Memphis’ Black Mayor Fears a Bleak Future : Tennessee: Leader wants to merge city with majority-white suburbs to relieve the strain on tax base.

It would be hard to find another American city where skin color plays a bigger political role, or one where its first elected black mayor is putting voters’ racial beliefs to a bigger test.

Less than two years after blacks first passed whites in voter registrations in Memphis, Mayor W. W. Herenton is on a course that could shift the city back to majority white.

Friend and foe alike are concerned.

Herenton wants to merge his predominantly black city with the well-to-do, mostly white suburbs that make up the rest of Shelby County. Without such a move, he said, the strains of a limited tax base could one day turn Memphis into a poor, black enclave surrounded by rich, white suburbs.

“I see some ugly realities,” he said at a recent press conference. “I see what happened to Newark (N.J.). I see what happened to Detroit. I see what happened to a number of urban cities that allowed the suburban areas to leave them.”

Herenton wants to consolidate the city and county governments, which now have separate mayors, law-making boards, bureaucracies, schools and tax structures.

Suburban residents have long opposed consolidation. City voters have supported it in the past. But the shift in the city’s racial makeup has added a new wrinkle.

“It would dilute our power,” said the Rev. Samuel (Billy) Kyles, one black leader. “I know it’s the right thing to do, but the problem in Memphis is our politics is so racial. If blacks are not in the majority, you simply cannot win an election.”

Some are more blunt about Herenton’s plan.

“I’m stunned,” said John Ford, a black state senator whose family runs one of the city’s most active political organizations; his brother is U.S. Rep. Harold Ford (D-Tenn.). “Who in the world is it he’s talked to that’s told him to think this way? . . . You’d have to be a plumb fool to think this up on your own.”

But Herenton, 53, the city’s first black superintendent of schools before becoming mayor, says blacks gain little by controlling a city that is broke.

“Unfortunately, we have a number of elected officials whose private interest comes before the public interest,” he said. “What you have is people who look at their own political futures first.”

Overall, Shelby County, which includes Memphis, is 55% white. The city, with 610,000 residents, is 55% black. About 17% of the 216,000 suburbanites are black.

Memphis schools are 80% black, the suburban schools 80% white.

Blacks outnumbered whites in registered voters for the first time in 1991, the year Herenton was elected by a margin of 142 votes out of the 247,973 cast.

He got 99% of the black vote, while his white opponent, former mayor Richard Hackett, got 97% of the white vote.

“You can’t get much higher than that. We’re calling the Herenton election the closest and most racially polarized in big-city history in America,” said Marcus Pohlmann, head of the political science department at Rhodes College, a private liberal arts school in Memphis. Pohlmann is writing a book about the election.

The same election raised the number of blacks on the 13-member City Council from three to six and on the nine-member city school board from three to five.

Herenton said the city, with its taxing ability just about exhausted, faces a $50-million budget deficit by 1996, even with little growth in services or the social programs he championed as a candidate.

He said Memphis must grow, through vigorous annexation if not consolidation. Under state law, the city has the power to annex unincorporated parts of the county.

“We must broaden the tax base of this city; I am convinced of that,” he said.

But annexation also raises interesting questions. Herenton won election largely due to a federal lawsuit challenging the city’s use of runoff elections and white suburban annexation as attempts to limit black voting strength.

He is setting up a panel of advisers to decide how to approach unification of the local governments. Above all, he hopes to let city residents decide the issue and avoid a vote in the suburbs.

In 1971, suburban residents voted 2-to-1 against joining the city. Three years ago, residents of several small suburban towns threatened to secede from the county amid talk about merging city and county schools, a proposal later abandoned.

The suburbs would likely oppose consolidation again, Pohlmann said. County residents pay lower taxes than they would in Memphis and many moved to the suburbs to get out of the city in the first place, he said.