Sarah Freeman

I’m running for U.S. Congress in Tennessee's District 8, West Tennessee, as a Democrat, an educator, and a Southerner.

I was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains (Bedford, Virginia) and lived in Galax, Virginia until the age of nine. My father was a surgeon, and I remember going with him on rounds into the local hollers where he treated patients who had no electricity and had never seen a doctor before.

My parents divorced. My mother moved us to Davenport, Iowa, and she began working at the Rock Island Arsenal. The shift was painful, dramatic, and hard. Because of my thick southern mountain accent, I was teased and placed in a remedial class. It was assumed that since I was from Appalachia I was illiterate.

I wasn't. In fact, I had read about every biography (written for young readers) in the Galax school library. I loved Virginia history and hunted for arrowheads and fossils in the lush woods and streams. Iowa was quite a shock. I did make friends, but it was hard, especially when my brother, David Hunter Wilkerson, a nineteen-year-old Marine, was killed in Vietnam on May 20, 1969. The damage to my family was irreparable.

After graduating high school, I went to the University of Iowa and was accepted into the honors program in history. My advisor, Dr. Linda Kerber, was a rising star in the new field of Women's History and a great role model. I went on to the University of North Carolina for graduate school where I focused my studies on U.S. southern, women’s, and political history with the firm guidance of Dr. Jane DeHart and many UNC and Duke University faculty.

When I started graduate school, I was single and had a boyfriend. When I graduated, I was married and had two kids. I also had been flirting for some time with Judaism. I studied it a good deal at Iowa, hung out with some Jewish students, went to Skokie for Passover, and many who helped me the most along the way were Jews. The same pattern continued at Carolina. When I met my husband-to-be, I was not surprised that he was Jewish. I exercised my freedom of religion, studied, and converted to Judaism.

Soon after I received my Ph.D., I landed a tenure-track job in the fabulous History Dept. at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, Arkansas. We had been there less than two years when the Westside Middle School shootings happened in March 1998. Four girls and a teacher were deliberately and systematically gunned down and many others were wounded by two boys. My kids went to a different school but knew children at Westside and had friends who had been in the line of fire. My instinct was to find out how such a thing could happen and to pursue ways to prevent such a tragedy in the future. There had been a bullying issue at my daughter's school, and the Westside shooters had similar behavioral issues, according to girls who knew them. I began speaking out in public forums and in letters to the editor about the problems of bullying and gun culture. Do we love our guns more than we love our children? When it became clear that deflection (I was told, "Grab the Bible and mums the word.") was how the community would move forward after the tragedy, we decided to leave Jonesboro. We moved to Germantown, Tennessee where they were completing a new synagogue. I took the hit for the family and commuted to ASU.

I wrote, published, taught, and made tenure while becoming involved in Germantown city government affairs. Near our sweet little neighborhood of Neshoba North, where my kids walked to Riverdale School and moved freely and safely around the neighborhood, city officials approved a massive up-zoning of residential property to high-density urban zoning despite strong neighborhood opposition. My neighbors and I fought to reverse the zoning and, in the process, discovered some things that were not quite kosher. After twelve years of unrelenting neighborhood activism, the city finally reversed the zoning back to residential. Predatory development is a growing problem in many communities in West Tennessee, and there are things that Congress must do to protect local communities and the environment from dangerous development.

In 2018, a super close municipal election put me on the front line of examining Shelby County’s notoriously rickety election system. I began to work with voting rights activists to establish a secure paper trail for every vote, and we succeeded. Soon after, I was appointed to serve on the Shelby County Democratic Primary Board. We had the authority to decide if county school board elections would be partisan. I fought tooth and nail to keep those positions non-partisan, and that was the right thing to do.

I was elected to serve on the Shelby County Democratic Party’s Executive Committee in 2020 and, in a state election, to serve on the Tennessee Democratic Party’s Executive Committee in 2022, a position I now hold. I was elected Vice President of the Democratic Women of Shelby County and was recently elected to represent Tennessee’s District 8 at the Democratic National Convention in August.

My background has shaped my ideology and politics. I care deeply about the treatment of our military and veterans. I strongly support commonsense gun laws. Raised by a single mother, I know how hard she worked to keep us going, and I recognize the real challenges many families face to keep going now. I support unions. As an educator, I have long believed in student loan forgiveness and greater federal funding for public schools. To combat poverty, we must increase the federal minimum wage, and we absolutely must save and protect Social Security. I believe in equal rights and equal treatment under the law without regard to race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, and class. Of course, we must protect the environment that gives us life. As a patriot, I support NATO and our allies, and I cannot stand by and watch as the democratic principles of our nation, its laws, Constitution, and elections, are desecrated.

I feel that what is required of me now is to take on the Republican incumbent in Congress and win. We all know that Congress is currently incapable of doing the business of the people, and that performative personalities who want a strongman as dictator have captured Congress. At the local and state level, I have worked to bring common sense and humanity back into the political discourse. It would be an honor to serve my people, whom I know well and who deserve much better than the current representation they have in the House. This is where my journey has taken me, and I look forward to a campaign of courage, integrity, and compassion.

Links:

Campaign Website: Campaign

Linkedin Profile: Linkedin

Ballotpedia Article: Ballotpedia