For black voters, elation, dismay

High hopes offset by Wilkerson plight

Inside the spare, sunlit dining room of Flames, a Jamaican restaurant on Blue Hill Avenue in Roxbury, three men at three separate tables, ate lunches of curried and jerk chicken, and watched coverage of the presidential election on a television mounted above the window.

As tape rolled of Barack Obama urging voters to the polls for the "historic election," they looked at one another and traded nods of approval. Here was a man on the rise, on the cusp of becoming the first black president.

Just a few blocks away, at the Charles Street AME Church, Senator Dianne Wilkerson was ending her bid for reelection after 15 years in office. The lone African-American in the state Senate, once seen as a rising star of this predominantly black neighborhood, was acknowledging that her campaign was over, felled by charges that she had taken cash bribe after cash bribe to execute political favors.

The parallel moments produced an unusual swirl of emotions among black voters in Wilkerson's Roxbury district. While many celebrated Obama's potentially history-making surge on a national political stage far from the city, they were also confronting the downfall of a black politician much closer to home, a woman many know not only as a senator, but as a neighbor and friend.

"It's really hurting the community - not that we believe she's perfect - but it is a sad loss for our community to lose someone like that," said 61-year-old Allan Edwards, the owner of Allan's Formalwear, a tuxedo shop on Blue Hill Avenue. "She has helped a lot of people. She's a very close, down-to-earth person. We all know her personally, when she walks up and down the street."

Reactions to the rise of one politician and the fall of the other are anything but simple. Obama is seen as an exalted and yet remote figure carrying the dreams of millions as he campaigns about hope and change in battleground states far away.

Wilkerson is the woman they see in church and on their doorsteps. She has made a career of knowing and solving their problems. And they have known hers, often as they played out on the nightly news and the pages of the newspaper. The images that the FBI released this week of her allegedly taking bribes, stuffing one bundle of cash under her bra in a posh Beacon Hill restaurant, have sparked rage, not all of it directed at her.

Many rushed to her defense, saying she had been unfairly targeted because she is black and was standing up for the black community. Many said she has been prematurely condemned.

"I just want to know: Has Senator Dianne Wilkerson had a trial, and have they found her guilty?" said the Rev. Betty Collier, pastor of The Way Free Gospel Ministry in Roxbury who berated the media outside the Charles Street AME Church yesterday. "It's as if everybody has found her guilty without even a trial, and doesn't the law state that a person is innocent until they are proven guilty by a court of law - not people?"

Wilkerson had been waging a write-in campaign after losing to Sonia Chang-Díaz in the Democratic primary in September. She had hoped that an expected flood of black voters supporting Obama would vault her to victory on Tuesday. Around Roxbury, her red campaign signs and Obama's blue signs adorn shop windows. After she ended her campaign yesterday, there was a sense in her neighborhood that Tuesday's ballot will be bittersweet.

"She could've been the congressperson, the mayor; she could have been the governor," said Wilkerson's campaign manager Boyce Slayman, moments after Wilkerson announced the end of her campaign from the pulpit of the Charles Street Church. "She's got that much talent and skill - if not for the human frailties, the human frailties. I know the community already feels her loss."

Around Roxbury, many voters agreed. They said Wilkerson's plight added a painful coda to an election that could see Obama make history. Several voters said Wilkerson's arrest seemed politically motivated, coming just days before the election.

"If it was long before the election it would have been all right, but really not at this time," Edwards said. "It just shows that they were out for her. For me, it's a sense of sadness. Whether she would have won or not, it would have been good if she just kept her name on the ballot."

At Flames, the lunch trio watched as a political talk show host talked about Obama launching television ads in Georgia and Arizona, traditionally Republican strongholds. Then, as they ate, they discussed Wilkerson.

"She's human; people make mistakes," said Reggie Barnes, 24. Barnes said he had been listening that morning to TOUCH 106.1 FM, a small radio station in Dorchester that bills itself as the fabric of the black community. The deejays, he said, had been extolling Wilkerson as a champion of the community.

"She deserves another chance," he said. "She's done a lot for the community."

Michael Levenson can be reached at mlevenson@globe.com.