Follow this chain of events.

Harold Ford Sr. is running for his fourth term in Congress and he faces opposition in the 1980 Democratic primary from another black elected official – Shelby County Commission Minerva Johnican.

Ford wins but does not forget and returns the favor when Johnican runs for re-election in 1982. Ford backs Julian Bolton who beats Johnican.

Johnican returns the favor two years later by backing a Republican, Karen Williams, in Williams’ challenge of Democratic state Representative John Spence, who is backed by Ford. Williams beats Spence.

Politics can be a set of chains similar to this. And if you look closely enough you can have a pretty impressive chain even if some of the links become a bit thin.

Johnican’s decision to challenge Ford at the height of his political powers may have had its origins in John Ford’s 1978 County Mayor gambit. He and the family political organization talked a number of probable contenders for county mayor in the 1978 county general election out of making the race in the name of a consensus black candidate – John Ford. Then Ford himself dropped out of the race.

On the other end of the chain, Johnican ran for and was elected to the Memphis City Council in 1983 and then satisfied her desire to make a race for mayor by running unsuccessfully for Memphis Mayor in 1987.

The bid for Memphis Mayor was another milestone in local politics which has included few women as mayoral contenders – city or county mayor. Their ranks include Pat VanderSchaaf and Wanda Halbert as well as Deidre Malone and Carolyn Gates.

Johnican, who died last week at the age of 74, will be remembered at a Saturday funeral service.

Johnican, like another departed political icon we’ve talked about recently on this blog – Otis Higgs – certainly didn’t win every political skirmish or battle over the years and she probably didn’t make it as far in elected office as her ambitions dictated.

But that is not always the mark of political success and more importantly political influence.

I’m not talking about the kind of political influence referenced in decisions made by legislative bodies as well as state and federal court indictments. This is influence on the culture of politics – the atmosphere that a citizen jumps into when he or she makes a decision to run for elected office or support someone else running for office beyond voting for them.

That kind of influence is almost always a mixed bag. A candidate who loses more bids for office than they win can influence the way candidates to come conduct themselves and their strategies. A candidate who wins can nevertheless be a cautionary influence of what not to do.

And some candidates define the times only to be left behind when the times change.

The vote totals aren’t what matters the most because the outcome is only the beginning for those who win. Then comes the very different job of governing.

That job begins about where the Robert Redford character in the movie “The Candidate” utters the final line of the movie – “What do we do now?”

Because most political lives involve both winning and losing, the influence of most political figures with any history is a study in how they acted when times were good and how they acted when times were bad and how much responsibility they really own for the good times and the bad times.

Johnican’s political involvement remained even when she was out of the public eye and public office.

Her name turned up regularly on the campaign finance reports of various candidates who hired a group of campaign poll workers she supervised over the years.

Johnican was also a bit of a prankster. The deadline for candidates to file their qualifying petitions at the Shelby County Election Commission used to be an event that drew large numbers of the hopeful, the desperate and the cautious to Election Commission headquarters at 157 Poplar Avenue.

Candidates could check out qualifying petitions without having to specify what office the petition was for. They would fill in that minor piece of information, especially if it was a citywide or countywide office, sometimes after they had collected the necessary 25 signatures.

In this particular election year, Bolton was the target of the prank as he was watching the clock and contemplating no or minimal opposition. Johnican borrowed someone else’s petition and made sure Bolton saw her as she raced around to get signatures. When someone asked what she was running for, she said County Commission loudly enough that he heard and then she started laughing and put a merciful end to the prank.

The last sound truck I ever saw used in a campaign was during Johnican’s 1987 run for mayor. I’m sure there are still some freelance sound trucks out there operated by political independents.

But Johnican’s came with a schedule and a jingle written especially for the campaign and it showed up as rival candidate Bill Gibbons was campaigning door to door in Lamar Terrace.

One of the undercurrents of the ongoing Nathan Bedford Forrest Park controversy is the idea by some but not all of Forrest’s admirers and defenders that the Ku Klux Klan, of which Forrest was the first Grand Wizard, was an organization that guarded against the excesses of Reconstruction era changes in government.

The defense of Forrest includes the idea that “radical Republicans” and “carpetbaggers” were manipulating the post-war era and its restrictions on the voting rights of ex-Confederates to put people into office who were simply puppets for their interests.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, African-American citizens were elected to state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives across the South. The political gains came over a very short period. It was short enough that these elected officials are often footnotes to the later elections of African-American citizens from the late 1960s into the early and mid 1970s, approximately 80 years later.

Many of those in the later group have their achievements noted with the caveat that they were the first African-Americans elected “since Reconstruction.”

Just this week, we used the phrase in referring to the late A.W. Willis of Memphis, who was the first African-American state legislator in Tennessee since Reconstruction when he was elected to the Tennessee House in 1966.

Thanks to the Tennessee State Library and Archives and the Tennessee Secretary of State’s office, we now have a ready source of information about that generally nameless and unseen group of black elected officials who held office during a volatile period in the 19^th century, some of them former slaves. The website, “This Honorable Body,” is a valuable addition to Memphis history as well as state history.

Among those on the creative staff that put the site together is Shelby County Judicial Commissioner John Marshall.

The page is more than a collection of bios. There are timelines and documents and explanations that put the legislators in the context of their times. There is even a teachers’ guide.

Funeral services are Friday, Feb. 22, for Criminal Court Judge Otis Higgs at 3:30 p.m. at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church, 70 N. Bellevue Boulevard.

The services come a week to the day that Higgs went home early from the Criminal Justice Center because he wasn’t feeling well and was hospitalized later that night and then died.

A couple of years ago, I was in Otis Higgs’ courtroom at the Criminal Justice Center. It was for a hearing in the Clayton Smart Forrest Hill Cemetery case and there was a point where the attorneys were talking among themselves about some important issue.

So as the rest of us sat in the courtroom waiting, the judge motioned for me to come to the bench and we got caught up. I hadn’t been at The Daily News very long and since Higgs had been re-elected to the criminal court bench, I hadn’t seen that much of him.

So after filling him in on what was going on with my job and what else I had been covering, I asked him if he had any interest in running for mayor again.

His answer was quick, definitive and precise — no.

I get that a lot from folks I covered in the 1970s and 1980s. One told me several years ago that he wasn’t “built that way anymore.”

I’ve also known a lot of politicians I covered in what were the early days for me who changed as well but not in a way that caused them to walk away voluntarily from the pursuit of political office.

It came to be their career, the way they made their living — even in offices that paid a part time salary. Too many of them were forced out because of what they became to make that work — corrupt. Some have successfully battled back from drug addiction only to remain addicted to politics, wanting to stay in office in the worst way possible and succeeding on those terms.

So much of politics is dealing with change on your own terms. It also involves a limited window of opportunity to do something for the right reason even if what you specifically want to accomplish is controversial.

Otis Higgs never won the political prize he wanted the most. But his 1975 and 1979 campaigns for mayor were an important part of our political evolution, setting in motion next moves that ultimately outran Higgs bedrock campaign message — that a political coalition across racial lines could take the highest office in city government and change a government with a fundamentally conservative outlook that dealt with racial issues from a position of majority rule instead of coexistence.

There could be discussions across the racial divide. But if there was disagreement, the talks were going to end with the majority exercising its power and its viewpoint.

Higgs was the first major African-American contender for mayor, running for the first time in 1975, eight years after A. W. Willis had run in the 1967 mayoral race won by Henry Loeb. Willis was accused of splitting enough of the black vote that incumbent mayor William Ingram was counting on to beat Loeb and become the first mayor under the city’s new mayor-council form of government.

In eight years, much had changed politically in Memphis. Chandler had his own concerns including that Juvenile Court Judge Kenneth Turner would split white votes. But even if that happened, Chandler still had the runoff provision to fall back on.

1975 was also the year Harold Ford Sr. took office as the Congressman for what was then the 8^th district. It’s difficult now to understand just what his election the year before – the year of Watergate meant to the emergence of black political leaders. Ford’s election was no fluke. It was no knee jerk Watergate reaction. He stayed for 22 years.

As current Memphis Cong. Steve Cohen told us in an editorial board discussion last year:

“The Congressional seat is different now than it was. When Harold Ford Sr. was elected to Congress in 1974, there was no black mayor. There was no black majority city council. There was no black majority county commission. … So the congressman who was the first major black elected official in this area became the godfather. Harold Ford became a political machine.”

And the Ford machine picked and chose those black candidates seeking to win other offices that it would back. But it was hardly that “textbook” in terms of the political mechanics. The machine also worked on getting people out of races through charm and/or pressure. The argument could be that if you don’t run now, we will support you later or if you stay in now, you will never have another chance ever again.

More importantly, there wasn’t then and there isn’t now a monolithic view of what more African-Americans in elected office means. There was no vision or master plan.

Ford was a lightning rod. Higgs wasn’t. Both knew there was an opportunity for new voices long left out of decision making to become not just heard but felt – to affect the city’s direction.

The third time that Higgs ran for mayor was in 1983.

On election night I made my way from D’Army Bailey’s campaign headquarters where the evening ended early to Higgs’ campaign headquarters where the evening lasted just a little bit longer.

The Higgs supporters were in a much better mood than the Bailey camp. In fact, many were chanting “We beat Ford” as the election returns came in showing Dick Hackett beating John Ford by a wide enough margin that Hackett did something Wyeth Chandler hadn’t done against Higgs in 1975 and 1979 – he beat his closest rival with a majority of the votes meaning he did it without a runoff.

Long before he ran in 1991, Willie Herenton had preached the need for a single consensus black mayoral candidate. He certainly wasn’t the only one talking up such an effort. But he was saying it publicly louder and longer than anyone else. Herenton even said it once at Clayborn Temple with Dick Hackett sitting a few feet away.

And 1991 was the year of the plan and the move to push the candidate that emerged from the plan more aggressively than ever before. Higgs was opposed to it enough to describe it as an effort to sell a “mythic water-walking” black candidate to African-American voters.

That was the phrase he used one day before the pivotal meeting at Bloomfield Baptist Church we describe in our weekend piece about Higgs. The meeting effectively ended his last bid for Memphis mayor before it began.

After that I would get an “anonymous” phone call several times over the years suggesting that Benjamin Hooks was interested in an appointment to various offices. The voice was always unmistakably that of Higgs.

The new issue of The Memphis News marks the debut of a new feature in our weekly.

It is The Memphis News Almanac. And like most almanacs, it is a set of events that happened on the dates covered by that particular issue in years past.

Nothing too elaborate. Just enough to get you thinking about where we’ve been as a city and community.

The feature is an outgrowth of some of our thoughts in the last year or so as The Daily News marked its 125^th anniversary. We heard from a lot of folks who have been reading us for a long time but were surprised to know we’ve been around that long.

So, our almanac covering all things Memphis will pull items from past editions of The Daily News as well as from definitive history texts like William Miller’s “Mr. Crump of Memphis” and James Roper’s “The Founding of Memphis” and “The Memphis Diaries of Ida B. Wells” edited by Miriam DeCosta-Willis.

We are aware that this feature begins as our community is having an interesting discussion about history. We also begin the feature as The Memphis News nears the five year mark in its existence. Our first issue, with a cover story on the suburbs, hit the streets June 18, 2008.

So, give our almanac a look and feel free to contribute. If you have programs or ticket stubs from events, political ballots or literature, photographs — any mementos that are reminders of our history that you wouldn’t mind possibly seeing in The Memphis Almanac, give it a scan and send it me at bdries@memphisdailynews.com.

Now that the State of the State address is done, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam is doing the roadwork for his proposed budget and priorities for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

He was at the University of Memphis Tuesday morning and on his way to Jackson for the afternoon.

The roadwork is about making sure each place he goes knows what is in the budget for them and hitting the larger themes about the state as a whole.

Haslam faced some questions after his appearance at the U of M about the plan for the state to move out of the Civic Center Plaza.

Here is our updated story that includes his comments on the move out of the Donnelly Hill state office building.

Memphis isn’t alone in this. The Cordell Hull state office building in Nashville would not only close as a state office building. It would be torn down, according to The Tennessean’s post-state of the state account.

Haslam said this morning in Memphis that he is aware the decision to close the state office building in Civic Center Plaza comes a week after Pinnacle Airlines Corp. announced it is moving its 500 employees out as the anchor tenant of One Commerce Square and moving company HQ to Minneapolis.

It also seems as if the early 1960s concept of Civic Center Plaza is being questioned on several fronts. The plaza was the idea of having a set of then-new modern office buildings on Main Street between Poplar and Adams at a time when city and county governments had filled the Shelby County Courthouse to capacity and 157 Poplar Avenue was built to handle the overflow from it. The 1910 era police station that fronts on Adams Avenue was expanded to hold the police and some courts as well.

The federal courts were in what is now the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law on Front Street.

Nearly 50 years later, all of those modern office buildings grouped together aren’t so modern anymore. Some have had more renovation than others. The county administration building is now undergoing a major renovation. City Hall, opened in 1966 at the twilight of the old commission form of government and the dawn of the mayor-council form of government, is the subject of a Wharton administration facility study that Mayor A C Wharton Jr. has said will include a look at whether the city might be able to use any of the space at the state office building.