Hometown Democracy Chairwoman Lesley Blackner says she didn’t know the phrase “step & fetch it” carried negative racial connotations when she used it in an e-mail to a Volusia County official last month.

Hometown Democracy is behind Amendment 4, a statewide ballot question that would require local governments to get voter approval before making any amendment to a comprehensive land use plan. In a May 13 e-mail to the director of the Volusia Council of Governments, Blackner wrote “I’m only too aware of your step & fetch it for the Chamber of Commerce crowd opposing Amendment 4.”

Both Blackner and the person to whom she addressed the e-mail are white.

The phrase is generally associated with black actor Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, a Key West native who used the stage name Stepin Fetchit in portraying shuffling, mumbling, servile movie characters in the 1930s and ’40s.

Former South Bay Mayor Clarence Anthony, an Amendment 4 opponent who is black, issued a statement today blasting Blackner for using “a term that is historically synonymous with degrading, racist stereotypes.”

Blackner, 50, said “I’ve used the phrase for years and had no idea anybody thought it had any racial overtones. If Mr. Anthony is offended, I’m sorry….I tell you what, I won’t use that term any more.”

A new book’s revelation that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was enthusiastic about Barack Obama’s presidential prospects because he is “light-skinned” and speaks “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one” created a firestorm over the weekend.

Republicans have blasted Reid and called for him to to step down from his leadership position while Democrats have generally circled the wagons in support of Reid.

Retired Lt. Col. Allen West, a black Republican running for a Palm Beach-Broward congressional seat, called Reid’s remarks “disgusting, despicable, and unacceptable. They are representative of how intellectual elite liberals do indeed speak of black Americans in their closed private spaces.”

But Debra Robinson, Palm Beach County’s only black school board member, said “I don’t see why it’s such an issue…I think that what he said was correct. My problem was he used the word ‘Negro,’ which is a bit outdated.”

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