Everyone tasked to comment on the St. Louis mayoral election that is currently underway – and many who comment upon it for sport – have had to face up to the racial math. In a notoriously divided city with a slight plurality of black citizens, three credible black candidates have filed, but only one credible white candidate has filed. Not everyone agrees on credibility and electability – and after the electoral college victory of Donald Trump for U.S. president, no one should be too impressed with their ability to predict such things. But the EYE believes that – due to past track record, campaign cash on hand, name recognition and ability to persuade voters – Lewis Reed, Tishaura Jones and Antonio French (black candidates) and Lyda Krewson (a white candidate) should all be considered serious contenders for mayor, whereas Jeffrey Boyd, Bill Haas and Jimmie Mathews have become perennial candidates for citywide office (and, in Haas’ case, for any office) who do not warrant serious attention.
In the old St. Louis, which many have come to believe is no longer the current St. Louis, there would be no genuine contest for mayor with the current field. The vast majority of white voters would vote for the one major white candidate, while the vast majority of black voters would split their votes three ways, with Krewson winning by 10 points easy.
But this election is getting a different kind of look from observers, and not only because we all need something to say for the next three months (the primary election is March 7) other than “so-and-so wins easy.” The rainbow coalition that elected two young black protestors, Bruce Franks for state representative and Rasheen Aldridge for committeeman, over veteran black political operatives (Peggy Hubbard and Rodney Hubbard Sr.), was the latest wake-up call. Franks and Aldridge came out of both Ferguson and the Bernie Sanders movement, another force of progressive change that destabilized the old white/black political divisions that made elections easier to predict. And Forward Through Ferguson deserves credit for keeping the priorities of the Ferguson Commission at the forefront of public discourse on the current mayor’s race, where every candidate, black and white, is being asked questions about “racial equity” and giving answers that take those questions seriously. Clearly, a public demanding greater racial equity after 15 years of the same white mayor, Francis G. Slay – a mayor who came to Jesus on “racial equity” rather late in his tenure, if at all – might be expected to give the benefit of the doubt to one of the black candidates. White people might actually vote in significant numbers for a black candidate who speaks to citywide concerns.
So this predicament is forcing people in St. Louis to talk about our politics in a different way, which in itself makes for a new kind of politics. Even Bill McClellan, the cantankerous Post-Dispatch columnist (whom we’ve mocked on occasion as an “Archie Bunker Democrat”), sees that something new is happening. He wrote about the mayor’s race in a recent column that included a good look back at our racially benighted past, raising issues and memories that we are sure to see again when the campaign heats up after the holidays.
McClellan’s column starts with the premise that Tishaura Jones was the front-runner – this was McClellan’s premise, not the EYE’s – back when the white candidate field was expected to be just as divided as the black candidate field remains to date. According to the old way of thinking and doing things, McClellan reasoned, Jones’ only hope would be to entice into the race a white candidate – perhaps a white woman with a first name similar to “Lyda” and/or a last name similar to “Krewson.” But maybe, McClellan mused, times have changed.
“Perhaps St. Louis is not as racially divided as it once was. Younger people are better about race than the generations before them,” McClellan writes. Then he takes a step back into the past with Virvus Jones, the former St. Louis comptroller, Tishaura’s father, former Political EYE contributor and a member of The St. Louis American’s editorial board who went on hiatus when his daughter filed for mayor. (The newspaper’s advocacy of Jones in her previous races for state representative and city treasurer was unqualified and never in doubt, and Virvus remained on the editorial board throughout our endorsements of her in those races and her victories.)
McClellan recalled chatting with Virvus a few years back about how their kids were less imprisoned in racial differences than their generation. “He told me that Tishaura, who had gone to school in the county under the desegregation program, had a lot of white friends,” McClellan writes. “Real friends. She is comfortable around white people, he said.”
McClellan sets the context of the conversation in the old St. Louis: “He and I were chatting with middling comfort across the great divide. I think we were at some political gathering, one of those events that fostered the fiction that there was a single Democratic Party, and not two parties, separate and not quite equal, the White Democrats and the Black Democrats.” In that world, which certainly persisted up to the most recent pre-Ferguson and pre-Bernie mayoral election, White Democrats and Black Democrats fought dirty in municipal primaries like Republicans and Democrats.
“In those days, we all knew the truth,” McClellan writes. “A candidate was guaranteed to win if she or he was the single candidate of one race while the opposition was split.” This internecine warfare certainly included the tactic of recruiting fake candidates of the opponent’s race to split their vote. “We called those faux candidates ‘stalking horses,’ McClellan writes. “Any politician worthy of office tried to recruit one.”
McClellan retells war stories from across the racial divide, including the one that spoiled the party – which very much involved Virvus Jones. McClellan writes that “the rules suddenly changed” in 1993 when “the feds launched an investigation into a stalking horse candidate. Her name was Penny Alcott and she was put into a race for city comptroller to split the white vote. The feds claimed the black comptroller was behind it. That was Virvus Jones.”
McClellan continues with the perp walk: “Alcott pleaded guilty to being a stalking horse and got probation. An investment banker went to prison after being convicted of defrauding voters by conspiring to fund her campaign.” McClellan shrugged his shoulders, knowing the game too well to get upset about any one particular player, saying he was “sympathetic” to Virvus: “What had he done that so many others hadn’t done?”
Then he adds a detail that brings us right up to 2017: “Not all journalists were as understanding. The chief investigative reporter for KSDK (Channel 5) was particularly aggressive. That was Mike Owens. He is now married to Lyda Krewson.”
Owens, no longer working in broadcast journalism, would no doubt defend his work record as tough, but fair, investigating crime and malfeasance where he found it, with no racial animus or hang-ups. Many black political players who came of age in the old St. Louis and paid attention to the news would disagree, and hope that candidate Krewson’s grasp on the imperatives of “racial equity” is greater than that possessed by her husband.
Note: Mike Owens’ name is not on the March 7 ballot, and Krewson has been in public life long enough for her own record to speak for itself. However, Virvus Jones’ name is not on the ballot, either, and Tishaura Jones has been in public life long enough for her own record to speak for itself as well. Yet you can be sure that her father’s legacy – as someone who was accused of playing the stalking horse game that so many played – will come up as we get closer to game time.
Filing for the March 7 primary election closes on January 6, and the candidates who file have until January 26 to withdraw and stay off the ballot. Every conversation about this campaign is provisional until January 26. That doesn’t mean we won’t all keep talking about it.
