By Jim O'Sullivan

People are waiting for Charles Calvin Yancey.

Outside the Dunkin' Donuts on City Hall Plaza, two men are expecting Yancey, Democrat of Dorchester and District 4 City Councillor in the City of Boston, for a Thursday afternoon campaign strategy session. He is 10 minutes late.

The next morning, Yancey will launch what his staff terms "the first official political volley" in his incumbent campaign against challenger Ego Ezedi. Ten terms, 20 years in office, now a stern test. No mere referendum on the utility of Yancey as a public servant, this; it's a dogfight in Four, and no one without a piece of the action wants to bet the house on either side.

"Flip a coin," says Larry DiCara, a former councillor and a close watcher of local politics. "Right now, it's too early to tell."

Outside the donut shop, Bill Murray and Michael Sheehan have concerns with Yancey's punctuality, which the councillor's staff acknowledges is not a standout trait. Murray, who works in the Boston office of Massachusetts Institute for Social and Economic Research, places a call up to Yancey's fifth-floor office. Along with Sheehan, a Malden city councillor, he waits another 15 minutes.

Now Yancey appears, black hair slicked back, the crown of his head bald and a just-barely-noticeable fringe of steel-gray around the sides. He greets the two men, shakes a few more hands - he is always nicely dressed and ever affable - and they find a table at a Starbuck's next door. He is late, but not so late that they have left.

They have waited for him, for Charles Yancey (though just say "Charles" and in City Hall and District Four everyone knows of whom you speak). He is the 54-year-old warhorse battle-scarred by countless ideological wars, was the City Council's first African-American president, was for a long time the Council's lone voice in the wilderness shouting for quixotic causes to deaf ears, and now is a senior statesman with a good deal of worry about a young comer who is enjoying media-darling status and guidance from on high office and who-knows-where.

Will others wait, too, or has time run out for Charles Yancey?

He is Dorchester's longest-serving elected official, grew up in Roxbury the son of a politically active mother and the sixth of eight brothers and two sisters. "I learned how to negotiate early in life," he jokes.

After an education in Boston public schools, he earned an economic degree at Tufts and later a Master's in public administration at Harvard, carrying signs in the civil rights movement the whole way. He worked in urban finance and development in the private sector, stepped up his involvement in grassroots political involvement, lost Council races in 1979 and 1981. In 1983, he ran again and won.

It was the year Ray Flynn won the keys to the mayor's office, where Yancey would battle him for the next decade. It was the year Tom Menino won a seat on the Council, the start of a two-decade relationship of, to put it delicately, not always locked step. It was the first year of the appointed school committee, a policy Yancey still blasts.

And it was the first year of the district city councillor, the Council grown from nine to 13. Yancey acknowledges today that the first year of district elections helped facilitate his ascendancy, and calls this year's ballot "a struggle for the hearts and minds of the people of District Four and, by extension, the City of Boston."

It is here, in the various incarnations of District Four, where Yancey has raised three sons and a daughter, in the house on Hooper Street in the residential Melville-Park area off Codman Square. Here is where he makes his stand, not in the resolutions about the war in Iraq or on the delegation he led last November to Ghana to increase foreign trade. Here is where he runs the Charles C. Yancey Book Fair, now in its 17th year, with more than 100,000 books handed free to more than 13,000 schoolchildren over the years.

It is in District Four that he hopes there is a plurality of voters like Mildred Augustine, a teacher's assistant at Jackson Mann Elementary.

"Every time you call him, he's there," Augustine says. "Even when he has two or three meetings, he'll come by, even if it's for five or 10 minutes.

"He's a strong man, he'll speak up, and a lot of people don't like that. A lot of people don't like him because, when the mayor says something, [Yancey] don't back down. He stands for his views."

City school buses now have crossing arms. Charles Yancey put them there, got the ear of Superintendent of Schools Thomas Payzant early on, and pressed for crossing arms to be affixed to the front of all school buses, to prevent children getting off the bus from walking in front of the bus as it started to move. Payzant asked for a demonstration, so Yancey arranged for a bus to be driven onto City Hall Plaza.

"If ever you see a bus in the City of Boston without a crossing arm, you can tell it's not a Boston Public School bus, because if it was, it would be in violation of the law," he says. "It's a small thing, but …"

But… over 20 years, there are a lot of small things. Ezedi charges that the incumbent's record is long "by default," a result of time elapsed, and Yancey detractors, emboldened by the notion of a strong challenger, deride Yancey as a councillor not committed to the minutiae of constituent concerns that keep the council in business.

"Charles Yancey's big hurdle is to get focused on bread-and-butter issues," says one high-level City Hall source. "And Ego Ezedi's going to beat his door in, because Ego Ezedi is focused on bread-and-butter issues."

"This is the kicker," Ezedi says. "When I was [working as Boston coordinator for Congressman Michael Capuano], I would be out at the meetings, neighborhood meetings, people would see me when they weren't seeing their city councillor, and they're asking me, who works for a federal elected official, to help them turn on a streetlight or to help them fill a pothole or remove an abandoned car."

Yancey labels any accusation that he fails to operate in the pothole world of city politics "a bald-faced lie." And he is ready with a litany of tangible results. He ticks off the B-3 police station at the corner of Blue Hill and Morton, the Gallivan Community Center, the community center on Mildred Avenue, and points to rising housing values.

"I'm not claiming sole credit for any of this, but working with people in the public and private sectors, particularly community activists, and the administration, we've been able to get a lot done," he says. "And there's no comparison between the way District Four looks now and the way it did when I was elected."

His foes on the City Council, tired of Yancey's shrill contrarian rhetoric, contend that the district would be served better by fresh blood.

"He's viewed as silly and irrelevant," says Council President Michael Flaherty, an at-large councillor. "And he's a good guy, he's a decent human being, and he's pretty sharp.

"But he misses the boat on the willingness to work with one another, to listen to someone else's point-of-view."

Yancey's campaign announcement, Friday in his Blue Hill Ave. campaign headquarters, is attended by, among others, a regiment of determined-looking elected officials. Councillors Felix Arroyo, Maura Hennigan, and Chuck Turner stand with him. State Rep. Gloria Fox sends a statement, and state Senator Dianne Wilkerson is fierce in her endorsement.

"This community is not going to be served by someone who would be part of the team. What's the team? What's the team done?" Wilkerson demands, framing the campaign as one "about the right of a community to defend its own independence."

Wilkerson's inference is that outsiders are meddling, an implicit Yancey campaign theme that Ezedi's backing is rooted outside the district. The concept exists among District Four voters, suspicion fostered by other Council members - Rob Consalvo in Hyde Park, Maureen Feeney in District Three, Flaherty - throwing their weight behind Ezedi.

"I'd tell all the white guys who live elsewhere to be careful because it could backfire," says DiCara. "If I were them, I'd be wary to get too much into it."

Ezedi scoffs, "Simply put, all that stuff is just said: Ego being the white man's candidate, Ego having no experience. All that's just a way to take the focus off the issues; that's all. And what it's doing is further polarizing a stereotype that has kept the black community back for so long, and that it's us against them."

"Them" for Yancey, includes the media, whose coverage has been "aggressive and negative," ignorant of his record, "mean-spirited," spreading "very vicious falsehoods," he says. Articles have been slanted, facts have been wrong, and he has been victimized by a pile-on mentality, he says, by those who "are loath to recognize my record."

Even as incumbent, he sees himself as underdog, perhaps because it is so familiar.

Yancey and Ezedi cross paths at a Tuesday night campaign event, lobbying for a union endorsement at I.B.E.W. Hall on Freeport St., one stop in a string of a tiring night on the stump-speech trail.

It is three months until the people of District Four will decide between the two of them. Before then, there is the small matter of a Sept. 23 preliminary election, when Yancey will dispatch with Arthur Sutton, another Dorchester man, when insiders say the Yancey turnout will be an indicator of November's climax.

Tonight, each is accompanied by a pair of staffers: Yancey by Chief Information Officer Ken Yarborough and a slender young man in a T-shirt, Ezedi by Press Secretary Jack Kowalski and a slender young man in a T-shirt.

All four staffers watch warily as Ezedi approaches Yancey. The two rivals shake hands, their smiles all teeth and no eyes.

"I'm still waiting for your vote," Yancey says, and they both laugh.