Black political activist Greg Murray is taking aim at Macomb County Democratic Party Chairman Ed Bruley again, accusing him of gerrymandering Macomb’s new commissioner districts to prevent minorities from getting elected.
A spokesman for the Macomb County Ministerial Alliance, Murray has feuded with Bruley since the 2001 redistricting when a similar complaint was registered about the new map for the Board of Commissioners.
Bruley, a four-decade veteran of politics, has routinely brushed aside Murray’s various criticisms, essentially comparing him to a gadfly.
But in a new Op-Ed piece written by Murrary, he makes the case that Bruley is inflexible and dictatorial (some political insiders would say that’s old news). The map the Dem chair drew, which was approved by the county Apportionment Commission last week, virtually ignored the fact that Macomb’s minority population nearly doubled over the past decade and now represents about 15 percent of the populace, Murray writes.
He also claims that two Republican maps that were rejected did a better job of giving minorities more political clout.
By way of their capitulation, Murray asserts that the Macomb NAACP and Bruley’s Democratic allies on the apportionment panel – Treasurer Ted Wahby and Clerk Carmella Sabaugh – are  guilty of shutting out the black community.
Murray’s column will be printed later this week in The Macomb Daily. Here’s a little taste:
“Ed Bruley is Ed Bruley. Once he gets an idea in his head, it becomes a fact to him and it better become a fact for you (either you are 100 percent with him or he is against you). If the Eastpointe, Center Line, and south Warren districts had been drawn north to south instead of east to west, the minority populations would have been kept contiguous, thus giving them a political footprint from which to affect the outcome of elections in those districts.

“Bruley has a history of disenfranchising minorities, starting with taking former Bobby Hill’s commission district seat for himself. We (the Ministerial Alliance clergy) believe Bruley carved Clinton Township’s 5th and 31st precincts out of District 9 so Dana Camphous-Peterson would not get the black vote during her run in (2010) against Fred Miller.

“He will say that Hill’s seat was not a black seat, and we acknowledge that (we do not support quotas), but we also know it was the only Macomb County commission seat where white voters were comfortable with electing a person of color. With Bruley’s genuine support, a qualified minority candidate could have run an efficient campaign.” 

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