By Adam Pagnucco.
If a particular elected seat has a history of being represented by a person of a particular racial group, should it always be represented by a person of that same group?
One of my readers brought up this question in reference to a school board seat in a recent email to me. Let’s see what this person had to say.
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Montgomery County Education Association made a decision to NOT support incumbents in the BOE race. For the District 4 race they decided to endorse Laura Stewart (an inexperienced liberal white candidate) over incumbent Shebra Evans, a two term incumbent who served as Board president during the height of the pandemic. So here is the issue I have. The district 4 seat has been a defacto Black seat since 1998.
Here is the history:
Blair Ewing (white male) had the seat from 1976 – 1998
Kermit Burnett (black male) was appointed to the seat on December 15, 1998
Kermit Burnett (black male) was in that seat from 1998 – 2004
Valerie Ervin (black female) won that seat in 2004 and remained until 2006
Chris Barclay (black male) was appointed to that seat in 2006 and remained until 2016
Shebra Evans (black female) was elected to that seat in 2016
Valerie Ervin, Chris Barclay and Shebra Evans were all endorsed by MCEA in the past.
If MCEA is successful they will cut Black representation on the Board of Education in half and make it that much harder for a person of color to regain that seat. Now I understand that there have been years of tension between MCEA and the Board, but this action seems short sighted and counter to so much of the rhetoric of the teacher’s union. In this race, MCEA could have sat it out, but instead they endorsed an opponent to a sitting Board member they had rigorously endorsed twice before. Given they are actively working to unseat a Black woman who they have championed in the past I think they owe the public an explanation. lf they are successful Montgomery County will only have one Black member.
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One disagreement I have with the above statement is when the source calls Laura Stewart “inexperienced.” I first met Stewart in 2018, when she was a vice president in the county PTA, and she wrote a guest post for me on the capital budget. When she was with the PTA, she was a big player on school construction and was voted one of the county’s most influential non-elected people in 2020. So while I think it’s fair to disagree with Stewart on a few things – and I do – I wouldn’t call her inexperienced.
Now to the above argument, which reminds me of the fracas over the County Council District 5 seat ten years ago. After being occupied by a White man (Derick Berlage) for three terms, it was held by appointee Donnell Peterman (a Black man) for a few months; Tom Perez (a Latino man) for one term and Valerie Ervin (a Black woman) for nearly two terms. Ervin resigned the seat before her second term expired and the council appointed another Black woman (Cherri Branson) to fill it.
In the ensuing Democratic primary, MCEA endorsed school board member Chris Barclay, a Black man. Ervin also endorsed Barclay and called the seat “a legacy seat” since it had been held by people of color for more than a decade. However, Barclay got in trouble because of his use of an MCPS credit card and MCEA withdrew its endorsement. In the end, two White male candidates – Tom Hucker and Evan Glass – received a combined 76% of the votes in a field which also included three Black men. Hucker wound up winning a very tight race. So in this particular election, voters did not agree that the race of candidates should be the dominant criterion for office – and let’s remember that this district included super-progressive areas like Takoma Park and Downtown Silver Spring.
How big of a thing is racial identity politics in Montgomery County elections? It’s hard to tell because the evidence is mixed. On the one hand, in addition to the above election in which race was explicitly mentioned, there was the 2022 election of Asian woman Kristin Mink in a district designed to elect a Black council member; the fact that Council Member Gabe Albornoz ran better in heavily White areas than heavily Latino areas in 2022; and County Executive Ike Leggett’s 2014 victory in Chevy Chase over two well-known White challengers. On the other hand, there are the strong performances by Council Member Will Jawando in 2022 and Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks in 2024 in MoCo’s heavily Black precincts. (I am going to write about that latter race soon.) And then there is the 2022 performance of council candidate Laurie-Anne Sayles, who ran about average in heavily Black precincts despite being a Black woman.
So who knows how well racial identity politics plays out among MoCo voters?
Now let’s return to my reader’s point. The District 4 school board seat has been represented by Black occupants for 26 years. Should the incumbent, Shebra Evans, be reelected because she would continue that representation? Or should she be judged on her merits alongside her challenger, former county PTA Vice President Laura Stewart?
That’s a value judgment above all. What do you think, readers?