Red, white, and black: three generations of African American politicians.

• Author: Gillespie, Andra

Ten years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Frederick Douglass found himself in a fight with fellow Republicans over the extent to which the party of Lincoln should demand the enforcement of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.

Douglass supported civil rights legislation that would enforce the amendments that freed the slaves and gave them equal social and voting rights, while many Republicans shrank from it, arguing that such legislation would amount to too much too soon and bring about a backlash from moderates and conservatives. Douglass, however, would not be cowed. In his column in The New National Era, he argued that Congress should enforce the Constitution, even if some people were uncomfortable with the pace of progress. We cannot wait, he wrote, "until the nation is educated up to giving us something more."

Douglass's defense of black political advocacy a century and a half ago highlights an abiding tension in American racial politics. Should civil rights activists work for swift or incremental change? Should black activists temper their demands in an attempt to win over skeptical nonblacks? Should fears of backlash temper efforts at racial redress? These questions have echoed throughout the past 150 years, recurring in the debates between W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, and in the tensions between Martin Luther King Jr. and accommodationists on his right and black nationalists on his left. In the past four decades, the debate has emerged yet again as racialized and deracialized black politicians have vied for political office and, in doing so, redefined the contours of modern African American politics.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights estimated that in 1964 there were only about 300 black elected officials in the United States. By 1970, that number had swelled to nearly 1,500, as many black activists, heeding civil rights leader Bayard Rustin's call to move "from protest to politics," began to run for elective office for the first time. While many of these so-called "first black" politicians, like Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes and California Congressman Ron Dellums, made conciliatory overtures to their nonblack constituents, issues of race defined their candidacies and their tenures in office. Socialized in black activist movements and informed by their personal experiences with de facto and de jure racism, these politicians actively courted black voters and embraced civil rights issues as part of their campaign platforms. Most often, their campaign rhetoric made note of the historic significance of their candidacies and emphasized policy issues, like police brutality or affirmative action, that were designed as overtures to blacks.

As a result, trailblazing politicians like Detroit Mayor Coleman Young and Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson often faced steep opposition from white voters. Many whites at the time feared that black elected officials would institute punitive policies in retaliation for Jim Crow. Others expressed doubts about the competence of black politicians; some were merely prejudiced. At the mayoral level, many in this first wave of black politicians won office only after white voters split their votes between two white candidates, or after large numbers of whites had fled the city. Through the early 2980s, the first-black mayors of large cities...