Black Appointed Officials

Abstract

In the emergent literature on black political participation and power in the United States, there is a lack of attention to black appointed officials as a subgroup in the burgeoning black politician class. Rather, there is almost an exclusive preoccupation with black elected officials. At the state and local level there is descriptive research analyzing aggregate gains of blacks in elected office (Conyers and Wallace, 1976; Campbell and Feagin, 1975), assessing the electoral base of black officeholding (Murray and Vedlitz, 1978; Hadden et al., 1968; Bullock, 1975), analyzing the attitudes and beliefs of black office holders (Cole, 1976; Salamon, 1973), analyzing the structure of ambition and the leadership recruitment process (Stone, 1980; Eisinger, 1978), and looking at the impact of black office holding on public policy (Keller, 1978; Jones, 1978; Watson, 1980). And at the national level there is a small body of literature on the black members of Congress and their organization, the Congressional Black Caucus (Barnett, 1975;