Posted on 09/07/2002 6:03:18 AM PDT by Overtaxed
DURHAM -- The gloves have come off in Tuesday’s primary elections.
This week the Friends of Durham mailed out a newsletter urging voters to make the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People’s political endorsements "as big a fiasco as their boycott of Northgate Mall."
Meanwhile an anonymous flier showed up around town, telling voters to re-elect Durham County Sheriff Worth Hill "so he can keep his son out of jail!"
According to Patrick Byker, president of the moderate-conservative Friends of Durham, the group sent its newsletter to more than 4,000 households. It endorsed candidates for local races, but the criticism of the liberal Durham Committee took up most of its front page.
The Durham Committee "apparently wants to exclude all non-black representation," the newsletter said. "It has endorsed only black candidates for local offices."
The newsletter also criticized Durham Committee Chairwoman Lavonia Allison, recounting news reports about her involvement in a car accident in which a girl was injured and her record as a property owner.
Allison did not return calls to her office or home Friday.
"[The Committee] doesn’t care about ‘black people,’ " the newsletter said. "It cares only about getting its hands on the County’s budget, finding government jobs for its otherwise unemployable insiders, and obtaining power over you," the newsletter said.
It calls upon voters to "reject the racism of the Durham Committee" and vote for the candidates that the Friends of Durham have endorsed.
Byker said his group spent a lot of time and effort to get to know the candidates and their platforms.
Unlike the newsletter, the flier targeting Hill was anonymous. Copies of the bright pink sheet of standard-size paper surfaced under windshield wipers and at other spots late in the week.
The flier listed 20 case numbers, almost all of them traffic charges and almost all of them dismissed by the district attorney.
"It’s a shame that somebody has to stoop to this level. My son is not running for sheriff, I am," Hill said.
Hill said the information in the flier, some of it dating to the 1980s, was not an accurate account of his son Bradford Hill’s record.
"He’s had several traffic violations and so forth and so on, but this is not an accurate presentation of his record," Hill said. "They should be looking at my record, not my son’s record, and I’ve never known of any of his things to be dismissed."
"He did like anybody would do, he got a lawyer and went through the process like everybody else does and paid his fines."
Hill said he has some ideas who was behind the flier but declined to comment on that. He did say he did not think his Democratic opponent, former state trooper Tony Butler, had anything to do with it.
"I’ve been serving this community since ’59 and if you have no more enemies than I do, I thing you’ve done well," he said. "I’m not going to let it bother me. I think the citizens of Durham are smart enough and have seen what I’ve done since I’ve been sheriff and will look through this to see it for what it is."
Wasn't it always like that? I would never even consider moving to Durham...the murder capital of the state.
.......and it isn't a motivational phrase.
It's a smelly, dirty, crime-infested, corrupt hole in the midst of a thriving, gleaming, high-tech center; an emabarrassment to the region.
This Black Tamany Hall can be credited for nearly every bit of it.
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