Word: mfume
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...Barack Obama is now very likely to remain the Senate's only black member. Kwesi Mfume, the former head of the NAACP, lost a primary against House Democrat Ben Cardin for the Senate seat in Maryland. Cardin will now face Michael Steele, the African-American Republican who is the state's lieutenant governor. Polls showed that Steele had some chance of winning against Mfume, whose support was small outside of his base of black Democrats. But that limited base cost him against Cardin, and the veteran congressman is a heavy favorite in a Democratic state like Maryland. The other African...
...School grad, Deval Patrick, who is running for Governor of Massachusetts, has played up his background as a corporate executive at Texaco and Coca-Cola. "A guy came up to me after a speech and said, 'I expected Jesse Jackson, and I got Colin Powell,'" Patrick said. Kweisi Mfume, who hopes to enter the Senate from Maryland but faces a tough primary opponent, is the exception to those men, touting his civil rights background as the former head of the NAACP...
...None of these candidates is a sure bet to win. Ford, a Democrat, is running in a conservative state, while Republicans Steele and Swann are contesting in places that traditionally elect Democrats. Mfume and Blackwell have better-funded opponents. Patrick in Massachusetts may have the best shot, as he is leading in the polls, but to win he has to get past two strong opponents in a Democratic primary and then a moderate Republican in the general election. But if a few of them win, it would make 2006 a watershed year for blacks in politics. There have been only...
...someone who can both address the divergent concerns of the nation's 36 million African Americans and navigate an increasingly hostile political climate. After declining to speak at the group's annual meeting last July, President Bush called his relationship with the N.A.A.C.P. "basically nonexistent." (Bush met privately with Mfume in late December.) Then the President named Gerald Reynolds, a conservative black Republican with a record of opposing civil rights protections, to head the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. "Racism is not a deal killer like it was in the '60s," Reynolds told TIME. "You can work around...
...time to do a lot of negotiating." That means reaching beyond liberals who have supported the civil rights agenda. Even within the black community--and the N.A.A.C.P.--there is a growing conservative voice. Some 11% of blacks voted for Bush in 2004, up from 8% in 2000. Mfume notes that the N.A.A.C.P.'s 64-member board of directors has more than a dozen Republicans. And the nine-member executive search committee charged with finding Mfume's successor includes in its ranks a prominent white Republican, Jack Kemp, who was Housing Secretary under President George H. W. Bush...