Shelby County Democrats: The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. Again.

In August, 2016, Tennessee Democratic Party chair Mary Mancini announced that the state party executive committee had voted to disband the Shelby County Democratic Party, a hopelessly fractious organization that, as Mancini noted, had experienced "many years of dysfunction."

One year later, in August 2017, a reconstituted local party took shape at a convention that crowned months of focus-group activity in tandem with the state party. Corey Strong, a Shelby County Schools administrator and a military reservist, was elected chair of a new body that possessed both an executive committee and a larger "grassroots" council.

Coupled with the revived Democratic activism that, in Memphis as elsewhere, fueled a "resistance" movement to President Donald Trump, the moment looked promising indeed for local Democrats.

But now, a year and a half later, in the aftermath of party successes at the ballot box in 2018 and on the threshold of a presidential election year, the Shelby County Democratic Party is freshly riven by a dispute that seemingly has racial overtones but may actually be the consequence of warring ambitions and an internal power struggle.

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