Sawyer picking up the nominating petition for mayor, May 20 (Twitter).
Tami Sawyer has quickly left her mark on Memphis. In 2017, she led #TakeEmDown901, the movement to remove the city’s memorials to Nathan Bedford Forrest and Jefferson Davis. Last year, she was elected to the Shelby County Board of Commissioners. And now, at the age of 37, she is running for mayor.
Memphis is the third-largest majority-black city in America, the bridge between the Upper South and the Mississippi Delta; it is also the second-largest city in the South to have never had a woman mayor.
Indeed, Sawyer is quite a departure from the good-ol’-boy, glad-handing norms of Memphis politics. Her first campaign ad highlights the rot and pain of Memphis as well as its joyfulness and soul; and whereas other campaigns might use such imagery to say here’s what we need to cleanse ourselves of, her campaign is using them to say here’s what we gotta lean into.
Sawyer faces two formidable candidates, incumbent mayor Jim Strickland and former mayor Willie Herenton. Strickland has presided over a development boom, especially downtown and along the Poplar Avenue corridor that runs from midtown to the wealthy suburb of Germantown. But his re-election is by no means certain. A moderate white Democrat, he was first elected in 2015 with only 42% of the vote. Many progressives deride what they call his “trickle-down” approach to city development, which they say has been at the expense of lower-income neighborhoods.1
Each green dot represents a black Memphian, each blue dot a white Memphian; see downtown and the Poplar Avenue corridor (Racial Dot Map by Dustin A. Cable, Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, University of Virginia).
They have also been critical of the city’s cooperation with ICE, especially after Memphis journalist Manuel Duran was arrested while covering an ICE protest, had the charges against him dropped, and then, when he was released from jail, was detained by ICE agents waiting for him. It also came out that the Memphis Police Department was illegally spying on activists.
Strickland’s base of support is apparently shaky enough that Herenton decided to throw his hat in the ring. Herenton was Memphis’s first black mayor and won five consecutive elections, serving from 1991 to 2009. Called “King Willie” by both fans and critics, he was popular if controversial for most of his tenure; however, his popularity declined during his latter years as mayor, and he resigned the office under the shroud of a federal investigation into one of his real estate deals. He then tried to unseat Steve Cohen in the 9th congressional district but lost the Democratic primary by 58 percentage points, alienating voters with a clumsy and borderline anti-Semitic message that Cohen didn’t care about black people. That was in 2010; Herenton hasn’t been heard from much since.
Sawyer’s policy proposals would steer the city away from developing its economy mainly through tax abatements and towards investing in its own people. She wants to expand affordable housing, increase the percentage of minority-owned businesses that are awarded city contracts, and limit tax incentives to companies that pay their workers a living wage. She also wants to introduce participatory budgeting, wherein everyday Memphians would have more input on how to spend public funds.
Though some Memphians worry that Sawyer’s candidacy will split the “black vote” and ensure Strickland’s re-election, others are not so sure Herenton could win a two-way race anyway. Besides, the Sawyer campaign claims they poll well with white voters as well as black.2 While Strickland’s support skews towards old money, Sawyer’s white supporters skew younger and more progressive; they were perhaps not very politically engaged (“Tennessee’s such a red state”) until the advent of #BlackLivesMatter and/or the election of Trump, and they have come to know Sawyer, at least in the news and on social media, as an important grassroots leader.
Sawyer and I became acquaintances thanks to #TakeEmDown901. I attended (and live-tweeted) the inaugural meeting she held at Bruce Elementary School on June 20, 2017, and I joined a couple of protests, though not the August 19 protest where seven people were arrested for trying to cover the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue with a tarp. I also did some research for a piece of protest art that became unnecessary when the statues were removed on December 20—an order made, it should be noted, by Jim Strickland, though like New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu he has been accused of attempting to erase the role played by grassroots activists.
A through-line from Sawyer’s activism to her mayoral campaign is a strong sense of historical groundedness. She doesn’t just talk about potholes, but also why the potholes are where they are. Her campaign slogan, “We Can’t Wait,” is a deliberate callback to Martin Luther King Jr; and in homage to a quote attributed to Shirley Chisholm (“If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring in a folding chair”), she is doing a series of “Pull up a Chair” meetings throughout the city, red folding chair in tow.
In early April, I chatted with Sawyer about her personal and family history; her intersecting identities of race, class, and region; the meaning and political utility of #TakeEmDown901; and what Memphis means for its citizens and a changing South. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Were you into history—
When I was growing up?
Yeah.
I was a big history kid. My parents are big readers, writers, history folks, so I just grew up with a lot of history in my household. That’s where I learned how to think about things, through the lens of knowing my own history and others’ history. I always dived deeply into history projects at school. I was obsessed with Russian culture. I used to create my own black history curriculums because they didn’t have them in school.
Did you grow up in Memphis?
I was born in Evanston, Illinois, where my dad’s from, and we lived there until I was eight; then another suburb of Chicago, South Holland, until I was 11, 12, and then we moved here.
How did y’all end up in Memphis?
My mom’s from here. Her mother moved to Chicago when she was two, but her dad and his family were still here. She wanted to come home and take care of my great-grandmother, who was like a second mom to her. And so that’s how we ended up here when I was 12.
Your mom’s family’s roots are in Fayette County, right?
Yeah; the great-grandmother was in Fayette County. My family has land in Fayette County, the land that my ancestors were slaves on actually. So when we moved back, my parents built a house out there. And, you know, knowing that the land I grew up playing on when we were visiting from Chicago, and then living on when we built that home in Fayette County—that that was the land my ancestors were once slaves on—it was always a big part of my identity.
Had that land always been in your family or did y’all buy it later?
It had always been in my family. My great-grandmother’s grandmother, so my great-great-great-grandmother was given a parcel of land, her and her husband, by the former slaveholder.
1870 U.S. Census entry for Edmond Fields and his mother in Fayette County, shortly before he married Tami Sawyer’s great-great-great-grandmother. The checkmark at the right means that Fields was a landowner (Ancestry).
Something that occurred to me recently: my dad was born in 1934 in Ellendale; when he was fairly young they moved to Lauderdale Courts, and he was a paperboy, delivered papers in both white and black neighborhoods. And I asked him, were there people in the black neighborhoods you gave papers to who could’ve been in their 80s or 90s? And he said, sure. So my dad delivered papers to people who were probably born into slavery.
Yeah, you know, I grew up with my great-grandmother and her sisters and her brother. There were 13 of them; by the time I had my own memory there were four left, three girls and a boy and the oldest was my great-grandma, she was born in 1910. So they knew of slavery. Their grandmother was born a slave. And the youngest of the 13, Ba Ida [short for “Baby Ida”] was a teacher before segregation ended.
1930 U.S. Census entry for the Ed and Ida Lovelace household in Fayette County. Ida was the daughter of Edmond and Frances Fields. Among her and Ed’s children were Ba Ida, Mozetta, and Tami Sawyer’s great-grandmother Frances (Ancestry).
I was able to record a lot of her oral history for school projects and things like that. And that’s why I have a really strong sense of being, you know, the first generation fully free.
Any stories you heard that stuck with you?
You had to ask questions. That generation came through Jim Crow, a violent Jim Crow—Tent City hit Fayette County so hard, when the sharecroppers were put off their land for trying to vote—and people just didn’t talk about it.3
When 1,400 African Americans in Fayette County registered to vote in 1960, white landowners retaliated by evicting more than 250 black sharecroppers, resulting in several impromptu settlements throughout Fayette and Haywood counties. Photograph by Ernest C. Withers, 1960 (National Museum of African American History & Culture).
I remember doing that interview with my great-great-aunt Ba in the ’90s, and she thought we had come so far because I was interviewing her as a ninth-grader at an all-girls’ private school; you know, to be talking to me about going to segregated colleges and teaching in segregated schoolhouses, and I’m going to St. Mary’s? That’s night and day.
Yeah.
But I always think about how much is, like, oral history. We didn’t get any things that were passed down. The home remedies, how do you cook, how do you make a bed, how do you store your sheets, those were the type of things that got passed down to me.
What sort of home remedies?
My great-great-aunt Mozetta used to make this concoction in a huge mason jar that was red onion, garlic, some kind of juice, vinegar, it was disgusting, and then they put a lemon and a little sugar in it like that made any difference! And if you had a cold you were supposed to drink it. I always hated it, but my mom would make her make it. I would heat it up and drink it just, like, straight.
That type of stuff. My great-grandmother Frances was a seamstress and she did that in Fayette County and then here in Memphis. She actually attended [former NAACP president Benjamin L.] Hooks’s church, which is how my mother first met [his nephew] Michael Hooks Sr., who was my brother’s dad. And she used to make beautiful dresses for us. I remember having to stay straight while she would make a model of me every summer, it was like a pin and stick type thing and I hated it.
Sawyer at her teenage home in Fayette County.
You know, one of my favorite songs was the Dixie Chicks, “Wide Open Spaces,” because I could go lay in the middle of a soybean field and read and it was my family’s land; it was the land that slaves bled and died on and toiled on and we owned it. We have a graveyard where all of my ancestors on my mother’s father’s side of the family are buried, all the way to the end of slavery.
Does it ever feel weird to you? Having something that, you know, many black people don’t have, having that place to be able to go to?
I mean, I’ve always been really aware of my privileges, before I even knew what privilege was, because down the street at the end of our land, in a two-bedroom house with no indoor plumbing, lived the family with eight kids, all kinds of adults, and I used to love going down there because they had a trampoline.
One of the girls was my age and she got pregnant when I was 14 and it was a scandal, my aunts didn’t want me going down there, and my dad was like, “Don’t be classist, she can go down there!” But I just remember when I started to realize they never came to our house. You know what I mean? I was always the one cutting through the trees and across the field to go plan their trip.
I walked on anybody’s property. I had a little Pekingese that I got for my 12th birthday—you don’t have those kind of dogs in the country—and he went running off one time. There were no fences, except for where there were some cows, and I was looking for my dog and I come around a corner and there’s like six men drinking, leaning against trucks, and a huge cow slit open bleeding out, and my dog was sitting there licking the cow’s blood, and I go running back home like oh my god. I was like, “He can’t come in the house!” And my mom was like, “You eat hamburgers every day, what are you talking about?” And I was like, “Get him away from me!”
I’ve always wanted to have a summer camp for kids in the city, black kids from low-income backgrounds who have never known true freedom—the concrete, the closeness of apartment buildings, no safe playground spaces. And not how so many people do these camps that are, like, “work ethic,” but just the opportunity to be free and sleep under a sky and use your imagination any way.
Those kids don’t need to work, they need to play!
Yeah, they just need to play!
Like my nieces today, we were at my parents (of course, they’re in the city now), but we were at their house a few weeks ago and the five-year-old is screaming and running in the house every time she saw a bee. And I was like, I used to, at the height of spring, get four mason jars, line them up, and go frog-collecting. It was a horrible inhumane practice, I now understand, but my favorite thing to do was fill mason jars full of frogs, poke holes, and see who made it overnight; let ’em go. Or hide frogs in the house.
I had all these homes. People weren’t locking doors. I’d be in all my aunts’ and uncles’ houses, picking up eggs, feeding chickens. I’m like, y’all know nothing! You’re scared of a bee? I used to come home wet, dirty, stung, scraped, hungry, and no one knew where I was for hours, and I was in every tree and ditch. And I think that’s where a lot of my creativity comes from: what am I going to do with this tree today?
I think who I am today was shaped by a lot of freedom. St. Mary’s gave me the freedom as a woman to speak my mind and not be afraid of being smart, being bold and outspoken. My parents gave me the freedom of embracing my blackness, and I can never remember a time when I was ashamed of being black or ashamed of our history, which is also coupled with the fact that I ran through wide open spaces, that I could travel, that I wanted for very little.
I never wanted people to not think I was black enough or, you know, people be like y’all are rich and I’d argue about that. And then I realized, everything that my story has given me set me up to be untethered to the things that keep us quiet. My privileges are a gift.
And for years I wasted them. I wasted them in DC [working for a defense contractor in the late 2000s and early 2010s], just working every day and then going to happy hour, it was work/happy hour/work/happy hour, like what am I doing with all of this history, all of this opportunity, all this freedom that the average black girl growing up in America doesn’t get.
What convinced you to come back to Memphis?
Family: my parents were getting older, I had a newborn niece and a seven-year-old niece. And I called DC “Neverland.” I felt like, I’ll never grow up here. I was going to be chasing the coming of GS-14 by 40, and I was just like, I want more than that and happy hour and “what’s the new spot?”
It’s funny—DC, Nashville, there are cities where I’ll go and I’m like, there’s no kids or old people here! Are they hiding them?
They disappear from your purview. It’s like, oh my friend had a kid, no one sees her anymore. Whereas here that’s not necessarily the case.
Yeah.
So I came home for that reason, and then also when Trayvon Martin was killed, I was reading and wondering, how do I get involved? How do I get involved? But DC is DC. It wasn’t my city. There’s a lot of things you can do in DC as a transplant; being a organizer is not the easiest of them. I had to figure out what’s next in life and I went home.
What was it that brought you to #TakeEmDown901?
There’s an A and a B story. I first wrote about Nathan Bedford Forrest for my junior thesis at St. Mary’s. I wrote about his march on Fort Pillow and I spent three months at the main library on Peabody (before they moved it). Then the next year, my senior year, the Ku Klux Klan came to town. The girls, we were picked up right after school and weren’t allowed to go, but a lot of the guys I knew who went to MUS and Christian Brothers went down there that weekend to counter-protest. I remember being like, why are they here? Why is this still a thing?
And I grew up seeing rebel flags and having friends who’d call Memphis “Memphrica.” And in Fayette County, where if I walked into the candy store, I was treated just like every other black kid: come in two at a time, put your money on the counter, don’t touch my hand.
I’ve always been interested in what it means to be Southern—for me, and what it means to be Southern for black people. I’ve always loved country music.4 And it’s led me to this point, that “Southern” is not “white and racist.” That can’t be the definition of it. It’s not fair that that’s the definition of it.
I came back home to Memphis and got involved in #BlackLivesMatter and planned a lot of protests. And the night they announced in Cleveland that they weren’t indicting the officers who killed Tamir Rice—I have these things called healing circles, you pray or sing or cry or whatever you need to do to heal. And for some reason I said, let’s have the healing circle at the Nathan Bedford Forrest memorial. The police were surrounding us, and I was like every year the Confederates come to the city, lay a wreath, by the hundreds in their regalia, and it’s more violent than we are pouring out this pain. And yet we’re right now being surveilled like we’re the dangerous ones.
Then I kind of burned out a little in ’17. I was at a retreat on conscious leadership and I was asked, “What’s one little thing you can hold onto, what’s one thing that you think would be easy or easier to achieve?” And I was burnt out because you’re not seeing people indicted, you’re not seeing change, people are calling us the racists, the movement is segmented, #BlackLivesMatter is falling apart as it’s beginning, all of these things were causing consternation for me. And they were like, focus on one little thing. And the one thing that came out for me was the removal of the statues.
I thought it was going to be easy.
I came home from the retreat and put on Facebook, you know, who wants to have a conversation about these statues? And that’s how we ended up with 350 people at Bruce Elementary. It was literally a Facebook account. I saw all those people coming to that room. I saw a kid show up and speak out.
I chose the statues as a symbol since people couldn’t connect to the death and poverty. People weren’t understanding what we were saying. There was always, well, all lives matter. Well actually if people just pull up their pants, well actually if black people could just care about education. And I was like, literally a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest and a statue of Jefferson Davis stand in the middle of this city, where there’s no other major statues. That’s how I get to the moment where I’m like, let’s take them down.
You ever heard of the Great Remigration?
Uh-huh, that’s like now, where we’re returning South, right?
Yeah. And what you usually hear about is people moving to Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Nashville, I guess Birmingham. But seems like Memphis is often left out of those conversations. I’m curious why you think that is.
There’s no opportunity. My parents did not want me to come back home. And most black culture in Memphis is, “If you can get out of Memphis, don’t look back.”
If you get an opportunity to make money here, you got to travel to spend it, or you go to Houston’s every Friday night. There’s just not a culture here of entertainment that’s centered on us, places that welcome us. That’s why we say the momentum isn’t for us, because—
Is that referring to Jim Strickland’s slogan [“Memphis has momentum”]?
Jim’s using it, the Chamber’s using it, developers are using it, [cell tower mogul] Billy Orgel’s son is standing on top of a building talking about Memphis has momentum and if you can’t see it, I don’t know what to tell you. And it’s like, no fam, you’re standing on top of a building that’s going to feed your great-grandkids, that your daddy gifts to you. Talking about if you can’t see—no we can’t all see how beautiful the Mississippi is when the sun sets and it goes all the way down through Arkansas and Mississippi. We don’t all get to see that.
Because I know kids who couldn’t tell you how to get to the Mississippi and they live five miles from it.
Memphis Business Journal, March 1, 2019 (link).
We grew up just not whole in this city. The schools are falling apart. You don’t want your kids going there, the teachers are burnt out, the 60 million dollars’ deferred maintenance, the lead and asbestos, the under-prepared food.
“But we have Sodexo here and we’re the manufacturing hub of the Mid-South!” Right. Yeah, we’ve got all these manufacturing and food preparation plants and none of them have said, let me give back to the city. I mean, when the Greater Memphis Chamber has on its website, until two years ago, “Come to Memphis—we have the lowest wages.”
You sell your people for cheap labor, why would Memphis be like Atlanta? People are saying, come to Atlanta and make money. Come to Birmingham and make money and it’s not as expensive as Atlanta but you can get to Atlanta in two hours. Come to Dallas and Houston and eat at Pappadeaux and go see the Rockets who actually win sometimes, and make money.
How do you think becoming mayor could change any of this?
I think me being mayor is like Maynard Jackson being mayor of Atlanta. I’m not saying I’m Maynard Jackson by any means, but what Maynard did was open up the city. He said, this city is open to black people. They can come here and earn money, send their kids to good schools, have a good life.
Memphis is closed, right? There’s a guy, Joe Kent, he talks about a closed ecosystem all the time, how there’s so much money that passes through Memphis and goes either to Mississippi or Arkansas or Nashville, and people who live here don’t get any opportunity. We can barely talk about a living wage—and at this point, we’ve latched onto $15 an hour and that’s not really the living wage point anymore.
Yeah, because it’s been 15, that’s been the slogan for a while.
Right! My running for mayor is about opening up the city. Shifting the identity of City Hall and the identity of the mayor of Memphis to one who leads around social equality, not around business developers. Developers do their job very well and don’t really need any help from the government. Who needs the support from us right now are the millions of people in the city and metro area.
It’s just a gutsy thing. I couldn’t imagine doing what you’re doing, and, like, I’m a white guy. I remember how much hate [former Commercial Appeal columnist] Wendi Thomas would get as a black woman writing in the paper, and you’re running for mayor. What will you tap into to deal with the hate you get?
It’s not easy, right? You were there for #TakeEmDown901 and I had people threatening my life. I haven’t really seen a whole lot of that since then; I’m seeing in some of the Confederate groups where they say, “Don’t write anything because they record everything!”—you know, so just because they’re not sending me messages anymore or calling my phone doesn’t mean there isn’t somebody out there who wants me gone. Which changes you.
But running for mayor was possible for me because, what more could they do, Bill, kill me? I’ve lived with the fear of, if I stand in one spot long enough under this hot sun will I get shot or one of my friends get shot, or will I get arrested, or will I get abused or hurt? So it’s not because I’m fearless. I have fear every day. But running for mayor is possible because, if I didn’t quit in 2017, the sky’s the limit on pushing. Because they groom me for this with their hate.
That’s what hate gets you.
I just think about the people who did this work when there was no protection for them. You know, I do draw strength from the fact that Ida B. Wells had to get on the train, that Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten and left in a jail cell for 7 days and had permanent disfiguration for trying to vote, that people in Fayette County were put off their land because they tried to vote, that Dr. King was killed. If those folks woke up and did it again until they couldn’t wake up anymore—right?—how dare I quit?
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- Jerome Wright, “Other sections of Memphis could use some trickle down,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, Nov. 17, 2016; Dan Conaway, “If you want to help, then help,” Daily Memphian, March 1, 2019; Tami Sawyer quoted in Lee Eric Smith, “With confidence and ‘courage,’ Tami Sawyer declares candidacy for Memphis mayor,” Memphis New Tri-State Defender, March 15, 2019.
- See Sawyer’s exchange with a caller starting around the 31-minute mark on The Unleashed Voice Radio Show, KWAM, May 18, 2019 (link).
- Linda T. Wynn, “Tent City, Fayette and Haywood Counties,” Tennessee Encyclopedia; Linda T. Wynn, “Toward a Perfect Democracy: The Struggle of African Americans in Fayette County, Tennessee, to Fulfill the Unfulfilled Right of the Franchise,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 55 (Fall 1996): 202–23.
- I later asked Sawyer for her country music recommendations, and they include Ronnie Milsap, Tracy Chapman, Tim McGraw, the Dixie Chicks, Chris Stapleton, Randy Houser, Jason Aldean, Kenny Chesney, Eric Church, and Dierks Bentley. “Oh, and no one can say anything to me about Kings of Leon. They’re Tennessee boys through and through.” She also firmly believes that “Old Town Road” is country.