EVA CLAYTON ASSOCIATES INTERNATIONAL - Key Persons
When Representative Walter Jones, Sr., announced his retirement in 1992, Clayton entered the Democratic primary to fill his seat. Recently reapportioned by the state legislature, the congressional district was one of two in North Carolina that had a black majority. Jones died in September 1992, and his son Walter, Jr., who was considered the favorite in the primary, captured 38 percent to Clayton's 31 but fell two points shy of winning the nomination outright. In the runoff, Clayton secured the support of her other primary opponents and won 55 percent to Jones's 45 percent. In the general election, Clayton ran on a platform of increased public investment and job training for rural areas in the district, which encompassed a large swath of eastern North Carolina including the towns of Goldsboro, Rocky Mount, and Greenville. She advocated slashing the defense budget to lower the federal deficit. "We went into the projects and knocked on doors and got people out" to vote, Clayton recalled. On November 3, 1992, she won the special election to fill the last two months of Walter Jones, Sr.'s unexpired term in the 102nd Congress (1991-1993) and defeated Republican Ted Tyler for a full term in the 103rd Congress (1993-1995). Mel Watt, an African American, also won election from a North Carolina district to the House on November 3, but because Clayton was elected to the 102nd Congress, she became the first African-American Representative from North Carolina since George White, who left Congress in 1901. In her subsequent four bids for re-election, she won comfortably, with 60 percent or more of the vote. She defeated Tyler three times, even in 1998, after court rulings reshaped the district once again by adding 165,000 new constituents and shrinking the African-American majority by 7 percent, effectively dividing the district between black and white constituents. In 2000, the GOP ran Duane E. Kratzer, Jr., who managed just 33 percent of the vote to Clayton's 66 percent.