City has lost a maverick

Anthony Crayton died Friday.

Unless you've lived in Roxbury for a while, or spent a lot of time in City Hall in the early 1990s, the name may ring only a faint bell. Yet he had as much of an impact as any one-term city councilor could hope for.

That is because Tony Crayton, more than anyone else, was the man who made Thomas M. Menino mayor. It was an event that changed both their lives, though not in the ways Crayton wished.

Crayton was a charismatic and hard-charging politician when he was elected to the council in 1991. He had been a community organizer and then president of the Black Political Task Force before he won his seat.

He joined a council whose core had mostly been in office since the dawn of district representation in 1983, and made clear he was about shaking things up. He wasn't interested in symbolic protests, or the standard racial politics.

''I consider the most distinguishing mark of mine that I had no intention of coming in here being a protester as a way of influencing things on the council," he said in one interview.

Crayton was a maverick. He took the heretical step of advocating a return to neighborhood schools, reopening the festering sores of busing.

He also agreed, in 1993, to cast the deciding vote to make Menino council president, to the chagrin of so-called progressives who had cast their lot with Maura Hennigan. At the time, it was clear that the winner of the presidency would probably become acting mayor, because Ray Flynn was all but begging on the evening news for a job, any job, in the Clinton administration.

Crayton thought the most important part of his job was to bring more resources to his district. So when Menino offered him the chair of the Ways and Means Committee in exchange for his vote for council president, Crayton jumped at it. Crayton's vote would pave the way to Menino's election as mayor in 1993. You know the rest.

''He angered some people because he didn't think the old way, he thought the new way," Menino said yesterday. ''He wasn't part of any establishment. He was Tony Crayton."

What seemed like a healthy pragmatism came to be viewed differently when it was time to redraw the map for the City Council. A community group put together a plan that it claimed would create an additional black district and, possibly, a Latino district. Some of the math supporting those claims was highly questionable, but Crayton was expected to enthusiastically support it nonetheless.

He instead went through the motions, refusing to vote against a competing map that preserved the status quo, one favored by the alliance that had elected Menino president. His former allies instantly vowed revenge, loudly.

They got it, just barely. Crayton lost his bid for reelection by 90 votes, out of 6,000 cast. His political career was done, and the job he hoped was waiting in the Menino administration never materialized.

The rest of his life became a downward spiral. He felt betrayed on all sides. He did some consulting work before fading from view completely. When he died of liver failure, he was only 56 years old.

''To get so far, only to have support pulled from you because you don't go along with the status quo was disheartening," Crayton's daughter Nataka said yesterday. ''And it pretty much broke his heart."

Crayton's defeat was a victory for what he rightly saw as a tired, timid black political establishment. At times he risked recklessly, but the lesson for his successors was to risk nothing. His legacy lives not merely as a cautionary tale, but a lesson in what might have been.

Crayton's old friend, community organizer Horace Small, put his career in perspective yesterday. ''He helped people," Small said. ''That's more than a lot of people can say. The bottom line is he touched lives, and he tried to make a difference."

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.