The day after he left the Shelby County Commission, Van Turner opened his campaign for Memphis mayor Thursday, Sept. 1, on the spot where the statue and gravesite of Confederate general, slave trader and Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest once stood.

“Do you know where I’m standing at?” Turner asked a crowd of about 100 supporters.

Turner is president of Memphis Greenspace Inc., the private nonprofit to which the city of Memphis sold Health Sciences Park and Fourth Bluff Park in 2017. Under Turner’s leadership, the nonprofit had Confederate monuments in both parks removed including the equestrian statue of Forrest in Health Sciences Park.

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Forrest’s remains were later disinterred and moved to a private site elsewhere in the state.

“We can take what we did with Memphis Greenspace and transform this city,” Turner said.

“We had to take down the statues. We had to take down the white supremacy and all of the things that this statue meant in order for us to progress forward.”

Turner outlined a set of campaign issues focused on spreading access to economic opportunities to all parts of the city in terms of city services and economic development incentives.

“I want the same things for my family that I want for your family,” he told a crowd that included an introduction and endorsement by newly-elected District Attorney Steve Mulroy.

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“We want good education. We want safe streets. We want good infrastructure. We want all these things for all of our families,” he said.

“We’ve got to know that when we send our young people off to go to a football game, they can go to that football game and come home from that football game without an incident,” Turner said. “We are going to have to tackle this problem of public safety. But public safety in this community is a poverty issue. We’ve got to make sure we are tackling the roots of the situation.”

With Mayor Jim Strickland term-limited to two consecutive terms, the field for the nonpartisan race in a bit more than a year away could be sizable.

In the past 30 years, incumbent Memphis mayors seeking re-election have drawn fields of more than a dozen challengers.

The 2009 special election for mayor following the resignation of Willie Herenton drew 25 contenders, a record for a mayor’s race under the 54-year-old mayor-council form of government.

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Turner announced on the same day Downtown Memphis Commission President Paul Young announced he would running for mayor.

At least five other contenders are considering the race or have been mentioned as possible contenders.

Turner opened his campaign moments after a move by some City Council members to bring back the runoff provision in the city mayor’s race fell one vote short of getting on the November ballot.

It would require a runoff election between the top two contenders for mayor if neither gets a majority on the October election day starting with the 2023 election.

Turner, an attorney, favors a runoff, saying the federal court ruling that abolished the mayoral runoff in 1991 was about the intent of those who wrote the charter when Black Memphians were not a majority in the city.

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“I think that has been cured. We’ve had white mayors and Black mayors. That’s no longer an issue,” he said. “I would have hoped that the City Council would have put forth runoffs but they didn’t do it.”

Turner said the council’s decision doesn’t mean it’s impossible for someone to win the 2023 race with a majority of the votes as Strickland did in his second term re-election bid in 2019.

“Memphis voters have seen this before and I think they are going to be wise enough to pick out candidates who have been in this community and have been working in this community,” he said.

“Just because there are multiple candidates in the race, it doesn’t mean necessarily that the vote will be splintered that significantly. The voters have always coalesced around the candidate who was right for the times.”

Mulroy linked Turner’s effort to the blue wave in the August county general election that saw Democrats win every countywide office and increase the Democratic majority on the commission to nine.

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“It kind of feels like change is in the air,” he said to cheers from a crowd that included several of the winners from August whose first day in office was Thursday. “Memphis is needing a change.”