DEL.ICIO.US‘Upstart’ Bell now Clayton County’s elder statesman
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Eldrin Bell, dressed for success in a cream pinstriped suit vest with a bright orange tie, walks into Butch’s diner in Jonesboro and works the room of gray-haired white folks with warm familiarity.
A beloved local doyenne has died, one man tells him. Another asks him to do something about litter strewn by a highway. Another sidles up and urges, “Don’t let them take this school system down.”
POUYA DIANAT / pdianat@ajc.com
Clayton County Commission Chairman Eldrin Bell posed with a broom because he ‘wanted to be the adult in the room,’ he said.
JOHNNY CRAWFORD / AJC
Commission Chairman Eldrin Bell, once controversial, has become a unifier in a place hurt by recent discord.
Bell nods and smiles confidently. It’s clear he needs to be needed.
“These are my big supporters, people who have been here 30 years or more,” said the 73-year-old, passing up ham, biscuits and gravy in favor of oatmeal, bananas and green tea. “They have high expectations of me. High expectations. All of these people are my family.”
Last month, an overwhelming majority of his new “family members” helped carry Bell, an African-American, to a second term as Clayton County commission chairman. The victory came after a racially tinged runoff election in which Bell put together a coalition of white and black candidates in a troubled county where the African-American leadership has come under waves of criticism since sweeping into office in 2004.
After the victory, an ebullient Bell posed for a photo with a broom. “I wanted to be the adult in the room,” he said. The comment brought smiles to longtime Atlantans: If the former Atlanta police chief with a legendary reputation as a scandal-dodging, head-knocking, lady-chasing dynamo was “the adult,” then that must be one crazy room.
In recent years, Clayton County has been. The school system lost its accreditation because of a “dysfunctional” board. Home foreclosures skyrocketed. And the African-American sheriff fired a large group of deputies, mostly white, after coming to office and marched them off with snipers on the roof.
Since then, Bell feuded incessantly with Sheriff Victor Hill and District Attorney Jewel Scott, both of whom defeated longtime incumbents who are white. The 2004 victories came after the county’s once majority-white voter pool grew to nearly 70 percent African-American.
“The African-American community said, ‘It’s our turn, let’s give them a chance,’ ” Bell said. “They did. And you know the rest of the story.”
Bell’s style of speaking his mind, waging battles and then building alliances with former, and even current, opponents, was forged during a tumultuous 33-year career with Atlanta police. It started with him as a rookie on a segregated force, then he worked his way up to security chief for Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first black mayor, and ended with him as chief. Bell said he learned to navigate through racial strife while patrolling changing neighborhoods in Atlanta in the 1960s and ’70s.
Broad experience
Bell said he pulled together his multi-cultural Clayton coalition this year after the NAACP opposed a referendum to approve a sales tax to build a juvenile justice center and police precincts. The NAACP objected because recreation centers from an earlier tax had not yet been built.
“We won [the referendum] and I carried that over to my campaign,” he said, pausing and smiling before adding, “and I hired a Republican [consulting] firm.”
Bell’s main opponent in this summer’s Democratic primary was Lee Scott, Jewel Scott’s husband, who engineered the 2004 sweep. Bell’s team pushed hard to collect early voting and absentee ballots and won in a runoff, defeating both Scotts and Hill. Six of Bell’s comrades won — three who are white, including Juvenile Judge Tracy Graham-Lawson, who was called “the hanging judge” in an election flier.
“It was competence and character over color,” said Bell, who calls himself a “Demopublican.”
“If anyone could bring our herd of cats together, it was Eldrin,” said Janie Griffin, a longtime resident who is white and one of the organizers of the slate.
Lee Scott calls the winners of Clayton’s Democratic primary, “the Republican slate.” He said Bell picked constant fights with Hill over funding “as a survival strategy” to distract voters from his own inaction and grabs for power.
“We have new leaders. Let’s hope they can improve the county,” Scott said. “But we have to remember, the current chairman was in charge the last four years.”
In interviews, residents were mixed about Bell’s ability to lead the county out of its housing crisis and school system troubles, for which he is not directly responsible.
Maria Gold, 60, who has lived in the county for 21 years, was hopeful Bell could step up to the plate. “I think he will,” she said. “I think that they’ll all have to work together. It has to be a collaborative effort, but it’s going to take a lot of work for sure.”
Joseph Wheeler, vice president of the local NAACP, leaned toward Bell in the election. “But he wasn’t my dream choice. He had a winning strategy, but he still has baggage and concerns with his relationship with Ronnie Thornton [a friend of Bell who was convicted in the corruption probe that also netted Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell] and Crandle Bray [the former county chairman], who is certainly old guard.”
Yet, it’s that kind of broad experience, hewn during his years in the Atlanta police — as chief from 2000 to 2004 — that makes Bell effective, said Kelley Jackson, who was active in Clayton politics for years.
“You need someone who’s calloused. He can go from the streets to the board room,” said Jackson. “He can be a little short or brash. But he has charisma. He’s a father figure with a paternal personality.”
Bell often refers to Clayton County in first-person singular, as in “my tax base” or “27,000 of my homes were reduced in value.”
The results of the recent elections may help stem the white flight that has occurred for a decade and stabilize the community, Jackson said. “It was vitally important for the residents with deep roots in Clayton County who didn’t want to leave. The whites want a voice, too. They may be only 30 percent [actually 23 percent] but they want a voice.”
A driving force
Listening to the public, the police ranks and political leaders was always Bell’s forte, said Lou Arcangeli, a former deputy chief in Atlanta and top aide to Bell.
Bell did well to forge relationships with white cops he knew belittled him behind his back, as well as older black officers “who thought he was an upstart,” Arcangeli said.
The recent elections “validated what I already knew. It’s inclusion and coalition building. He promoted people in the department that he did not like or even trust. But he knew they could do the job,” Arcangeli said.
Bell’s job has him maintaining a whirlwind schedule that over two days last week had him meeting with school officials, the governor’s office, the director of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport (much of which is in Clayton County), Clayton mayors and the Atlanta Regional Council. He said his job is to hold the line on spending — it increased slightly in Clayton this year — and to garner some job-creating development for the county.
“There seems to be a need [for Bell] to control — whether it be the school board or another city,” said Phaedra Graham, the former Riverdale mayor who ran unsuccessfully against Bell this year. She has a suggestion for his second term: “Focus on the affairs of the county. We have problems with crime and foreclosures. People are moving away. We’re looking at a reduction in our tax base.”
Bell said he knows the distinctions between the school and county boards. But this is a crisis, and bold steps must be taken. In the early 1990s, when the crack epidemic came to Atlanta, Bell pushed for a juvenile curfew.
The situation with the schools “is the driving force, whether our community survives or is severely diminished. This has crossed over to affect everything in the county,” he said, pounding the table. “So it is my job.”
The sudden noise caused several diners to look up at the “only adult” in the room.
Staff writer Michelle Ewing contributed to this report.
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