Blacks Increasing Political Presence in Diversifying County

Leggett has developed a smooth, consensus-building style and has emphasized issues that resonate across the county. During his time on the council, for example, he won passage of a smoking ban, and in his campaign for executive he called for slowing the pace of growth.

Ron Sims, an African American who is in his third term as county executive of Washington's King County, a predominantly white jurisdiction outside Seattle, said he is the first black elected to lead a large, majority-white suburban jurisdiction.

"Race is a factor, I know it is," Sims said. "And you overcome it with excellence so people feel confident in your abilities."

David A. Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and an expert on black voting trends, said Leggett and some other black politicians are different from an older generation of office seekers who concentrated on winning offices in jurisdictions with black majorities.

"If you are ambitious, if you want to be a senator or a governor or president, you of necessity have to appeal to a fairly significant number of white voters," Bositis said.

Walters said blacks in Montgomery have not been forced to mobilize politically as much as they have elsewhere, in part because the county has less of a troubled history of racism than do Prince George's County or the District.

"Montgomery County is an interesting place," Ervin said, "where there is a lot of affluence in the African American community and there is a lot of acceptance of African Americans in the broad social and political context."

Still, she said, the nature and outcome of Leggett's campaign for county executive "does not mean that racism is not alive and well" in Montgomery. Ervin won the nomination for the council district that includes Takoma Park and Silver Spring.

While Leggett says that race was a "non-story" in his own campaign, he also says that blacks should have aggregated their political power in the at-large council races. Four African Americans unsuccessfully sought four Democratic at-large nominations in a field of 17 candidates that included three incumbents.

Black Democrats made a "strategic error" by not putting their energy and fundraising power behind a single at-large candidate, Leggett said.

That analysis infuriates the Rev. Donell Peterman, an African American minister in Silver Spring who was appointed to a seat on the council in July 2002 on the condition that he not seek election that year. This year, he sought an at-large seat. "I thought it was insulting anytime someone said there are too many of you all," said Peterman, referring to the four African Americans seeking at-large Democratic nominations.

"We did lack black unity within our own community," he said, noting that the African American Democratic Club in the county endorsed only two of the four black at-large candidates. Ann De Lacy, the club's president, said Peterman did not complete a questionnaire that was part of the endorsement process. He placed last, with 1.7 percent of the vote.

She also disagrees with Leggett's contention that black Democrats should have backed only one at-large candidate. The club endorsed Bailey, a county workforce development manager, and education lobbyist Robert "Bo" Newsome because they both appeared to be viable candidates who would represent the interests of African Americans, she said. "The feeling was we couldn't pick one over the other," she said.

Newsome and Bailey finished sixth and seventh, respectively, among the 17 contenders for the at-large nominations.

Bailey was endorsed by a group of longtime African American leaders in the county, but in his view, the support came too late to make much of a difference. He also said that a likely victory by Ervin took some pressure off endorsing organizations to consider diversity in making their selections in other council races. The attitude Bailey detected was that "we're gonna get one" in Ervin so was there was less need to endorse another black candidate.

"We have to aggressively move past the idea that when you have more than one African American or more than one of any ethnic group, it's a negative," Bailey said.