See Jane Win by Caitlin Moscatello

Author:Caitlin Moscatello
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

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LONDON LAMAR was in a different position. She might have been a state house candidate in red Tennessee, but she was a candidate in Shelby County—a rare blue district—where Black women were seeking office in historic numbers.

She was running in what she called the real Memphis—which, at least on the night I drove to meet her, was about a 25-minute ride from my hotel near Beale Street, a stretch of downtown made famous by jazz and blues legends like Louis Armstrong and B.B. King (but on this occasion, was overrun by white tourists in town for a college football game). I passed a cheesy souvenir shop, trying to pass itself off as a music store that had photos of Trump, Jeff Sessions, and Pope John Paul II in the window next to a laminated piece of paper that read, “Donald Trump, I love you. God love’s [sic] you. Memphis love’s [sic] you. Keep us in your prayers.” Lamar was right. This wasn’t the real Memphis. It couldn’t be, not in a city that was two-thirds Black, in a county that had voted overwhelmingly for Clinton in 2016.

Remember that this was a district so blue Republicans didn’t even bother to field a candidate for the state house seat Lamar was looking to win. This meant that in her case, the primary, held in August, was the big show—and she had her work cut out for her. Lamar was running against two other Black women, Doris DeBerry-Bradshaw and Juliette Eskridge (both of whom were much older than she was). It was a scenario—women of color running against other women of color—that Peeler-Allen referred to as “the white boy problem.”

“We don’t hear organizations hemming and hawing when they have two white men going toe-to-toe, so this is an opportunity to really look at the issues and the candidates, and make a decision based on what you think is best for the community,” she said. In the New Orleans mayoral race in 2017, two Black women went up against each other in a runoff. (Higher Heights ultimately endorsed one of the candidates, then city council member LaToya Cantrell, who went on to win the election.) For Peeler-Allen, “That’s the ideal, because it shows the depth of engagement of Black women across the board.”

Lamar said that in a field of all Black women, her age, 27, had become a major point of contention, ammunition for her opponent to use against her to make her seem unqualified. “Obviously we need more Black women in office in Tennessee,” she told me, “but within the Black community, there is this intergenerational thing going on with the older generation up against the millennials.” There was a woman who was ripping out her campaign signs from people’s front yards, said Lamar, “saying, ‘Don’t vote for her, she’s too young, she’s not experienced.’ It’s testing my patience because you can’t do anything about it unless you catch it on video.”

The age question wasn’t going to stand in Lamar’s way.

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