He could be enjoying a luxurious life in the Washington suburbs, but instead he's bent on running a country where two of the three previous leaders were executed, and the third was indicted for crimes against humanity
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The scene in the hotel ballroom was almost familiar.
The FOBs waited for their candidate, whose photograph taken at the Democratic National Convention was affixed to the lectern. Men greeted one another with macho-intimate half-chest-bump half-hugs and talked in small groups about the most important election of their lives, stars-and-stripes flag pins on their lapels.
On that Sunday afternoon late last summer in Beltsville, a campaign manager gave the usual remarks about his man's record of sacrifice and about shifting the campaign to its next phase. With the slow jams of a band at another reception oozing through the wall, the candidate himself finally took the stage and, between fits of applause, wooed voters and touted his record as a legislator independent of a too-powerful executive branch. Over and over again, he told his supporters that, God willing, he would be their next president.
But the event's familiarity went only so far. The chest-bump greetings were followed by a strange finger-snapping handshake. The lapel pin flags had just one star, and 11 stripes. There was an accent on the candidate's fine English. The FOBs were "Friends of Brumskine," Charles Walker Brumskine, and he was rallying the good people of suburban Maryland to make him the next president of war-weary Liberia.
"This is not about a job. This is not about money. This is about the remaking of our country," Brumskine said, trying to get comfortable at the lectern. "Your parents left us a place to call home, but my generation destroyed what our parents left. It is our responsibility to rebuild it."
This is the nature of today's Liberia. Started as a colony for free blacks from the United States in the early 1800s, the small country on the west coast of Africa is unique in its mix of descendants of American pioneers and African tribesmen. But after 200 years and a long civil war, the black Promised Land has turned black cloud. Today, the voters are in bombed-out Monrovia, Gbarnga and Ganta, but much of the country's money and influence has found asylum in places such as Minneapolis, Providence and Ellicott City.
Brumskine, 54, knew the people gathered in Beltsville and their concerns. His own family has lived in Northern Virginia for years; he did, too, after fleeing Liberia and its notoriously violent president at the time, Charles Ghankay Taylor, in 1999. Brumskine returned to Africa in 2003 to challenge Taylor for the presidency.
Friends tried to talk him out of it. A family prayer meeting was called. Some questioned how far off the plane he'd get before Taylor gunned him down.
This is just crazy, some said. Of the last three men elected to the job Brumskine was hoping to win, two were brutally executed and the third -- Taylor -- is under indictment for crimes against humanity. Virginia was sanity and solid ground. Brumskine had a growing law practice in Washington, a nice suburban home, a wife with a good job and a kid at Harvard. Liberia was a bloody riddle on a rocky shore.
The Beltsville stop marked the end of a fundraising tour that had taken Brumskine from Staten Island to Sacramento and from Pittsburgh to Tulsa, 12 cities in all. From this point forward, he would be in Liberia to concentrate on the election, which is scheduled for October 11, 2005. In a huge field of candidates, he is one of a handful regularly mentioned as real contenders.
The Man Who Would Be President