The day after his second term on the Shelby County Commission ends, Van Turner will announce he is running for Memphis mayor in 2023.

The Thursday, Sept. 1, announcement in Health Sciences Park is the first campaign announcement in what is expected to be a crowded field of contenders to succeed Mayor Jim Strickland, who is term-limited.

Online invitations to the event began circulating on social media Tuesday, Aug. 30, morning, showing Turner next to the slogan “Van Turner for City of Memphis Mayor.”

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The setting for the Thursday announcement is one of two parks the city sold in late 2017 to Memphis Greenspace Inc., the private nonprofit headed by Turner.

Memphis Greenspace then had Confederate monuments removed from both parks, including the city’s most prominent Confederate monument — an equestrian statue of Confederate General, slave trader and Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest — in Health Sciences Park.

The park had once been named Forrest Park.

Turner was also part of the negotiations for the later removal of the remains of Forrest and his wife beneath the base of the monument in June 2021 in his capacity as head of Memphis Greenspace.

For Turner, his involvement in the removal of the Confederate monuments was personal.

Forrest remains removed from Health Sciences Park

He recalled that his father, Van Turner Sr., had told him of not being allowed to walk through the park and had viewed the statue of Forrest as a message about white supremacy and its hold on the city’s politics.

The elder Turner was a math teacher at Whitehaven High School, where the younger Turner was a graduate.

Van Turner Jr. is part of a generation of Memphians born in Memphis who, in many cases, left the city for college and then returned toward the end of the 1990s and into the 2000s.

In Turner’s case, his path was an undergraduate degree from Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1997, a White House internship with the office of presidential personnel during the Clinton Administration and a stint teaching English in Yamanashi, Japan, as part of an exchange program. He then went to the University of Tennessee Law School, where he earned his law degree in 2002.

Turner was associate general counsel to the Memphis City Schools system and clerked for U.S. District Judge Hardy May. He was president of the Ben F. Jones chapter of the National Bar Association.

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Turner’s formal entry into politics was as chairman of the Shelby County Democratic Party from 2009-2013.

He was elected to the County Commission in 2014 for the first of two terms. He ran unopposed for his second term. During those two terms, Turner has also been president of the NAACP’s Memphis Branch — a post he currently holds.

Turner has built political alliances with both Strickland and Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris as well as fellow Commissioner Tami Sawyer and other activists.

Other potential Memphis mayoral candidates include Downtown Memphis Commission President Paul Young, former County Commissioner James Harvey, Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner and Tennessee House Democratic leader Karen Camper.