York prepares to elect its first black mayor

YORK, Pa. - Kim Bracey was only 5 when the riots brought soldiers, barricades, and fear to her hometown. But she remembers the National Guard tanks rolling down the street, the shotgun blasts echoing through the neighborhood, and her parents hiding her in a back room when the sun went down, lest she get caught in the cross fire.

Today - 40 years after York erupted in racial violence - Bracey, a retired Air Force sergeant, is poised to become the first African American mayor of this working-class central Pennsylvania city.

"York had a horrific time then," said Bracey, 45, a former economic-development official who has spent the last decade trying to revive a downtown that has, for the most part, languished since the riots. "But I am ready to be the mayor for everyone."

The election of a black mayor today is all but guaranteed. Bracey's Republican rival, Wendell Banks, is also African American - and has barely campaigned. He failed to appear at a scheduled debate and at newspaper editorial-board meetings. York County Republican Chairman A. Carville Foster Jr. has called Banks a "sporadic candidate" and has essentially conceded victory to Bracey, calling the Democrat "a qualified candidate."

Efforts to reach Banks for an interview were unsuccessful. The only other candidate is Steven Young, a last-minute write-in candidate who is white.

A smokestack city of 40,000, York is more than 60 percent white. But a quarter of the population is African American, and the number of Hispanic residents is rising, so minorities soon could be the majority.

York was thrust into national headlines 10 years ago, when prosecutors reopened the unsolved 1969 killing of a black woman from South Carolina who was fatally shot while visiting relatives here. One of the 10 white men indicted, Charles Robertson, was mayor when he was charged in 2001. The district attorney also brought charges against two black men for the killing two days earlier of a white police officer.

In a decade when violence was erupting in much larger cities, with more devastating results, York received little attention 40 years ago when a white youth shot and wounded a black man, touching off almost two weeks of rioting and violence here.

When word of the new charges came 10 years ago, many white residents of York said they wanted to bury that ugly chapter, when dozens of city blocks were torched and hundreds of people injured. In contrast, black residents expressed relief that prosecutors were at last seeking justice in the death of Lillie Belle Allen, a 27-year-old mother of two.

Allen was visiting relatives here in July 1969 when she and four family members drove into an ambush involving about 100 youths, many of them armed. Allen, a preacher's daughter, was trying to switch drivers with her panic-stricken sister when she was shot.

Allen's killing came just two days after a black mob had ambushed 22-year-old Police Officer Henry Schaad, who was white, as he rode in an armored vehicle to rescue an injured motorcyclist.

Robertson was a police officer during the riots; prosecutors said he provided ammunition to the shooters and helped incite the violence. He was acquitted in 2002.

In recent decades, the city has struggled to retain good-paying industrial jobs, but public/private investment has rejuvenated some blocks of the business district and brought in a new minor-league baseball park, where the York Revolution plays its home games. At the same time, community leaders have worked to try to repair the emotional wounds left by the riots.

"They used to call York 'the South that never grew up,' " said Abe Amoros, who was elected the city's first Latino city council member in 1990. "But York has made great strides."

Some African American residents say racial tension is still evident and hope Bracey will help change that. "You hear the car-door locks click when we walk by," said Bryant Starling, a trade-union staff member and Philadelphia native who moved to York six years ago. "There is still prejudice and discrimination. It's time for change."

Others say they see big problems in York and are not impressed with the candidates.

"Color shouldn't have anything to do with it," said Clarence Smith, 62, who is white. He said he hadn't decided whom he would vote for when he went to his polling place today.

Smith, who retired from his job as a film restorer at the Library of Congress and moved to York in 1995 to care for his aging mother, said he is fed up with crime in the city, which he believes has its roots in bad schools and a bad economy. "Look at the paper. What jobs are there? There's no hope," he said.

One could call South George Street the corridor Kim Bracey built. As executive director of a local economic-development group, she helped bring life back to the heart of York's business district, and worked to reverse the exodus of residents after the riots. After that, York's current mayor, Democrat John Brenner, hired her to run the city's Community Development Office. Brenner chose not to run again; Bracey resigned in January to run for his post.

"This is where it all began for me," Bracey said during a walk down South George Street, waving her arms at the commercial strip of restored historic buildings and brand-new construction. She was on her way to a senior center to thank residents who had helped her campaign.

"Her being female and African American is a plus," said Christine Laws, who greeted Bracey at the center as "our next mayor." "It gives people an incentive to work with her," Laws said.

"Kim represents the best York has to offer, [and] has credibility in the Anglo and African American community," said Amoros, now communications director for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party.

No shortage of challenges confronts York's next mayor: the highest unemployment rate in 26 years, one of the lowest income levels in the state, a spate of violent crime, and onerous property taxes.

On top of that, the city is hovering on the verge of filing with the state as a distressed city.

"We're putting fingers and toes in the dike to stop that," said Bracey.

The York area's jobless rate - 9.2 percent - was nudged upward by layoffs at major employers such as Harley-Davidson, which is considering relocating its motorcycle-assembly plant to another state, taking with it 3,000 jobs at the Harley plant just outside town and threatening thousands more support jobs.

Harley is expected to make its decision before the next mayor takes office. For her part, Bracey says the impact could be large - many Harley workers live in York, and the company is a major contributor to the local United Way, which supports an array of social-service programs in the city.

Fighting crime the old-fashioned way (more police officers walking the beat and interacting with residents) is high on Bracey's list. A drug-related drive-by shooting killed a 9-year-old Lancaster girl visiting family in York during the summer.

"We can't lure more people to the community without addressing crime," she said.

The trial of those charged with Lillie Belle Allen's murder culminated in 2002 with guilty verdicts against two white men, one of whom is still in prison. In 2003, two black men were convicted in the death of Officer Schaad.

The memories of the two victims have a permanent place in York now. Two benches bearing the names of Allen and Schaad have been erected on the high hill of Farquhar Park, where Robertson once led a "white power" rally and just up the hill from the railroad crossing where, soon thereafter, Allen was gunned down.

Bracey recognizes that racial animosity in York didn't end with the verdicts, and won't end with the election of an African American mayor.

"If the president experiences it, Kim Bracey will experience it," she said yesterday. "I just want the dialogue to continue and keep working to bring York into the 21st century."