Word: governor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Howard University, will be the embodiment of state government for the next four years. When he is inaugurated in January, he will command more day-to-day administrative power than any other elected black official in the nation's history. (P.B.S. Pinchback, hitherto the nation's only black Governor, served for just four weeks in Louisiana during Reconstruction.) But there is also an important symbolic dimension to Wilder's election. It is sobering to remember that just one other black has been elected to major statewide office since Reconstruction: former Republican Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts. Only two black Congressmen...
...Washington suburbs of northern Virginia, crosses Richmond and heads east to the bustling Tidewater area around Norfolk. Although no Democratic presidential contender has carried Virginia since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, the party has controlled state government since the 1981 election of L.B.J.'s son- in-law, the popular Governor (and now Senator) Chuck Robb. The respected current Governor, Gerald Baliles, cannot succeed himself under state law. As political scientist Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia puts it, "I think of Virginia today more as a Middle Atlantic state than a Southern state...
...Wilder was forced to eke out such a narrow victory only because he was a black candidate. The most common benchmark is to measure Wilder's vote against the come-from-behind 54% to 46% triumph of Democrat Donald Beyer over Edwina ("Eddy") Dalton in the battle for Lieutenant Governor. What gives piquancy to this comparison is that Beyer, a Volvo dealer and political neophyte, was running against the widow of a former Governor. "Wilder would have won a victory similar to Beyer's if he had been white," contends Sabato. But this is a bit facile...
...this Byzantine maneuvering was but a prelude to Wilder's breakthrough: his nomination for Lieutenant Governor in 1985. Virtually no leading white politicians wanted Wilder on the ticket; the issue was whether they would risk his wrath to keep him off. Wilder cemented a successful alliance with Baliles, the underdog for the gubernatorial nomination, because he was in the weakest position to resist a black running mate. "There were people in the Baliles campaign," Wilder recalled afterward, "who didn't want me on the ticket either...
...that men who fancied themselves learned penned some of the last erudite-sounding but morally bankrupt justifications for segregation. And it will be in Richmond on Jan. 13 that there will be a black hand on the Bible when Lawrence Douglas Wilder is sworn in as Virginia's 73rd Governor. It is not only in Berlin that ugly walls and once impassable barriers are tumbling down in a world bright with change...