Cover Story: Black enough?Atlanta's black elected officials often have a dual duty ' to the positions they hold and to the communities that got them where they are.BY K. MATTHEW DAMES

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My father's words were still with me: "hell to pay." I might be hated and vilified in the black community if I got into that mess. Only a fool would get involved. Maybe I should say no. But why? Because I was black? - In Contempt, Christopher Darden.

Lewis Slaton never had to deal with this. The hell begins early, with whispers about ability and place, vague concerns about fitting in. Achievement usually quiets the dull roar of doubt. But when the profession is politics, and the politician is black, another type of "hell" comes into play. Then, all the awards, all the nights spent studying until 3 a.m., all the accommodations cease to matter because then the question - from your own folks - becomes "Are you black enough?"

It is the dual burden of the black elected official: duty not only to office, but also to race. Christopher Darden devoted a considerable portion of In Contempt to it. State Attorney General Thurbert Baker has been criticized in the name of it. And should Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard Jr. win re-election in November, he will confront the phenomenon in ways he can only begin to imagine when he prosecutes black activist Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin for murder.

Howard, who became Fulton County's first African-American district attorney when he succeeded Slaton in 1997, acknowledges the dual duty and embraces it. "In a way, it is a privilege; it's almost as if you're not simply an elected official handling the responsibility of your job, but you take upon a greater mantle of responsibility," he said last week, a day before he rested his case in the Buckhead murders trial. "It becomes quite significant, because it enlarges your influence over a certain area of the community."

But the competing responsibilities can quickly become burdensome when they careen into each other, a situation Howard faces daily as the person responsible for prosecuting a great number of people who look like him. "When you're the prosecutor, you're responsible for incarcerating a lot of African-American men," he says, "and you are faced with this dilemma: how do you satisfy both ends, and how do you do those fairly?"

Like Howard, Michael Bond considers the dual burden to be the price of being black and elected, and he would prefer it be no other way. "I know my father and his colleagues felt a dual responsibility, not only to be effective legislators, but to be effective African-American males to the community at large," says the second-term Atlanta City Council member and son of NAACP chairman Julian Bond. "And if it doesn't exist today in the mind in all African-American elected officials, it should."

Bond adds his white colleagues cannot possibly recognize the burden because of the many advantages they long have enjoyed. "I don't think they feel pressure to deliver to the same degree like I feel I have to deliver. And when you look at the north side of [Atlanta] as opposed to the west end of town, there's simply more to be done on the west side of town. The job is just different."

The paradox of the dual duty is a legacy of a now-mature civil rights movement, according to Charles E. Jones, chairman of Georgia State University's African-American Studies department. "When black people fought to put black people in office [in the '50s and '60s], there was an implicit understanding that black elected officials would be more sensitive and responsive to the black community," Dr. Jones says, explaining that people from other historically underrepresented communities, including women and gays, often have had similar expectations of their elected officials.

In this regard, Fulton County Sheriff Jackie Barrett claims a duty to yet another constituency: women. Elected in 1992 to be the nation's first African-American female sheriff, Barrett feels she won the position on the strength of her popularity with women, and has been able to hold the position since then due to consistently strong support from the same community.

Barrett concedes her recognition and acceptance of multiple duties can be a difficult balancing act. "It does not mean that any members of my constituency or any of my employees are given any less than any others are. But I think it's something that you keep in the back of your head, and it perhaps makes me more accessible as an elected official. Those who did so much to get me here and the sacrifices that were made, I think I owe. I don't have the luxury of getting tired."

And Barrett is particularly sensitive to striking a balance between acknowledging the burden - yet keeping its recognition from seeming like favoritism - since she and her agency have lost a reverse discrimination lawsuit lodged by 16 white former and current Fulton sheriff's deputies. The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the June 1996 verdict in March, and she says the accusation that she is racist hurts her deeply. "To my dying day, I will say the allegations are not true. As a member of the criminal justice community I have to respect the judicial process, but I am not going to allow that to define me. The verdict is what it is. I can say 'Gee the court says I'm a racist, I must be a racist,' but I know better," she explains. "There may be a sense in the community that that's what we [black elected officials] do in a place like Fulton County, because it is majority black, but that's so wrong."

Forty years after the civil rights movement bore its first politicians of color, social and political conditions may have evolved to where the phenomenon and its public recognition could be the exception rather than the rule. There are a number of factors that may hamper a black elected official's ability to be as responsive toward the black community as its constituents feel he should be, Georgia State's Jones says, not the least of which is the urge to remain in office or advance a post-office career.

Further, the expectation may be outdated, according to Robert Brown, an assistant professor at Emory University who holds a dual appointment in the school's African-American studies and political science departments. With many African Americans having more prominent involvement in mainstream corporate, educational and political positions - the most vivid local example being LaFace Records founder Antonio Reid's ascendance to head Arista Records, where he not only will guide the careers of African-American artists such as Whitney Houston and Outkast, but white artists like Sarah McLachlan, the Eurythmics and Ace of Base - there is an increased need to think and act in ways that reflect more diverse constituencies. For example, the number of black elected officials soared from barely 100 to 10,000 after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and the number of African Americans in Congress has increased eightfold.

As a result, Brown says, "I think it varies now, whether they feel the need to respond to it. With this later generation of blacks in these positions, I don't think they feel as beholden to the expectations as the leaders did a generation ago."

Yet strong expectations continue to resonate with some citizens. "I wouldn't say that the responsibility of a black elected official is a dual duty. I think that doing one's job and doing a service on behalf of the black community should be synonymous," says Lukata Mjumbe, an Atlanta community activist. "Certainly, black elected officials, more than many other people, experience and struggle with what Dr. W.E.B. DuBois described as a double consciousness - where they constantly have to wrestle with a dilemma of whether they will commit to their African-ness or their American-ness. But I don't think it should be a dilemma. If they look at their position as they are responsible to those who elected them into office, then their commitment should be to the black community."

And besides, Mjumbe continues, they owe. "Black elected officials always have to make certain that they don't buy into the game and think they are the same as white elected officials. They [black elected officials] have a different history, and they also have a duty to history. There is a legacy of struggle connected to why they even have the opportunity to sit where they sit, and therefore they have a responsibility to the history of struggle. Tragically, they too often accept the rules of the game and see themselves simply as players."

Opinions like Mjumbe's echoed loudly and publicly enough last year to place the state's first African-American attorney general at the center of this controversy. Thurbert Baker was called to task by a bevy of area black leaders after he chose to re-prosecute former state Sen. Ralph David Abernathy III on theft, forgery and witness tampering charges last year. A deadlocked Fulton County jury had forced a mistrial in September 1999 when they could not determine whether Abernathy was guilty of misappropriating approximately $13,000 in state expense account funds.

Baker prosecuted the son of the legendary civil rights leader again in December, and a jury found Abernathy guilty of 18 criminal counts of a revised 28-count indictment. Abernathy has been sentenced to a prison term of four years.

"That may have been a part of his strategy, to say to the public I will prosecute a well-known African-American.' But I'm waiting for him to say to the public 'I will prosecute a well-known white elected official. We haven't seen that," says state Rep. Tyrone Brooks, one of Baker's strongest critics in the Abernathy matter. Brooks and others accused Baker of selective prosecution. "He knows he has turned his eyes and ears away from many violations of the law because they involve well-known white public officials at the state level, and probably some at the county and municipal level."

Baker denies he acted upon any motivation other than to prosecute a violation of the law. "We don't have a dual duty in the office of the attorney general; I certainly don't have a dual duty as the attorney general of this state," Baker said. "I've got a singular responsibility to uphold and apply the laws of this state equally among everybody within the confines of Georgia. If we ever get to a point where we're having to pick and choose how we prosecute cases based on factors other than the evidence before us, then we're on a slippery road that I'm afraid we would never recover from."

Baker adds he sleeps well at night following this code. "The only regret I ever have is not based on race or status, but when I see elected officials who violate the law. We're the ones sworn to uphold the laws; we're the lawmakers in a lot of instances. But other than that, it's not my responsibility or place to get into the other factors. I think that clouds your ability to analyze cases and to make the best decisions about them."

Georgia State's Jones observes that while Baker's color-blind stance may resonate in some quarters, it makes him an easy target for criticism from some blacks. "If you take away Baker's color and just listen to his rhetoric, he sounds like any other attorney general. And I think that's what people have some trouble with: the sort of policy he adheres to without pointing to the problematic nature of the criminal justice system, which incarcerates a disproportionate amount of African-Americans." And while all indications are that Baker's stance is genuine, cold, hard political reality - Baker's position is a statewide office, while Howard, Bond, Barrett and Brooks represent considerably smaller districts whose respective constituencies contain a significant proportion of African-American voters - may contribute to his adoption of it.

Should Howard and Fulton County Sheriff Jackie Barrett survive elections this year, they will be involved in an event that should bring this conflict forth with thunderous reverberations: the capital murder trial of Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. A Fulton County grand jury indicted Al-Amin on March 28, charging him with being the shooter that killed sheriff's deputy Richard Kinchen and seriously injured another sheriff's deputy, Aldranon English. Howard notified Al-Amin and his attorneys last month that he intends to seek to execute Al-Amin if a jury finds him guilty.

This is the paradox: an African-American prosecutor is seeking the execution of an African-American male with a history of pro-black advocacy, doing so at a time when the criminal justice system both Howard and Barrett represent not only is seeking answers to why African-Americans are disproportionately held by the system, but also has begun questioning the wisdom of capital punishment, since there is strong evidence that many criminal defendants - again, disproportionately African-American - do not have access to adequate legal representation. And all this in a state that will soon suffer a potentially virulent debate over the Confederate battle symbol on its flag.

Atlanta's black activist community already has rung the bell of duty, partly by questioning both Howard's and Barrett's commitment to a fair criminal process because of the respective governmental positions they hold.

Howard calls this thinking irrational, noting that he is following the same course in the Al-Amin case that he followed in his office's prosecution of Gregory P. Lawler, who was convicted and sentenced to death in March for killing Atlanta police officer John Richard Sowa. Lawler is, and Sowa was, white.

"I think that as a black prosecutor, I have a distinct advantage in handling this case," Howard says of his role in prosecuting Al-Amin, noting that a lot of the controversy over capital punishment stems from evidence that shows black criminal defendants are executed at a much higher rate than white criminal defendants. "I would agree that much of the selection has been done in an unfair racial manner. In this case, my being prosecutor allows our community to not focus on the decision [to execute] but to look past that and look at the evidence."

Not that the decision makes him happy, and this is the other side of the responsibility. "When I walk into a courtroom and I see the vast numbers of African-American men, I am hurt, disappointed and angry," Howard adds. "What it says to me is, I've got to find a way to make this not happen."
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