NYT: City Council Races Offer Change in Ferguson After Months of Upheaval
[font size="1" face="Times New Roman"]]By JACK HEALY and JOHN ELIGONMARCH 14, 2015[/font]
[font size = "2" face="Times New Roman"]FERGUSON, Mo. — They gathered under the fluorescent lights of the First Baptist Church here one night last week to lay out visions for their battered town, four aspiring politicians, two white and two black, debating the daunting challenges of rebuilding Ferguson.
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On April 7, Ferguson will cast its first votes for local leaders since Mr. Brown’s death in August, testing whether the anger and calls for reform rising from Ferguson’s streets will translate into higher voter turnout and a new direction at the ballot box. For years, local leaders in Ferguson ran unopposed in elections that drew 12 percent of registered voters, only single-digit percentages of black residents and almost exclusively white candidates.
Now, eight candidates, many first-time political hopefuls, are trying to fill three of the seven Council seats; all three are being vacated by members who decided not to run again. City officials said the candidacies were unprecedented: Four African-Americans are running this year, compared with a total of three in Ferguson’s previous 120 years.
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Patricia Bynes, the Democratic Party committeewoman for the area that includes Ferguson, said getting people out to vote was as important as registering them. When she went door to door with volunteers, she said, she found that many people were registered to vote but that they did not know when to cast their ballots or who was running.[/font]
[font size="2" color="red" face="Times New Roman"]“The hurdle in the past has not been voter registration,” she said. “It’s been voter education in making sure they know there is an election.”[/font]
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/us/politics/city-council-races-offer-change-in-ferguson-after-months-of-upheaval.html
I have relatives in suburban Philly who live in "townships" (an affiliated set of towns that operate under a single jurisdiction and share government services like police and the volunteer fire department) that are the same size as Ferguson. How do these townships communicate to residents? Outside of regular snail mail, they also use robocalls and/or "email blasts" that residents can sign up for where they can find out if there is a snow emergency, when board meetings are scheduled, when the library is closed, if trash collection schedules are being modified, or if the schools or "X" town is is having an event like a parade or a carnival, etc.
The Democratic Party in MO needs to take a look at this. Being in a big city (Philly), I get bombarded every year by the party machinery about the primaries and general elections... And they try to have special elections coincide with the next scheduled election day. This lack of communications thing in Ferguson however, is a problem that seems easy to fix if they would care to do so...
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after he was murdered. She said, "Do you know how hard it was for me to get him to graduate?
I am white but I have a nephew my oldest sister's son, living in Texas who, though not "technically" black, is black as far as any racist cop is concerned. His biological parents were from India, but very dark-skinned, and since his teen years he has always dressed and presented as a young black man, and many of his close friends are black. In other words, he is, as far as most people can tell, black. (Ironically, his sister's biological father was black, but she looks to most people to be "less black" than her brother.)
My nephew graduated from high school and went for vocational training. At age 35, he has a steady job and two lovely children. Though divorced, he also has been in a long term relationship with a nice woman whom he intends to marry, and she acts as a loving stepmother to his kids, whom he has sole custody of.
IOW, he has done everything right. My sister, a nurse and an Army vet, has raised him with middle class American values, just as most black parents raise their kids, and though many of his close friends are black, he also has many who are white and Hispanic. He is the embodiment of the so-called "American Dream."
But like Obama, who is himself as much white as he is black, and who was raised by white grandparents after his mother's death, my nephew is and always will be nothing but a scary, despised "other" to racists, and since he lives in Texas, I am always afraid of what might happen to him if some racist bully with a badge decides some day to mess with him.