Michael B. Hancock, the new president of Denver's Urban League, believes that black people are beginning to look more closely at the substance of a candidate's position. The color of his or her skin is no longer the automatic it once might have been.
"African-Americans in large part were oral-tradition kinds of folks. If you could speak well, we liked it," he says, pointing to Jesse Jackson as an example. "Now people may say you speak well, but what's the substance?"
And the dispersion of blacks across the metropolitan region and the migration of whites back to the inner cities is increasingly becoming an important factor. In 1970, 75 percent of Denver's 47,011 African-Americans lived in north and northeast Denver; in 1990, that figure dropped to 57 percent. "You have blocks in [House] District 8 where increasingly there are more whites than blacks," Samuel Williams says of the demographic changes in the neighborhoods roughly surrounding City Park. "If we can't keep motivating candidates, we can't defeat white candidates." Williams agrees that "when you represent 4 percent of the population, any movement represents a diminishment of political power," but he says that black dispersion is less pronounced here than on the East Coast or in parts of California. Besides, he adds, "the black population does not necessarily vote in a block. The growth in the number of black Republicans attests to that."
These days, when he's talking about the white emigration back to the inner city, even Jones sounds like a Republican. Let the white yuppies drive up property values, he says--that benefits everyone. "They're courageous," he adds. "Like blacks integrating white neighborhoods. It's a good thing they are often politically active. We need political activism to be strong in the city."
And even though whites are moving in, Jones wants to ensure that the longstanding seat of power remains exactly where it is: with black people. "We're gonna determine who goes to the Statehouse, the city council. In short, there is a vacuum. We'll take [whites] on as partners and make sure everyone understands who the general partner is.
"With the right candidate, people could be impervious to race," says Jones, speaking historically about Webb's victories and of the future. Jones's optimistic assessment may reflect a generation growing tired of identity politics.
Or it may just be naive. Dale Sadler, a black lawyer who is running for Happy Haynes's council seat, remembers when "blacks were struggling equally." He characterizes Webb and his allies as a "group of ebony elite calling the shots" and points to what may be the turks' other legacy: "Black politicians are no different from white politicians.
