
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 17, 1994                   TAG: 9409290008
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

RACE AND WARDS IN ROANOKE

AN AT-LARGE system for choosing local governing bodies can act as an incentive for elected leaders to think of the good of the community as a whole, rather than simply one section of the city. It can encourage all members of a city council to keep in touch with each of the various sections of a community, thus helping avert the kind of political isolation of a minority and its representative(s) that can arise under a ward system.

And at-large systems can promote racial equity in the allocation of political influence.

Not that they often do. As Thomas R. Morris and Neil Bradley demonstrate in a new book, "Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-1990," at-large local-election systems in Virginia generally have worked to block black voters from a fair share of political influence.

Morris, a political scientist who is president of Emory & Henry College, and Bradley, associate director of the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Office of the American Civil Liberties Union, co-authored a chapter on Virginia, one of the eight states surveyed in the book.

In the Old Dominion, they found, one typical Southern pattern is reversed: White and black Democrats have been more cohesive at the state level, including in Douglas Wilder's gubernatorial victory in 1989, than at the local level. For instance, local judgeships are filled by the Democratic caucuses of the General Assembly. Yet in a state whose black population is about 20 percent of the total, only five of 127 circuit-court judges in 1990 were black and only nine of 184 general-district judges.

In another respect, however, the Virginia pattern is like that of other states. As a strong general rule, at-large systems for electing local governing bodies produce serious underrepresentation of candidates favored by black voters. Only rarely do majority-white constituencies elect blacks to office; it is unusual, though somewhat less rare, for majority-black constituencies to elect whites.

Roanoke's experience of recent years, however, is in sharp contrast to the general rule. Roanoke City Council, elected entirely at-large, has in the past decade and a half usually numbered five whites and two blacks. That's a slightly higher percentage of blacks (28 percent) than in the city's voting-age population (22 percent).

Under the at-large system, those results reflect thousands of white votes that have been cast for black council candidates, and thousands of black votes that have been cast for white candidates. That habit is almost almost certain to weaken if Roanoke adopts a ward system.

Ward-system advocates, a group that includes some blacks, say it's not a racial issue in Roanoke. That's true in the sense that switching to a ward system here, unlike many other places, wouldn't likely increase black representation on council.

The proposal is a racial issue, however, in the sense that a ward system could easily and unnecessarily resegregate a municipal politics that is more successfully biracial than in most other Virginia localities and than in most other arenas of Roanoke life.

by CNB