A C Wharton was born and raised in Lebanon, Tennessee. A C Wharton shares his name with his father and grandfather, and named his eldest son by the same name. Wharton has stated that his first name is simply the letters "A" and "C" and does not stand for anything else.
He graduated from Tennessee State University with a degree in Political Science and earned a law degree from the University of Mississippi. He became an academic, teaching at the university for 25 years.
In 1980, then-Shelby County Mayor Bill Morris appointed Wharton as Chief Shelby County Public Defender. His concern for the mentally ill in the criminal justice system resulted in the Jericho Initiative, which became a national model program. He chaired the county’s Jail Overcrowding Committee and developed new ways to reduce overcrowding without compromising public safety.
In June 2009, Wharton announced his intentions to run for mayor of Memphis in a special election to replace Mayor W. W. Herenton, who vacated the office soon after being elected to his fifth term in order to run again for superintendent of the city school board.The special election was held October 15, 2009. Based on unofficial returns, Wharton won election with 60 percent of the vote in a field of 25 candidates.
Wharton was sworn into office on October 26, 2009. He was the fourth African American to serve as Mayor of Memphis (previous African-American mayors were J. O. Patterson, Jr., W. W. Herenton, and Myron Lowery). He was the second African American (after Herenton) to be elected to that office.
On June 17, 2014, the Memphis City Council passed Wharton's budget "that includes Mayor A C Wharton’s plan to cut retiree and current employee health benefits". Under Wharton's budget, current city employees and retirees (under the age of 65) (including Police and Fire) would have an increased health insurance premium rate hike of 24%. City Retirees over the age of 65 will have to pay 100% of their health insurance premiums.
On October 8, 2015, A C Wharton lost his re-election campaign for a second term as Memphis Mayor and conceded to Jim Strickland, former city councilman. He only obtained 22,199 votes as compared to Strickland's 41,829. As a result of this loss, his last day in office was December 31, 2015.
In 2010, the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation filed a joint federal lawsuit against the city administration for violating the Clean Water Act and the state Water Quality Control Act.
In 2011 on a different issue, city employees filed a federal class action suit against the Wharton administration,claiming that his budget and relations with the city union violated city employees' First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment rights.
Wharton lives in the Glenview neighborhood of Memphis with his wife, Ruby, an attorney. The couple has three sons together and raised three other boys.
Memphis
Memphis .is a city in the southwestern corner of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat of Shelby County. The city is located on the fourth Chickasaw Bluff, south of the confluence of the Wolf and Mississippi rivers.
Memphis had a population of 653,450 in 2013, making it the largest city in the state of Tennessee. It is the largest city on the Mississippi River, the third largest in the greater Southeastern United States, and the 23rd largest in the United States.
The greater Memphis metropolitan area, including adjacent counties in Mississippi and Arkansas, had a 2014 population of 1,317,314. This makes Memphis the second-largest metropolitan area in Tennessee, surpassed by metropolitan Nashville.
Memphis is the youngest of Tennessee's major cities, founded in 1819 as a planned city by a group of wealthy Americans including judge John Overton and future president Andrew Jackson.A resident of Memphis is referred to as a Memphian, and the Memphis region is known, particularly to media outlets, as Memphis and the Mid-South.
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