Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 10, 1993 TAG: 9310100121
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
Mary Sue Terry must spend more time with black voters and talk more about the social problems that worry them if she's going to win their traditionally Democratic votes, delegates to Virginia's annual NAACP convention warned Saturday.
Bruce Fleming of Ettrick, a retired federal education official, has personal reasons to favor Terry, and he may well vote for her.
She hired Fleming's son when she was attorney general. But even this appreciative father said of Terry and Republican rival George Allen:
"I don't think either of the candidates has done a good job of getting out to black voters. I think it's going to be a very close race."
Friday-night speeches by Terry and Allen at the convention at Virginia Tech left NAACP members cold.
"To me, it was a waste of time. Neither of them said anything," said Patricia Wood, a Waynesboro homemaker.
"They've given us a lot of fluff," said Dave Moore, a Montgomery County School Board member and calibration technician at Corning Inc. in Christiansburg. "We don't need political rhetoric."
Rather than skewer each other over their political histories, he said, Allen and Terry should have told the NAACP exactly how they'd keep Virginia from losing new industrial plants to North Carolina.
"What we want to hear, and what everybody wants to hear, I guess, is manufacturers coming to give our children jobs," said Charlotte Richards of Colonial Beach, disabled by carpal tunnel syndrome injuries at a Northern Virginia auto plant a few years ago.
Virginia Carrington, a retired instructional aide from Earlysville, said she was sick of hearing Terry and Allen talking about the death penalty. "We have a lot of homeless people in Virginia. I don't hear a thing about that."
She doesn't like Allen much, she said, and she didn't see "a darn bit of difference" between him and Terry.
Conventioneers were grabbing up literature on independent Nancy Spannaus, a follower of Lyndon LaRouche. He's a political extremist and frequent presidential candidate who's serving a prison term for mail fraud and tax evasion.
Charles Brown of Suffolk probably will vote for Terry, but he admired Spannaus' "straightforward answers" to questions Friday night.
Spannaus got attention partly because she gave it. She spent hours at the convention Friday, and her staffers were still there Saturday, handing out a table's worth of tracts.
Terry needs to do the same thing, according to NAACP delegates.
"People are saying she hasn't come to the black community," said Evangeline Jeffrey, former president of the NAACP's Roanoke branch. Though she's leaning toward a vote for the Democrat, Jeffrey keeps hearing that Terry's a "little aloof."
"She needs to get out in the trenches a little more," said Julian Greene Jr., a Terry backer and NAACP president in Petersburg.
People who've seen Terry up close this campaign speak highly of her.
George Taylor, from the Eastern Shore community of Wattsville in Accomack County, said Terry spent an hour with his NAACP branch there two weeks ago. "I met her face-to-face," he said, and he was impressed.
The NAACP doesn't endorse candidates.
About the most that Virginia NAACP leader Ernest Miller of Cumberland would say about this race is what everybody else said - the candidates need to talk with black voters.
"They are beginning to surface more now," he said. "I hope it's not too late."
Keywords:
POLITICS
Memo: ***CORRECTION***