Prometheus 6

That a Black person is one one side and a white person is on the other does not automatically give an issue a racial aspect.

“This is really not about race,” Ms. Todd said in a telephone interview as she traveled to Montgomery for the hearing. “This is about Joe Reed controlling the party and trying to get his way, and he’s just a bully.”

Issues of Race and Sex Stir Up Alabama Election
By SHAILA DEWAN

MONTGOMERY, Ala., Aug. 24 — When Patricia Todd won the Democratic primary runoff for a seat in the Alabama Legislature last month, the big news might have been her sexual orientation. With no Republican opponent, Ms. Todd seemed poised to become what political observers said would be the first openly gay officeholder in state history.

But instead, it is the fact that she is white, in a majority black district in Birmingham, that has become the burning issue. One of the state’s most powerful Democrats, who had earlier urged voters not to support Ms. Todd because she is white, is backing a challenge to her nomination that could end her candidacy.

On Thursday, a Democratic Party subcommittee heard a challenge to Ms. Todd’s candidacy on the ground that she had violated a rule that, by party officials’ own admission, has not been enforced in nearly 20 years. The subcommittee voted to disqualify both Ms. Todd and her runoff opponent, a black businesswoman named Gaynell Hendricks, because neither had complied with the rule.

The full party committee, which will meet Saturday, can now either overturn the decision or uphold it and appoint a replacement candidate, and Ms. Hendricks would be eligible. But Ms. Todd’s campaign manager, Mark Kelly, said the dispute would almost certainly end up in court.

The challenge was brought by Ms. Hendricks’s mother-in-law. But it was tacitly supported by Joe L. Reed, a longtime Democratic kingmaker and the party’s vice chairman of minority affairs. Mr. Reed had urged voters to support Ms. Hendricks, and at one point the Alabama Democratic Conference, a black political organization that he is chairman of, gave a check to cover the $3,000 fee needed to bring the challenge in case Ms. Hendricks missed the deadline. He also controlled the subcommittee; three of the five members were drawn from a pool of Mr. Reed’s appointees.