence of the black vote. Walker, the owner of the Universal Life Insurance Company, black Memphians tipped the balance in favor of Kefauver. Sanford, was the election in 1948 of the anti-Crump candidate Estes Kefauver to the US Senate. How did race change Memphis politics? The answer seems to be that as blacks found ways to participate more and more in the political process, they determined more and more the outcomes of elections. But the Ford family, at their best and at their worst, represents an equally significant episode of the story, one suitable for a political history in its own right. Herenton-the two most important Memphians of the last century. His energy, his sincerity, his manner-he still remains the most exciting person I ever met.) It makes sense to begin and end the book with Mr. I was in junior high, and for some reason I had been chosen to be among a group of students who met him at a luncheon in a hotel ballroom. (I still remember the day I met Harold Ford. But the chief contribution of the book is to firmly situate the Ford family in the history of twentieth-century Memphis politics, beginning with the election to the US House of Representatives in 1974 of Harold Ford, then all of twenty-nine years old. Patterson, Maxine Smith, Pat Vander Schaaf. Thus, with half of its story postdating the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike, reading the book was a trip down memory lane, reprising names I hadn’t heard or thought about in years: alphabetically, Andy Alissandratos, Wyeth Chandler, Mike Cody, Dick Hackett, Otis Higgs, Minerva Johnican, Dan Kuykendall, Danny Owens, J. I grew up in Memphis in the 1970s and 1980s. Sanford has managed to pull off an entertaining, absorbing account-and a quite comprehensive one, too-of the political campaigns, elections, and administrations that made up twentieth-century Memphis. So when I began reading Otis Sanford’s new political history of Memphis, From Boss Crump to King Willie: How Race Changed Memphis Politics (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press), I was prepared to be bored. Orr, used to say about ancient Egypt, “The pharaohs didn’t build those pyramids engineers and architects and highly skilled craftsmen did.” Since around 1980, professional historians have gradually turned away from chronicling the public performances of presidents and legislators-all without telling us what we really needed to know, that the public performances hid the private truth that presidents and legislators were serving not the public interest but moneyed interests-and have turned toward documenting the everyday people who actually do the work that keeps civilization going: women, artists, and the laboring classes (the three, of course, often overlap). Over the past thirty years, it has thankfully gone out of fashion in the academy.
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