Valerie Ervin for Roz Pelles

To: Montgomery County Central Committee
From: Valerie Ervin, Montgomery County Council District 5
Date: December 10, 2007
RE: Roz Pelles, Candidate for Delegate, District 18

Dear Central Committee Members,

It is with great sorrow and heavy hearts that we mourn the sudden passing of Delegate Jane Lawton. Jane Lawton and Roz Pelles were friends and allies. Roz entered this race for the vacant District 18 seat in the House of Delegats because she wants to honor the legacy of Jane Lawton, a great woman and a great fighter for District 18. Roz Pelles is that rare person who is a combination of her southern roots, growing up in the segregated south, her civil rights activism which began at an early age when she sat down in front of restaurants in Winston Salem, North Carolina to protest the right for black people to sit at lunch counters, her work in organized labor to promote and protect workers rights and the rights of all those who thirst for justice, and her most important job, that of raising three amazing sons. Roz has worked hard and accomplished a great deal in her life but I believe that the work that she has done has prepared her for the task at hand. Roz Pelles has all the qualifications that would make her a great delegate in the tradition of superb representation from District 18 in the House of Delegates in Annapolis. I support Roz Pelles because I believe that she is a great leader with strong values and is a person who will listen to her constituents on issues of importance and then she will lead and not follow. Roz is a woman of great moral conviction who has spent her entire life working to ensure that the promise of democracy is actualized through hard work in the community and by mentoring a new generation of young people to carry on the legacy of democracy and civil rights. Roz was the Executive Director of the National Rainbow Coalition a couple of years before Rev. Jackson made one of his most famous speeches at the Democratic National Convention in 2000. He said, “The lone arm of justice reaches neither for the political left nor the political right, but from the moral center. Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Politics asks the question, would it work? Morality asks the question, is it right? In the end, if it is morally right, politics and popularity has to adjust to the unyielding power of the moral center.” It is in this spirit that I raise my voice along with many others in this community who think that the time is right for a leader like Roz Pelles. Her appointment to the House of Delegates will be historic. She will be the first African American woman to serve in the Montgomery County Delegation.