Morning In Memphis?

By Kleinheider Posted on October 25, 2009 at 1:09 pm

The new mayor is a position to make change in the city unseen in decades:

As far as Wharton and his team are concerned, when he takes the oath of office at noon Monday, he will carry with him something no previously elected mayor has ever brought to the office — a combination of management experience and broad-ranging popularity.

Willie Herenton had been superintendent of Memphis City Schools, but he won a racially polarizing election by a tiny margin over Dick Hackett. When Hackett won a special election in 1982, he was only 32 and got just 30 percent of the vote in the general election before getting 54 percent in the runoff.

In 1972, Wyeth Chandler was in his early 40s and taking over a city deeply divided after four years of Henry Loeb, Memphis’ first Council-Mayor chief executive and the man whose term began with hard-line handling of the sanitation workers’ strike that would scar the city.

Thus, says longtime University of Memphis historian Charles Crawford, Wharton begins his new job with a mandate unprecedented since the days when E.H. Crump’s political machine ran the city.

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