Wilkerson to Continue Campaign

UPDATE: Wilkerson's statement is now public. She blames US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan for his timing.

Despite pending federal charges, State Sentaor Dianne Wilkerson will continue her sticker campaign to retain her seat. The most infamous stuffed shirt in Boston is currently out on a $50,000 bond while awaiting a Federal corruption trial for allegedly accepting $23,500 in bribes.

Wilkerson might have been listening to her mother too closely before making her decision. Ethel Johnson, who lives in Charlotte, NC, thinks that her daughter is the victim of a media set-up with race as the driving factor.

For his part, Wilkerson's close alley Boston City Councilman Chuck Turner has been keeping things classy by claiming that Sonia Chang-Diaz, the woman who beat Wilkerson in the August Democratic primary contest for the Second Suffolk Senate Seat, is like "someone coming from another city coming in and representing people in another city."

Turner's comments can easily be construed as a racial taunt: Chang-Diaz lives and works in predominantly white and Latino Jamaica Plain; Wilkerson hails from predominantly black Roxbury. Both live in the Second Suffolk.

Bostonist understands that race is a part of this controversy. Wilkerson is Massachusetts's only black State Senator, and that is an injustice. But the color of a person's skin, or, as in the case of Wilkerson, her history of advocacy, cannot erase a pattern of abuse of power or of official corruption. If the allegations against Wilkerson are true, she has not only betrayed the voters in her district, but the very base that got her where she is today. $23,500 is not a high price, in absolute standards, to buy political influence, but consider that it is nearly seven thousand dollars more than a person making minimum wage will pull down in a year.