E-Mail This Article to a Friend Getting out the candidates (continued)

THEY MIGHT want to look to the Latino community for inspiration. Compared to African-Americans, Greater Boston’s Latinos are politically inexperienced; blacks have been representing Boston on Beacon Hill since Charles Lewis Mitchell’s election in 1866. (Edward Garrison Walker, who was also black, was elected to represent Charlestown, then a separate community, in the same year.) More than 100 years would pass before the state’s first Latino legislator, Nelson Merced, took office in 1989. Among Boston’s 22-member state legislative delegation, meanwhile, blacks outnumber Latinos five to two, with Wilkerson and State Representatives Rushing, Fox, St. Fleur, and Shirley Owens-Hicks in the former category, and State Senator Jarrett Barrios and State Representative Jeffrey Sanchez in the latter.

But when it comes to candidate development, the Latino community possesses a model that African-Americans would do well to emulate. Aspiring Latino candidates can turn to ¿Oíste?, the statewide political organization that counts Barrios among its founders. In addition to offering urban-voter-education services like those provided by Boston VOTE and Dunk the Vote, ¿Oíste? functions as a clearing-house where politically ambitious Latinos can get the information and resources necessary to run. "We cultivate them by making sure that they know they have a campaign plan — that they know how to run for office, they know how to fundraise, they know how to do get-out-the-vote," says ¿Oíste? executive director Giovanna Negretti.

Since ¿Oíste?’s founding three and a half years ago, Negretti estimates, the group has trained approximately 30 would-be candidates. Most of their victories have come in cities like Salem, Lynn, and Chelsea — which have dense Latino populations — rather than in the Boston area. Indeed, only about five of the group’s 30 trainees have come from Boston proper. Still, several of ¿Oíste?’s attributes — aggressiveness (¿Oíste? taps individuals to run for office), practicality (the group plans to establish a PAC for Latino candidates), and ambition (in statewide meetings, ¿Oíste? sells itself as the organization up-and-coming Latino pols must get to know) — would well serve a comparable organization in Boston’s African-American community. There’s a bit of irony in this: both Barrios and Negretti cut their teeth working for Wilkerson, who is African-American and has developed a reputation for mentoring promising young leaders of color. (Wilkerson did not respond to a request for an interview.)

Cofield suggests that the group’s cohesion may be an outgrowth of the Latino community’s political inexperience. "The African-American community — I’m not saying this disparagingly — is much further along in the political process, so in some of the things that they’re training people on we’re further along," Cofield says. But, he adds, "Having said that, I think they’re doing an outstanding job. There’s no question that there are some elements of their overall program that we African-Americans need to focus in on and do also." Rushing’s praise is even more effusive. "The most organized group of people, who’ll take advantage of [redistricting], are going to be the Hispanics, as long as the Hispanics take advantage of this and stay organized and keep their political organization growing," he predicts. "They have certainly organized themselves that way. They’ve trained people to do workshops. They’re very oriented to ‘We have to build the ability and the infrastructure to do this; we have to have people who’ll know how to [run for office], and we have to have a larger group that knows how the system works.’ I’m not sure if the black community is going to change the way they’ve been doing this."

MAYBE NOT. But some are already working toward just that goal. Political strategist Joyce Ferriabough, who is African-American, says she and Mukiya Baker Gomez (a veteran African-American political operative who managed Charles Yancey’s 2002 city-council campaign) are mulling some type of new infrastructure to cultivate candidates. "[We need to] have seminars and workshops advising people what happens in a campaign, what you need to do in a campaign, fundraising, and all that stuff," Ferriabough says. "People need to know the resources are out here for them to get up to speed." And Boston’s Urban Progressives, a relatively young group that began as a networking organization and shifted into politics during the city-council race between incumbent Chuck Yancey and newcomer Ego Ezedi, is tightening its focus on grooming young leaders of color. The group plans to sponsor a panel on candidate development at 21st Century Black Massachusetts, an April conference convened by Wilkerson.

If these groups — or any others — can fill the void, Boston’s black community might expand its representation on the city and state level and avoid bruising internecine battles like last year’s Yancey-Ezedi contest, in which Ezedi was dogged by allegations that he was the white man’s candidate. "I don’t think we should have had a race like that," says Rushing. (Ezedi declined to be interviewed for this article.) Ten years from now, though, political observers may actually look back on the Yancey-Ezedi race as a positive watershed. "I think it was an overall good experience, Ego running," says Sean Daughtry, a 32-year-old research chemist who backed Ezedi in 2002 and is vice-chair of Boston’s Urban Progressives. "We’re hoping in the future there will be more challengers, and not just for those seats traditionally held by people of color. Overall, Massachusetts has a problem with incumbency and nobody challenging."

There’s clearly a pool of prospective African-American candidates who could reap the benefits of a return to candidate development. Mel King cites community activists like Dunk the Vote’s Ron Bell and the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative’s John Barros, as well as Ezedi and Baker Gomez, as potential candidates. Ferriabough mentions Ezedi and Kerby Roberson, a Haitian-American who ran for Governor’s Council in 2002. (Roberson says he plans to run again, but also criticizes the Massachusetts Democratic establishment for not encouraging more candidates of color.) "I don’t want people to say, ‘Oh, there aren’t any,’" Ferriabough says. "That’s a bunch of crap. There are some very dynamic men and women at all different levels in every neighborhood who are doing some extraordinary work. They’re not out front, but they’re picking up the slack in the community." Now, it seems, all they need is a framework that can help them succeed.

Adam Reilly can be reached at areilly[a]phx.com