The Race Race

Caraway visits Willie Mae Spencer, an elderly woman who spoke at the Multipurpose Center. She ushers the candidate around the area in her Taurus, pointing out neighborhood ills. "When I'm going to church, the devil is so busy," she says with dismay.

"Drug houses, prostitution, they got to go," Caraway agrees. "But the drugs first because they are dangerous. The drugs are what get their heads bad."

Back in her sauna-hot home, Spencer serves up Cokes with ice. Caraway promises to call city agencies and demand a stop sign at a busy intersection nearby. "I just won't be getting Mrs. Spencer a stop sign," he says later. "I'll be saving someone's life."

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It's a Monday night at the North Oak Cliff library branch, and the League of Women Voters won't let Williams speak at their candidates' debate. It turns out he mistakenly faxed his application to the wrong office.

League representatives are adamant that he not sit with Caraway, Oakley, Beckles and Lynn until Tim Dickey, a North Dallas activist who lives in the district, stands up to protest. "Your bureaucracy is overriding my democracy," Dickey says indignantly. The women, who run a tight ship for their voter education programs, eventually concede after a show of hands by the audience.

During the debate, Caraway smoothly deflects insinuations that he's a quasi-incumbent. He even has the nerve to argue that his wife's reappointment of him isn't nepotism, which he defines, with the help of some dictionary, as a transfer of governmental largesse to relatives--not appointments to boards.

Williams later slams Caraway as soft on sexually oriented businesses, or SOBs, which still proliferate in the northern part of District 6 despite determined opposition from neighbors. "We know some people in this race have a connection to the SOBs," Williams says, referring to Barbara Mallory Caraway's acceptance in 1999 of $2,000 in campaign donations from Burch Management, owner of some of Dallas' most popular strip bars. Facing negative publicity, she later returned it.

While Williams and the other candidates urge crackdowns on the SOBs, Caraway stresses conciliation. Strip-club détente can be reached when city officials can talk about compromise solutions "openly, without ridicule." Until then, the SOBs will run legal rings around the city. "If they sell seven Cokes for seven dollars each, and they all band together," he says, "they have a lot of money to fight the city."

In his fourth council run, Williams could be Dallas' own Harold Stassen, the candidate who ran for president 10 times. Executive director of Rainbow Bridge, an inactive nonprofit youth organization that owes $2,277 in property taxes to the city, Williams says he works on commission as a salesman for Medical Air Services and Associates, an emergency air transportation company. He insists his chances of winning are good. "Every time I've run, I've run to win," he says, blaming parochialism for his electoral failings. "I'm from East Texas and that has always been a factor."

Williams expresses bafflement that he's not a council member yet. "You would think in '91 we both would have walked in, because we tore the system down," he says of himself and Marvin Crenshaw, the other 14-1 plaintiff who's challenging incumbent Leo Chaney in District 7. "People have not appreciated the work Marvin and I did."

Also present at the debate is Beckles, 51, a private-practice attorney who ran an unsuccessful 1992 campaign for state representative. A Bronx native who came to Dallas to attend Oak Cliff's now-defunct Bishop College, he's served on several city and civic panels, including the Health and Human Services Committee and Preservation Dallas.

In person, Beckles is easygoing, but he doesn't hesitate to criticize other candidates. He faults Dwaine Caraway's advocacy of a $2.3 million clubhouse at Cedar Crest golf course (now halfway finished) during his parks board tenure. "It's a total waste of taxpayer dollars," he says.

Beckles has done little campaigning. Last week, his campaign hit a serious snag when the Morning News reported two past arrests for violent attacks on women. The first involved a 1992 domestic dispute with his wife. According to an arrest report, Beckles' wife said he pushed her down outside their home and kicked her in the head three times. She later declined to press charges. In the News, Beckles called the incident "a family thing that got out of hand."

Similarly, an ex-employee who complained in 1994 that Beckles bound, gagged and hit her, then forced her to perform oral sex, also declined to prosecute. Beckles says police blew both incidents "out of proportion." He won't comment what exactly the cops got wrong in the second case but stresses he wasn't convicted of wrongdoing and therefore did nothing wrong.