THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, May 29, 1996 TAG: 9605290450
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY PERRY PARKS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ELIZABETH CITY LENGTH: 61 lines
The School Board is open to ideas on how to increase minority representation on the board, Chairman Marion Harris told representatives of three minority organizations Tuesday night.
The spokesmen for the NAACP, Elizabeth City Housing Resident Council and Inner-City Forum had come to express concerns that blacks were not getting elected to the board, which consists of seven white members.
Two black candidates, Mary E. Sharpe and Rodney Robinson, ran for two Elizabeth City-Pasquotank School Board seats this month and lost. The speakers Tuesday blamed the county's at-large voting system.
``Basically, whites vote for a white candidate, and blacks vote for a black candidate,'' said Anthony Lambert, representing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In a county that's nearly two-thirds white, he said, ``these obstacles make it harder for African-Americans to get elected.''
Only a couple of blacks have been elected to the board in the past decade. Terry Mitchell, the most recent black member, was appointed by the board earlier this decade but lost to Janice Boyce in 1994.
``It's a matter of whether or not the children could be better served if we had a more diverse group,'' city activist Paul Bryant said.
The voting patterns are ``unfortunate,'' Bryant said. ``But if that's what's happening, then are the children suffering?''
Harris told the speakers that the federal government had reviewed the board's voting system in 1986 and had ruled that it was fair.
``There's no intent on this Board of Education to be discriminatory,'' Harris said. ``If there's a better way to do it, we're willing to look at it.
``We'll be talking among ourselves and seeing what we can do to improve the situation in this county.''
Bryant had raised the same issue at a joint city-county meeting last week. During that meeting, black City Councilman Jimi Sutton had responded that if more blacks would vote, more blacks would end up on the school board.
Lambert disputed that point on Tuesday, saying that the way districts are set up often creates hurdles too large for black candidates to surmount, ``even if every black individual were to vote for a black candidate.''
Pasquotank County Elections Board numbers show that 1,729 blacks voted on May 7 - 26 percent of the county's registered black voters. Among whites, 2,856 voted, about 24.8 percent of those registered.
Black candidate Rodney Robinson finished second in a three-way race, garnering 1,619 votes. That was 456 behind winner Frank Jennings, but almost 1,000 more than Carl Conner, who is white.
Mary Sharpe, who is black, received 2,000 votes in her loss to F. ``Mark'' Small. Sharpe got nearly 300 more votes than there were black voters, and she lost to Small by 408 votes.
The numbers show that, assuming all blacks and no whites voted for the two black school board candidates, Robinson could have won if only a third of registered black voters had turned out.
Sharpe could have received the votes she needed, also, if blacks had increased turnout by seven percentage points and all voted for her, on top of her support from white voters.
Regardless of the turnout, William Leigh of the housing Resident Council said that black students need more people like themselves to look up to.
``We cannot ask African Americans to take whites as their role models,'' Leigh said. ``We need more African-Americans.'' by CNB