_ cil (SRC) that in the 11 states of the old Black candidates in U.S. elections If Art Fletcher wins the elec- tion Nov. 5, Washington state will be one heartbeat from hav- ing a Negro governor. - Art Fletcher is a black man in politics. He has won the Repub- lican nomination for lieutenant governor in a state where Ne- groes number less than 2’ per- cent of the population. He de- feated speedboat driver Bill Muncey of Seattle in the pri- mary. E Fletcher, a Pasco City council- man, is the first Negro to run for state office in Washington. He has company this year from about 350 black candidates con- testing election to public office throughout the nation. It is the political version of black power. ~ Exact figures on the number of Negroes holding and seeking public office are hard to come by. But the dimensions of the movement are measured in a re- cent United Press International Survey of the 50 state capitals and political and civil rights or- ganizations interested in the subject. It indicates that perhaps 650 to 700 Negroes now hold elected office, ranging from sheriff and city councilman to U.S. Senator Edward Brooke of Massachu- setts. Most of the approximately 350 seeking public office this year are incumbents up for re- election while others are testing their political strength for the first time. The Southern Regional Coun- in Atlanta reports Confederacy, 298 Negroes hold elective office, ranging from Sheriff Lucius Amerson in Tus- _kegee, Ala., to State Sen. Leroy Johnson of Atlanta, Ga. The SRC knows of 109 Ne- groes, many of them seeking re- election, on the Nov. 5 ballot in the 11 Old South states. Most of the Negro officehold- ers and seekers are. Democrats. The Democratic National Com- mittee has a list of 531 now in office with 190 seeking election, and this year’s candidate list is not yet complete. “The remainder are Republi- cans or independents — or in some areas non-partisan where such a designation is required as a condition for getting on the ballot. There will be other firsts for Negroes this year besides Flet- cher. Missouri will have its first Negro congressman since both candidates in the Ist District (St. Louis) are black. ; Ohio also will-send its first Negro congressman to Washing- ton, with two Negreos running against each other in the 21st Congressional district, repre- sentating predominantly the Ne- gro Hough area of Cleveland. One is Louis Stokes, brother of the mayor. In New York’s Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell is virtually cer- tain to return to Congress, which refused to seat him after the last election. _At least two black women are making bids for seats in the U.S: House of Representatives. New York’s newly created heavily black 12th Congressional Dis- trict in Brooklyn is sure to elect a Negro. Assemblywoman Shir- ley Chisholm, the first black wo- ee ee ee eae man to hold a national commit- tee post in the Democratic Par- ty, faces James Farmer, Repub- lican-Liberal candidate and for- mer CORE director, and Ralph Carrano, white, candidate of the Conservative party. : In Virginia, Miss Ruth L. Har- vey of Danville is running as an independent for the U.S. House of Representatives from the Fifth Congressional District. She is challenging W. C. Daniel, De- mocratic standard bearer and Byrd machine man, and Weldon Tuck, the Republican, for the seat of recent retired William M. Tuck. : In Illinois, for the first time, a black woman, Fannie Jones, an East St. Louis school teacher, is on the Democratic state ticket seeking election as clerk of the State Supreme Court. In Wilmington, Del-, a Negro is seeking to unseat a white in- cumbant as President of the city council. : In Florida, one of three Ne- groes running for the State Le- gislature is given a better than even chance of making it. — In Indiana, a Negro 1s running for the state Appellate Court, hoping to become the first black ALLAN By WILLIAM eon A day travelling in, through the ghetto of “Dynamic” Detroit, reveals that the inner city, as it’s called by the politicians, has about 250,000 persons (60 per- cent black, 40 percent white, with a median income of $3,000 or below) living in 80,000 units of sub-standard housing. The De- troit Housing Commissioner, Robert Knox, a liberal Democrat, says most of the substandard houses are owned by absentee landlords, who make a “mini- mum” of repairs. About 25 per- cent of the houses are vacant, or rather unlivable. The sub-stand- ard ones Knox talks of, are de- clared fit for human habitation by the Detroit Board of Health. “It’s expensive to be poor, says Albert Boer, director of the Franklin Wright Settlement. ‘“People in the ghetto pay higher prices at smaller grocery stores, because ther€é are no supermarkets. They also pay higher insurance rates for cars, homes,. businesses. The rent is higher and in this area 62 per- cent of the houses are dilapidat- ed, yet the workers pay $75 a month, only $2 less than the average rent throught the city,” said Boer. The landlord is there once a month to collect his rent, so in many cases is the sanitation to coliect the garbage, hence the statistic there are more rats in Detroit than people. : Knox the housing director looking out from his expensive suite, comfortable, air Ccondition- ed office, pontificates thus: “It costs more to maintain the ghet- to for such services aS police, fire, sanitation and héalth than it would do to tear it down. There is more tubercuJOsis, more malnutrition, more colds—every>. PACIFIC TRIBUNE—OCTOBER 18; f968Page 8’ * ”* ° — to be elected to state-wide of- fice. A generation ago, Indiana was a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan. Unfortunately, however, regis- tration in black ghetto areas is still very low — below 50 per- cent. There is also a first of sorts with three black persons for President—Mrs. Charlene Mit- chell, the Communist Party can- didate, and Dick Gregory, the artist-activist, and Eldridge Clea- ver, the Black Panther leader on the Peace and Freedom ticket. In California, at least 60 black candidates are running, most of them incumbents, with Congress the highest office being sought. About 35 are up for election to posts in Los Angeles County alone, including the president of the Hollywood school board. In Michigan, where 13 Negroes hold state office and two are con- gressmen, more black candidates have filed than ever before. In the South, Negroes go into the election holding 23 legis- lative seats in the 11 states of the Old Confederacy — 11 in Georgia, 6 in Tennessee, 3 in Texas, and I each in Virginia, thing from rickets to old age debilitation.” Fifteen minutes by the free- ways, from Grosse Pointe, where the auto millionaires live, brings you by car to Brady and Rivard streets—in the East side section of the ghetto. It looks like a hur- ricane had hit the area, its mark- ed for urban (black) removal. So city services like sanitation get cut down,no one comes around to enforce the building codes, slum landlords, who did little to repair before, now just come for rent, with guns sticking out of their jacket pockets. Everywhere the garbage flows out of open cans into alleys and covers vacant lots. The City doesn’t pick it up. Houses are dilapidated, abandoned, some firegutted. Discarded refrigera- tors lie around, bathtubs, busted furniture, the rusted bodies of old cars are seen. A sign hangs from a tree, “no littering or dumping, Violators will be pro- secuted.” Then there are the silent men, bent over, in old clothes, push- ing carts along the streets, com- ing from all over after tours of alleys, to sell their findings to the junk shops whose signs say: “we pay more. Copper, brass, iron, paper, aluminum, lead batteries.” The Detroit News, slick racist sheet many times characterizes the ghetto as “streets full of futility.” But the ghetto is full of strug- gle, not futility, no matter what Detroit newspapers claim. Many neighborhood organiza- tions to fight the gouging land- lords have sprung up. The Unit- ed Tenants organization has won, the right to have tenants not pay rent until repairs are done. Before the tenant councils be- gan “assembly line justice’ was “meted out by Wayne County Cir- Mississippi and Louisiana. All signs. point to an increase in November. Fletcher is an exception to the rule in that he won a state-wide primary mostly with white cuit Court Commissioners, who handled landlord-tenant eviction cases. The Neighborhood Legal Services complained that tenants would be evicted and not even told when their case would come up in court. New tenants rights have been won. Now a tenant can pay rent to the court until a landlord fixes up needed repairs. But federal funds for public housing, are being funneled off for the war in Vietnam. Urban renewal, or black removal, has seen in Detroit several thou- sand high rise apartments go -up in swank Lafayette Towers area, supposedly cleared for urban renewal. Apartments rent for $238 a month, far out of reach of the former black resi- dents, who moved into new slums. Rep. Chas. A. Diggs (Dem), after being told that prices are at least 20 percent higher in the ghetto, by a group of Catholic women, black and white who visited over 500 stores, has urged Mayor Jerome Cavanagh to set up a city consumer pro- tection agency or lead a consu- mer boycott to combat gouging merchants in the ghetto. Cava- nagh ignored him. The East Side Voice of Inde- pendent Detroit (ESVID) joined with other ghetto groups re- cently to picket Detroit police headquarters to protest ‘“Ges- tapo” tactics used by Detroit and Chicago cops to beat down demonstrators. Frank Ditto, leader of the de- monstrators has been tireless in bringing the death-dealing con- ditions in the ghetto to the at- tention of civic officials, candi- dates for public office. But the Establishment and its spokesmen, both in Detroit City Hall, Lansing and Wash- ington ignore™black¢spokesmen. - Communist presidential candidate Charlene Mitchel an: Sits voters. votes. The bulk S of candidates are see < vee Negroes are ee a su ; the population, Thential part of mostly when Nea are winning roe. in oF close to the majority. are in 0 No low cost bi, for an PRN plan ecuines. Factories that ores are allowed of plburbia on the taxes for 10 np ep wundreds of work: e ment did x service as sigh ‘,-rennan, execu- Judge of €corders Court, rebellion of d Setting bail € thousands dragnets, e ae mole Crocke, support nN Nich Rep. John Gv®S Hood, ‘or US. 69 mayo uve ny ayorality ane Toit’s ghetto "S, speaks for ayor wi the police aoe be S an e recent ac ‘Xample he tion of Cited the Cleveland Pee oe 4P in Cleve- a Tesoly 3 _the nerve ae nding Officer. Young have to | bee