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Is black politics dead in California?
The steep decline in the number of powerful black officeholders could be a sign of the community's political maturity -- or its demise.
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[06/23/99]

Lauryn Hill: Hoochie or hero?
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[06/22/99]

The peace dividend
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By Mark Boal
[06/21/99]

Ramsey Clark, the war criminal's best friend
The former U.S. attorney general has become the tool of left-wing cultists who defend Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Rwandan torturers as anti-imperialist heroes.
By Ian Williams
[06/21/99]

The rehabilitation of Latrell Sprewell
The Knicks star has gone from villain to hero -- because he challenged authority in a city sick of The Man.
By Julian Rubinstein
[06/21/99]

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In March, the coalition brought more than 100 people to march on City Hall, and then over to Brown's bay-front warehouse, which houses his "We the People" organization. They chanted "We're the people!" and attacked his early decisions. Some criticized Brown's proposal to draw 10,000 new residents to downtown Oakland, which he called his "elegant density" plan, because they fear the newcomers will be whites with money, who will flock from around the Bay Area to enjoy Oakland's better weather, lower housing costs and proximity to San Francisco. A few black leaders began to compare the liberal former California governor with New York's Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani. "I don't think he cares much about diversity," former Mayor Elihu Harris, who is black, told the San Francisco Chronicle after Brown's State of the City address in April. It looked like an outbreak of ugly racial politics was going to paralyze Brown's attempts at reform.

But two months later, the storm is over. Brown ousted the two officials -- and at least three others -- and lived to talk about it. But he doesn't want to talk about it, insisting the controversy is ancient history now. We're sitting in his small City Hall office, which is strangely anonymous five months into his tenure -- no photos or plaques or even art on the walls -- and Brown is uncharacteristically tight-lipped. "Nobody's talking about that anymore. The Chronicle's not covering it. The [Oakland] Tribune's not writing about it." Just because the media isn't covering something, I remind him, doesn't mean it's irrelevant. "OK, maybe they're talking about it in some of the black churches," he admits. "But tell me who else is talking."

When I repeat Harris' comment about "diversity," I touch a nerve, and suddenly Brown can't help himself. He's talking, all right, an angry, staccato stream-of-consciousness rant.

"Let's talk about diversity. Every city department head but one is black -- is that diversity? People can say anything they want." He points to my cup of water on his desk. "They can say there's two cups on the desk, but that's demonstrably not true. Facts are facts." I nod, and he moves on to the issue of crime, which he's made his own. "Reducing crime is saving minority lives. Let's look at the city's murder victims last year. Almost all of them were black.

"Oakland government was not working," Brown continues. "We had process paralysis. The insider group needed to be shaken up -- the friends getting jobs for friends. People voted for change, and that's what they're getting."

The irony of Brown's early battles with Oakland's black leaders is that when he ran for mayor last year, Brown became "the black candidate," despite the presence of seven real-live African-Americans in the race. Much of the city's black leadership, and a plurality of its black voters, seemed prepared to elect this white man mayor, judging that his track record on issues of concern to African-Americans, not to mention his Oakland-boosting celebrity, more than made up for his lack of melanin. Brown got 59 percent of the vote in the crowded field, and carried every Oakland precinct, including black strongholds, except for a couple in a Latino rival's City Council district. And after his June election, Brown put a city charter change initiative on the city ballot, giving the traditionally weak mayor more power. In a clear mandate for Brown, the measure won 75 percent of the vote.

Then suddenly, just a few months into his tenure, Brown seemed to be in trouble with the black community. The cause: His quest to oust both Chief Joseph Samuels, who he alleged paid insufficient attention to bringing down Oakland's declining but still high crime rate, and Superintendent Carole Quan, who he argued put school district bureaucrats before the interests of school children. Certain black leaders were also angry that Brown, backed by Oakland's take-no-prisoners city manager, Robert Bobb, was threatening the tenure of seven other department heads and another 60 middle managers who had been put on notice to improve their performance or find new jobs. "Bobb was hired to clean house and bust up the hegemony of African-Americans at City Hall," charges Leo Bazile, a former city councilman, two-time mayoral candidate and leader of the Community and Clergy Coalition. "He and Brown teamed up."

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