Dr.
Martin Kilson's grand overview of the course of Black American electoral
politics during the past three decades is required reading for all
persons concerned with U.S. history and politics. Kilson's exposition
and interpretation of the "core agenda" that has mobilized
African American activists, politicians and voters, from passage
of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through to what Dr. Kilson calls
the current "maturation phase" of electoral activity,
will certainly be referenced by scholars and journalists in the
decades to come.
Kilson,
who enjoys a special place among Black America's pre-eminent political
scientists, skillfully interprets data compiled by the Joint Center
for Political Studies to trace the remarkable commonality of mainstream
civil rights organizations' political positions and those championed
by African American officeholders. This struggle around "core
issues" - defined by Kilson as "housing, jobs, education,
criminal justice, and an overall pro-active federal role in ending
racism's impact in these areas" - has served as the practical
and authentic nexus of the political conversation between African
Americans and those who speak on their behalf.
It
is the Republican Party's failure to address the core Black agenda
that has led to the GOP's "abysmal" electoral record among
African Americans, says Kilson. He notes, however, that "signs
of attitudinal fissures" have arisen along generational lines
regarding the idea of school vouchers, both among Black officeholders
and within the African American electorate.
Kilson
points out that "the 'generational-conflict' notion is only
applied to black politics" - never to Latinos and whites. He
sounds a "wake-up call to Black America's national civil rights
leadership," to be vigilant in the face of emerging "stealth
candidacies" of Black nominal Democrats backed by rightwing
money. First-term Newark city councilman Cory Booker's 2002 effort
to oust four-term incumbent Sharpe James was a major manifestation
of this threat, says Kilson. He warns of more such "stealth
candidacies" to come, "fueled by conservative funding
sources linked to the Republican Party."
-
The Publishers, The Black Commentator
The
entire State of Black America 2002 report in a bound paperback book
may be purchased directly from the National
Urban League. It features Martin Kilson's report and seven other
essays. The price is $24.95 plus shipping and handling. You may
e-Mail to Lee Daniels, Director of Publications at [email protected]
or telephone 212.558.5345. None of the proceeds of sales of the
book go to The Black Commentator, but please mention us if you order.
Thank you.
State
of Black America 2002
American
Politics 2002: Maturation Phase
by
Martin Kilson
There
is no better point of departure for portraying the maturation phase
of the political status of African-Americans in the overall American
political process than examining this year's 30th Annual Report
on Black Elected Officials by the Washington-based think tank, the
Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and written by
its senior political analyst, Dr. David Bositis. Under the deft
leadership of Eddie Williams, the Joint Center has provided the
indispensable service of tracking both the growth and overall comparative
systemic attributes of African-Americans holding the several kinds
of political office in the United States since 1970. All Americans
genuinely interested in the growth of equality and diversity in
political officeholding in our American democracy are greatly in
its debt for having skillfully performed this function for a generation
and a half.
An
Overview of Black Elected Officials
As
the militant phase of the Civil Rights Movement began to gain a
favorable public policy and legislative response from the United
States federal government by, say, 1964, there were around 350 Black
elected officials. When those halcyon days ended and the Joint Center
conducted its first census of Black Elected Officials (BEOs) in
1970, that number had reached 1,469. The steady shift in the politics
of African-American life between 1970 and today - from full-fledged
civil rights activism to a mixed-politics of both civil rights activism
and sophisticated Black electoral mobilization - has produced the
unprecedented number of 9,040 BEOs the Joint Center found for the
year 2000. This figure amounts to between two percent and three
percent of all United States elected officials.
Viewed
in regional terms, some 869 BEOs, or 9.7 percent of the total represent
Northeast states; 1,636, or 18.2 percent, represent Midwest states;
and 326, or 3.6 percent represent Western states. Not surprisingly,
the South recorded the largest 30-year growth in BEOs, with 6,170,
or 68.5 percent of the total. The reasons for this are plain enough.
First, about 55 percent of all African Americans live in the South.
Secondly, local, state, city, and federal officeholding jurisdictions
include large concentrations of African Americans. And thirdly,
the necessity of ethnic-bloc political and electoral mobilization
is still a reality of African-American life today - just as Irish-American,
Jewish-American, Polish-American, Italian-American, Latino-American,
Chinese-American, WASP-American, etc. ethnic-bloc political and
electoral mobilization are still realities in overall American life.
Keep
in mind that ever since the rise of an ethnically pluralistic American
political culture in the post-Civil War era, when Irish-Catholic
Americans became a major force in the urban industrial working class
- and were joined from the 1890s onward by Italian-Americans, Polish-Americans,
Jewish-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, etc. -
the American political culture has allowed democratic space for
ethnic-bloc political and electoral
mobilization. The WASP host cultural group in our American democracy
first designed and utilized electoral methods based on ethnic patterns.
WASPS did this initially in the pre-Civil War era with political
exclusion purposes in mind; they manipulated voting boundaries or
districts to keep down the votes of competing religious groups among
the WASP sector. Then, from the post-Civil War era onward, competing
WASP politicians also manipulated electoral districts for political
inclusion purposes, recruiting Irish Catholic voters who might favor
Republican Party candidates in industrial cities or states over
Democratic Party candidates. This WASP-initiated manipulation of
electoral mobilization through the design and re-design of voting
districts became known as "gerrymandering," after Elbridge
Gerry, the 18th-century WASP highborn Massachusetts merchant who
had an extraordinary but deeply checkered career in the political
life of the young nation. As governor of Massachusetts in 1811 (Gerry
would become James Madison's vice president in 1813, before dying
in 1814), it was his party's redrawing of voting districts - one
of which had the shape of a salamander - to ensure their continued
power that his opponents seized upon to produce the eternal pun...
From
the 1890s on, as Irish-Americans learned to employ ethnic-bloc activism
in the electoral process, such ethnic-bloc patterns became a key
element in expanding the political incorporation of weak and marginal
white groups. It was through such democratic ethnic-bloc electoral
space that the first Irish-American city councilmen, mayors, state
assemblymen, congressmen, and governors gained office in great states
and cities like New York and New York City, Illinois and Chicago,
etc. The names of James Michael Curley (an early Irish Mayor in
Boston and also Governor in Massachusetts), Timothy Sullivan (an
early Irish Mayor in New York City), Alfred Smith (first Irish governor
of New York and in 1928 the first Irish candidate for president
of the United States), and even John Fitzgerald Kennedy (in 1960
the first victorious Irish candidate for president) reflect the
long-standing pragmatic weaving of ethnic-bloc modalities into the
electoral fabric of American political culture.
Thus,
in our contemporary American society this ethnic-bloc pattern of
electoral mobilization is legitimately applicable to African-Americans,
Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, etc.
Curiously
enough, however, beginning in the conservative Reagan and Bush Republican
Administrations in the 1980s onward, conservative analysts and pundits
have pejoratively labeled this very American mode of political organizing
as "identity politics" and declared that it violates the
very traditions of American social and political conduct. In fact,
just the opposite is true. The historical record on the role of
ethnic-bloc modalities among WASPS and white ethnic groups alike
makes it unmistakably clear that their use has qualitatively advanced
the nature of democratic space in American political culture. So,
too, now for African-Americans: their use of ethnic-bloc patterns
since the late 1960s has made possible a steady-state growth of
BEOs to the 9,000-officeholder level and beyond. I have no doubt
that the invention of the "identity politics" rhetorical
maneuver among conservative analysts and pundits - put forth often
in such organs as The New Republic, The National Review,
Commentary, and so on, and by such conservative black analysts
as Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, K.A. Appiah, Randall Kennedy, and
John McWhorter - emerged as a racist response to this hard-wrought
African-American political achievement.
Of
course, even as black voters have voted heavily for BEOs, they have
also voted for white candidates who have supported blacks' civil
rights agenda. Recently, black voters have elected two white mayors
in two large black-majority cities - Gary and Baltimore. In a similar
vein among whites, the past decade has seen a growth of electoral
liberalism among white Americans in regard to their voting for African-American
candidates. As I will discuss below, this has been the case especially
for BEOs representing statewide offices, and even some county and
city offices. On the other hand, since the 1960s, only a few African-American
congressional officeholders have gained office through majority
support from white voters - namely, Senator Edward Brooke (Republican,
1967-1979) in Massachusetts, Senator Carol Moseley-Braun (Democrat,
1993-1996) in Illinois, and Congressman J.C. Watts (Republican,
first elected in 1994) in Oklahoma. Nevertheless, it is reasonable
to expect that a growing number of African-American candidates will
contest statewide and House of Representatives offices in white-majority
districts. Indeed, it seems clear now that even the White House
is within reach of a uniquely appealing African-American political
personality, such as General Colin Powell, America's first African-American
Secretary of State.
Looking
at it in broad strokes, then, since 1970 the African-American political
class has acquired and put to use some important new political status
attributes that have led to a distinctive maturation of its position
at city, state and federal levels. Because I will end this essay
on municipal politics, I'll begin this part of the discussion considering
black political advancement at the state level.
Attributes
of Black State Officials
In
the early 1960s, there were no more than 40 Black State Officials
(BSOs) across the country. Now, this category of African-American
political officeholders totals 606 and includes 571 state legislators
and 35 statewide administrators. Further, it should be noted that
nearly a third of the 35 statewide administrator posts held by African-Americans
are major decision-making offices. They are: Colorado:Lieutenant
Governor (Joe Rogers); Connecticut: State Treasurer (Denise L. Nappier);
Georgia: Attorney General (Thurber E. Baker); Georgia: Public Service
Commissioner (David L. Burgess); Georgia: Chief Justice-State Supreme
Court (Robert Benham); New York: State Comptroller (H. Carl McCall):
North Carolina: State Auditor (Ralph Campbell); Oregon: State Treasurer
(Jim Hill); Tennessee: Chief Justice-State Supreme Court (Adolpho
A. Birch); and Texas: Chair-State Railroad Commission (Michael L.
Williams).
Again,
the African-American electorate in the South has generated the largest
number of black state legislators. Mississippi has 45; Georgia,
43; Alabama, 35; South Carolina, 33; Louisiana, 31; North Carolina,
24; Florida, 20; Tennessee and Texas, 16 each; Arkansas and Virginia,
15 each; and Kentucky and West Virginia, 4 each. The rising status
of African-American women in black leadership councils is seen in
the fact that the percentage of black women state legislators now
stands at 31.7 percent of black state representatives and 33.8 percent
of black state senators. Moreover, as Bositis observes in the document,
"Of the states with a significant number of black state lawmakers,
black women constitute the largest proportions of state representatives
in Tennessee (53.8 percent), Illinois (46.7 percent), Georgia (40.6
percent), and Florida (40 percent). Georgia (54.5 percent), Ohio
(50% percent), and Virginia (50 percent) have the largest proportions
of black women among state senators.
Finally,
it's important to take note of the expanding appetite among the
African-American political class for contesting top decision-making
statewide offices, and especially the pinnacle state office of governor.
Currently, six African-American politicians, all Democrats, have
come forth as serious gubernatorial candidates: Roland Burris, in
Illinois; Gary George, in Wisconsin; Jim Hill, in Oregon; Daryl
Jones, in Florida; H. Carl McCall, in New York; and Alma Wheeler
Smith, in Michigan.
Changing
Attributes of Black Mayoralties
The
black political class' qualitative advances in municipal politics
have paralleled their advances at the state level. When the Joint
Center launched its annual census in 1970, there were barely a dozen
black mayors holding office in cities whose population was 100,000
or more. The most important of these cities then were Cleveland
(Mayor Carl Stokes), Gary (Mayor Richard Hatcher), Newark, N.J.
(Mayor Kenneth Gibson), and New Orleans (Mayor Ernest Morial). More
than with the election of blacks to state offices or to the U.S.
Congress, the election of the first cadre of black mayors in the
late 1960s and early 1970s epitomized the post-Civil Rights Movement
electoral ethnic-bloc mobilization of black Americans. The election
of black mayors among the early cadre from 1967 through the 1970s
- which later included such mayors as Maynard Jackson and Andrew
Young in Atlanta, Coleman Young in Detroit, Wilson Goode in Philadelphia,
and Marion Barry in Washington, D.C. - produced political leaders
who became household names among millions of African-Americans in
a way statewide officials among the African-American political class
never have.
This
was so mainly because the smashing of white racist barriers to viable
black electoral participation and governance parity in American
society required fashioning at the level of urban politics a special
activist chemistry that was publicly "pro-black," on the
one hand, and sharply anti-white-supremacist, on the other. After
all, it was in American cities where a fierce alliance of several
entrenched negative forces of American political culture dominated
the urban civil life from the mid-19th century well into the mid-1960s.
That fierce and roguish political alliance involved a culture of
governmental corruption, electoral chicanery, and the Northern urban
variant of the overall American white-supremacist patterns of behavior:
It fomented, among other things, massive and violent job discrimination,
massive and violent housing market discrimination, massive discrimination
in access by blacks to public education resources, racist criminal
justice practices, and an all but official tolerance of some significant
level of anti-black (and Latino) police brutality. Keep in mind
especially that as the weak and poor white-ethnic working classes
mounted their own electoral mobilization challenge of the WASP power
class' hold over American politics in general, they started that
process in the cities and with the structures of municipal government.
From
these structures, the white-ethnic working classes and their middle-class
politicians forged a sharply politicized access to county offices,
state legislatures, governors' offices, state bureaucracies, federal
offices in Congress and the powerful federal bureaucracies, and
the presidency itself. In a very real sense, then, city-level structures
are the foundation of the American political system.And just as
white-ethnic groups learned this and conquered city-level structures
from the 
post-Civil
War era through the first half of the 20th century, so, too, the
African-American working class and its middle-class leadership had
to learn this.
Thus,
in the past 30-odd years African-Americans have fashioned - against
the grain of the white majority's anti-black bigotry - their own
special use of democratic space to achieve governance parity in
running city-level structures. Although this aspect of black Americans'
struggle for equality is still in progress, the quantitative and
qualitative status of black mayoralties today represents a veritable
sea-change from the late 1960s. For example, there are today some
forty-seven black mayors in cities of 50,000 and above. These cities
range from the large ones - Houston (1,953,631), Philadelphia (1,517,550),
Dallas (1,188,580), Detroit (951,270), San Francisco (776,733) Columbus,
Ohio (711,470), Denver (554,636), Cleveland (478,403), Minneapolis
(382,618), and Arlington, Texas (332,969); to medium- and near-medium-sized
cities - Newark (273,545), Birmingham (242,820), Rochester (219,773),
Richmond (197,790), Paterson, N.J. (149,222), Savannah (131,510),
Flint, Michigan (124,943), Portsmouth, Virginia (100,565), Trenton,
N.J. (85,403), Wilmington, Delaware (72,664), Mt. Vernon, N.Y. (68,381),
Saginaw, Michigan (61,799), and Monroe, Louisiana (53,107).
Perhaps
the most interesting new development on this front has been the
growth of Black mayors in white-voter majority cities.... These
white-voter majority black mayoralties also range across the population
spectrum of cities - from large ones: Houston (24.3 percent black),
Dallas (25.9 percent black), San Francisco (7.8 percent black),
Denver (11.1 percent black), and Minneapolis, and Minneapolis (18
percent black); to those of medium size: Jersey City (28.3 percent
black), Chesapeake, Virginia (28.5 percent black), Des Moines (8.1
percent black), and Oceanside, California (6.3 percent black); to
smaller municipalities: Carson, California (25.4 percent black),
Kalamazoo, Michigan (20.6 percent black), Evanston, Illinois (22.5
percent black), Hempstead Village, New York (25.7 percent black),
and Sarasota, Florida (16 percent black).
Changing
Attitudes Among Second Generation BEOs
Because
their electoral success was a product of the successes and lessons
of the Civil Rights Movement, the 1960s "generation" of
Black Elected Officials held and acted on broadly uniform attitudes
regarding the main public-policy issues of primary concern to African-Americans.
Between the middle 1960s and the middle 1980s, there was a broad
consensus among BEOs on issues relating to school desegregation,
criminal justice practices and police practices, abortion, affirmative
action, etc. (The same high level of consensus on key issues existed
between black elected officials and the black electorate.) During
the 1990s and the first two years of the 21st century, however,
some measure of conflict has surfaced between the 1960s generation
of the black political class and second-generation cohort of post-Civil
Rights era BEOs. A 1999 poll conducted by the Joint Center was the
first to uncover
the signs of attitudinal fissures along generational lines within
the African-American cadre of black elected officeholders; and this
poll also discovered competing perceptions about public schools'
performance between the officials and average African-American voters.
The
findings revealed that the black general public is more inclined
to rank public schools as "fair" and "poor"
than are black elected officials. Sixty-five percent of those in
the 18 to 25 age group ranked public schools as "fair"
and "poor" (33 percent rated them fair; 32 percent, poor),
compared to 51 percent of the 18 to 40 age group of elected officials
(31 percent rated the schools as fair; 20 percent, poor). The elected
officials were much stronger in ranking public schools "excellent"
and "good" in all age categories - 50 percent in the 18
to 40 age group, 61 percent in the 41 to 49 age group. But, among
the black general public, only a plurality rate the public schools
as "excellent" and "good" - 35 percent of the
18 to 25 age cohort viewed them that way, while 44 percent and 41
percent among the 26 to 35 age group and the 36-50 age group, respectively,
did so. Perusing this data, the Joint Center's David Bositis observed
that a "significant part of this difference is attributable
to school board members, who seem to hold unusually high opinions
of their local public schools, with 71 percent rating them as excellent
or good and only 6 percent rating them as poor.
In
other words, to put it in the most charitable terms, many black
school board members around the country lack an evaluative understanding
of their own policy roles. Perhaps local chapters of the NAACP and
the National Urban League can help these myopic and ideologically
self-serving black school board members and other black educational
personnel become more aware of the terrible record of performance,
generally speaking, of public schools - which 95 percent of African-American
children attend. The issue of school vouchers highlights a particularly
sharp rift in perceptions as between younger and older generation
black officeholders. In the Joint Center's 1999 poll, the attitude
of older-generation BEOs toward school vouchers contrasted sharply
with that of the black general public. Some 60 percent of the latter
favor school vouchers while, according to Bositis, "opposition
to school vouchers averages more than 70 percent" among BEOs
in the middle and older age groups, which constitute the vast majority
of the nation's black officeholders. Thus, only 27 percent of BEOs
in the 41 to 49 age group favor school vouchers and only 23 percent
in the 50-64 age group favor school vouchers. Only in the minority
sector of BEOs - in the 18 to 40 age group - can a 49-percent plurality
of support for school vouchers be found. This situation contrasts
sharply with the attitude toward school vouchers among the black
general public. Some 71 percent of its 18 to 25 age group, 76 percent
in the 26 to 35 age group, 67 percent in the 36 to 50 age group,
and a plurality of 49 percent in the 51 to 64 age group support
school vouchers.
Reflections
on Newark's 2002 Mayoral Campaign
As
African-Americans enter the second year of the 21st century, there
has so far been little serious indication of changes in black electoral
behavior stemming from the small shifts in political attitudes among
generationally-defined sectors of black officeholders, or between
BEOs and the black general public. For example, black Republican
Party candidates - and conservative candidates, black or white,
in general - have not demonstrated any significant capacity to advance
electorally among African-American voters by exploiting the evolving
attitude differences among BEOs or between BEOs and the black general
public. According to the Joint Center's 2000 data, only seven black
Republicans hold office in black-majority districts nationally -
a record which, it must be said, indicates a stunning lack of interest
by both the white and the black politicos of the GOP in sincerely
pressing their case with black voters. Despite more than two decades
of rhetoric that Republican conservatism offers African Americans
a viable avenue for inclusion, the GOP has yet to mount a substantive
real-life effort to address what poll after poll shows African-Americans
consider major core issues - such as racist practices in housing,
job markets, income/wealth patterns, educational opportunities,
health patterns, and the criminal justice system. Instead, the Republicans
have seemed content to play appointive politics with the
black electorate. The 2000 presidential campaign and its aftermath
saw the Bush Administration and its allies in the mainstream media
temporarily shelve two decades' worth of a hard-line rhetorical
advocacy of "color-blindness" in order to vigorously trumpet
its high-profile black appointments
Make
no mistake: this development is progress of some significance, and
not only in comparative terms with the paucity of black appointments
in the Reagan and Bush I administrations. In fact, these black appointments
were an historic acknowledgement from the conservative political
establishment that its heretofore sacred whites-only at the top
rule is an unacceptable way to conduct politics now even to those
it considers its core constituency. In short, the conservatives
have been forced by the power of African-American political activity
since the 1960s, the emergence of Asian-Americans and Latino-Americans
as political forces in their own right, and by white Americans'
move toward greater tolerance to realize that to be considered modern
and legitimate in American politics now, one has to have
- to use that once- verboten word - diversity at the
top of the administrative structure.
Nonetheless,
the high-level appointments cannot obscure the GOP's abysmal black-related
electoral record. In the 2000 election campaign, there were 24 blacks
running for Congress on the GOP ticket - incumbent J.C. Watts, of
Oklahoma, and 23 first-time candidates. Of the 24, only Watts won:
all the 23 others lost. As Lee A Daniels put it in the February
2001 issue of Opportunity Journal, "What does it say
about the Grand Old Party that it could capture the White House,
but not get a single new black Republican elected to Congress....
Imagine the impact if 20 of those 23 black candidates had won office.
Or if 15 had. Or 10, or even 5. We'd have been bombarded with declarations
that the GOP was "now making serious inroads into the Democratic
stranglehold on the black vote...."
Daniels'
particular point was that, the individual strengths or weaknesses
of the black GOP candidates aside, the fact that all 23 lost bespoke
a lack of commitment from the national party itself. And that lack
of commitment to include blacks among its ranks of elected officeholders
continues.
Note,
first, that the Republicans are assiduously courting Latino voters,
trying to cut into the 69-percent support the Democrats garnered
in 2000. A June 3, 2002 article in the New York Times ("Bilingual,
So to Speak, but Halting") underscored this point when it recalled
that the President last year made the first-ever radio address in
Spanish by a U.S. President. "He doesn't try very hard to get
the pronunciation the way native speakers speak," the Times
quote Otto Santa Ana, a Chicano studies professor at the University
of California as saying. "But Latinos were very encouraged
by him. Here is the president of the United States speaking Spanish,
however haltingly. He's simply legitimizing what is so obvious to
us that people cheer him. And they cheer him because he's acknowledging
them as Americans." The article declared that Bush will make
significant use of his Spanish-speaking skills in 2004, when Latinos
are likely to be as much as 10 percent of the electorate, up from
their present 7 percent in 2000. "So by necessity," said
Matthew Dowd, one of the President's pollsters, "Republicans
have to win a larger share of them. Speaking Spanish can only help
with Latinos who as a group are inclined to vote Democratic."
No
such obvious ethnically-targeted effort is being mounted to enlarge
the GOP's small slice of the black electorate, however. Recall that
all six of the African-Americans who've mounted serious challenges
for their states' gubernatorial chairs this year are Democratic.
In other words, when it comes to electoral politics, the Grand Old
Party, America's mainstream conservative party, is still the same
old party - it considers black voters invisible men and women.
However,
one important exception to the absence of a substantive conservative
attempt to corral black votes has now occurred in Newark, New Jersey,
during the bid this past spring by the incumbent four-term mayor,
Sharpe James, for a final term in office. James was challenged not
by an openly conservative black Republican candidate, but rather
by what might be called "a covert black Republican candidate"
- a conservative Black Democratic Newark city councilman, Cory Booker.
Booker, 33, had stellar "public" credentials: he was young,
good looking, highly articulate and charismatic, with degrees from
Stanford, Yale Law School, and Oxford University via a Rhodes Scholarship.
He mounted a major challenge to the 66-year-old James, who during
his 16 years in office had transformed the majority black voter
base in Newark (whose population is 53 percent black and 30 percent
Latino) into a major New Jersey statewide swing vote, as was demonstrated
in the Democratic electoral victories in 2000 of U.S. Senator Jon
Corzine and in 2001, of New Jersey Governor James McGreevey.
What
sparked the ostensibly surprising capacity of Booker, a one-term
city councilman, to mount a major challenge to a longstanding incumbent
was, first, Booker's skill at appealing to a segment of black voters
disenchanted over what they view as the poor performance record
of Newark's public schools. Booker took up the advocacy of school
vouchers as his policy response to the school-performance issue.
There's
no question that, although there's nothing genuinely "liberal-reform"
about school vouchers, the idea, as the Joint Center's data has
shown, has great appeal to many working-class black voters who've
become disenchanted with the general (and specific) poor performance
of public schools. Furthermore, during the Newark campaign Booker
was adept at fashioning a liberal-reform appeal to both black and
white middle-class voters (whites comprise some 15 percent of Newark's
population). He lambasted the longstanding role of patronage in
Newark politics and the perks available to patronage appointees
in order to paint James as the "Old Guard Black Leadership"
and himself, by contrast, as leading a "New Guard Black Leadership."
This seemingly liberal-reform appeal caught many Newark voters'
imaginations, and, as the election approached, polls showed James
leading by only 4 to 6 percentage points - which meant that the
contest was, statistically speaking, virtually dead even.
The
Newark race generated an enormous amount of coverage from the national
mainstream media - and the quality of that coverage, both in the
news stories and the opinion columns raised profound questions.
James, who once simultaneously held a state senate seat along with
the mayoralty, is widely acknowledged, as Kean University political
science professor Merle Treusch told the New York Times,
as "probably the most powerful African-American political figure
in the history of New Jersey." Yet, with few exceptions, the
mainstream media devoted little space, if any, to the significance
of that achievement, or to presenting any but the most superficial
accounts of Newark's struggles over the past three decades. Instead,
the coverage was so one-sided in Booker's favor as to be nothing
short of astonishing. There's no doubt that Booker's candidacy was
buoyed by vigorous - one might say, swooning - endorsements from
conservative, centrist and liberal columnists in Newsweek,
The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report,
and the Newark Star-Ledger, among other media outlets and
publications; and ultimately by editorial endorsements from the
Star-Ledger and the New York Times.
Booker
was also endorsed by a host of national luminaries, including former
New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, and scholar-activist Cornel West;
many of them contributed to the nearly $3-million war chest he raised
for the campaign - a figure substantially larger than what James
raised.
But
the endorsements and the outsized war chest weren't enough on election
day, May 14th, to counter James' support by the state's entire Democratic
political establishment, from McGreevey to the entire Newark city
council (excepting Booker, of course) and the Mayor's superb voter-mobilization
skills. James won with 53 percent of the vote, to Booker's 47 percent.
Despite Booker's claim that James did not represent the city's black
masses, James won all of the city's black-majority voting districts,
including the one Booker represents, while Booker won the Latino-majority
and white-majority districts.
James
had said before the election that this would be his last term in
office. Booker declared after the final results were in that he
fully intended to run for the top post the next time around.
As
I said, the Newark contest was important in several respects - but
its greatest importance is revealed by the coverage it drew. Indeed,
the quality of that coverage, especially the opinion columns, provides
a very big clue that, despite the liberal-reform aura projected
onto Booker's campaign, what-voters-saw-is-not-necessarily-what-they-would-have-gotten
from a Cory Booker mayoralty. In fact, my view is that Booker, while
nominally a Democratic councilman, is substantively "a covert
conservative Republican candidate." Why do I say this?
First,
the initial public evidence of Booker's conservative leanings was
revealed by the ultra-conservative columnist, George F. Will, in
his March 17, 2002, weekly syndicated column, when Booker had already
made clear his plans to challenge James. Will wrote that "Booker's
plans for Newark's renaissance are drawn from thinkers at... the
Manhattan Institute think tank, and from the experience of others
such as Stephen Goldsmith, former Republican mayor of Indianapolis,
a pioneer of privatization [of public institutions] and faith-based
delivery of some government services...." Will's reference
to Booker's connection to the Manhattan Institute was particularly
telling. After all, it is at the Manhattan Institute where longstanding
conservative opponents of the mainline black leadership's civil
rights agenda - in regard to housing, jobs, education, criminal
justice, and an overall pro-active federal role in ending racism's
impact in these areas through affirmative action and related policies
- hang their hats, or have significant links. That list includes
such white conservatives as Abigail Thernstrom, William Bennett,
Nathan Glazer - and such black ones as Shelby Steele, Alan Keyes,
and John McWhorter.
Will's
column also revealed another dimension of the de facto conservative
operational dimension of Booker's mayoral candidacy: Namely, that
it was a stealth affair in regard to its campaign funding. For,
although nominally a Democrat, Booker's funding came mainly fromconservative
Republican sources - whom Will euphemistically described as "reform-minded
supporters [of Booker]". Will noted that by March 2000 Booker
had "raised $1.5 million 
through
reform-minded supporters in New York financial circles." This
May, as the election drew near, the one-term councilman was reported
to have raised a total of $2.8 million for his campaign, exceeding
the $2.3 million raised by James - a four-term incumbent! Whence
Councilman Booker's resources?
That
important question was skillfully plumbed by The Black Commentator,
an online political journal co-published by Glen Ford, of nearby
Jersey City, New Jersey, and Peter Gamble, of Philadelphia. The
April 5, 2002 BlackCommentator.com article traced the strong ties
between Booker and, via conservative black Republicans, such Republican-linked
rightwing foundations as the Bradley Foundation and the Walton Foundation.
At the center of the relationship stood the Black Alliance for Educational
Options (BAEO), which declares vouchers as the answer to lack of
quality education available to many black children in public schools.
Established in the late 1990s by Dr. Howard Fuller, a conservative
black school superintendent, in Milwaukee, BAEO organized its own
activist mechanism and fashioned ties with such conservative white
organizations as the Free Congress Foundation. These latter groups
were heavily supported by the Bradley Foundation, the Walton Foundation,
and other deeply conservative foundations. In turn, as The Black
Commentator found, "BAEO has received $1.7 million from [the]
Bradley [Foundation] since June of 2001... [and the] Walton Foundation
came up with $900,000 in seed money."
Thus,
as Black Commentator declares, the BAEO has no "life independent
of Bradley [Foundation] and... the Walton Foundation.... In a December
2001 report, the liberal People for the American Way asked rhetorically
whether the BAEO was a 'Community Voice or Captive of the Right?'
Transparency in Media, which keeps track of rightwing foundations,
describes the BAEO as 'a project' of the Bradley Foundation."
The Black Commentator concludes "that Cory Booker's [Newark
mayoral campaign] organization is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bradley
and Walton [foundations]."
Considering
the publication's research and Ford's insight in the broader context
of American politics and African-American politics, the findings
offer the first systematic description of an emergent conservative
and Republican Party strategy of using black conservative activists
in "stealth" fashion to corral the votes of a segment
of the African-American electorate. The Black Commentator's words
are worth citing in full:
It
is the BAEO [on whose board Cory Booker sits] and its patrons
that have propelled a one-term [Newark] councilman into places
of honor at the tables of the rightwing rich. The Free Congress
Foundation proclaimed Booker among the nation's top four "New
Black Leaders," along with J.C. Watts, the Republican congressman
from Oklahoma; Deborah Walden-Ford, a professional Right operative
who also sits on the BAEO board; and Star Parker, a former welfare
mother turned ultra-conservative speaking circuit maven. The Free
Congress Foundation gets a fat check every year from Bradley -
$425,000 in 2002. Parker sits on the board of Black America's
Political Action Committee (BAMPAC), the political toy of... Alan
Keyes, 1996 GOP presidential candidate and MSNBC talk-show host.
White Republicans get most of BAMPAC's campaign contributions,
but Cory Booker certainly qualifies for access to some of Keyes'
more than $2 million treasury. Last year, Booker won the first
BAMPAC Leader of Tomorrow Award, bestowed on those "under
40 who promote the BAMPAC mission and are seen as rising stars
on the political landscape." Another BAMPAC board member,
Phyllis Meyers Berry, is president of the Center for New Black
Leadership, created... with $215,000 from the Olin, Scaife and
VCJ Foundations - and Bradley.... Booker's stock soared in the
circles of selfish wealth.
The
Manhattan Institute... recipient of $250,000 in Bradley money
in 2000, invited Booker to one of its power lunches [seminars],
where [in an address] he effortlessly dropped Right-speak code
words.
This
constellation of conservative forces that constituted the soul of
Councilman Cory Booker's mayoral campaign in Newark is just the
opposite - ideologically and politically - of the genuine liberal
wing of the Republican Party, the one that produced such national
black figures as Arthur Fletcher, an important Labor Department
official in the Nixon Administration, and William T. Coleman, the
former longstanding chair of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who was
Secretary of Transportation in the Ford Administration; and which
in the administration of New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean two decades
ago fostered the careers at the cabinet level of such black Republicans
as Leonard Coleman, who later became National Urban League Board
Member and President of the National Baseball League.
Conclusion:
Lessons of the Booker Campaign
The
campaign of Cory Booker for the mayor's chair in Newark thus illustrates
one new facet of 
what
I call the maturation phase of African-American politics. Namely,
that the national Republican Party - at its pinnacle through a deeply
conservative but politically savvy Republican White House under
President George W. Bush - is seeking to penetrate the fissures
in political attitudes and policy issues that, understandably, have
now emerged among the expanded segments of Black America. So, it
should be, in contemporary parlance, a wake-up call to Black America's
national civil rights leadership in the NAACP, the National Urban
League, the National Council of Negro Women, the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, and a variety of national professional associations
among African-Americans, as well as the Congressional Black Caucus
and related organizations of BEOs. They must sharpen their political
antenna for the long-haul task of detecting the next round of what
I call "Black Stealth Candidacies" for mayoral, congressional,
state legislator, and other offices around the country - that is,
black candidacies packaged ostensibly along Black liberal-reform
views, but which belie their true funding sources and ideological
objectives. Ostensibly black-run conservative machinery (the BAEO,
the BAMPAC, and the Center for New Black Leadership) fueled by conservative
funding sources linked to the Republican Party - are now equipped
to initiate more of these "black stealth candidacies"
- and they surely will.
One
ingredient black progressive forces will find useful in dealing
with this latest effort to block black political progress is to
remember one of the attributes that contributed mightily to black
political development in the century just ended: an understanding
of how to transfer leadership from one generation to the next.
One
notion continually trumpeted by the pro-Booker columnists and the
pro-Booker news stories was that the Newark campaign represented
a "generational conflict" between the "old"
(and, by implication, no longer viable) civil rights-oriented and
progressive leadership out of which James emerged, and the "new"
African-American, under-35 cohort. However, this isn't the first
time the generation-conflict gambit has been substituted for honest
analysis of black political behavior. It was trotted out in the
1980s, too, when the Reagan Administration was trying to declare
black progressive politics dead by fiat. Then, the media also anointed
a small group of black conservative ideologues, such as Shelby Steele,
and young black wannabes as the "new generation" of leaders
of Black America. While Steele and several of his fellow ideologues
are now ensconced in conservative think tanks or academia, the political
wannabes quickly faded from sight. A second revealing fact about
the "generational-conflict" notion is that it is only
applied to black politics - not to the powerful currents re-shaping
the political activity of Latino and Asian Americans, and never,
of course, to the dynamics of political activity among white Americans.
In
fact, the notions put forward in this fashion are hostile as well
as politically tendentious interpretations of the generational factor
- not conflict - in African-American politics, not liberal and black-friendly
interpretations. They are motivated by a desire to divide and
conquer.
In
fact, the maturation phase of African-American politics has shown
how skillfully the first-generation cohort of black elected politicians
have transferred leadership to a second-generation cohort, on the
one hand, and on the other hand sustained solid commitment among
the second-generation cohort to the core policy features of the
longstanding African-American leadership's civil rights agenda.
This occurred, for instance, as Carl Stokes and Louis Stokes transferred
black mayoral leadership to Michael White in Cleveland; as Maynard
Jackson and Andrew Young transferred black mayoral leadership to
Dennis Archer in Detroit; and similarly in New Orleans, Birmingham,
Richmond, Philadelphia, etc.
It
is the continuing responsibility of the older generation of black
civil leaders and politicians - now exemplified by a primary task
of Mayor Sharpe James - to transmit their leadership skills to a
succeeding, younger generation cohort who exhibit genuine commitment
to the mainline African-American leadership's civil rights agenda.
That
agenda is represented not only by the NAACP, the National Urban
League, the National Council of Negro Women, the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, and the Congressional Black Caucus, but also
by the sundry African-American professional associations, trade
unions, and voluntary organizations.
We
need look no further than the black electorate of Newark to see
the importance of that task. For when it became clear in the 2002
Newark mayoral campaign that the genuine African-American civil
rights agenda was not the political agenda of Cory Booker's candidacy,
the vast majority of Newark's African-American voters voted accordingly.
****
Martin
Kilson has taught at Harvard University since 1962 and is now Frank
G. Thomson Research Professor. He recently finished a two-volume
work, The Making of Black Intellectuals: Studies on the African-American
Intelligentsia (forthcoming).
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