Kilgore's Record May Polarize Voters in Va.

Although McClenney supports the death penalty, he said Kilgore's emphasis on that issue and his advocacy of its expansion divert attention from more significant public goals.

McClenney attended a segregated high school in Lawrenceville, Va., southwest of Richmond, where lab equipment went to the white schools and his classmates received hand-me-down band instruments, such as his dented silver clarinet, "after the white kids had banged them up."

He is 64 now and has seen decades of progress -- "I'd rather live here than anywhere else. We've come through our changes," he says -- but he is discouraged by Kilgore's record.

He met Kilgore once in his office to discuss education.

"I cannot read a man's heart. I can only go by what he says," McClenney said. "When you sit down with Jerry, he's a calm kind of guy. I don't understand it. I don't know what to think. But I'm concerned about my daughter and children and grandchildren and the students I teach."

Emphasizing the death penalty is a disturbing diversion from improving schools, roads and mental health services, McClenney said. Moreover, a disproportionate number of those executed in Virginia are black.

From 1977 to 2001, 83 people were executed in Virginia, according to a state report. A little more than 50 percent of them were black. Blacks make up 20 percent of Virginia's population.

"You have to filter it through my filter, of the brutality to black men" in the state's past, McClenney said.

A substantial majority of Virginians strongly support the death penalty, according to polls.

"The fact that Jerry Kilgore has spent his life trying to keep law-abiding citizens safe from violent criminals should appeal to anyone, no matter who they are," Kilgore spokesman Tim Murtaugh said. "African American parents want their children to go to gang-free schools just like anyone else does."

Murtaugh called it "common sense" for Kilgore to support legislation that would have made it a capital crime when a member of a street gang orders a killing. The measure stalled in the Senate.

Kilgore said his goal with his public policy proposals has been to protect Virginians.