Angela Rye says a Dixiecrat holds back Memphis. Is it really white men, or is it the tax base? | Evanoff

It is odd to bear a lashing by a Washington political operative who seems to not at all know Memphis.

Yes, I mean Angela Rye. Last year she berated white Memphis for poor black progress over 50 years. She was just back in town.

Speaking on the campaign trail of mayoral candidate Tami Sawyer, Rye called Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland a “Dixiecrat.”

This stings. Rye means white men repress black people, hold Memphis back. I thought the city's tax base holds Memphis back, but Rye implies it is the unwitting black voters of Memphis. They elected a Dixiecrat.

That’s a word largely lost on young Americans, although often used in the 1940s and 1950s. It described Southern Democrats who opposed the civil rights stand by the party’s progressive wing, a stand a white U.S. Congress and a white U.S. Supreme Court one day would enshrine as the law of the land.

The word faded away, the way politicians on the wrong side of history fade away, but Angela Rye is polished, smooth, glamorous really. She lives in a time when African Americans, frustrated by a sense they were never going to be let into the economic mainstream by white people, find they finally have the ear of a receptive America.

So she comes into this old city, a place where well-meaning people have tried for 50 years to keep racial tension from boiling over, and also tried to take this slow-moving, glorious and odd concoction of old Delta habits and modern urban ways, and tried to forge something durable here for everyone. 

Is it working? In some ways, no. Memphis proper lost 10,000 households between 2009 and 2017 to the suburbs. More than one in five homes remain impoverished. Gangs and crime are common. In some ways, yes. Never has the black middle- and upper-tier been this large in Memphis, or as influential, one reason those symbols of a lost era, the name Confederate Park and the Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest statue, vanished on Strickland's watch.

This is a complicated city, just like America. And what does Rye make of it? She lays on rhetoric heard 70 years in the past.

Come on, Tami. What was she here for?

Memphis mayoral race 

Criticizing the mayor is not out of bounds. They say he has a thin skin but from what I’ve seen he listens and I guess would welcome genuine insight. Calling him a Dixiecrat isn’t insight. It is a black political operative who has no stake in Memphis egging on black people who do.

I’m not trying to defend Strickland, the first white mayor elected in almost three decades in this city of some 655,000 population, which is about 64% black. He needs no defense from me. 

Sawyer is smart and capable, elected a Shelby County Commissioner last year, and doesn’t need an outside firebrand to speak for her. Sawyer can say what she thinks. She ought to say what she thinks. She's calls herself an activist.

She is part of the new generation of young and motivated Memphis leaders. What we need is a clear vision articulated by this generation, a vision we all understand, accept and want to work to achieve.

What I’d like to hear is the candidates analyze the tax base. Sawyer favors higher school spending, which is a good cause. Yet, Shelby County’s budget anticipates $795.1 million in property tax revenue this year, compared to $803 million last year.

If the economy is booming, and Greater Memphis employment sets a record every month, why would tax revenue slip 1%?

Tax base gets to the essence of what is happening here. We could afford more police, reduce property taxes on homes, afford more teachers, renovate Tom Lee Park and at the same time restore Mud Island River Park — if we had more tax revenue.

So why is tax revenue headed down?

Just making a living

Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris told me, speaking off the cuff, he thinks too many PILOT tax breaks for corporate expansions drained off new tax revenue. Harris is a young Yale law grad who studied at the London School of Economics. If he is right, the city mayoral candidates might dig into the matter, define our economic strategies.

Memphis could use a solid contest between Strickland, Sawyer and candidate Willie Herenton, the mayor from 1992 to 2008.  Digging at what makes the city tick can get at solutions to build the tax base, fix blight, upgrade schools and improve people’s skill levels. Let the person with the best idea for moving Memphis ahead win.

Sure, Sawyer is trying to draw the spotlight away from the better-known Strickland and Herenton. But why call in Rye? She is educated and articulate, the chief executive of Impact Strategies, a Washington political consultant, and when she comes to town and hurls insults, she isn’t really inciting a riot, but what is she doing? Just making a living, I guess.

Ted Evanoff, business columnist of The Commercial Appeal, can be reached at evanoff@commercialappeal.com and (901) 529-2292.