Tuesday, February 27th, 2007...6:35 am
Boykins In, Apparently
Word is that Clarence Boykins filed his statement of organization to run in the Democratic primary for Ward 2 yesterday. This allows him to start collecting money and signatures and otherwise cause the sorts of mischief that we expect out of our candidates. The city clerk’s candidate listing still doesn’t reflect this, but it should soon. (See CORRECTION below)
Boykins has been active in Southern Arizona civic affairs for years, working with organizations like Travellers’ Aid, United Way and advisory boards for TUSD and the University of Arizona. He has also been a state president of the NAACP and worked on the effort to pass a Martin Luther King Jr. holliday in 1992 (that was the time it passed).
Boykins previously ran for State House of Representatives, coming in 6,000 votes short for third place behind Jonathan Paton in a very Republican district. He stirred up a bit of a controversy when he tried to make the case that Paton shouldn’t automatically get a vote just because of his service in Iraq. He probably could have made his case a little better, but it didn’t help matters when Alex Rodriguez and some others piled on with a press conference where they said some dumb ass things about Paton’s deployment enabling both the press and the Republican party to tag Boykins, a decorated Vietnam veteran whose left hand still shows his injuries, as someone who doesn’t support the troops. I found the attacks on Paton in poor taste and, to put it bluntly, bad politics, but the constrenation coming from the crowd that just months before tried to smear John Kerry’s service smelled a bit hypocritical to me.
Interestingly, Boykins’s web page for his legislative campaign is still up.
NB - Should Boykins win, he would only be the second African American member of the Tucson City Council. Chuck Ford represented Ward 4 on the Southeast side for two terms from 1979-1987, and ran for mayor in 1991.
CORRECTION - Jumped the gun on this one. It turns out that Boykins, despite rumors to the contrary, has not filed a statement of organization, although he has pulled papers.
1 Comment
February 27th, 2007 at 11:28 am
Ted, from the headline, I thought that this article was about diminutive Milwaukee Bucks two-guard Earl Boykins.
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