Lee Harris: ‘Memphis has suffered from the lack of energized leadership’
Lee Ardrey Harris’ political timeline looks like this:
Ran for and won Memphis City Council seat in 2011.
Ran for and won Tennessee state senate seat in 2014.
Now he’s eyed a new seat – Shelby County mayor.
“If there is a word to describe me it is that I’m impatient,” said Harris, 39, a University of Memphis law school professor. “We’ve built up the expectation a politician has to stay around for 20 years. I don’t have 20 years. We need to get work done in this city,”
Although the 4.2-percent jobless rate in metropolitan Memphis is the lowest in decades, the Democratic and Republican county mayoral candidates have keyed in on economic development as an important political theme. The issue is the center of Harris’ campaign.
Harris and ex-labor leader Sidney Chism are contending in the May 1 Democratic primary. With early voting scheduled to start Wednesday, the primary winner will compete in the Aug. 2 general election against the winner in the Republican primary. Law bars present Mayor Mark Luttrell from seeking a third term.
Political observer John Ryder, a Memphis lawyer and general counsel to the Republican National Committee, describes Harris as a “new Democrat’’ in contrast to the long-established Chism, former Shelby County Democratic Party chairman.
“Harris is young, a little bit brash, a young-man-in-a-hurry kind of guy,” Ryder said. “He starts out at the law school, goes to the City Council, goes to state Senate, then jumps into the mayoral race in a campaign heavily influenced by social media.’’
On the campaign trail, Harris ties low-wage jobs, neighborhood blight, a strained tax base and the poor performance by Shelby County Schools into a common theme of alleviating misery.
“It’s the typical issues – crime, education, blight. Lately there’s a fourth. That’s poverty,” Harris said. “I’m focused like a laser on it.”
He contends blight steadily erodes Memphis, the city of 652,000 population that makes up two-thirds of Shelby County.
“The real problem with Memphis is people will not move into the hollowedout neighborhoods,” Harris said.
The solution: Invest at once in revived neighborhoods, improved mass transit and better education. This will draw people back for the schools, he said, and lift property values.
While it sounds like a generationlong endeavor, Harris said, “if you have the right set of leaders in place, you could get it done in five to 10 years.”
Leadership, he contends, is at the root of the problem, although he doesn’t single out Chism, an ally of Willie Herenton, who was mayor of Memphis from 1992 to 2009.
“I have a lot of respect for Sidney Chism,” Harris said. “I’ve known him my whole life. We attended the same church. I grew up in Whitehaven at Mt. Joyner (Missionary Baptist Church) with him.”
After the recession hit in 2008, Memphis rebounded slowly, held back by falling household income, job losses and rising home foreclosures. Those challenges continue and with the rise of Black Lives Matter activism, Harris contends, are bringing forward younger Memphians who he says are “not passive” and are looking for key roles in public service. He identifies himself as someone able to articulate a new direction for the city and county.
“Memphis has suffered from the lack of energized leadership,” Harris said. “We’ve suffered under the status quo for a long time.” .
Harris, who will turn 40 in August, grew up in Memphis in a middle-class home. His father was a high school physical education teacher and track coach. His mother was a high school guidance counselor.
He was graduated from Overton High School, and then Morehouse College in Atlanta in 2000 after nearly two years at the London School of Economics. He and Leetra, his sister, both graduated in 2003 from Yale University Law School.
Baker Donelson, the biggest Memphis law firm, recruited him as a litigator, bringing him back to the city. He joined the U of M law school faculty in 2005, and is a tenured professor, teaching mergers and acquisitions, contracts and corporate law.
Harris has continued teaching through his political career, but said he would step down from the law school if elected to devote full time to the mayoral position. He’d also give up the Senate position. Alena Allen, his wife, a 2003 Yale Law School graduate, also teaches at the U of M law school.
“I’m not saying an elected official alone is going to change everything,” Harris said. “But I do believe it takes leadership to start it off.”
As county mayor, Harris said, he’d open talks with Shelby County Schools to re-purpose closed school buildings and go one step further: Borrow money to build an array of first-class schools able to attract residents back to the neighborhoods.
“If you’re going to change the community are you going to invest in education or are you not going to invest in education? That’s the kind of commitment you have to have,” Harris said. “You have to give voice to an agenda, decide on a couple of things that can make a difference, like blight and education, and then get them done.”
Is the county mayoral office a stepping stone to eventually run for mayor of Memphis? Harris notes that is too far off to say.
“I might like to run for the job when we can say we were successful in the county,” Harris said. “But who knows? That could be in 10 years.”
Harris website is https://www.leeharrisformayor.com/