Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

The tiny town of Mason, Tennessee was not on the map for the state, much less the country. With a population of roughly 1,200 near Memphis, the town was small, quiet, and majority Black. And then Ford decided to build a battery plant nearby, and now everyone wants the land Mason is on, especially the state GOP, who is now threatening to take over and dissolve the town's charter in order to get at the now very valuable land in the area.

The Tennessee Comptroller issued an unusual appeal last week to residents of this small, majority Black town, which occupies fewer than two square miles in rural west Tennessee.

“In my opinion, it’s time for Mason to relinquish its charter,” Comptroller Jason Mumpower wrote in a letter mailed to each one of Mason’s 1,337 property owners.

Mumpower urged local residents to “encourage your local officials to do what’s necessary to allow Mason to thrive. There is no time to waste.”

State comptrollers, responsible for financial oversight of local government, typically communicate directly with elected local leaders and not their constituents. “We have not issued a letter to citizens like this before,” Comptroller spokesman John Dunn said, noting it is “unprecedented for us to publicly call for a town charter to be relinquished.”

But the Comptroller’s unprecedented public callout comes at an unprecedented time not only for Mason, but for the state. Mason, located in the southeastern corner of Tipton County, now finds itself with some of the most coveted real estate in Tennessee.

It’s one of the nearest towns to the massive new site to be built for Blue Oval City, a key component in Ford Motor Co’s multibillion-dollar pivot to electric vehicle manufacturing.

Mumpower’s letter has infuriated Mason’s part-time elected officials, who insist they have no intention of ceding their town’s 153-year-old charter – which would subsume the largely African-American, majority Democratic community under the governance of Tipton County, which is predominantly white and Republican.

“This is our home. We were born and raised here. The majority of the town is homegrown people that live here,” Vice Mayor Virginia Rivers said. “He is trying to conquer and divide us. It’s akin to a hostile take-over and it’s not hard to figure out why here, why now.”

Town leaders are accusing Mumpower and other state officials of big-footing a long-ignored, largely Black community now that major investment is heading its way.

Mason is 60% Black and includes descendants of men, women and children enslaved in the area before Emancipation. For more than a century the town was led by White elected officials.

That changed in 2016, when fraud and mismanagement allegations led to the resignations of nearly all City Hall officials, all of whom were White. Mason’s current mayor, vice mayor and five of its six alderman are Black.

“It’s because of the Black people that are in office,” said Rivers, who first became Vice Mayor in 2021.

“And it’s because of all the places in the world, Blue Oval could have selected, they selected here. There’s no way Mason won’t prosper and grow. And now they want to take it away from us.”

 

John Grisham couldn't have written a better script.  Evil, corrupt white politicians that embezzled millions and left the town's finances in ruins for years, a town struggling to right itself with a part-time Black government and no help for the Republicans in the state legislature who ignored the town and its people completely...

...Right up until the town became the home of Ford's new plant, with tens of thousands of jobs. 

 

Suddenly, Republicans came down on the town like a hammer.

 

Republicans don't care about anyone, folks. They care about being rich. They especially don't care about Black, rural America, and will use every opportunity to destroy us whenever they can get away with it. It's almost assured that they will, and that the town will be destroyed and the residents bought out or driven off to make way for new prime developments for Ford's workers and plant executives. Republicans want permanent fiefdoms run by state legislatures with GOP supermajorities, who can pass whatever laws they like. The rest of us are subjects and serfs.

The right people will get rich, as always. As they have for 400 years.

 

Those people will get crumbs, or worse, bullets.

Black Lives Still Matter.