Broward elected official’s past use of ‘n-word’ surfaces in campaign ad

A campaign advertisement that’s landed in mailboxes of southeast Broward voters is reminding them about School Board member Ann Murray’s past use of a racist epithet used to denigrate African-Americans.

The mailer comes from supporters of one of her opponents. “We don’t need a racist on the School Board. We don’t need Ann Murray,” the ad declares.

It features news headlines from 2011 and 2014 about her use of the “n-word.”

Murray used the word in 2007 when she was a supervisor in the School District’s transportation department. She was with a group of employees providing transportation services during the Super Bowl when she referred to watching a previous football game in the “n—–” section at the top of what is now known as Hard Rock Stadium.

Her use of the word wasn’t widely known when Murray won a 2008 special election and won a full, four-year term in 2010.

After it became public in 2011, Murray apologized and rejected calls by some civil rights and political leaders that she resign.

It was an issue in her 2014 re-election effort, when she narrowly won re-election with 51 percent of the vote.

Murray is running for another term in the the Aug. 28 School Board election for District 1, which takes in much of southeast Broward including Hollywood, Hallandale Beach and Dania Beach.

The district’s registered voters are 42 percent white, 22 percent black, 27 percent Hispanic and 9 percent “other.”

As is typical for negative attacks, the mailer doesn’t make clear who sent it. It comes from “Citizen Action Inc.,” in Tallahassee. The address is a UPS Store.

Campaign finance filings with the state Division of Elections show the committee has been largely inactive since the 2016 elections. It’s received two contributions this year. One was for $100.

The second, on July 26, for $50,000, came from the Broward Teachers Union political committee.

The teachers union has endorsed Jim Silvernale, one of Murray’s three challengers.

The other candidates are Veronica Newmeyer and Natalia Garceau.

Murray has said her use of the n-word “was a slip of the lip” and apologized. “I am not a racist,” she said during her last re-election campaign.

Murray told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 2014 that she “didn’t say it to insult anyone and I certainly didn’t say it to hurt anyone’s feelings.”

She said it’s a word that she never used, except in this case, and thinks it came up because she grew up poor in Boston and occasionally was able to scrape together money to attend a game “up in the nosebleed section of Boston Garden. It wasn’t called the nosebleed in Boston at the time.”

Partial transcript of 2014 Sun Sentinel interview with Murray

“I was talking to one person and I included myself in the remark that I said, OK. I said we. I realize that [the person who complained] was upset with me and I apologized to her… it was something that if you talk to my own children, they weren’t brought up, my husband and I didn’t use the word they certainly were never allowed to use it. And when we discussed it as a family because it was an embarrassing thing for me to have put myself in, and they said Ma you have to be kidding us. And I said no I’m not. I said it was a very unfortunate situation. How did it happen? We were at the Orange Bowl game and it was pouring down rain, we were servicing the Super Bowl game, and transportation, we had done this in various situations. I think we did the Super Bowl game prior to the one that we were at, and we were standing out there with umbrellas as buses came in and we shuttled people from parking lots to the stadium and I said to [the person who complained], I says, ‘God do you remember when we were here for the Dolphins and Bills games and we sat up in the nosebleed section?. And you can take the ‘n’ and use it whichever way you want. And that was the conversation between her and I. And she looked at me like and what did you say?…

“The thing is I certainly didn’t say it to insult anyone and I certainly didn’t say it to hurt anyone’s feelings….

“I grew up in Boston, OK. From a poor Irish family. I’m a first generation American. It’s a sports town. As a young person, we used to go to the Boston Gardens all the time as kids. And it was like a quarter, 35 cents, which in that point in time was very hard to collect that kind of money. But as young people, we always sat up in the nosebleed section of Boston Garden.

“It wasn’t called the nosebleed in Boston at that time. And really what I think about, when I sat back and I thought about where did that remark come from, it was something that I heard as a child. My family did not use the word. We were my husband and I didn’t use it. My children don’t use it. They have many black friends in West Park. And they were just shocked. They said Ma we couldn’t believe it that this happened to you. I said well I said it and I apologize. There’s no more I can say about it.”

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