Boston election: Media targets city council members of color

Team Unity, from left: Charles Yancey, Chuck Turner, Felix Arroyo and Sam Yoon. Photo: Yawu Miller/Bay State Banner

Boston’s racist ruling establishment used the recent City Council election here to wage an all-out assault on the right of oppressed communities in Boston to representation, in an attack focused on Team Unity—Chuck Turner, Felix Arroyo, Sam Yoon and Charles Yancey—the four Boston city councilors from oppressed communities.

These four councilors have functioned as a unit fighting racism and injustice in Boston. They have sponsored resolutions against the war in Iraq, in support of Rosa Parks Day and to declare an HIV State of Emergency in Boston’s oppressed communities. They have fought for jobs, Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) reform, tenants’ rights and against placing a bioweapons lab in the oppressed community, to name a few important struggles.

Team Unity has supported the Boston School Bus Drivers’ Union in campaigns for safety for drivers, mechanics and Boston’s school children. Members have fought tirelessly against an unending stream of attempts to resegregate Boston schools under the slogan of returning to “neighborhood schools.”

Councilor Yoon is the first and only representative of Boston’s Asian community on the City Council; Councilor Arroyo is the first and only representative of the Latin@ community. Oppressed communities now make up the majority of Boston’s population, but continue to be underrepresented in city government.

Councilor Arroyo particularly displeased the establishment powerbrokers by clearly demonstrating his support of the revolutionary government of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, leading the immigrants rights May Day demonstration in Boston, advocating licenses for the immigrant community, and proposing that anyone who could prove residency in the City of Boston be allowed to vote in city elections. This last proposal would have completely changed the political landscape in Boston.

Arroyo also sought to name a main street in the Latin@ community Simón Bolívar Boulevard, visited Venezuela as an official representative, and coordinated home heating oil relief from Venezuela for Boston’s oppressed communities. In return for this, the racist establishment launched a slander campaign calling Arroyo an “absentee councilor” and showing his face on the side of a milk carton in the style of campaigns to find lost children.

The establishment’s campaign against Team Unity was well coordinated. The mayor, the Boston Globe and the Democratic Party all played their role at the behest of the banks and big business. The mayor fielded candidates against Turner and Yancey, while the racist establishment machine fielded and funded a representative of the “old boys” network from a long established West Roxbury family, John Connolly, as an at-large candidate in an attempt to unseat Arroyo or Yoon.

The Globe, which in the past had endorsed all of the Team Unity candidates, endorsed only Connolly this year. The Democratic ward committees followed suit, and the Democratic governor got in on the act, giving all of his actual active support, photo ops and publicity to Connolly. Not only were endorsements and political support withheld, but a well-orchestrated campaign made sure that sources of financial support for earlier Team Unity campaigns were not available.

The Globe also wrote articles alleging that Turner—the only politician from any level of government with an office in the heart of Roxbury, and the core of the Team Unity group—wasn’t representing the people of his district. Turner, the most grassroots and community-based city councilor, mobilized his base of support and turned back this attack, winning by a landslide in both the preliminary and final elections. Yoon and Yancey also were re-elected.

Taken as a whole, these attacks represented a full-court attempt to turn back the clock to the “good old days” before the desegregation battles of the 1970s, when the Boston government was the exclusive province of white politicians and their sponsors in the banks and business establishment. It is part of the war at home against the workers and oppressed just like the attacks against immigrants, heightening racism and division in the face of the developing capitalist economic crisis.

In the face of this offensive, the Boston School Bus Drivers’ Union and the Boston International Action Center came out in support of the Team Unity campaign, in both the preliminary and final election. Volunteers jumped in to participate in the campaigns, and a traveling sound truck rallied for the campaigns throughout the communities on the weekends leading up to the election and on Election Day.

The Team Unity sound truck also participated in an Oct. 27 anti-war demonstration, spreading the anti-war message of the Team Unity councilors and soliciting support against the attack on the representation of oppressed communities. But overall, the progressive movement failed to recognize the character of the attack or oppose it.

In the end, the racist machine’s candidate, John Connolly, was successful in narrowly defeating Felix Arroyo. The nature of the campaign was laid bare in subsequent days when the Arroyo staff shared with members of the School Bus Drivers’ Union hate mail that had been sent to the councilor actually signed “the Bulger Group”—referencing one of Boston’s leading racist political families, that of former State Senate President Billy Bulger. Bulger was a leader of the racist forces that opposed desegregation of Boston’s schools in the 1970s. The crying need for solidarity with the oppressed communities against racist attacks in whatever form they come has never been clearer.