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Red State Governments Are Dominating Democrat-Led Blue Cities
Joshua GreenAugust 30, 2023 at 9:00 AM UTC
Illustration: Sammy Harkham for Bloomberg Businessweek
This story is part of Businessweek’s Cities issue, a collaboration with CityLab. Read more here.
In 2018, after a pair of high-profile, deadly shootings of Black men by police officers in Nashville, the residents of Davidson County, Tennessee, which encompasses the city, voted overwhelmingly in a ballot referendum to create an independent community oversight board that would work with police to curb shootings and review cases of alleged misconduct.
As a reform measure, it hardly seemed excessive. Memphis already has a similar oversight board. Right before the vote, the Nashville District Attorney’s Office released surveillance video of one of the incidents. It showed a White police officer, Andrew Delke, fatally shooting a 25-year-old Black man, Daniel Hambrick, from behind during a foot chase. Delke was indicted on a charge of first-degree murder and pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
Even so, support for the reform wasn’t universal. The Fraternal Order of Police sued to keep the measure off the ballot. It stayed on and passed, 59% to 41%. A few months later, the new board came into being. Its 11 members included representatives from the Black and Latino communities as well as women and people from distressed economic areas. “What’s important is that it was set up through a community coalition of about 50 or so local organizations, with input from the city council and the mayor,” says Jill Fitcheard, the board’s executive director. “It’s exactly what community oversight should look like.”
Fitcheard at the Witness Walls by artist Walter Hood, which honors Nashville’s role in the Civil Rights Movement.Photographer: Stacy Kranitz for Bloomberg Businessweek
When the board issued its first advisory report earlier this year, it revealed, among other findings, that 96% of youths against whom officers had used force in schools were Black, and 58% were female. (Just over a quarter of Nashville residents are Black.) The report suggested reforms ranging from de-escalation training to recruiting more non-White and female candidates to the Metro Nashville police force.
But what might have been a promising start for Nashville reformers instead met an abrupt end. In May, Tennessee’s heavily Republican legislature passed a bill dissolving community oversight boards, over the objections of critics who argued that it overturned local voters’ wishes and punished minority communities. Elaine Davis, the Knoxville Republican who sponsored the bill, said at a hearing that its purpose was “to ensure a timely, fair and objective review of citizen complaints while protecting the individual rights of individual law enforcement officers.”
Governor Bill Lee swiftly signed the bill into law, and with the stroke of his pen, state Republicans stripped power away from two Democratic cities. “These state legislators want to cut away oversight and police accountability until it’s nothing,” Fitcheard says. “It feels very targeted.”
Tennessee is hardly alone. In red states across the South, Republican legislatures are increasingly interfering in the governance of Democratic cities by blocking liberal reforms and often dictating conservative policies in their place. In Texas, Republicans overrode measures in Austin and Dallas guaranteeing water breaks for construction workers and blocked cities’ ability to mandate paid leave for workers. In Mississippi, Republicans created a separate police force and court system for a majority White part of the heavily Black capital city of Jackson, prompting the US Department of Justice to file a complaint calling the move “racially discriminatory.” In Missouri, Republicans forced Kansas City to increase spending on policing and have been trying to take control of police oversight in St. Louis, which would reverse the outcome of a statewide ballot initiative passed 10 years ago.
Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 4, 2023. Subscribe now.Illustration: Jim Stoten for Bloomberg Businessweek
Nowhere is the trend of states superseding cities more pronounced than in Nashville, and nowhere are the racial dynamics more glaring. Earlier this year, Tennessee Republicans made national headlines by expelling two Black Democratic representatives from Nashville and Memphis—Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, respectively—for protesting gun violence on the statehouse floor, three days after a shooter killed three children and three adults at a Nashville school. (A third protesting Democrat, Representative Gloria Johnson, who’s White, wasn’t expelled.) Voters in Nashville and Memphis fought back successfully by reelecting Jones and Pearson to the statehouse in August. But that hasn’t stopped state Republicans from imposing their political priorities on the city—often in ways that appear designed to intimidate or punish residents.
In June, Vanderbilt University Medical Center turned over transgender patients’ medical records at the insistence of Tennessee’s attorney general, who the hospital says had used his legal authority to force administrators’ hand. State Republicans also passed laws allowing them to seize control of the Nashville airport authority and to slash the size of the city’s Metropolitan Council from 40 to 20, a move widely seen as retaliation for the council’s rejection of a bid for Nashville to host the 2024 Republican convention. (The city sued and won a temporary reprieve.)
At one point this year the encroachment even reached the level of street names, when two GOP lawmakers started an effort to rechristen a city street named for the late Democratic civil rights icon Representative John Lewis as “President Donald Trump Boulevard.” The bill was later withdrawn.
Charlane Oliver, a Democratic state senator from Nashville, says that sort of racial provocation is embedded in the Tennessee Republicans’ power play: an overwhelmingly White, conservative party overriding the democratically expressed preference of a multiracial urban community. “The old playbook has never really gone away,” she says. “With the election of Donald Trump, the Southern strategy was reawakened.”
“What’s happening to Nashville now, and to many other cities across the country, is that we’re being colonized by the state legislature”
Sitting in his office at City Hall in early August, Nashville’s Democratic mayor, John Cooper, is doing what he often does these days: keeping abreast of the various legal battles between the city and state. After Republicans passed a law allowing Tennessee to appoint a new board to oversee Nashville International Airport, the city refused to disband the existing board and went to court. To Cooper’s dismay, his side hasn’t prevailed in the latest round of legal maneuvering. “We just found out that they’re not giving us the injunction against the state board that we were seeking,” he says with a sigh. “But our lawyers think we’ll eventually be successful on the merits.”
Not too long ago, Tennessee had a reputation for effective governance and bipartisan consensus. The state produced a succession of moderate Republicans who became national figures, from Howard Baker Jr. to Lamar Alexander. Nashville prided itself on being known as the “Athens of the South.” It’s always been the “massive economic growth machine” that drives the state, Cooper says, waving toward the “siege of cranes” scattered across the skyline. As recently as five years ago, a local historian could refer to Tennessee as “a prosperous and congenial island of civility in a nation of division” without drawing stares of incomprehension.
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