Jackson Baker
Wharton delivers his inaugural address in the Hall of Mayors.
Less than an hour before he was to take the oath as Memphis mayor in
City Hall, and mere minutes after he had participated in the
swearing-in ceremony for his temporary successor as county mayor,
Joyce Avery, A C Wharton was standing near the dock of
the auditorium in the county building, exchanging pleasantries with
well-wishers.
One such was a TV cameraman, who told Wharton that his family, like
the mayor-elect’s, had come from the area around Lebanon, in Middle
Tennessee. What was the family name? Wharton asked. When he was told,
his eyes widened in recognition. “Oh yes,” the soon-to-be mayor of
Memphis replied. Each land-owning family in Wilson County had employed
both black and white sharecroppers, he explained, and his forebears,
the Whartons, had shared space on the Smith farm with the
cameraman’s.
Wharton said all this not in any bittersweet or up-from-nothing way,
neither Grapes of Wrath nor Horatio Alger, but in the same heady
spirit of belonging to a single common humanity that had characterized
his soaring “One Memphis” rhetoric in the late mayoral campaign.
That was one A C Wharton. Another had been on display on the
previous Friday night at a downtown fund-raiser for state
representative G.A. Hardaway, at which Wharton and TV jurist
“Judge” Joe Brown (a former Criminal Court judge for real) had
been guests of honor.
On that occasion, Wharton had begun his brief remarks
self-effacingly (“I am not the mayor, but I’m the man of the minute.
This is just the intermission”) but quickly escalated into some
hardball advice for Hardaway, based on his own 60 percent landslide
victory over 24 opponents the week before. “I’ve taught him how to
stomp people. It ain’t enough just to win, G.A. You’ve got to
stomp people.”
And he concluded his remarks with a clear warning to would-be
opponents in 2011, the date of the next regularly scheduled general
countywide election: “If you let the so-called experts tell you they
know this city and who the voters are, they don’t know jack. We
know, and the numbers show it. We know, and let me tell you right now,
anybody who contests or tells you they know better where the hearts and
minds of Memphians are, they do so at their own peril. If they didn’t
learn this time, they’ll learn next time.”
Asked about that on Monday morning, as he stood in the well of the
county building, minutes before trekking across the plaza to his new
workplace at City Hall, Wharton nodded his head vigorously to
underscore that conquistadore sentiment:
“Yeah, I mean, it’s clear. It’s not me saying it. It’s the people
saying it. I just had one vote just like everybody else. If you go all
the way back to the 2002 race, ‘He doesn’t have fire in his belly. He,
uh, can’t get the black vote.’ And, for the life of me, I don’t know
whence they keep coming up with this idea that I can’t get black votes.
You know, ‘I know more than the Public Defender.’ For some reason, they
keep saying that, and I don’t know what they want me to do.”
The reference to his longtime pre-mayoral role as Shelby County
Public Defender, charged with upholding the legal prospects of the
least of these, his brethren (along with such big-time public offenders
as former state senator John Ford), was a segue of sorts back to
A C the Unifier. And this was the A C Wharton who would once again be
on public display when, shortly after noon in the Hall of Mayors, he
took the oath from former Circuit Court judge and state Supreme Court
justice George Brown, who had once preceded Wharton as director
of Legal Services in Shelby County.
In his inaugural remarks, Wharton re-asserted that he regarded
himself as having received a mandate to govern, and, after listing some
particulars that needed doing, then said, “But one of the clearest and
most universally shared mandates and directives I have heard and
received from people across this community is the desire for me to help
bring an end to the rancor and divisiveness that has too often defined
our politics and clogged the engine of our forward progress.”
The new mayor returned to his campaign theme: “I’ve said it before,
and I will share it again: One Memphis! … One Memphis means you
working with government and government listening to, being responsive
to, and working with you.”
And Wharton concluded on a note that evoked both the spirit of
cooperation and the musical history of the city he now is charged with
guiding: “Today, I call on every Memphian to commit to work with us as
we seek to create a melody from Memphis which strikes chords of
collaboration, whose tone is civility, and whose message is filled with
the hope, possibility, and the highest of aspirations.”
• Meanwhile, the administration of Shelby County may continue
in some sense to be guided by Wharton’s precepts.
Fealty to the policies of her predecessor was pledged by Joyce
Avery, who took the oath as acting mayor of Shelby County and thereby
stepped up, for a 45-day period mandated by the county charter, from
her previous role as chair of the Shelby County Commission.
With Wharton and other local dignitaries standing in a phalanx of
support behind her, Avery had said, “It is not the place of an acting
mayor to offer grand new plans, propose expensive projects, change
things that have worked for years, or get out in front of the TV
camera. My role is to offer continuity between Mayor Wharton’s
administration and the administration of the next mayor.
“Shelby County faces challenges from bond debt to violent crime. We
are on the right track, however. Our debt is coming down, and law
enforcement is vigorously attacking crime. I want to make sure that we
strictly adhere to the debt plan that was established during Mayor
Wharton’s tenure so we can continue to reduce our debt and ensure our
children are not bridled with the burden of past spending.”
Nothing there was suggestive of Wharton the would-be unifier, who
has singled out consolidation as perhaps his primary goal. Rather,
Avery focused on the example of Wharton the taskmaster and
budget-cruncher — a role questioned in some quarters by those who
saw the now departed county mayor as a jealous guardian of his own
prerogatives and those of his staffers, inclined to generosity (an
over-generosity, said his critics) in his own immediate work
sphere.
The components-to-be of that sphere in the new environs of City Hall
were still being assembled as the new Memphis mayor began his tenure.
With the exception of city attorney Herman Morris, major
appointees had not been named, and many a ranking county employee was
left to wonder what the future held. A particular mystery was the
identity of Wharton’s CAO, a position still being held for the moment
by Jack Sammons, a holdover from the two-and-a-half month regime
of Mayor Pro Tem (now, once again, Councilman) Myron
Lowery.
But there was no question as to who would be in charge, and those
who doubted it would be well advised to heed that warning issued last
Friday night by Wharton to potential opponents. Not to do so would be,
as he put it then, “at their own peril.”
