Tami Sawyer believes she has changed the Memphis political conversation, and, if elected, she will change the Memphis mayor’s office, too.

In just more than five years, Sawyer has gone from a young professional returning to her hometown, to one of the city’s leading activists, to a Shelby County commissioner and to the precipice of the city’s highest office. She has become a progressive darling, endorsed by a slate of national liberal organizations and singled out in a tweet by Hillary Clinton.

Along the way, she has been one of the clearest voices for systemic change in a city where poverty breaks down along racial lines and a white minority holds precipitously more wealth than the black majority.

That is the prism through which Sawyer regards her candidacy and the Memphis mayoral election. Her campaign slogan, “We can’t wait,” is both a sign of how urgently she believes Memphis needs to change and the precocious nature of her candidacy. At 37, she would be one of the youngest people to hold the office and the first woman.

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“I have changed the conversation of this city. In the last five years, the conversation about equality and civil rights in Memphis has been reopened. What I believe was considered a closed chapter … I don’t think (I deserve) credit for it alone, but I think I am a part of those of us who have said, ‘This hasn’t been resolved.’ … I am part of the work of a movement that has shown millennial leadership,” Sawyer said.

In the final weeks of the campaign, some decade-old tweets have reappeared, contradicting the message of equity Sawyer has made her calling card.

'The thing that kept me up every night and woke me up every morning'

In a late-August interview, Sawyer noted that she didn’t take a direct path to Memphis, to activism and to challenging for the Memphis mayor’s office. She was born in Evanston, Illinois, and moved to Memphis when she was 12.

For someone that has made the pursuit of equity their calling card, Sawyer also will acknowledge, unprompted, that she had a privileged upbringing. After she moved to Memphis, she attended St. Mary’s Episcopal School, an elite private school. She is also tangentially related to one of the city's leading families, the Hooks.

Michael Hooks Jr., the CEO of Allworld Project Management, is her half-brother. He and Sawyer have the same mother, Gladys Sawyer. Hooks Jr. is the grand-nephew of legendary civil rights leader and NAACP Executive Director Benjamin Hooks.

Hooks’ firm, Allworld, is one of the leading minority contractors in Memphis and has received millions in city of Memphis contracts during Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland’s administration. Multiple Allworld employees named Hooks have donated to Strickland. No one named Hooks had donated to Sawyer through the end of June.

After St. Mary’s, Sawyer attended Hampton University and then the University of Memphis. After she graduated from the U of M, she went to the Howard University School of Law. She spent a decade in Washington, D.C., and considered leaving home for good. Sawyer came home to be closer to family and, in her words, "grow up."

When Sawyer returned to Memphis in 2013, she transitioned from being politically conscious to politically active.

“I was invested in conversations in D.C. but I wasn’t an organizer because things were organized. It was D.C. I could step out of my apartment and walk into any protest you want,” Sawyer said.

When she got to Memphis, Sawyer said, she found the organizer’s role was available. And, when she filled that role, she found it fulfilled her.

“I really got into it by accident and then I liked it and it was the thing that kept me up every night and woke me up every morning," Sawyer said.

Sawyer would find no shortage of causes to speak on. Throughout the past four years, Sawyer’s voice has been prevalent in citywide conversations about race, about the use of force by police and a debate about the progress Memphis has made toward racial equity.

On July 17, 2015, a Memphis Police Department officer killed 19-year-old Darrius Stewart, an unarmed black man. Sawyer, as part of the Memphis chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement, helped organize protests throughout the city. She spoke at Stewart’s funeral and, in a short speech, described his death as a galvanizing moment for the city and another life gone too soon.

In 2016, Sawyer entered the political arena for the first time, running to be the Democratic nominee in House District 90. She lost to incumbent John DeBerry by a few hundred votes.

It would be the next year, 2017, that the spotlight would land more squarely on Sawyer. As national attention began to focus on Confederate monuments, Sawyer called for public meetings regarding Memphis’ statues, which had lingered since the days of segregation and Jim Crow.

She became the public face of TakeEmDown901, the activist organization that through public protest propelled the continued presence of the statues to the front of the Memphis political conversation.

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland supported taking down the statues. However, Sawyer and her group frequently felt he was standing in their way, particularly after several protesters were arrested during an August 2017 protest at the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue. That protest followed the death of an activist in Charlottesville, Virginia.

"The protest is always a tool. It was not a protest against Jim Strickland. It was a protest against the fact that these statues still stood. Instead of removing your ego and being able to see that we were out there in solidarity of someone having just been killed," said Sawyer. "Heather Heyer's death is what drove us to the park that day. The police reaction is what drives us to the park the rest of the week."

Strickland used a legal maneuver in late 2017 to transfer the statues out of city ownership, enabling them to be taken down. How much credit Sawyer and Strickland deserve for the statues no longer standing in Memphis depends on which side you ask.

In the aftermath of the statue removal, however, Sawyer’s profile rose and enabled her to launch a successful bid for a seat on the Shelby County Commission. Her Twitter feed became a bully pulpit to speak on issues of equity and social justice.

The glare of the spotlight

Sawyer, like a man she criticizes often, President Donald Trump, and a woman she admires, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, relies on social media to get her message out.

She tweets policy proposals, her opinion on current events and criticism of those who have drawn her ire, including the media. She uses the platform to build a brand and a following.

However, the platform and her decade-long use of it have, at times, placed her in a position when she must explain herself.

In 2009, she posted, “Little white kids n scary movies freak me out. I'm glad I can't have white babies. Cuz I might kill one thinking they're damned.”

“I want to be clear that I’ve grown significantly in the last 10 years and would not have this response to anything similar — meme or otherwise — today. I’m sorry that I shared that view in 2009 and I’m sorry it’s causing hurt today for people,” said Sawyer.

There were other tweets that attracted attention, too.

She said multiple times that she did not respect police. The Memphis mayor oversees the Memphis Police Department. She also claimed to have outed a closeted lesbian teacher, who quit her job as a result.

Sawyer's Twitter history shows the evolution of someone transitioning from private citizen, to an activist and then to a public figure. Over the past decade, Sawyer’s social media presence, like many of those on similar platforms, has become less of a running diary and more of a public persona.

"It is clear that I have not always been the person that I am today. I have said things on public platforms that are hurtful, offensive, and just wrong. As someone who works every day in the fight for justice, I am sorry I ever thought these things, said these things, and amplified these things," said Sawyer.

In the past several days, Sawyer has sought forgiveness and redemption for her tweets. And she says those tweets coming to light have emboldened the types of people who have given her negative attention and threats in the past.

During the mayoral campaign, Memphis Magazine depicted her and opponent Willie Herenton in caricature, cartoons that were widely panned as racist and pulled from shelves.

She was among those friended on Facebook by an account the Memphis Police Department used for activist surveillance. She has been the target of death threats and assault. The threats, she says, have continued during her mayoral campaign.

That negative attention and the spotlight have changed her, she said during an interview in early July.

“I have to remind myself, like in my darkest moments, because it’s not easy … I look at people who are getting it even harder. I look at (Ocasio-Cortez) … and I see what they say to her all day,” said Sawyer.

"I don’t like going to grocery stores … I’ve changed the way I move through the city, not because I think I’m some superstar, you know, because I don’t feel safe all the time in public areas ..."

Sawyer paused. Her voice soft, she noted the attack that civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer faced in Mississippi in 1963. Everything she has faced pale in comparison to attacks like that.

“I just watched Fannie Lou Hamer’s video, her Fourth of July video about the flag today … They took her ovaries and left her there on the jail cell floor for seven days to die. If she can survive that, I can survive this with all the privilege that I have to sit here and talk to you in a coffee shop about it.”