Blacks vying for all-white Md. council

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By Jeffrey Anderson THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Greenbelt, a city that prides itself on its heritage as a New Deal-era social experiment, is finding its commitment to inclusiveness tested as two black candidates contend for seats on its all-white City Council in Tuesday's elections.

Until this year, only two blacks had ever run for the council and none had been elected, even though blacks account for nearly half the 21,000 residents of the 6-square-mile city just outside the Capital Beltway, according to the most recent census estimates. Asians and Hispanics make up 20 percent.

The disparity has caught the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP. Both filed complaints last year, prompting the Justice Department to take a closer look at whether the Maryland city's election practices comply with the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

(corrected paragraph:) That investigation remains open, the department said Thursday. But residents of the largely liberal enclave are left to ask themselves whether their electoral system discriminates against minorities, or whether something else is to blame.

For Kathleen Norvell, a Greenbelt resident and ACLU member who disparaged the rights organization's interference, it is simply a matter that the city's black voters have never taken an interest in local politics.

"It's a theoretical community," she said of Greenbelt's black residents, most of whom are clustered in rental units on one side of the city and are more transient than the mostly white homeowners.

"If people don't want to be involved, you can't make them," she said.

But civil rights groups and electoral experts point a finger at the city's at-large voting system, in which candidates must campaign for votes in every part of the community. This makes it hard for candidates with less time and money at their disposal to compete, they say.

"Certain communities get deprived of a voice," said Timothy F. Maloney, a former Maryland delegate who practices law in Greenbelt. "The system ... favors longtime residents and property owners over new residents and renters. That is a fact."

As evidence, the reform advocates point to the nearby city of Bowie, which switched in 2001 from an at-large system to a hybrid at-large/single member district system. Since then, it has seen a steady increase in black candidates and elected officials from the new single-member districts.