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From Boss Crump to King Willie: How Race Changed Memphis Politics. By Otis Sanford. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 276. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-62190-417-5; cloth, $29.95, ISBN 978-162190-322-2.)
Otis Sanford provides a sweeping top-down overview of the intersection of race and politics in Memphis, Tennessee, in From Boss Crump to King Willie: How Race Changed Memphis Politics. It focuses on the years between 1902, when Edward Hull Crump, the longtime white political machine boss of Memphis, first became involved in the city's politics, and 1991, when Willie W. Herenton was elected as Memphis' s first black mayor. Sanford's work provides a synthesis that fills a gap in the historiography on race and politics in Memphis after the sanitation strike and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968. In writing a book that is both memoir and academic history, Sanford, a former managing editor for the Memphis Commercial Appeal and a professor of...