Houston NAACP gets out the vote in mayoral race

In a hotly contested runoff election held Dec. 1, 2001, Houston's incumbent Democratic mayor, Lee P. Brown, won his third consecutive two-year term. Because of term limits, Brown, who was a law enforcement administrator in Atlanta and New York City before becoming Houston's mayor, cannot run for a fourth term.

The runoff was inevitable when none of the six candidates in the Nov. 6, 2001, general election received 50 percent of the votes. In that election, Brown picked up 125,187 votes, or 44 percent, while the next highest vote getter, Councilman Orlando Sanchez, received 115,965 votes, or 40 percent. Pollsters across the nation watched as the first Black mayor in the nation's fourth largest city faced a runoff with Sanchez, who if victorious would become Houston's first Hispanic mayor.

Yolanda W. Smith, executive director of the NAACP Houston branch, was concerned with the runoff, too.

"We went into every nook and cranny to get out the vote," Smith says. "We even went to homeless shelters, because we knew even though people are homeless, many of them are voters. In fact, some homeless persons use their voter registration cards as identification. So we worked with the shelters - Star Hope, the Salvation Army - to get those people out to exercise their right to vote."

Ethea Farakkhan, the branch's political action officer, echoed Smith: "We had enough sense and enough experience to go into the trenches where some people dared not go. We are non-partisan, but Republican money was flooding Houston. Working through the national [NAACP] Voter Empowerment Program and with Texas Voter Empowerment coordinator, Claude Foster, we leased several vans to carry voters to the polls."

There are seven NAACP college chapters in Houston, and many of their members worked as volunteers in the get-out-the-vote effort. According to Smith, about 400 volunteers canvassed neighborhoods, going door-to-door distributing pamphlets and providing citizens with election information. "We trained our volunteers to ask such questions as: `Are you going to vote?' and `Do you have a way to the poll?' If they didn't, we took their names and addresses and arranged to have them picked up. If we found, while getting out the vote, that some constituents had missed the registration date, we registered them for next year," Smith says.

The branch's work paid off. More voters went to the polls in the runoff election than in the general election. In Fort Bend County, a small part of which falls within Houston's city limits, approximately 33 percent more voters went to the polls in the runoff. Brown thanked the Fort Bend County voters in his victory speech.

"The voters from Fort Bend and throughout the Houston area came out and supported keeping Lee Brown in office for two more years," the mayor said on Dec. 1. "We got our voters to the polls. My opponent aired more campaign ads and mailed more flyers. He won the air war but we won the ground war."

- Phil W. Petrie

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Jan/Feb 2002
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