Having been born and raised in Nashville, and having moved back to just outside it when I retired from the Army in 1995, and having earned by Master degree from Vanderbilt, I read with interest Roger Simon's RealClearPolitics piece on Dr. Carol Swain, a retired Vandy law professor running for mayor. The election is only two days hence ("Nashville's Next Mayor May Be a Black Conservative Woman").
Dr. Swain's bio is impressive.
Swain’s vitae resembles neurosurgeon/cabinet member Ben Carson’s, but is in some ways more extraordinary. She was one of twelve children born in rural Virginia in 1954, growing up in a shack without running water. Her mother, a victim of infantile paralysis who never made it out of high school, was physically abused by her stepfather. Her own father ended his education at third grade. Carol herself, shoeless and unable to attend on snow days, did not finish high school either. She dropped out and married at sixteen to have three children, one of whom died of sudden infant death syndrome. Five years later, she was divorced and tried to commit suicide.Will she win the election? Well,
But then everything slowly changed. In a remarkable bootstrap story she would likely ascribe to her faith, Swain earned her GED while working as a cashier at McDonald’s, then attended, in succession, Virginia Western Community College, Roanoke College (BA), Virginia Tech (MA), University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (PhD) and Yale (MLS).
But wait, as they say, there’s more. By 1990, at the age of 36, she was a professor of politics and public policy at Princeton for nine years to be followed by a similar position at Vanderbilt where she also taught law until she retired in 2017. Along the way she was the author and editor of eight books and had her scholarly work cited by two Associates Justices of the US Supreme Court.
It’s hard to quantify, but Carol Swain yard signs and billboards seem to be everywhere in the city’s African-American neighborhoods. They also surface with regularity on the luxurious lawns of the tonier suburbs south and west of the city.Personally, I don't think she will win or even force a runoff. (Well, not this election, anyway. But a mayor's term ends in four years.) The incumbent is David Briley, who has two things going for him: his grandfather, Beverly Briley, was the founding mayor of the political unification of the city of Nashville and Davidson County in 1963. Second, since that year no incumbent has ever lost re-election.
Ten total candidates are running for Nashville mayor but Swain has competition from only three, all of them being white men, one being the incumbent.
What Dr. Swain's post-election plans will be no one knows (unless she wins, of course). But even if she loses, I am sure we will hear much more from her, and that's a good thing.
As an end note: After retiring from the Army in 1995, my family and I returned but not to Nashville proper. We now live in Robertson County, north of Nashville, in a subdivision still being built. Almost all the new residents here are coming from Nashville, some from as close as the Goodlettsville township, which is literally just down the road. But it falls under Metro Nashville governance, so they have left.
It is not "white flight." Our neighborhood is diverse: mainly white, but multiple black households and an Indian one (as in, from India) are merely a few doors away from us. Every one of them moved here from Nashville. (My next-door neighbors moved here from China, though, not Nashville.)
The Nashville Chamber likes to boast that "One hundred people per day move to Nashville." That is true. What they do not tell you is that 70 per day move out. Dr. Swain's political strength is among Nashville residents who know why and want something done about it.
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