Dorchester dilemma

Who should replace Charlotte Golar Richie?

by Ben Geman

Laura Younger has pushed the "max A/C" button in her white Ford Tempo, but it's no good -- the air conditioner doesn't have the muscle, so she rolls down the windows and pushes on through Dorchester.

You couldn't blame Younger, a Roxbury community leader, if she wilted in last Sunday's heat. She's spent hours campaigning with state-representative candidate Marie St. Fleur in the former assistant attorney general's bid to replace Charlotte Golar Richie, who earlier this year left office to become Mayor Tom Menino's housing secretary.

But she knows time is getting short: the primary for the Roxbury and Dorchester seat, which all but decides the winner in the heavily Democratic Fifth Suffolk District, is coming up on June 8. And whoever wins will not be replacing some anonymous hack, but inheriting the seat of a woman credited with raising the district's profile and turning the attention of the local political establishment to its needs.

"We have worked very hard to see that people who have lived here through thick and thin can benefit," she says en route to meet the candidate for a few more hours of door-knocking after morning visits to several churches. "Charlotte Golar Richie helped bring credibility back to this district, and we think Marie is the one to carry things further."

But inside the district -- home to a kaleidoscopic mix of African-Americans, Haitians, Vietnamese, Latinos, whites, and more -- that view is not unanimous. Barry Lawton, a long-time community activist and a history teacher at the Jeremiah Burke High School, is giving St. Fleur a stiff challenge, positioning himself as the alternative to the woman he says the district's political power structure is trying to "anoint."

A third force in the primary is quirky perennial candidate Althea Garrison. For more than a decade, she's been on the ballot for something, be it the House, the Senate, or the city council. She even held the Fifth Suffolk seat for one term after she successfully challenged the validity of incumbent Nelson Merced's nomination papers in 1992.

Menino, who supports St. Fleur, is throwing his weight around in this race. So are other prominent city and state pols. Richie has remained technically neutral, but she's apparently backing St. Fleur. Golar Richie's "advisory board," a coalition of activists who served as her de facto board of directors when she held the seat, is behind her as well. And so is her former boss, Scott Harshbarger, whom St. Fleur served as an assistant attorney general for seven years.

The Bay State Banner recently endorsed St. Fleur, too, and State Senator Dianne Wilkerson has also come out for the 37-year-old Haitian immigrant, whose father fled the brutal regime of "Papa Doc" Duvalier for Boston when she was a young child.

But Lawton has powerful supporters as well. City Councilor Gareth Saunders is in his camp. Herald columnist Wayne Woodlief called him the best man for the job in a recent op-ed piece. Organized labor, including the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, has come through with several endorsements, which probably means bodies on the street come Election Day. In a district where turnout is historically lousy, this kind of help -- taking voters to the polls, placing sign-holders, making last-minute phone calls -- is crucial.

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Sunday afternoon, a group of Lawton strategists are huddled in the 42-year-old's cramped Blue Hill Avenue campaign office, plotting out the nuts and bolts of the race's last days.

At times it's hard to tell whether Lawton -- tall, thin, affable, and soft-spoken -- is the candidate or a volunteer himself. At one point, he gets up to bring in some milk crates that serve as tables for volunteers folding literature in the office's tiny back room. Then he pulls a granola bar from the office's canteen and holds it aloft. "Anyone?" he inquires before unwrapping and eating it.

That kind of hands-on, we're-all-in-this-together spirit is typical of Lawton, his supporters say. "Barry's just been there," says Lawton strategist Kevin Peterson. "He has experience, he's been a community leader, he's filed legislation on their behalf, he's registered voters."

On the way to Franklin Park to woo Roxbury voters, Lawton says his years as a high-school teacher have molded his thinking. "We have thousands of young people locked up in prison who come out with fewer options than they had going in," he says. To reverse the trend, he says he'd work to ensure that local construction projects provide jobs for community residents. And he vows to ensure that residents have access to work and education that puts them on career tracks with opportunity for advancement.

St. Fleur's vision isn't notably different. Both candidates have a history of work with nonprofit and community groups in the Dorchester and Roxbury area, and they've identified many of the same issues -- not just jobs, but affordable housing and education -- as priorities for the district. St. Fleur would allow job training and education to count toward the work requirement for welfare recipients, and Lawton supports increasing the earned-income tax credit.

It's not ideological differences but St. Fleur's former day job -- and her ties to Menino and Harshbarger -- that put the juice into this race. Lawton has branded St. Fleur the "establishment" candidate. "She chooses to prosecute people from the community, while I choose to defend them," he says. "There's a distinction there. I choose to serve the community from the community."

But St. Fleur and supporters call accusations that she's the "downtown candidate" simply ridiculous. "I take offense to that," she said testily during a debate on Boston Neighborhood Network television last Friday. "A kid makes it out of the neighborhood and now she is the establishment candidate?"

"She was raised in the community and has significant grass-roots support," adds consultant Joyce Ferriabough. "She is a success story out of Dorchester."

St. Fleur and backers point out her ties to area organizations like Project HOPE and the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative. And the candidate hopes to use her familiarity with such organizations to help them work better together. "You have to be able to work with all the groups in the district and have a basic respect for them, to look at what their positions are and be a facilitator," says St. Fleur, who speaks both Spanish and Haitian Creole -- surely a plus in this diverse neighborhood.

Walking down Fowler Street in Dorchester, St. Fleur doesn't seem daunted by the long day or the heat. She chugs up porch steps and drops in on backyard barbecues, even hand-writing messages on literature when residents aren't home. "I truly love what I'm doing," she says. "I love the people of this district."