Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 5, 1991 TAG: 9104050389
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"Right now we don't have but one party," Tucker said. "Some call themselves Democrats. Some call themselves Republicans."
During a speech-making visit to Blacksburg this week, the Halifax County resident said it was the conservatism of Virginia's Democrats and Republicans that prompted her to run for governor as an independent protest candidate in 1981.
In fact, she said, she decided to run only after the Richmond Times-Dispatch ran side-by-side profiles of the two white male candidates, Democrat Charles Robb and Republican Marshall Coleman.
The two were so alike, she said, that nobody seemed to notice that the newspaper had inadvertently flip-flopped paragraphs - mixing up the end of the story about Robb with the end of the one about Coleman.
She won few votes, but the campaign gave her a forum for her populist views. "I knew I wasn't gonna win - so I could say anything I wanted to."
Tucker was keynote speaker Wednesday for the Women's Week program at Virginia Tech. She spoke Thursday at a benefit for the Concerned Citizens for the Preservation of Nellies Cave Community.
Tucker, 60, a black woman raised in a sharecropping family, has been a political force in Halifax since the 1970s when she formed a local grass-roots organization, Citizens for a Better America.
She has fought against voting and hiring discrimination, uranium mining and toxic-waste dumping in Southside Virginia. She is an honorary member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Tucker says it is time for minorities and women to fight to get more of their own elected to office.
A third party could start small, she said, first winning local elections. "It would scare the Democrats back into being Democrats."
In Halifax County, she said, there is one black and one woman on the Board of Supervisors. "They good as tell you: `This is all you're gonna get.' "
But, she added, "I am so proud of women who have stood up and been counted. If we had more women in Congress, we wouldn't have had a war. It's hard for a woman to send her son over to kill somebody."
Tucker, who worked for the election of Gov. Douglas Wilder in 1989, said she is "kind of disappointed in him, because I expected more from him."
She said she was upset that Wilder saved a white man, Joseph Giarratano, from the death penalty, but failed to do the same for a black man, Wilbert Lee Evans - who had been credited with saving prison guards' and nurses' lives during a breakout by other death-row inmates.
But Tucker, laughing, wouldn't go into more detail about her disagreements with Wilder. "Doug is my friend."
Tucker, who is working on her autobiography, said she might run for governor again. After the book comes out, she said with another laugh, "I might be famous."
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB