Every time the Committee looks down and done, it pulls itself together and comes back swinging.

Whether the strong showings by its endorsees in Tuesday's elections -- especially the upset victories of Joe Bowser for county commissioner and Jonathan Alston for school board -- are true signs of Committee clout or just Barack Obama spinoffs will be debatable as long as anybody cares.

Still, the Committee is due a degree of respect if for no other reason than that it has endured as a political force in Durham for 73 years, and in that time accumulated a goodly share of trophies.

In 1928, there were just 50 black voters registered in Durham. Within four years of the Committee's formation in 1935, its get-out-the-vote drives had 3,000 blacks registered -- 13 percent of the total in a Jim Crow county 25 percent black.

For comparison, in 1944 the demographically similar town of Winston-Salem had just 300 blacks on the voting books.

Credit for conceiving the organization (originally, Committee on Negro Affairs) is variously distributed, but attorney Conrad O. Pearson and N.C. College (now NCCU) dean J.T. Taylor were in at the start, and C.C. Spaulding, head of N.C. Mutual Insurance, was the founding chairman.

By 1936, the Committee's work had nine blacks named delegates to the county Democrats' convention, and it was making common cause with organized labor. That connection would pay off after World War II, when the Committee, unions and liberal whites took the old guard on and won.

That coalition got progressive war hero Dan K. Edwards elected mayor in 1949. Two years later, it backed the first two women to win City Council seats -- Katherine R. Everett and Mary Duke Biddle Trent (later Semans), as well as Mutt Evans, a Jewish merchant who went on to six re-elections as mayor.

One of the Committee's own, R.N. Harris, won a City Council seat in 1953. By then, the Committee had already been instrumental in getting school improvements, a park and swimming pool for blacks and black policemen on the city force.

For decades, the Committee was an effective machine, getting its people to the polls and holding their votes to its party line.

For all its successes, though, the Committee was and remained a creation of the Parrish Street financial elite. As the civil rights movement evolved, critics of the status quo -- particularly Louis Austin, firebrand publisher of The Carolina Times -- took the Committee and its leadership to task for not being aggressive and outspoken enough in the cause.

Generations pass away and times really do change -- sometimes, a very great deal. Whatever its future, the Durham Committee has done a great deal to create Durham's present -- not to mention the county commissioners' next four years.