Term Limits Shake Up Seats Held by Blacks

Nowhere is the impact of California’s new term-limits law more evident than in the cluster of seats held by African Americans in a broad swath of Los Angeles County from Marina del Rey to Paramount and from South-Central Los Angeles to Long Beach.

Only one incumbent is running in the March 26 primary races for five Assembly seats now held by black legislators in the area. In addition, two African American veterans of Sacramento are bumping heads in a state Senate race, and a mad scramble is on to succeed disgraced former U.S. Rep. Walter Tucker III (D-Compton), who was convicted on federal extortion charges in December.

At first glance, the churning promises to bring the largest single change in Los Angeles’ African American political leadership. But at second glance, the change may be illusory.

With a prolonged career in the Legislature now impossible, some members who have decided to move on appear to be treating their seats as part of a family business, analysts say.

Take Assemblyman Willard H. Murray Jr. (D-Paramount). He’s hoping to pass along his old seat to his daughter Melinda as he battles to succeed Tucker.

Or Assemblywoman Juanita M. McDonald (D-Carson). She also has jumped into the race for Tucker’s seat--and son Keith is running for her seat.

It doesn’t end there: Tucker himself, hoping to keep the House seat in the family, is backing his wife, Robin, to succeed him.

Riding a famous political name into office is common, regardless of a constituency’s ethnic makeup. More than 20 candidates in legislative races statewide are close relatives of longtime politicians or are former legislators seeking to return.

But where term limits are concerned, race is of particular significance to many African American politicians: Much of the early momentum for the 1990 ballot measure that created term limits was aimed at removing former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), the most powerful black politician in California history.

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Now, in the first election year in which term limits take hold, 25 members of the 80-member Assembly are being forced out of office, and 10 of the state’s 40 senators will have to leave. Some members facing term limits in 1998 have opted to run for other seats this year.

“I don’t recall a time when so many seats were contested,” said former Compton City Councilman Maxcy Filer.

Yet, as Filer and many observers of black politics say: The more things change, the more they remain the same. The notion that term limits would produce more “citizen politicians” carries little weight.

Kicking out members of the Assembly after six years and state senators after eight has done nothing to undermine the role of money--and thus political connections--in elections, observers say.

“It still costs an awful lot of money to run a race,” said attorney Cynthia McLain-Hill, who closely follows politics in central Los Angeles. “Either you’re independently wealthy or you’re working somewhere in the [political] system to raise the funds.”

Few private citizens--especially minorities--”are secure enough economically to take six years out of their careers to become an elected official,” McLain-Hill said.

The Los Angeles County seats held by African Americans are all in overwhelmingly Democratic districts where victory in the primary is tantamount to winning the general election.

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Along with Murray, Tucker and McDonald, these races feature other names that have become political staples in African American communities--Hughes, Dymally, Farrell and Wright. That has produced a certain frustration in some quarters.

With term limits, “people wanted to give new candidates a chance to run,” said a veteran of dozens of campaigns in South-Central Los Angeles, speaking on the condition he not be identified. “I don’t think they wanted to give recycled candidates a new chance to run.”

Nevertheless, the races promise at least a reshuffling of some faces in the Legislature and Congress.

The big prize is Tucker’s 37th Congressional District seat, which covers Compton, Carson, Watts, Lynwood and parts of Long Beach.

Political handicappers see the race as a free-for-all, with the leading contenders being Murray, an acknowledged master of slate mail campaigning, McDonald and Compton Mayor Omar Bradley.

The race also has attracted Lynwood Mayor Paul Richards; Compton City Clerk Charles Davis; M. Susan Carrillo, who serves on a county water replenishment board; Dale C. Tatum, a college professor, and Joyce Harris, a retired corporate manager.

Voters in the district will have to cast two ballots: one to name a replacement to complete Tucker’s unexpired term and another to nominate candidates for the full two-year term.

In the 25th State Senate district, which sweeps from Marina del Rey to Paramount, a donnybrook is shaping up between incumbent Teresa Hughes (D-Inglewood) and Assemblyman Curtis Tucker Jr. (D-Inglewood).

By several accounts, Tucker had planned to challenge Hughes for the Senate seat when she was forced out of her old South-Central Los Angeles Assembly seat by reapportionment four years ago.

Political elders in the Legislative Black Caucus stepped in and brokered a deal under which Hughes would serve one term in the Senate and step down this year in favor of Tucker, said several political consultants who requested anonymity.

“I was in the room when the agreement was reached,” one person said.

Now, Tucker’s supporters insist, Hughes is reneging on the deal. Hughes’ campaign consultant, Richard Ross, dismisses such talk as a distortion that “Curtis and his people have been peddling.”

Hughes said she “would consider other options at the end of the four-year term,” Ross said. “Subsequent to that, it became apparent to her that Assemblyman Tucker is not a worthy successor.”

The race promises to go down to the wire, with several observers saying Hughes will be tough to beat with Willard Murray’s formidable slate mailer backing her.

Among the races for the five black-held Assembly seats in Los Angeles County, the one attracting the most attention is in the 48th District in South-Central Los Angeles, where Democratic Assemblywoman Marguerite Archie-Hudson is retiring because of term limits.

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It shapes up as a three-way contest between former Los Angeles City Councilman Robert Farrell; Rod Wright, an aide to U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), and Bob Campbell, deputy director of the county Museum of Science and Industry.

In the Assembly district that Juanita McDonald is abandoning--the 55th in Southwest Los Angeles County--the betting is that the black vote will be split between McDonald’s son Keith and Carl E. Robinson, a retired postal worker and perennial candidate. That would allow former Assemblyman Richard E. “Dick” Floyd, who is white, to recapture the seat he lost to McDonald four years ago.

McDonald captured the seat when Floyd and former Assemblyman Dick Elder split the white vote after they were forced into the same district by reapportionment.

Although Latinos are a strong presence in most of these districts, their proportion of voter registration remains too low to make them a significant factor, experts say.

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Assemblyman Kevin Murray (D-Los Angeles)--yet another member of the Murray clan--faces only token opposition in the 47th Assembly District, and Inglewood Mayor Edward Vincent is expected to easily win the Democratic primary in the 51st District, Curtis Tucker’s old seat.

But Kevin Murray’s sister, Melinda, a deputy district attorney, is in a close race with the Rev. Carl Washington, an aide to County Supervisor Yvonne Burke, to succeed Willard Murray in Southeast Los Angeles County’s 52nd Assembly District seat. Both are running for office for the first time. Melinda Murray has the benefit of her father’s name and slate mailer, while Washington has been cultivating contacts in South-Central for years, especially during his work promoting a gang truce in Watts.