Disunity in L.A. : Blacks Face Grim Future in Politics

For the black political community in Los Angeles, the future became grimly obvious in the autumn of 1986.

The city’s senior black leadership had gathered to anoint the next of the chosen, the politician they hoped would succeed retiring David S. Cunningham Jr. in the city’s perennially powerful 10th District City Council seat.

The selection was pivotal. The council’s two other blacks--physically frail Gilbert Lindsay and Robert Farrell, soon to be targeted by a recall effort--held tenuously onto power. A unanimous selection could have installed the eventual successor to Mayor Tom Bradley as the city’s foremost black politician.

Felt Spurned

But discord ravaged the effort.

Bradley and Cunningham endorsed one candidate. Many women supported another. Some politicians backed former State Sen. Nate Holden, who eventually would win. Young blacks, ignored by their elders, felt spurned.

“There was an air of distrust,” Bradley recalled. “We could not get a successful coalition.”

Since then, the schisms have intensified. Politically, the black community in Los Angeles is riddled with divisions, its once-certain unity split between honored elders and anxious young, between the sometimes contradictory ambitions of women and of men, between traditionalists and those who seek a new black agenda.

While Bradley, now 71, serves what most believe will be his final term, no dominant black political figure has arisen to eventually assume the mayor’s mantle of leadership. Many black activists in Los Angeles worry openly about holding onto other black-controlled seats.

Critical Confluence

The divisions come at a critical confluence, as the community confronts the rising political surge of Latinos and Asians and copes with the conflict-of-interest controversy clouding Bradley, who for 16 years has towered as a symbol of black political success.

The concerns of the city’s blacks are far from isolated. Indeed, they flow from a troubling national phenomenon: Despite the emergence of some powerful black politicians, the promise of a generation ago--a heady time when desire and opportunity conspired to fling open the doors to public office--has hardly been fulfilled.

Mark Harris, a 32-year-old Los Angeles native regarded as one of the brightest stars of the incoming generation of black political activists, describes the future bluntly.

“Black elected officials are an endangered species,” Harris said.

With few exceptions across the nation, blacks ushered into office by the civil rights movement have grown old in elective jobs that have proven thus far to be dead ends. Young, politically active blacks, frustrated that their elders have not moved up, are increasingly looking to challenge them for primacy. Latinos and Asians increasingly pose a challenge.

Nationwide, the number of black elected officials has grown each year since 1970--but the rate of increase has slowed to a crawl. In California, despite the prominence of elected blacks such as Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, blacks hold 1.6% of elected offices, well below their nearly 8% share of the population. Black officials themselves see little chance of mounting a successful run at statewide office, and few are optimistic that their numbers will increase significantly.

“We had a surge, we reached a plateau--and we’ve leveled off for some period of time,” Bradley, now in his fifth mayoral term, said in an interview.

To Harris and many others, the only hope for a resurgence of black politicians comes in a delicate arrangement of coalitions between blacks and other minorities--and an unprecedented effort by black politicians to run for office in areas dominated by white voters.

Historic Reluctance

But that will require both an easing of racial tensions and a complete reversal of white voters’ historic reluctance to support the ambitions of blacks. Harris recently confronted a reminder of just how long the odds are:

The airport shuttle bus eased up to a Century City office tower where Harris, an elegantly turned-out senior executive for the California State Bar Assn., a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall law school and a seasoned alumnus of myriad political campaigns, was to attend a meeting. A traffic jam marred the tower’s entrance.

The shuttle bus driver, a white, remarked on his passenger’s race: “Now that you’re here, I guess all those cars can get parked.”

For blacks in Los Angeles, the roster of current black elected officials reads like a tribute to the elections of the 1970s, testimony to how much was accomplished then--and how little things have changed since.

In Los Angeles, most of the black state and high-ranking city officials are in their 50s--at least. Councilman Gilbert Lindsay is 88; U.S. Rep. Augustus Hawkins is 81; Bradley is 71. Councilman Nate Holden is 61 and Rep. Mervyn Dymally is 63. Locally based legislators Bill Greene, Teresa Hughes, Willard Murray, Diane Watson, Maxine Waters and Julian Dixon range from 51 to 58.

Among the politicians frequently mentioned as contenders for Bradley’s mayoral job, in contrast, are 37-year-old Michael Woo, 40-year-old Zev Yaroslavsky, 41-year-old Gloria Molina, 46-year-old Richard Alatorre--all members of the City Council--and 39-year-old City Atty. James K. Hahn. Each represents a younger generation and other political constituencies--Asian, Jewish, Latino and white.

There is no widespread discontent with the black leadership simply because of their age. But many politically active blacks are concerned that--without an infusion of youth--other groups represented by younger and more dynamic politicians will move to the forefront. According to blacks, challenges to the elders have thus far been forestalled by the black community’s loyalty to its political trailblazers.

That loyalty and sentiment has masked a growing ineffectiveness on the part of some senior black politicians, said one member of the city’s black political elite.

“The community pays a tremendous price for sentimentality,” he added, echoing the private concerns of many of his peers.

If many of the blacks now in office are troubled at their difficulty in moving up the political ladder, young blacks who have been waiting on the sidelines for their chance are even more frustrated.

No Choice

One young political aspirant cites a local commandment: “Thou shalt not criticize, nor worse yet run against, an incumbent in the black community.” With the logjam, though, some young blacks say they have no choice but to challenge their elders at the ballot box.

“The joke around the country is that California has the oldest black elected leadership--once you get into office, you die in office. It’s guaranteed,” said 35-year-old Inglewood Councilman Daniel Tabor, the first vice president of the National Black Caucus of Local Elected Officials.

Tabor tried to compete and felt the consequences. In 1988, he challenged Curtis Tucker for the state Assembly seat that the 70-year-old Tucker had held for 14 years. Tabor lost in a battle punctuated by Tucker’s vows of revenge.

Still, Tabor vowed, “There are going to be skirmishes, maybe even wars within the African-American community for political leadership. You begin to wonder, ‘How are you going to do this peacefully?’ and I just don’t see a peaceful solution. We need new, aggressive thinking . . . but unless we take the people out who are already there, we’re not going to get it.”

The next race likely to attract the younger generation will be an expected 1991 clash between two blacks--Councilman Robert Farrell and challenger Kerman Maddox--for the seat Farrell has held since 1975. In late 1987, Maddox helped lead what proved to be an unsuccessful recall effort against Farrell, whom he criticized as not responsive to the community’s concerns. While Farrell is only 51, he carries the support of older black leaders, who were angered by the 35-year-old Maddox’s recall effort.

According to Maddox, “this tremendous gap” has emerged between his generation of politically involved blacks and their older counterparts.

“A lot of us feel, ‘How much longer do we have to wait before we get an opportunity? How much longer will Gil Lindsay be there? How much longer for Gus Hawkins?’ ”

David S. Cunningham III, a Los Angeles attorney and son of the former councilman, is less inclined than Maddox to chastise older politicians. Still, he said wryly: “Martin Luther King at 26 was ready for a leadership position. Unfortunately, if we had someone like that today, he might be confronted with the response, ‘You’re much too young and your ideas are sort of radical.’ ”

The younger generation is banking that conditions in the black community have deteriorated to the point where loyalty to the elders might be discarded. The younger blacks stress a two-pronged approach on issues: More emphasis must be placed on black entrepreneurship and economic development in the inner city, and black officials at all governmental levels must work together to solve problems such as drug use and gang warfare.

Liberally Oriented Leanings

But the young--like their elders--recoil from being defined solely by inner-city issues, and in many ways they share the same liberally oriented leanings of their forebears.

“I care about the environment; I care about public schools, not because I can’t afford private schools,” said Los Angeles lawyer Cynthia McClain-Hill, one of a group of young black professionals working as fund raisers and advisers for black politicians. “I’m concerned about oil drilling because I like the beach a lot.”

To the young, the entrenched politicians have prevented a growth in political activism among poorer blacks by failing to rally voters with registration drives and the like. They also criticize the elders for failing to groom replacements with ties to the poorer communities and of refusing to work together to benefit the poor.

To the old, the younger generation has moved so quickly to trade its education for personal financial gain that it has lost sight of fellow blacks who have not made it. Few of the young, compared to past generations, have dedicated themselves to public service, the elders say. The elders look to the youthful ambitions with a mix of offhanded disdain--and fear.

“Even though the old guard’s a little long in the tooth, they have not become politically senile,” said the Rev. Cecil L. Murray, the senior minister at First A.M.E. Church, the oldest black congregation in the city. “The danger is if they (the challengers) divide the black electorate. . . . It frightens me, but as I look at reality I see the division will cause us to lose some territory.”

Sharp Concern

Losing territory is of sharp concern. Blacks are generally under-represented as it is, and like all political minorities have more confidence in representatives who share their background than in those who do not.

The division between generations comes into stark relief in the persons of Almena and Melanie Lomax, two members of a highly political Los Angeles family. Almena Lomax, who admits to being more than 70 when it comes to age but loses her candor there, remains optimistic about the chances for black politicians overall. And she dismisses entirely the notions that young leadership is needed for the future.

“Dianne Feinstein--she’s no ingenue,” Lomax said, referring to the former San Francisco mayor and current Democratic gubernatorial candidate, who is 56. “Why do we have to have somebody under age 45?”

But to her daughter Melanie Lomax, a 38-year-old attorney and former general counsel for the local NAACP, the emergence of younger leaders armed with a newly sculpted, economics-dominated black agenda is essential. Without them, she characterizes the chances for black political success as “bleak.”

“She likes to remind me of the accomplishments of her generation,” Melanie Lomax said of her mother. “I acknowledge all her generation has done, but it’s time for a new generation. I tell her, ‘It’s time for the second revolution.’ ”

In Almena Lomax’s younger days, when the civil rights movement suffused the black community with unity, the way to political prominence was clear and alliances were simplified: blacks and Jews worked together, their efforts uncomplicated by the relatively small population of Latinos and Asians.

Numbers Mounted

Propelled by the civil rights struggle and in particular the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, the numbers of black elected officials mounted in the 1970s, in Los Angeles and elsewhere. In California, Wilson Riles won election as state schools superintendent and Mervyn Dymally moved from the state Senate to the lieutenant governor’s office.

Locally, some who already held office, such as Bradley, moved up. Others who today serve as the core of black leadership--Rep. Julian Dixon, State Sen. Diane Watson and Assemblywomen Maxine Waters, Teresa Hughes and Gwen Moore--won elective office.

But the last major shift upward came a decade ago, in 1978, when then-Assemblyman Dixon ran successfully for Congress, Watson won the Senate seat, and Moore captured the Assembly position. And at those levels, it has turned out, they stayed.

With the exception of the 10th District contest, one political consultant said, “there’s been a lid on political opportunity in Southern California for virtually a decade. . . . There’s been no turnover, no deaths, no moving up.”

The reasons are varied. Across the nation, the close of the 1970s ushered in a wave of conservativism that swept Ronald Reagan and others into prominence. Democratic politicians felt the force of the conservative onslaught--perhaps none more so than blacks, who for many whites had come to personify liberal politics and bygone issues.

In 1975, when Watson won election to the Los Angeles city school board, the debate over school busing was in full flower. She attributes much of her political prominence in those days to the integration battle, and the fact that she alone “looked like the litigants. . . . Here I am, black, and I’m defending all these little black children.”

Now, she said in an interview in her Sacramento office, “there’s more interest in economic development than there is in civil rights. . . . Integration is no longer an issue. The issues have changed.”

At the same time, nationally as well as locally, politics became a more expensive exercise, giving an edge to incumbents--who overwhelmingly are white. The power of incumbency is particularly strong in the absence of a potent opposition force, such as the political machines that have guided events in other cities.

Without such a structure, according to Lorenzo Morris, an expert in black politics from Washington’s Howard University, Los Angeles and California veered to “the politics of personality.” Such a system, he said, benefits a central figure such as Bradley or Assemblywoman Waters, but does little to pull forward succeeding generations of politicians.

Morris contrasts the lack of structure today with circumstances at the height of the civil rights movement, when organized groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People “socialized the people into political action.” While the latter two groups--and another black community power base, the church--still exist, black officials say they have far less pull than a generation ago.

“Basically, we have been disenfranchised of a political structure,” Morris said.

The biggest barrier to blacks in politics, as in all fields of endeavor, has been the lingering specter of racism.

Bradley’s 1982 gubernatorial campaign made an indelible impression on black politicians. With money and prominent Establishment politicians behind him, Bradley came within 52,295 votes of defeating Republican George Deukmejian--out of 7.5 million votes cast. A host of polls found that from 5% to 15% of the voters--well over the margin--refused to vote for Bradley because of his race.

Bradley attributes his loss not to racism but to a surge in voting by gun advocates angered by his support of a gun control measure on the ballot. But most other black leaders disagree.

Political scientists state flatly that, given racism, Bradley’s electoral success in a white-dominated city is exceptional.

Apart from Bradley, the state’s most prominent black politicians have gained clout by working up the leadership ladder, as opposed to winning over the electorate. Assembly Speaker Brown and Congressman Dixon, chairman of the House ethics committee, are frequently cited examples.

Electoral Success

Figures gathered last year by the Joint Center for Political Studies, a Washington institute that researches black political issues, show that electoral success for blacks thus far has been largely limited to black-dominated districts. There are no black governors or U.S. senators, and only two of the 23 blacks in Congress--one of them Ron Dellums of Oakland--represent white-majority districts.

Of the top 12 cities represented by black mayors--as measured by city population--all but Los Angeles are at least 40% black. The number of black mayors of cities with populations over 50,000 decreased from 34 in 1987 to 28 in 1988. All were replaced by whites. A UC Berkeley survey shows that in recent elections, black mayors across the country won 7% to 20% of the white vote--again far less than the level Bradley has achieved.

“There has been no real progress in blacks getting elected outside of black districts,” said Bruce Cain, associate director of UC Berkeley’s Institute for Government Studies. “The Bradley phenomenon, the (Wilson) Riles phenomenon, is still fairly isolated.”

Most of the 6,829 blacks in office as of 1988, by the Joint Center’s count, were in municipal and school board jobs that politicians of any race first seek. But blacks increasingly are finding that there is less chance of upward movement for them than their white peers, political scientists say.

“One reason you see black mayors in so long is they really can’t use it as a springboard,” said Charles Henry, associate professor of Afro-American studies at Berkeley. “It’s sort of on the top of the ladder for them.”