I’m giving this blog another go. The last entry I wrote was on a study of parking fines and fees that I did last fall, almost a year ago. I’d like to write more regularly, but I’m also mindful that even writing a drafty blog entry takes some time and discipline. I try to write 1000 a day, in a style adapted from Peter Elbow’s “freewriting” which I get alot out of and I see a bit as a workout in that it lets me flex my voice and feel some agency on what I write. Many times ideas will bubble up as I write or I will see things in different ways. And the act of writing, even if it is verbiage that is pretty disposable in and of itself, is also something I feel good about doing. The quality of the stuff I write is roughly on par with this paragraph. It takes me about 15-20 minutes to write 1000 words. I keep the freewrites in a folder, maybe someday I’ll go back to them or they may provide material in the unlikely event that someone ever looks for biographical information on me.

Anyway, we are 12 days away from the 2024 presidential election. Around here it is consuming everything. As all that roils everything, I’m focusing on another election. The 1992 Wilmington Democratic primary. I renewed my subscription to newspapers.com and, starting in Spring 1991, have been clipping (virtually) News-Journal articles about this primary. At first they have been far and few between, and I have spent an hour here and an hour there gathering the clippings. But as I have gotten closer to the September 1992 primary date, I’ve been logging sessions almost daily and the articles are daily. I am now on the clippings of September 10th and the primary is on the 12th.

I’m not sure how many of the few folks who will read this will know the significance of this primary (congratulate yourself if you do). This primary is essentially the election, as Wilmington’s electorate has a 2-1 edge in registered Democrats to all other voters, leaving Election Day itself to be more of a formal ratification/coronation of the Democratic candidate. Up for grabs in 1992 is the Wilmington mayoralty, in which incumbent Dan Frawley is seeking an unprecedented third term and Jim Sills is running against him. The results of this election is not a surprise, as SIlls will upset Frawley on his way to becoming the first African American mayor of Wilmington.

I feel connected to Jim Sills because he is my predecessor, having been on faculty in UD’s public policy/administration school and, in 1972, founded the center that I now direct. Jim came on my radar a few months ago and I am with him on getting him to talk about the olden days, getting his recollections of his time in Delaware politics and the university (not mutually exclusive topics). It is a slow process, and as things unfold I have been acquainting myself with late 20th century Wilmington, which, historically speaking, is a time period that has not been touched after Carol Hoffecker wrapped up her book Corporate Capital in the early 1980s. As a start to becoming more acquainted with this era, I’m reading up on this election.

The process has fascinated me. I have learned a ton and have many thoughts and observations and rabbit holes that are open to me and I hope I’ll keep writing on this blog to air some of this out. But I don’t want to do that today. Instead I want to write about the election itself. I know that Sills will win, and have shared this spoiler now, despite Frawley’s incumbency and his big advantage in financial resources. It is, in a larger sense, a race between Sills’s orientation to community development (i.e., Black grassroots and neighborhood) vs. Frawley’s orientation to economic development (i.e., the continuation of Wilmington’s longtime status as a company town). I look forward into diving into this and negotiating the nuances that will challenge this hypothesis. But not today.

Instead, I’ll mention that, along with Sills, there is a loose coalition of 8 African American primary candidates, for councilmanic and local legislative elections, that are allied with Sills. People whose names still come up today, like Ted Blunt and Herman Holloway Jr. and a young Stephanie Bolden, and others that I haven’t heard of until now. Gary Hutt, an embattled incumbent councilman, running against the much better financed campaign of a Dupont lawyer named Griffiths. Will these folks come in on the same wave that Sills will ride? Or will Sills’s election be more of a one-off. I don’t know, and have resisted the temptation to peek. I’m two days away, and I am in suspense.

Hopefully I’ll blog a sequel to this in the next few days. I’ve already spent more time writing this than I planned to spend. I am also thinking how, in 2020, the contested presidential election was also the last time that I dove into Newspapers.com to chronicle a contested election on Philadelphia Skid Row. I’m wondering about whether the timing of my dive into late 20th century Wilmington here is more than just a coincidence, or whether I’m seeking refuge in the past, where I know that, 32 years later, we are still okay.

[please excuse the draftiness, I don’t have time to proofread]