Race for Conyers seat shapes up as family affair

DETROIT » The morning after Rep. John Conyers Jr., DMich., announced his resignation from Congress on her radio show, host Mildred Gaddis remained livid about his swift political demise. She questioned the veracity of a woman who accused Conyers of sexual misconduct, raged about the racism that led fellow Democrats to demand his ouster and spoke of how disrespectful the episode had been to a 52-year congressman considered a civil rights icon.

At the same time, she also meticulously avoided showing any support for Conyers’ hand-picked successor, his 27-year-old son John Conyers III, whom the elderly lawmaker attempted to anoint on her airwaves the day before.

That balancing act — revering and defending the fallen man while shrugging off his judgment about who should carry on his life’s work — was performed throughout Detroit’s African-American political world this week. As smooth as the 88-year-old Conyers hoped his succession would be, his departure creates a once-ina-half-century vacancy for, as Gaddis put it on the air, “an overcrowded field of opportunists who have been waiting for the congressman to retire or die.”

That field may or may not include Conyers’ son; he’s yet to declare his candidacy and has been slammed with news of an arrest connected to an alleged domestic assault earlier this year in Los Angeles. But even before Conyers’ announcement on Gaddis’ program on Tuesday, another relative — state Sen. Ian Conyers, the congressman’s 29-year-old great-nephew — had announced his own candidacy. And State Sen. Coleman Young II, son of Detroit’s first black mayor but fresh off being clobbered by incumbent Mayor Mike Duggan last month, declared his bid Friday.

Conyers’ hopes for a political dynasty won’t come easy, especially with the family divided as to who the heir apparent should be. Conyers III, who said he was unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight by his father, is a political unknown who told the Detroit News on Thursday he remains undecided about a run and will decide next month. Conyers III describes himself online as a hedge fund manager who lives in Detroit and Los Angeles.

In February, he was arrested but not prosecuted in an incident in which his girlfriend accused him of cutting her with a knife and body-slamming her on a bed, NBC News first reported Wednesday.

One person who hopes to undermine the case for Conyers III is his own second cousin, Ian Conyers, who on Tuesday liked a tweet containing a link to an MLive. com article about a 2010 scandal in which Conyers Jr. paid the Treasury Department $5,600 for Conyers III’s unofficial use of a Cadillac Escalade bought by the congressman’s office. Conyers III had extensively documented his alcohol-soaked exploits in the vehicle on social media.

Young II, also a state senator, took a different tack, promising to continue to file the reparations bill and rattling off statistics reflecting the unfair treatment of blacks in the criminal justice system. Young made racial discrimination a central tenet of his campaign against Duggan, who is white and who beat him by a 2-to-1 margin, and said he would return to such themes. “It’s important that the right person replace John Conyers, a person who shares the values and ideals of the community,” Young said. “We need to keep talking about race. It’s an important issue that’s overlooked.”