At the end of a turbulent week in the race for Memphis mayor, five of the dozen declared contenders drew a lot of interest toward the back of the crowd at the Overton Park Shell, even though they weren’t the main attraction.

“Dreamfest,” a combination of live music, DJs, spoken word performances and social justice causes like Black Lives Matter drew an evening group of around 100 people Saturday, May 20, to the Shell.

The People’s Convention was included with the latest in its series of meet-and-greet events, a chance for voters to talk one-on-one with the mayoral contenders. Earlier versions of the events have included speeches by the candidates.

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But that wasn’t the case at the Shell. The campaigning was restricted to booths at the back by the guitar sculpture. Nevertheless, the campaign for mayor is moving from fundraising and planning to a more public, and at times tentative, phase.

Some campaign workers who tried to go into the crowd found that those who came to listen to the music and see the performances weren’t interested.

But there were enough people stopping on the way to the green lawn and coming from their seats in the audience to keep all five candidates who showed up busy with one-on-one conversations.

“It’s confirmed to me the necessity of these types of events,” said Rev. Earle Fisher, co-founder of the People’s Convention.

The group will host a convention in mid-July over several days to consider making endorsements in the mayoral race and the city council races on the October ballot.

Businessman J.W. Gibson and Downtown Memphis Commission president Paul Young came with campaign volunteers and yard signs for the taking, just as they have at past installments of the series.

City Councilman Frank Colvett didn’t come with a table or campaign signs. Instead, he worked a seating area at the very back of the Shell and on the sidewalk by the parking lot separating the Shell from the Brooks Museum of Art.

“I want to go out and shake everybody’s hand, and that’s not appropriate for this. I have to cool my jets and wait for them to come to me,” he said. “The upside is if someone comes up wanting to visit, then they have a real interest and are curious.”

Memphis-Shelby County Schools Board member Michelle McKissack had some candy on her table and campaign gift bags.

The candy drew a few children along with their parents. McKissack was strategic in letting the adults take the initiative to start talking politics, realizing some were wrangling children whose attention would shift suddenly once their candy selections were made.

State House Democratic Leader Karen Camper, attending her first of the meet-and-greets, was making up for contacts lost when the Tennessee legislature was in session in Nashville.

“It’s a real opportunity to have an up-close conversation,” she said.

The night before in Hickory Hill, Camper drew a group of about 30 to a meeting room adjoining A&R BBQ with a speech mixed with lots of one-on-one contact both before and after her remarks from the small stage there.

“People have lost hope. People have lost trust,” she said from the stage. “We have too much crime. What we are doing about it is not working.”

Camper promised a full crime strategy if elected mayor that would be driven by crime data and would close what she likened to a “pipeline” that is leading teenagers and young adults to crime.

Most of those in the room were already Camper supporters, or at least knew her.

The exception was two young men who ordered barbecue at the counter in the next room and then came in expressly to eat it at a table, unlike most of the customers who were picking up to-go orders.

Neither wanted to sign in with the campaign and told those with Camper’s campaign they were just there to eat.

Camper came over and said they didn’t have to sign in. With her best elevator-pitch, she mixed questions about them with a short pitch of her campaign outlook and then left them to eat.

“I think I got more out of it when I was just sitting at a table talking to them,” Camper said Saturday of the encounters the night before with the two men and others.

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The Dreamfest audience was the biggest potential audience so far of the People’s Convention meet-and-greets.

And Colvett said it was worth it, even if the mayor’s race wasn’t center stage Saturday.

“You can actually have 10- or 15-minute conversations. You get past the sound bites and the flowery oratory and all the soaring speeches,” he said. “In 10 or 15 minutes, you have to get into the details of your plan. That favors me. I’m the only legislator that has actually served in city government.”

It came at the end of the week in which a new political action committee, The Greater 901 Initiative, rolled out a controversial poll that showed former County Commissioner Van Turner and Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner Jr. atop the pack of contenders, with Turner at 16% and Bonner at 15%.

Days later, Chancellor JoeDae Jenkins ruled the city charter currently has no requirement that candidates running for mayor must live in the city until or unless they win the race.

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The ruling in a lawsuit, filed by Bonner and Turner, avoided what would have been a shuffling of the mayoral field as the candidates formalize their bids for the office starting Monday with qualifying petitions to get on the October ballot.

Neither Turner nor Bonner was at the Shell Saturday, although Turner has attended past meet-and-greet sessions sponsored by the People’s Convention.

Just outside the courtroom Thursday, Bonner acknowledged that while the lawsuit was pending, he was somewhat in a waiting mode with some campaign events that were usually not publicized in advance.

That, he said, would be changing now that the path was cleared for him to remain in the race.

Fisher has been critical of Bonner and former Mayor Willie Herenton for not participating in the series of meet-and-greet events hosted by the People’s Convention.

“It’s ridiculous that people can run for an office as impactful as city mayor in 2023 and not commit to coming to events that they did not curate themselves and not commit to open debate. It signifies to me the willingness to exploit and manipulate a small sector of the electorate just to get access to positions of power.”

Rev. Earle Fisher
Co-founder of the People’s Convention

“It’s ridiculous that people can run for an office as impactful as city mayor in 2023 and not commit to coming to events that they did not curate themselves and not commit to open debate,” he said. “It signifies to me the willingness to exploit and manipulate a small sector of the electorate just to get access to positions of power.”

Fisher noted the Caissa Public Strategies poll for The Greater 901 Initiative used a sample of registered voters that was 53% Black and 45% white – while the city’s population is 65% Black and 23% white.

“That’s a 20% overrepresentation of white citizens. I think that’s who they are targeting,” he said. “And looking how they can move the needle in a particular demographic. … It might be putting your thumb on the scale a little bit, or it might just be an attempt at narrative shaping.”

“I don’t really object to them trying to shape their narrative as much as I would hope that the outlets that run it put that context in perspective for the average reader,” Fisher said.

He added the People’s Convention will likely have its own polling with a more representative sample. In the 2019 campaign for city offices and over the last four years, the convention has done polling on both candidates and issues.