Race Is Top Issue in Bid to Represent Memphis

By ADAM NOSSITER
MEMPHIS — The notion that some elective offices belong to minorities is being put to a sharp test here, as a veteran politician’s Congressional candidacy in a historically black district is being challenged because he is white.

The politician, Steve Cohen, a liberal Democrat and longtime Tennessee state senator, is the odds-on favorite to become the first white to represent Memphis in Congress in more than three decades. Mr. Cohen, 57, spent much of that time in the state legislature, where he was known for being attentive to the needs of black constituents — a 60 percent majority in the Ninth Congressional District, which includes most of this sprawling, sultry city.

Yet some influential black leaders here have denounced Mr. Cohen’s strong showing — he won the Democratic primary in August — and have called on black residents to rally behind the slow-starting campaign of Jake Ford, 33, a first-time candidate running as an independent. So far, many of the city’s black pastors have endorsed Mr. Ford.

Mr. Ford’s youth and inexperience notwithstanding, his candidacy cannot be discounted: he is a scion of the family that has held the seat since a breakthrough election in 1974 put his father, Harold Ford Sr., in office, and for many in Memphis the Ford name is synonymous with political power and neighborhood activism.

Though he is not the Democratic candidate, Jake Ford is seeking to follow his staunchly Democratic father and brother to Washington. The Fords, as embattled legally as they are prominent politically, still hold top spots in local and state government, and Mr. Ford’s older brother Harold Jr. is leaving the Congressional seat to run for the Senate. (Jake Ford explained the absence of a formal endorsement from his brother Harold by saying, “We have a large family.”)

Ethnic and racial claims on elected offices are nothing new. Black residents in Brooklyn this year urged David Yassky, a white Democrat, to step aside as a candidate in the majority-black 11th Congressional District. Mr. Yassky went on to lose the primary. But in Memphis, a city with lingering memories of Jim Crow’s political exclusion of blacks, these claims are being made with special urgency. They are accompanied by Bible Belt reminders that Mr. Cohen, who is Jewish, is not only of a different race, but also a different faith.

“Mr. Cohen has stood on the floor of the Tennessee Senate and opposed the chaplain of the day praying for Jesus,” said the Rev. Dr. LaSimba M. Gray Jr., a prominent local pastor who has helped lead opposition to Mr. Cohen’s candidacy.

Dr. Gray also condemned Mr. Cohen’s refusal to denounce same-sex marriage, a persistent theme of his critics here. “At this point, Jake Ford is in a better position to represent our values and our community,” he said.

Mr. Ford is a high school dropout with a G.E.D. He has never held elected office, says he is currently working for his father’s consulting firm (“You can pretty much call me what you want,” he said, when asked to describe his occupation) and has been christened Joke Ford on a widely read blog written by a local black resident.

Because of the contrasting résumés of the two candidates, there is hardly unanimity among blacks here in supporting Mr. Ford. Mayor Willie W. Herenton, who is black and a longtime rival of the Ford family, announced his support for Mr. Cohen two weeks ago.

“I felt it was time in this community on this occasion that we show solidarity that will cut across political ideology, race, ethnocentrism, any kind of prejudice and to support a man who’s eminently qualified for this role,” Mayor Herenton said recently at a news conference, according to The Commercial Appeal, Memphis’s major newspaper.

Mr. Cohen is the grandson of an immigrant from Lithuania. He recalls exclusion, as a Jew, from fraternities at Vanderbilt University in the 1960’s, and for years was the lone loser in fights with colleagues in the legislature over issues like publicly posting the Ten Commandments. He has said that, if elected, he will seek membership in the Congressional Black Caucus, though it is not clear if the caucus would allow him to join.

Yet it was evident recently in a campaign swing through a historic black neighborhood that the opinions of black leaders have had some resonance. One of those leaders, William Larsha of the Shelby County Democratic Executive Committee, is urging blacks to prevent a Cohen victory by turning out to vote against the Democratic candidate in November.

“In 1974, it became a Congressional black district,” Mr. Larsha said. “It also became, to most black people, a precious district. And it became a historically black Congressional district. I believe it was put together by decent white people to be a black district, which gives African-Americans an opportunity to be elected to Congress.”

But poverty is persistent in the district — 20 percent of the population is poor — the schools are ailing and the crime rate is high.

“The Fords, they’re more on the scene,” said Anthony Bridgewater, 28, a community college student who was watching Mr. Cohen charge ahead of a black high school band in a recent game-day parade in the tattered Orange Mound district. “They visit churches, come into the schools. Over here in Orange Mound, the Fords can relate to people better. Steve Cohen is more of a Nashville-type person.”

Yet others along the parade route, lined with boarded-up stores, marginal auto repair shops and sagging front porches, said they were fed up with the Fords. Indeed, Cohen supporters appeared to outnumber Ford supporters along the route.

“Take your blinders off and look at the condition of Memphis,” said Jeffrey Hines, a resident watching the band assembled at Melrose High School. “Crime’s gone up and the school system is failing our children, and we’ve had an African-American in Congress for 30 years.”

A political scientist at Rhodes College here, Marcus D. Pohlmann, called Mr. Cohen the favorite, by a considerable way, but added that black voters “might still just vote the Ford name.”
Articulate and voluble, the younger Mr. Ford dismisses any suggestion of dynastic entitlement. Standing by his side, however, at a Steamfitters Union local, where he had gone to seek its blessing, was his father, who beat back federal corruption charges in the early 1990’s and remains a force in local politics. Smiling, the elder Mr. Ford said simply, “This seat belongs to the people of the Ninth District.”

A union member, Roy Turner, jumped in with an attack on Mr. Cohen’s position on same-sex marriage: “I’m against all that homosexual stuff.”

Jake Ford quickly added, “I certainly want to protect the sanctity of marriage.”
Critics of Mr. Cohen have made insinuations about his bachelorhood; he volunteers that he is not gay, but that he is simply “older.”

In his Depression-era home on Overton Park, which is crammed with a lifetime’s worth of political memorabilia, Mr. Cohen wearily dismissed the attacks over same-sex marriage and speculated that a victory for him, as a white man, could be a moment of racial reconciliation for this city of the Deep South.

“I think it will be an overcoming, a coming together,” he said. “And I think it will say we’ve overcome a lot of the problems since Dr. King was killed.”