The Memphis City Council that takes office in January will have a majority of seven women with the election of three women to the body Thursday, Nov. 16, in the city runoff elections — the second and last round of balloting of the city election year.

Jerri Green, Pearl Walker and Michalyn Easter-Thomas — the winners Thursday by the unofficial results — join Yolanda Cooper-Sutton, Janika White, Jana Swearengen-Washington and Rhonda Logan — who were elected and reelected in the October city elections.

It marks the first female majority on the council in the 55-year history of the mayor-council form of government.

Three city council runoff races close out Memphis election year

The council had six women in 1994 when the late Barbara Swearengen Ware won a special election to join five other women elected in 1991.

Easter-Thomas won a second term easily Thursday in a runoff with clothing store owner Jimmy Hassan.

With all 13 precincts reporting in Council District 7, the unofficial results were:

Easter-Thomas: 966

Hassan: 504

City Council pushes final votes on primary elections, mayoral runoffs

Green and Walker won by much narrower margins in races that saw several lead changes.

Green, an attorney and a senior policy advisor to Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, upset former city council member Scott McCormick by a 56-vote margin to claim the District 2 council seat. That was after McCormick posted the leading vote total in the October election results leading to the runoff.

With all 19 precincts reporting, the unofficial results were:

Green: 1,752

McCormick: 1,696

Green won the district seat held by Gwen Awsumb, the first woman to be elected to the council in the 1967 elections that kicked off the mayor-council form of government.

She also noted the new council majority comes as the Shelby County Commission also has a majority of seven women.

“We just were really hard on our ground game,” Green said of her runoff strategy and her win.

She and McCormick emerged atop a field of six contenders on the October ballot.

Green said the narrowing of the race for Thursday’s runoff helped to focus votes that had been split among several Democratic contenders — including Green — in the nonpartisan race.

Green said she also redoubled her efforts for the runoff, knocking on 6,000 doors in the district since the Oct. 5 election.

The runoff turnout in District 2 was the highest of the three contests, accounting for more than half of the total votes cast in all three races.

Walker, a Whitehaven activist who ran unsuccessfully for the council four years ago, won Thursday by the narrowest margin of the night — a 14-vote margin over retired Memphis Police officer James Kirkwood.

With all 11 precincts reporting, the unofficial results were:

Walker: 781

Kirkwood: 767.

A timeline of the twists and turns in the race for Memphis mayor

Walker said despite the close results in her race, she was “fully confident” she was going to win.

“I regrouped, and I added more people to the team,” she said of her runoff campaign. “It was a stronger, tighter structure.”

She also said connections made in her work promoting Whitehaven businesses and the community in general, as well as her activism with the Memphis Branch NAACP and as part of the opposition to a crude oil pipeline in southwest Memphis — all since her council bid four years ago — served her well with voters in the district and supporters outside the district.

The runoff election drew an overall 4.1% turnout with 6,477 early, absentee and Election Day ballots, including write-in votes. That’s out of the 157,534 voters in the three districts.

Most of the votes, 56%, were cast during the early voting period.

The 4.1% turnout compares to a 23% turnout citywide in the Oct. 5 elections.

The runoff elections in the three districts were triggered when no candidate in each of the races got a simple majority of the votes cast in the October city elections.

By the city charter, the top two vote-getters in each district advanced to the runoff election, with early voting beginning in late October leading up to Thursday’s Election Day in the three districts.

Sanford: Times have changed. And they demand a return to mayoral runoffs.

Easter-Thomas, Green and Walker join a 13-member council that takes office Jan. 1 with five new members and six returning members.

McCormick is one of three former council members who ran on the October ballot to return to the body.

McCormick was elected in 2003 to a Super-District council seat and resigned in 2008 to become director of the Plough Foundation.

Former council member Philip Spinosa won a return to the council via the District 5 seat on the October ballot.

Former council member Berlin Boyd lost his bid in October for the Super District 8 Position 3 seat.