The DNC Race Riot: What black anger means for the Democrats.(some within the Democratic National Committee are determined to continue to contest the Florida vote count)

Maxine Waters was livid. "If Maynard Jackson does not get taken care of so he can represent us inside this party," she told delegates at the Democratic National Committee's winter gathering in Washington, "there ain't gonna be no meeting to elect nobody else!" Waters, the six-term congresswoman and one-time head of the Congressional Black Caucus, was trying to build support for Jackson, the former Atlanta mayor who was a late entry into the race for party chairman. But fundraiser Terry McAuliffe, with the backing of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had already locked up more than enough votes to win. With the election just hours away, Waters made a frankly racial appeal on Jackson's behalf, taking pains to "remind" black delegates that they should vote for the former mayor. And part of her appeal was the threat to disrupt the whole winter meeting. "We had to do it that way," Waters later explained.

Since Jackson was sure to lose, what Waters really wanted was a set of concessions from McAuliffe-a big title for Jackson, new staff, more power within the party-and, in the end, she got most of what she wanted. In return for Jackson's promise to drop his challenge, McAuliffe awarded Jackson the newly created position of "National Development Chair," which gives him control of a variety of equal- opportunity programs inside the DNC, as well as of the party's new Voting Rights Institute. "We are a united party with one mission," Jackson said in a let-bygones-be-bygones statement released after the agreement.

But the Democrats are not at all united. The story of the winter meeting-the late-night negotiating sessions, the demands, and the threats of racial confrontation that led to the Jackson settlement-is an ominous development for the Democratic leadership. The party has within its ranks a group of angry activists who might through sheer force of will chart the party's direction in the next couple of years. The group-made up of a relatively small portion of the DNC's black caucus, plus some white allies-is convinced that Al Gore won the presidential election, and it plans to re-fight the Florida vote for months and years to come, even at the expense of planning future races. For now, centrist Democrats can only hope the firebrands' influence fades soon. If it doesn't, the Democrats, so close to victory last year, may be headed toward a 1980s-style electoral wilderness.

The Jackson candidacy, for all the passion it inspired, was a relatively brief affair. It began in mid December, when, during a conference call of DNC executive-committee members, officials said chairman Joe Andrew was leaving and McAuliffe would run for the job. Waters took that as an announcement of a fait accompli-others on the call didn't hear it that way-and said she was angry that black Democrats hadn't been consulted. She mentioned Jackson as a possible candidate to oppose McAuliffe.

"His phone jumped off the hook after she threw his name out there," says Daniel Halperin, Jackson's business partner in Atlanta who would come to run the Jackson campaign. "But it was an uphill battle." That is an understatement. There are about 450 delegates who are allowed to vote for DNC chairman. By January 1, McAuliffe had in his hand signed endorsements from more than 300 of them, a total that rose as the month went on. In addition, his support cut across racial lines, with at least two-thirds of the 90 members of the black caucus in the McAuliffe corner. Altogether, it appeared that Jackson might not be able to muster more than 40 votes party-wide.

On more than one occasion, Jackson suggested the whole election was rigged; he called it "a Florida inside the DNC." But many delegates looked at it another way: What sense did it make to support a candidate who could barely make a dent in McAuliffe's lead? Wouldn't that be a self-marginalizing strategy? "I couldn't figure out why Maynard was in," says Alice Huffman, a longtime Democratic activist and black- caucus member who became a key McAuliffe supporter. "I didn't see why we should just all team up because we were black and put the party in the position that if Terry won, then we weren't with [the party]."

The winter meeting began on Thursday, February 1, with the election scheduled to take place the following Saturday morning. That gave both sides just two days to avoid a potentially divisive standoff. On Thursday, after a day filled with meetings and cocktail receptions and dinners, Jackson and McAuliffe got together for a negotiating session that began at 11 p.m. in McAuliffe's campaign headquarters on the ground floor of the Capitol Hyatt Hotel. With them were Waters, Huffman, Halperin, Harold Ickes, former chairman Don Fowler, and a few others. It turned out to be a long night.