Blacks Will Decide Who Wins

Los Angeles’ African American community has shrunk in recent years as a percentage of the city’s population. At the same time, the African American vote has never been a more important electoral force. Indeed, black voters will probably decide the May 17 mayoral election.

Today, about 10% of the people in Los Angeles are African American -- down from 14% in 1990 -- but blacks cast 16% of the March primary election vote, according to The Times’ exit poll.

The African American Voter REP Project has registered more than 50,000 voters over the last three years alone and, in contrast to other voting blocs nationwide, African American voting propensity is increasing and has been, with very few exceptions, since the early 1990s.

Few dispute that the disproportionate voting strength of African Americans was decisive in the 2001 mayoral runoff election in which James K. Hahn beat Antonio Villaraigosa by 7 percentage points.

It’s no wonder that the contestants are courting this bloc even more intensely. But it’s harder to predict who’ll claim the black vote this time.

A March election exit poll by Loyola Marymount’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles found that almost 25% of black voters chose Villaraigosa, compared with nearly 20% who voted for Hahn. Now both candidates must vie for the 49% of the African American voters who supported City Councilman Bernard Parks, the 3% who voted for Sherman Oaks lawyer Bob Hertzberg and the 1% who voted for state Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sun Valley).

Two points bear noting:

First, almost half of African American voters cast ballots for Parks, even if they were uncertain about his citywide viability. Most analysts interpret this as dissatisfaction with the way Hahn handled Parks’ ouster as chief of police. The power of the Hahn name has lost its long-standing punch in a community that feels betrayed.

Second, looking at the same statistic from the opposite angle, more than half of African American voters cast ballots for non-African American mayoral candidates. This has interesting implications for the May 17 election.

Traditional theories of ethnic voting suggest that minority candidates should expect to receive upward of 75% of the vote from their own group. Parks’ lack of success in capturing an overwhelmingly majority of black votes at the polls -- particularly in light of his overwhelming victory in his run for the vacant 8th District City Council seat just two years ago -- signals the community’s expanding vision and emergence from “race rigid” voting.

The African American community may be reverting to its historic roots, whereby its elected officials traditionally have served as catalysts for bringing together divergent constituencies across the city. Researcher-writer Susan Anderson has noted that although L.A. has long been a racially divided city, it also has a 90-year history of African American coalition building. This goes back at least to the epochal and coalition-supported election to the state Assembly of Frederick M. Roberts -- an African American who won in 1918 in a majority-Anglo district despite the fact that his opponent waged a racist campaign.

In 1934, Augustus F. Hawkins replaced Roberts. And, in 1962, voters elected Hawkins the state’s first African American congressman. The next year, African Americans made their major Los Angeles electoral breakthrough, putting Tom Bradley, Billy Mills and Gilbert Lindsay on the City Council, and F. Douglas Ferrell in the Assembly.

Coalitions played a key role in most of these victories. More history-making black electoral victories -- including Yvonne Brathwaite Burke’s ascent to the Assembly and Kenny Washington’s to the community college board -- followed in the next decade. Bradley, perhaps the greatest urban coalition builder of our time, capped this trend by becoming the city’s mayor for a record-breaking 20 years.

Today’s candidates must understand this history and recognize that African Americans have long known how to both hold and share power. The fact that African American voters spread their votes around in the March election indicates the maturation process of a community capable of evaluating political candidates on grounds other than skin color or family legacy. The candidate who includes African Americans in the governing coalition, finds a strategy to deal with long-standing problems with the Los Angeles Police Department and offers a coherent plan to improve public schools, create more jobs and provide better housing for residents in predominantly African American communities is likely to receive the lion’s share of the black vote.

After all, this is a community that, perhaps more than any other, knows the value of its vote. As W.E.B. DuBois once put it: “The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defense -- else what shall save us from a second slavery?”