Despite Gains, Black Candidates Face Obstacles

Ask people around the little Mississippi Delta town of Mayersville how things have changed since Unita Blackwell became the state’s first black female mayor and the answers flow as free and fast as the river at the edge of town.

The responses are almost uniformly positive, but they also hint at the high expectations--unfairly high, some say--placed on America’s growing legions of black elected officials, whose ranks will swell in this watershed election year despite lingering obstacles.

“She brought in the water tower. Mostly it was pumps then,” Marie Stapleton said. “Sewage, too. There wasn’t nothing but those little old outdoor houses.”

Saul Green gestures toward a group of low, neatly kept apartment buildings opposite his home. “Old folks’ houses,” he said. “And paved streets. I grew up here when they wasn’t paved.”

Janis Edwards appreciates the food distribution system Blackwell set up for the struggling town, population 526. Town officials buy groceries in bulk and resell them for $14 a box in a once-a-month program that draws hundreds to the tiny town hall.

“You get more than what you pay for,” Edwards said.

Blackwell, who first was elected in 1976 and earlier this year won a $350,000 MacArthur Foundation grant for her creative public service, said black elected officials are “supposed to be super people.”

“The black people,” she said, referring to her 80% black constituents, “never had a chance. And so they expect us to come up with something immediately. The whites look at it: ‘We’ve given you a chance to be there. Now solve these problems.’

“That’s not fair.”

Others agree, but say black elected officials--a rarity a generation ago and now almost 7,500 strong--have managed to mold legislation in the interest of underrepresented minorities and, beyond that, to “inspire folks.”

“Now, more blacks understand the political process,” said Rep. Edolphus (Ed) Towns (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. “There’s something to vote for. In the old days they felt, ‘What difference does it make?’ ”

In 1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. declared, “We can never be satisfied . . . as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.”

At the time, “nothing” was hardly an exaggeration.

Still ahead were the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which would first bolster black voter registration efforts and then provide close federal monitoring of elections, which continues today in some, mostly Southern, states.

In 1970, when the Washington-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies first tallied the nation’s black elected officials, there were 1,469 in all, including 623 in municipal offices.

In 1991, there were 7,480 black officeholders, including 26 in Congress, 458 in state legislatures and 3,683 in municipal posts, according to the Joint Center. Among the latter: mayors of 21 cities with populations over 100,000, including David N. Dinkins, mayor of the nation’s largest city, New York.

All of those numbers are expected to grow substantially after the November elections.

There could be 16 to 21 new black members of Congress and more than 170 additional black legislators, according to projections by the Electoral Participation Project, a research group. If Carol Moseley Braun wins in Illinois, she would be the first black woman in the U.S. Senate.

In most cases, the growth will come because of new, majority black districts created to reflect population shifts in the 1990 U.S. census and the Voting Rights Act’s mandate that minority voting strength not be diluted in forming new districts.

Many of the changes will come in the South, where nearly 53% of black Americans live. Blacks make up only about 11% of the U.S. voting-age population, and only 1.5% of all elected officials. Both proportions are higher across the South, though nowhere do they reach parity.

In Alabama, which has a 22.7% black population, 16.4% of elected officials are black; in Mississippi, the comparable figures are 31.6% and 14.0%; in South Carolina, 26.9% and 11.0%. By contrast, New York state, 14.7% black, and Ohio, 9.8% black, each has 1.1% black officials.

“This is going to be a quantum leap,” Julian Bond said of the November election.

Bond, who was elected in 1965 to the Georgia House as one of its first black members since Reconstruction, now teaches and writes about civil rights.

“I’m 52,” he said from his office at Williams College in Massachusetts. “If I look over the course of my life, enormous progress has been made. When I was the age of the students I teach, I couldn’t vote in most parts of Georgia.”

The first wave of black officials, tempered in the fire of the civil rights movement, carried an agenda of solving “poor people’s problems” and curing urban ills, Bond said.

“We used to be generally the same person,” he said of his fellow black electoral pioneers. “Now we’re incredibly varied. . . . Now people are elected because they have some business connection in their background, or they might be trade union activists, or it may be their community leadership--not just civil rights work.”

Still, despite differences in background, most black elected officials since the 1960s have been Democrats; Rep. Gary Franks (R-Conn.) is the lone exception in Congress today.

Towns predicts that there will be 13 to 15 new Black Caucus members after November. On many close votes, he said, including votes that would block certain defense expenditures the caucus has fought, “They could make a difference.”

And with increased numbers of Latinos and other minority members, “I’m hoping we’ll move more toward coalition politics. . . . It really translates into a lot of power,” he said.

On the state level, black leaders such as North Carolina House Speaker Daniel Blue have helped pass bills, such as one making it easier to register to vote, similar to legislation that President Bush vetoed, said Selwyn Carter, who heads the voting rights project at the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Council.

On the local level, Bond said black mayors have been able in many cases to “reduce police-community tensions. . . . They’ve extended city services to parts of the city that haven’t had them before, democratizing services.”

“When minorities start being elected to school boards,” said Prof. Bernard Grofman, a voting rights authority, “it becomes more likely, suddenly, that there’ll be minority principals . . . and teachers.”

Still, despite overall progress for black elected officials, many goals remain elusive, sometimes because of unique, race-based challenges.

First, history shows that voters remain far from colorblind. With rare exceptions, such as Gov. L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia, white voters tend to elect white candidates.

“If you don’t have districts that are approximately 60% voting-age blacks, you’re not going to get black elected officials,” Carter said.

Advocates of black enfranchisement once fought poll taxes, literacy tests and arbitrary registrars, but the battles today are over how to draw congressional, legislative and local office districts.

“It’s a new generation of discrimination,” said Frank Parker, a lawyer who has handled Voting Rights Act lawsuits and who wrote “Black Votes Count,” a book focusing on bias at the polls and how to overcome it.

In one Mississippi county, Carter said, about two out of five residents are black, but only one of the five members of the county commission is black.

The districts have been ordered redrawn so that county roads are evenly distributed, according to mileage. The upshot: One district with a black majority, and four others with black minorities--a 49% minority, in one case, Carter said.

Carter called the mileage rule--like poll taxes and the rest--”a barrier to deny voting rights.” And the Southern Regional Council has asked a court to disregard the rule and establish a second black-majority district.

There’s another unique challenge facing black elected officials.

In many cities, the same demographic patterns--including “white flight” to the suburbs--that helped create black voter majorities have compounded the problems that the resulting black elected mayors face in office.

“Often, they have experienced dramatic declines in economic bases,” said Grofman, who teaches at the University of California, Irvine. “The number of blue-collar jobs has diminished.

“People look and they say, ‘Gee, here we have these minority elected officials, but we don’t see dramatic improvements for minorities.’ But that’s really a foolish expectation. The changes are not going to be all that great, no matter who’s in office.”

Bond sees a larger lesson in this “sad confluence” of rising black electoral power and tougher times economically.

“I think we oversold politics,” he said. “It was, ‘Vote for me and I’ll set you free.’ We were going to move mountains. It was unrealistic.”

Besides politics, blacks must continue to be increasingly involved in business and economic development, education and civic affairs, Bond said.

“Unless we have a multifaceted approach, we’re not going anywhere,” he said. “I began to realize a long time ago that this was not going to be over in one election cycle, or in one decade.”

As for Mayor Blackwell, she’s thinking about using some of the MacArthur money to take time off to write a “how-to” book for leaders of poor communities like hers who want to make improvements.

But given her mayoral salary of $6,000 a year, the grant has a more practical meaning, too.

“I don’t have to worry this month about my light bill,” she said.