Have We Returned to 1987, Folks?

As Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young prepares for this Saturday’s official announcement that he’ll run for the city’s top job again, he should say hello to the ghost of former Mayor Clarence H. “Du” Burns.

And Councilman Brandon M. Scott should look in the mirror and see a political image that looks a lot like former Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke.

It’s 1987 all over again, but will it bring the same kind of promise to one man and the same kind of heartache to another?

Du Burns, like Jack Young, was an accidental mayor. When William Donald Schaefer bailed out at City Hall to run for governor, Burns was City Council president and became mayor by default.

Burns was a man who came up the rough way. He’d sold newspapers as a youngster, later sold vegetables at a Belair Market stall, and then became the locker room attendant at Dunbar High School.

He needed a City Hall connection just to get that menial position. But everything he did, he did well. He became a City Councilman, and then City Council president. And thus became Baltimore’s first African-American mayor when Schaefer went to Annapolis.

Mayor Young can identify with such a history. He graduated from Baltimore City Community College and found jobs at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He worked in the cafeteria. He worked in the mailroom. He worked as a file clerk in the radiology department.

Then, City Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke hired him as a part-time staffer. He found a niche, made political connections, got himself elected to a City Council seat of his own. And then came the accidents: Sheila Dixon had to quit as mayor, Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake took over the job, and Young got the Council presidency.

And then the second accident: the Catherine Pugh bookscandal, Pugh’s removal, and Young’s automatic ascendance as the new mayor.

But now, after roughly a year in office, he’ll have to face the young City Council President Brandon Scott (there are other candidates, but Scott’s considered the chief challenger) – much like Du Burns, after 11 months in office, had to face the young Kurt Schmoke, who was state’s attorney when he ran against Burns.

Scott graduated with a political science degree from St. Mary’s College, hooked on with then-Councilwoman Rawlings-Blake before winning a council seat of his own – at the age of 27. He’s shown a consistent flair for the political limelight and became Council president when Young became mayor after the Pugh scandal.

He’s young and promising, much like Schmoke in 1987. Scott is 35. Schmoke was seen as the embodiment of the city’s potential. He was 38. He was a star scholar-athlete at City College, went off to a Yale education, a Rhodes scholarship and a Harvard law degree. He defeated the incumbent state’s attorney, William Swisher, to become the city’s chief prosecutor.

When Schmoke ran for mayor against Burns, many saw this as the city’s future overtaking its past. Burns was considered old business, even though he’d prepped for the job for years, much of it under the astute Schaefer.

Schmoke was aided by laudatory coverage in The Sun, which was then considered a powerful political voice, while the newspaper wrote Burns off. Many anticipated a landslide. Burns did not.

The race was closer than anyone anticipated. The young Schmoke won, and became the city’s first elected African-American mayor. A heartbroken Burns, who died in 2003, faded from view.

A vision of the future had triumphed over what seemed a leftover image of the past. The upcoming campaign is starting to look like an image of yesteryear, but no one knows yet if it will play out the same way.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, most recently “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).