This November, Minneapolis’s only African-American City Council members, Natalie Johnson Lee and Don Samuels, will go head to head for the same council seat. Redistricting has yanked Samuels’s troubled Jordan neighborhood out of the Third Ward, the old “Nordeast,” and fused it with the Fifth Ward. The Fifth Ward, meanwhile, lost the Warehouse District and the string of ritzy new housing along the Mississippi to the more affluent and politically connected Seventh Ward. The new Fifth Ward, without a doubt the darkest and poorest part of town, could very likely be the lone African-American seat when the new City Council takes office in January 2006.
Political insiders say it did not have to come to this. According to several current council members, Samuels, anticipating that his Jordan neighborhood would be “redistricted” into the Fifth Ward, let it be known that he planned to move into the newly reconfigured Third Ward. Samuels himself admits that many politicos, even old-time Nordeaster Walt Dziedzic, retired cop and former Third Ward council member, supported his plans to move out of Jordan.
Johnson Lee heard the same stories, but wanted to meet with Samuels to make sure his bags were really packed. She claims Samuels kept avoiding a meeting until the day after his campaign literature, announcing his run from the new Fifth Ward, hit the streets. I called Samuels to get his take on what happened (or in this case didn’t). He claimed that he never made any promises to move, but also said he understands why there might have been “some confusion” around the issue. A “big part” of what appears to be a change of heart, he added, is that his wife did not want to move from their “lovely home” in Jordan.
On the record, their colleagues say that both Samuels and Johnson Lee are thoughtful and capable. Off the record, of course, another story appears. If you apply Woody Allen’s “80 percent of success is showing up” test, Johnson Lee has the edge. She rarely misses meetings and has almost single-handedly kept the departments of Public Health and Civil Rights off life support. On the other hand, Samuels has one of the weakest attendance records on the council, according to several of his fellow members; he also has virtually no substantive accomplishments—unless, as one member suggested, “you give Don points for his vigils.”
If you apply the Teddy Roosevelt “bully pulpit” test, Samuels beats Johnson Lee hands down. A forceful orator, he is known as “the Preacher” behind council doors (he is, in fact, an ordained Baptist minister). One councilmember told me, “You want Don on your side for the speech. Unfortunately, Don cannot use his impressive life experience as a springboard for making policy.”
Johnson Lee, meanwhile, has a reputation for being unnecessarily combative at times, and has made some significant enemies, most notably Hizzoner R.T. Rybak. The mayor has made his support for Samuels in the Fifth Ward quite apparent. Unfortunately, that does not carry much weight in the Fifth Ward, especially since Rybak publicly questioned the bona fides of community activist Spike Moss and the Rev. Jerry McAfee, pastor of New Salem Baptist Church and a frequent Rybak critic. Beyond that, there have been whispers in the Fifth Ward that the Jamaican-born Samuels—who once called Moss a “white man in black skin”—does not truly “get” native-born black people and even believes he is a cut above them. Such talk is “totally wrong and divisive,” said Samuels. “I am proud of my Jamaican heritage. But I have been lived in this country since I was twenty. I have been married to two African-American women. Unlike certain black ministers on the North Side, who make their living here but are not invested as residents, I am part of the fabric of the North Side. When you try to be a bridge, people come at you from both sides.”
Both Samuels and Johnson Lee believe, for different reasons, that the DFL endorsing convention this month will help determine who has the mojo going into the home stretch. Samuels and his supporters believe the DFL endorsement will prove his deep Fifth Ward support. Johnson Lee predicts that the expected absence of many of the usual suspects at the convention—people who will ostensibly back her—will prove that she has “more support from traditional DFLers than I ever did when I beat Jackie Cherryholmes,” the former Fifth Ward council member and City Council president.
Samuels went on to predict that, no matter what happens in the next few months, the race between him and Johnson Lee will be “acrimonious, nasty and negative.” Based on the barbed comments I have heard in recent weeks, he is probably right.
Leave a Reply Cancel reply