Editor’s note: Next year’s Memphis mayoral election to replace term-limited incumbent Jim Strickland is the latest in a long line of mayoral and city council races with historical implications. This story takes a look the maneuvering behind the races. 

The 16 elections for Memphis mayor in the 54-year and counting history of the mayor-council form of government in Memphis are a set of political struggles that have always been about more than who got the most votes.

The 2023 race for Memphis mayor began earlier this year with questions about majority votes and how voting bases, Black and white, are split by the number of contenders.

The 16 races of mayor starting with the 1967 election of Henry Loeb and ending with Jim Strickland’s reelection in 2019 have something for all sides of the discussion.

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The path to a mayor elected with a majority of the votes cast and counted one year from this month comes with a complex and at times contradictory backstory.

For instance, by some calculations the 2023 race for mayor will be the first since 1971 that no incumbent mayor is seeking reelection.

Some say it’s the first race without an elected incumbent since the 2009 special election for mayor when interim mayor Myron Lowery was running.

Still others point to the 1982 special election for mayor which featured J.O. Patterson, who had served an interim mayor before city chief administrative officer Wallace Madewell became mayor during what was a November special election.

Of the nine city elections since the runoff provision was eliminated from the city charter by federal court order 31 years ago, four ended with a winner in the mayor’s race who did not get a majority of the votes cast.

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That included the 1991 race of three contenders with a 65.1% voter turnout, but not the record field of 25 in the 2009 special election with a turnout of 23.4%

A majority of the city’s voters haven’t participated in a city election since 1991.

Somewhere near the middle of the 16 races for mayor is the death of a key provision in the city charter that defined five of the first seven of the races – the runoff provision.

The provision in the 1967 city charter that set up the mayor-council form of government required that if no candidate in one of the races for mayor or City Council did not get a majority of the votes cast in October, the top two vote-getters would advance to a runoff race in November.

The first five city elections under the mayor-council form of government went to a mayoral runoff election.

In all but one, turnout was greater in the November runoff than it was in the October election.

The exception was the 1982 special election runoff between Dick Hackett and J.O. Patterson Jr. That was also the only mayoral runoff where the candidate with the most votes in October was not the winner in the November runoff.

Patterson was the City Council chairman and served briefly as interim mayor, and thus the city’s first Black mayor, following Wyeth Chandler’s resignation. He was the top vote-getter in November 1982 followed by Hackett, who was County Clerk, in a field of nine.

Nine years later, the December 1982 runoff loss by Patterson to Hackett was one of the examples plaintiffs in a federal court case cited in their successful challenge of the runoff provision on Constitutional grounds.

Federal Judge Jerome Turner ruled in 1991, ahead of that year’s race for mayor, that the intent of those who drafted the 1967 charter was to make it impossible for a Black candidate to win citywide office, including the seven citywide or “at-large” City Council seats that Turner also abolished in his ruling.

The charter was drafted and approved in a referendum of city voters at a time when the city’s population was 60% white and 40% Black.

By the 1991 campaign, Willie Herenton and other Black political leaders believed the city was close to if not at a Black majority – especially a Black voting majority.

Herenton became the consensus Black challenger to Hackett, who won a full four-year term in 1983 and reelection in 1987 with October majorities and without triggering the runoff provision either time.

Herenton became the city’s first Black elected mayor by a 142-vote margin over Hackett – each getting just over 49% of the vote.

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The third candidates on that 1991 ballot was Robert “Prince Mongo” Hodges, who claimed to be an alien from the planet Zambodia and proved to have an ear for politics that included proposing casinos or prisons on Mud Island depending on the election year.

If Mud Island was to be a prison, it would be surrounded with shark-infested waters under Mongo’s platforms as he became a perennial in mayoral races – city and county.

Regardless of the changing plans for Mud Island, executions in Court Square were a regular feature of Mongo’s platform.

Hodges got fewer than than 3,000 votes in 1991, prompting speculation about how the close race between Herenton and Hackett might have changed had he not been on the ballot.

Herenton’s Long Legacy

The first Black candidate to run for Memphis mayor in 1967 – state legislator and businessman A.W. Willis, had been criticized for splitting the Black vote in the race that kicked off the “strong mayor” form of government.

The seven-candidate race with Willis as the only Black contender proved to be a showdown between former Mayor Henry Loeb and incumbent Mayor William Ingram, the last mayor of the commission form of government.

Both advanced to a November runoff with Loeb winning.

Ingram wasn’t the only candidate accusing another of splitting the vote.

City Commissioner Hunter Lane took out full-page ads in the 1967 campaign accusing various other contenders — including then-Shelby County Sheriff and future Shelby County Mayor Bill Morris, who finished third in 1967 — of not being able to beat Ingram in a runoff.

In the case of Willis, he was accused of splitting the Black vote by white rivals in the race.

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The vote-splitting allegations continued in 1971 after Loeb chose not to run for a second term. The top two white contenders – City Council member Wyeth Chandler and Juvenile Court Judge Kenneth Turner – advance to a runoff with Chandler winning.

Turner would run for mayor again.

But Turner lost much of the Black vote that was a key part of his path to the 1971 runoff when attorney and Judge Otis Higgs picked up Willis’s political mantle and took Chandler to runoffs twice in the 1975 and 1979 mayoral races.

A reprint of a 1967 Willis campaign poster was the first page of the program for Herenton’s oath of office ceremony in 1992.

Four years after his close upset of Hackett, Herenton won a second term with 75% of the vote.

It was the largest percentage for any mayoral contender under the mayor-council form of government and with only a single token challenger – John Baker, who had been among the contenders in the 1982 special election.

In the 1999, 2003 and 2007 city elections, Herenton drew more challengers and went on to become the city’s longest- serving mayor with percentages above and below the 50% mark.

The 1999 mayor’s race drew 15 candidates including Herenton as well as a combination of former supporters and rivals from 1991 who had dropped out of that earlier race in the name of not splintering the Black vote.

Herenton won with 45.75% of the vote.

The 2003 ballot featured eight contenders for mayor and Herenton won with 69.8% of the votes in a showing almost as good as 1995’s race. But it was with the lowest percentage voter turnout – 17.4% — of any Memphis city election in the 54-year history of the mayor-council form of government

A total of 14 contenders made the race for mayor in 2007, Herenton’s last bid for mayor before resigning in 2009. And Herenton posted his lowest percentage with 42.4% with City Council member Carol Chumney his closest competitor at 34.6%.

The 2009 special election for mayor, the last time there was a race for mayor with no elected incumbent, drew a record field of 25 candidates.

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Shelby County Mayor AC Wharton won with 60% of the vote. Of the 25 candidates, 15 failed to get out of double digits in their vote totals.

Wharton won a full term in 2011 among a field of 10 with 65.3% of the vote.

Four years later, Wharton lost his bid for a second and final term to city council member Jim Strickland becoming only the second elected incumbent under the mayor-council form of government to lose a bid for another term at City Hall.

Strickland won with 41% of the vote and four years later won his current term of office with more than 60% of the vote.