Black Officeholders Research Articles

Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction by Gordon C. Rhea

Reviewed by: Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction by Gordon C. Rhea Caroline Wood Newhall (bio) Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction. By Gordon C. Rhea. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. 200. Cloth, $29.95.) Gordon C. Rhea’s latest work on Stephen A. Swails is a welcome and compelling biography of a “long-forgotten central participant” in the “political history [of Kingstree, South Carolina], in the story of African Americans’ participation in the Civil War, and in South Carolina’s Reconstruction experience” (xi–xii). Swails, a Black Pennsylvanian who achieved fame as the first Black commissioned officer in the history of the United States, spent his life after the war dedicated to the intertwined causes of justice, Black equality, and uplift through education and property holding in South Carolina. This quick read serves as an informative microhistory of the tumultuous events that informed Swails’s life from the early 1830s to his death in 1900. As Rhea notes, “Biographies of the nearly 200,000 African Americans who fought in the war are exceedingly rare” (xii), and his research into Swails is a necessary step in bringing greater attention to Swails and to the devastatingly difficult circumstances African Americans faced in the South after the Civil War. Earlier works have examined Swails’s career to some degree, [End Page 266] including Eric Foner’s Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Office-holders during Reconstruction (1996) and William E. Jenkinson III’s Stephen A. Swails: Soldier, Politician, and Lawyer (1998), but no published works have so thoroughly examined Swails’s life from childhood, to his military service, to his tumultuous career in Reconstruction-era South Carolina as a member of the Freedmen’s Bureau and later the state legislature. The book is composed of eleven brief chapters. The first six largely focus on the lead-up to the Civil War and the service of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, as well as background information on reactions to Black soldiers and their experiences in war. Chapters 7 through 11 deal with Swails’s postwar life and career and form the bulk of original research and insights that make this work a significant contribution to the historiography of the period. Rhea relies on the research of Hugh MacDougall, an attorney in Cooperstown, New York, and Jenkinson, an attorney in South Carolina, as well as Swails’s personal papers, Freedmen’s Bureau records, and Swails’s correspondence with South Carolina governors and federal officials. Rhea’s work is a welcome addition to the field wherein the complexities of Reconstruction and the persistent terrorism embittered white supremacists used against African Americans and pro-equality whites receives significant examination. As such, it is in good company with the work of historians such as Cynthia Nicoletti, Bradley Proctor, Benjamin Ginsberg, and Adam Domby, and presents an excellent discussion of South Carolina’s highly contested postwar elections. Rhea’s discussion in chapter 9 of white supremacists’ use of violence to undermine democratic processes is especially rich in detail on the challenges that people like Swails and his family faced, as well as the connections between violent events in South Carolina, the passage of federal legislation such as the Ku Klux Klan Act in 1871, and the end of Reconstruction with the election of Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency in 1877. Rhea illuminates Swails’s involvement in these processes, including a near firefight on the floor of the state legislature in 1876 and a horrifying day in 1878 wherein Red Shirt members of the Democratic Executive Committee nearly lynched Swails in front of one of his children. White residents threatened to execute Swails if he remained in South Carolina, while both President Hayes and Governor Wade Hampton, a former Confederate, proclaimed they could do nothing about it. This violent intimidation and thwarting of justice meant that Swails was forced to live in Washington, D.C., for the next twenty-two years while his family, whom he often visited, remained in Kingstree, South Carolina. One critique of this work is that Swails’s story does not begin in earnest until chapter 7, in part...

Whitelashing: Black Politicians, Taxes, and Violence

This paper provides the first evidence of the effect of tax policy on violent attacks against Black politicians. I find a positive effect of local tax revenue on subsequent violence against Black politicians. A dollar increase in per capita county taxes in 1870 increased the likelihood of a violent attack by more than 25 percent. The result is robust to controls for numerous economic, historical, and political factors. I also find counties where Black officeholders were attacked have the largest tax reversions. This provides the first quantitative evidence that Reconstruction political violence was specifically related to Black political efficacy.

Forgotten Legacy: William McKinley, George Henry White, and the Struggle for Black Equality

To secure his party's nomination in 1896, William McKinley courted Black Republicans. George Henry White, a Black attorney elected to Congress from North Carolina that same year, was an ardent McKinley supporter. Benjamin R. Justesen, the author of a 2001 biography of White, documents the fitful political partnership between McKinley and the congressman. Justesen argues, first, that biographers of McKinley have minimized his commitment to African American political equality; and second, that White and McKinley orchestrated the largest number of Black appointments to federal positions of any president. (Despite civil service reforms a decade earlier, both parties still expected their presidents to reward loyalists.) Justesen argues that “McKinley's role as a sincere friend and benefactor of African Americans may be among the best-kept secrets of American political history” (p. 2). White came to office at a precarious moment for Black rights. Raised on his free family's turpentine farm, he earned a law degree at Howard University and served in the North Carolina legislature before running for Congress. An erudite speaker, he stumped for McKinley during the 1896 campaign. Yet the importance of Black votes to Republican candidates was waning. Southern states were flagrantly stripping African Americans of the franchise. During White's first term, white supremacists carried out a violent coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, to oust Black officeholders. In 1900 the state's voters approved an amendment to the state constitution to disfranchise Black residents. White used his prominence in Congress to implore his fellow Republicans to stop this violation of the Fifteenth Amendment.

The Risen Phoenix: Black Politics in the Post–Civil War South. by Luis-Alejandro Dinnella-Borrego

Reviewed by: The Risen Phoenix: Black Politics in the Post–Civil War South. by Luis-Alejandro Dinnella-Borrego Michael W. Fitzgerald (bio) The Risen Phoenix: Black Politics in the Post–Civil War South. By Luis-Alejandro Dinnella-Borrego. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Pp. 233. Cloth, $49.50.) Let's accentuate the positive. This is a nuanced work reflecting on black congressmen during Reconstruction and its aftermath. Through an appreciative examination of six leaders, Dinnella-Borrego shows that they disagreed on a lot. But having determined to provide a deromanticized version of what these beleaguered legislators could accomplish, the author could have gone farther. These six congressmen were relatively prominent. They were James Rapier of Alabama, Josiah Walls of Florida, John Roy Lynch of Mississippi, Robert Smalls of South Carolina, John Mercer Langston of Virginia, and George White of North Carolina. They seem a plausible cross-section of the postwar era's twenty black House members. Still, the author never explains why he chose these individuals, beyond the existence of relatively ample evidence, three of them having written autobiographies. The tone is upbeat, with the author twice framing the study as an antecedent to the age of Obama. The author dissents from scholars such as Thomas Holt and Steven Hahn who see these leaders as elitists, locked into a political structure that diminished their ability to speak for the impoverished masses. "This critique is largely unjustified," Dinnella-Borrego concludes (6). The author emphasizes the relationship between these leaders and their grassroots constituency, rather than the machinations of Washington power politics. He also demonstrates quite tangibly that black congressmen were not monolithic, that especially after Redemption they differed on issue after issue as the wider political climate chilled. In general, this study approaches black officeholders with an appreciation of the practical constraints under which they operated. They were locked as junior partners in an interracial Republican Party, but they were not sellouts: "they did their jobs well" and their constituents took pride in them. Though they favored negotiation and compromise in their congressional roles, they also "functioned as national spokesmen for all African Americans" (216). This nuanced emphasis makes Dinnella-Borrego helpfully attentive to real-world constraints. In particular, he highlights the generational conflict between the older Republican officeholders and the younger generation of unelected black activists, like Ida Wells and T. Thomas Fortune, who saw themselves as protest leaders per se. And because this study extends beyond the normal Redemption endpoint of 1877, it enables exploration of the fluid political alignments of the 1880s and 1890s, as agrarian movements challenged the two-party order. This [End Page 341] is complicated political terrain, marked by apparent opportunistic shifts, and it is refreshing to see a knowledgeable take on how African American leaders responded. As should be evident, this book has much to recommend it. The discussion of what black congressmen actually did, and what the institutional constraints were, is refreshingly concrete. That said, having determined on a realist defense of these legislators, the author could have pursued that line more consistently. Dinnella-Borrego notes in his introduction that his subjects fought "for patronage and other government improvements," but he seldom recurs to the topic of government jobs again, once mentioning it in the context of corruption (6). This oversight understates the centrality of patronage, an abiding practical obsession of Reconstruction politics; patronage provided a tangible civil rights demand that tied black activists to the political structure. Nor does the author talk much about the related Reconstruction factional divisions—the Radical-versus-moderate conflicts—that facilitated black leaders' rise to elective office. One might expect discussion of the quadrennial presidential nomination process, which enabled black Republicans to maintain some modest bargaining power even after their party had abandoned Reconstruction. And the opposition Democrats did not "unwittingly" promote black officeholding through racial gerrymandering; they consciously did it to maintain control elsewhere and to hold their restive agrarian constituency in line (151). The book would have profited from a review of the published Ulysses S. Grant papers, especially since the congressmen Dinnella-Borrego examines so often acted as loyal foot soldiers for Republican administration policy. Given the Gilded Age context, and the Republicans...

Performance and race in evaluating minority mayors.

This research compares a performance model to a racial model in explaining approval of a black mayor. The performance model emphasizes citizen evaluations of conditions in the city and the mayor's perceived effectiveness in dealing with urban problems. The racial model stipulates that approval of a black mayor is based primarily on racial identification or racism. A model of mayoral approval is tested with two surveys over different years of citizens in a city that has had 20 years' experience with black mayors. Findings indicate that performance matters when evaluating black mayors, indicating that the national performance models of presidential approval are generalizable to local settings with black executives. Implications for black officeholders are discussed. However, the racial model is alive and well, as indicated by its impact on approval and the finding that, in this context, performance matters more to white voters than to black voters. A final, highly tentative conclusion is offered that context conditions the relative power of these models. The performance model may explain more variation in approval of the black mayor than the racial model in a context of rapidly changing city conditions that focuses citizen attention on performance, but during a period of relative stability the two models are evenly matched.

The Tennessee Black Caucus of State Legislators

Beginning in the late 1880s, the state legislature approved laws disenfranchising a number of Black voters in Tennessee and made it virtually impossible for the continued election of Black officeholders. Indeed, only 17 Black Tennesseans held elective office from 1885 to 1900 (Cartwright, 1976; Scott, 1964). The landmark reapportionment case Baker v. Carr (1962), which challenged malapportionment in the state legislative body, provided the constitutional precedent that eventually led to the creation of several majority Black districts in Tennessee. As a result of this Supreme Court decision and other apportionment cases (Reynolds v. Sims, 1964; Wesberry v. Sanders, 1964), states were forced to reapportion their legislative districts. The 1964 election of attorney Archie Walter (A. W.) Willis, Jr., the first Black legislator in the state since Reconstruction, was but one important tangible political outcome of these court rulings. This longitudinal study examines the role of race in the Tennessee General Assembly from 1970 to 1988. The study relies heavily on interviews with various Black caucus members and three other sources: Abstracts of Public Chapters (Office of Legislative Ser-

The South Carolina Legislative Black Caucus, 1970 to 1988

V. 0. Key observed that the legislature in South Carolina gives direction, cohesion, and continuity to the politics of the state (Key, 1949, p. 2). The South Carolina legislature, similar to legislatures throughout the South, was a bastion of prejudice and reactionary social policy (Willingham, 1985, p. 3). It was both a product and vehicle of the state's racist and undemocratic social order. The social order was characterized by a political system in which race determined the administration and distribution of public goods and services that affected the quality of everyday life. African Americans were excluded from public administration and the decision-making process. Public officials extracted revenue from the Black community without providing that community with public goods and services. The political system reinforced the exploitation in the workplace (Reed, 1979). Thus, the election of African Americans to the South Carolina legislature in the 1970s represented a significant departure from the state's political history. Seated in a powerful political institution from the state, Black legislators could now challenge the traditional conservative and anti-Black orientation of the general assembly. This study focuses on the issue of Black legislators' responsiveness to the Black community of South Carolina. As Michael B. Preston asserted, adequate representation of Black demands as well as the potential that Black interests may prevail over conflicting White preferences require that there be Black officeholders to translate these demands into policy (Preston, 1974, p. 198).

Double Reverse Discrimination

Double Reverse Discrimination Steven F. Lawson (bio) J. Morgan Kousser. Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. 590 pp. Figures, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). In their long and torturous struggle for racial equality following the end of slavery, African Americans counted the right to vote as essential to winning full freedom. Reconstruction gave newly emancipated black southerners their first opportunity to cast ballots and elect members of their own race to public office. As participants in biracial governments, they helped bring to the war-devastated South public school systems, internal improvements, and progressive state constitutions. However, their pride of accomplishment proved short-lived as Reconstruction gave way to Redemption, and by the turn of the twentieth century, white southern conservatives regained political control and disfranchised most of the African-American electorate. Nevertheless, the legacy of this pioneering suffrage experience did not die. Regaining the franchise became critical to restoring freedom and full citizenship. Blacks challenged their loss of voting rights in the courts but to no avail. In 1876, a year before the last Union troops withdrew from the South, the Supreme Court decided that the federal government lacked the power to protect citizens from intimidation and violence in state and local elections. 1 Two decades later, while the high tribunal in Plessy v. Ferguson upheld racial segregation, the justices also validated poll taxes and literacy tests that white southern officials implemented to disqualify blacks from voting. 2 With the ballot central to their quest for freedom, black plaintiffs did not give up on the courts. Their persistence paid off in 1944, when the Supreme Court outlawed the Democratic white primary that excluded blacks from the only meaningful election in the South. 3 This judicial triumph stimulated black voter registration, but legal rulings by themselves did not crack the wall of white supremacist resistance that arose in the 1950s to keep the black electorate from expanding. Not until civil rights protests in the 1960s forced the federal government to respond positively did Congress pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This potent piece of legislation finally led to the elimination of the remaining legal obstacles to black [End Page 477] voter registration and provided the federal government, largely through the Justice Department, with the necessary power to enforce the law. The passage and enforcement of the Voting Rights Act guaranteed the reenfranchisement of the majority of African Americans and sparked the election of thousands of black officeholders in the South. The successes of the Second Reconstruction have exceeded those of the first and have proven more durable. In contrast to the post-Civil War period, until recently, the Supreme Court in the post-Civil Rights era generally supported black political empowerment. Starting with a series of rulings in 1969, the high bench interpreted the Voting Rights Law to cover not only registration and voting but also methods of conducting elections. 4 The court recognized that state legislatures might use redistricting to establish boundary lines that reduced or eliminated the possibility that black voters could elect candidates they favored. Furthermore, local governments could reach the same end by holding elections at large instead of by districts. The justices considered these and other arrangements examples of improper vote dilution if they were adopted with a racially discriminatory intent or produced a racially biased effect. Congress agreed with this interpretation as it renewed the act three times in 1970, 1975, and 1982 with the expansive court decisions in mind. As a result, a growing number of legislative districts in the South for state and national offices were drawn with a majority-black population, thereby promoting the election of a larger number of minority representatives than ever before. However, the legislative and judicial consensus favorable to minority voting rights came under assault in the mid 1990s. Opponents of affirmative action, including some liberals who had originally supported passage of the Voting Rights Act, contended that lawmakers did not have a constitutional obligation to fashion electoral procedures that would effectively increase the chance of electing minority officeholders, just as they could not use race to...

Florida's black public officials, 1867-1924

Florida's Black Public Officials, 1867-1924. By Canter Brown, Jr. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. Pp. xiii, 252. Illustrations, introduction, biographical directory, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95, paper.) Florida, like Arkansas and Texas, is an often neglected comer of the old Confederacy. It has been over two decades since any major work focused upon African Americans or the political during the postCivil War years in Florida. This is an unfortunate oversight given that just before the outbreak of hostilities between the North and South and during the early years of Reconstruction, black Floridians accounted for almost half the state's population. In fact, the desire of Florida blacks to participate in politics surfaced immediately after Lee's surrender when over 150 African Americans cast ballots in municipal elections in the town of Fernandina. President Andrew Johnson effectively quashed this effort. In Freedom's Lawmakers (1993), Eric Foner attempted a compendium of southern black officeholders during Reconstruction, but admitted that he had certainly overlooked a considerable number. Canter Brown, Jr.'s new work on Florida demonstrates what Foner was up against. In the end, Brown writes, with respect to Florida, the identities of about 600 different individuals who held substantive office came to light, but several hundred others may have been excluded because of sparse records (p. xi). This book proves that every southern state requires a separate study of black officeholders. Until this is complete, the names and background of obscure black politicians will be lost to history and the United States black political heritage will never be fully documented. Brown, the Historian-in-Residence at the Tampa Bay History Center, has uncovered a host of Florida black political participants overlooked by Foner. Identifying African-American politicians who served from the Reconstruction era (1865-1877) until the middle 1920s is a daunting task. Across the South, many served as delegates to constitutional conventions or were elected to local, county, or state offices. Their tenure has too often been ignored in the history of the postwar and Redeemer South, but they nonetheless served their constituents reasonably well and attempted to forge alliances with white politicians that would ensure justice, equal rights, and equality for the former slaves. Congress assumed control of Reconstruction in 1867 and enfranchised blacks. In Florida, blacks united with whites to form a coalition known as the Mule Team. Daniel Richards and a former Union officer, Liberty Billings, joined forces with Charles Pearce, the presiding elder of the Florida AME Church and William U. Saunders, a Maryland mulatto, to promote the Republican ticket. However, the political process divided white Loyalists, carpetbaggers, the state's principal black churches, and the black electorate generally (p. …

"The Vampire That Hovers Over North Carolina": Gender, White Supremacy, and the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898

ESSAY "The Vampire That Hovers Over North Carolina" Gender, White Supremacy, and the Wilmington Race Riot of 1 898 by Andrea Meryl Klrshenbaum ? ?? November 1 898 hundreds ofwhite men took to the streets of Wilmington, North Carolina, to retake the city from the clutches of "negro domination." The rioters began their day of death and destruction by reducing the offices of the local black newspaper to rubble. They then headed into the predominandy black section of the city, where shooting ensued. Most African Americans were defenseless against the onslaught ofwhite violence, destruction, and murder. Estimates vary widely, but by the end of the day, anywhere from 14 to 250 people, most ofthem black, were dead, and many prominent Republicans, Populists, and African Americans were banished or had fled the city in fear.1 The Wilmington race riot of 1898 marked the violent culmination of the Democratic party's white supremacy campaign in North Carolina. In their efforts to end political control by the Populist-Republican coalition, also known as Fusion , Democrats used the protection of white women as a rallying cry to unite white men in Wilmington and across North Carolina. The use ofwhite supremacist ideology to incite the riot is well documented in historical accounts, while the importance ofwomen and gender, defined here as societal expectations based on perceived sexual differences, is often ignored.2 Gender greatly influenced the power structure oflate-nineteenth-century political developments in North Carolina . Adding fuel to the fire of the white supremacist campaign, the combined power of gender ideology and sexual anxieties shaped the dynamics that led to the Wilmington race riot. The Democratic political machine effectively combined the fear of aggressive black male sexuality and the ideal of white female purity to create a sexualized and gendered political rhetoric that incited members ofthe white community to violence. Democratic, Populist, and Republican newspapers all used this rhetoric to greater and lesser advantage throughout the white supremacy campaign. In 1877 President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew all of the Federal troops remaining in the South, marking the end of Reconstruction. Across North Caroli- na, Republican control ended as Democrats regained the majority ofpolitical offices in elections held around this time. In Wilmington, Democrats had regained power one year earlier by electing a majority to the board of aldermen, the governing body of the city. As the Democratic party consolidated control after 1 877, the number of black officeholders and voters in North Carolina shrank rapidly. Party leaders then enacted several measures to ensure their continued power. Democrats gerrymandered Wilmington voting districts in order to reduce the political strength ofthe black population. Under the new system, blacks would be a majority in only one of the five wards even though they constituted 5 6 percent ofthe city's population. According to the city charter, each ward would elect two representatives to the board of aldermen; the board would then elect one of its members as mayor and fill the vacant position by election or appointment. As in many larger urban areas, the government of Wilmington consisted of a small cadre ofpowerful city bosses who ensured that people supportive of their views were elected to the board of aldermen.5 The Democrats held power in North Carolina until 1894, when they lost control ofboth houses ofthe legislature to the statewide fusion ofthe Populist and the Republican parties. "Frequent reminders of the turbulent era of carpetbaggers and scalawags had for years kept the mass ofwhite men voting solidly Democratic," notes historian Helen Edmonds. "But to many white farmers, by 1 894, the familiar cry of defending the state against Negro rule was becoming an outworn shibboleth."4 The Populist party was formed in the late 1 880s out of the Farmers' Alliance, an organization created to voice agrarian discontent with economic conditions across the South and Midwest. Prices for farm products had dropped steadily since the Civil War, and farmers were struggling to survive economically.5 The rural poor hoped that the creation of a new political party would give them a voice in government. Populist leaders initially employed the ideology ofwhite supremacy and excluded blacks from the party. In 1 892 Populist candidates wielded racist messages to...

Legislative Life in the 1990s: A Comparison of Black and White State Legislators

Although the number of black state legislators has increased dramatically in the last several decades, there is relatively little known about these important officeholders and how they compare to their white colleagues. Through a nationwide survey conducted in 1991-92, we gain some information on these legislators. The results depict some similarities among black and white legislators in terms of background characteristics and public policy concerns. The more obvious trends in the survey findings, however, are the many significant racial differences between these lawmakers, especially their perceptions of black legislative life and racial progress. While region, racial composition of district, party status, and gender serve to condition these racial disparities, significant differences in black-white legislative views remain. As more African Americans are elected to high state office, expectations that black officials may be able to address issues important to black (and perhaps other) citizens are raised. Following the 1994 elections, there were 529 black state legislators, more than three times as many as there were in 1969. The states, moreover, are the most fiscally healthy level of government, and this factor along with the increased devolution of power from Washington has propelled black state legislators to the forefront in terms of meeting minority needs. As important as black legislators are, surprisingly little is known about who they are, what they have accomplished, and what kinds of barriers they encounter. Even less is known about how they and their white colleagues view one another. Since African Americans are relatively new to most state legislatures, this lack of knowledge is not surprising. Yet it is important to know how white and black legislators work together, how their backgrounds compare, what their political ideologies and policy concerns are, and how white legislators perceive black officeholders' political actions. These racial comparisons are

Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction (review)

Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction (review)

Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction

(1994). Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 68-68.

Freedom's lawmakers: a directory of black officeholders during Reconstruction

Freedom's Lawmakers is the first comprehensive directory of America's first generation of black public officials--those who held office during the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War. With positions including congressman, justice of the peace, constable, and member of the legislature, the nearly 1500 officials listed here offer a panorama of the black community in all its diversity--freeborn and slave, Northern and Southern, rich and poor. The book draws on extensive research in the era's primary sources, and the voluminous literature on Reconstruction that has appeared in the past generation, providing information about the antebellum status, occupation, property ownership, military service, and other attributes of black officeholders. The concise biographies are augmented by 125 halftones, including seven composite photographs at the front of the book. In some cases, only a few pieces of information are available, but in a remarkable number of instances, the book traces the life histories of previously unknown individuals, most of them born as slaves, who played a role in America's first experiment in interracial democracy. The biographies follow many individuals into the twentieth century, illustrating the impact of these black Americans on post-Reconstruction society and the consequences for black Americans of the overthrow of Reconstruction.

Black Appointed Officials

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;

A Framework for the Analysis of Urban Black Politics

The analysis of urban black politics requires examining both the magnitude of the problems confronting black office holders at the municipal level and the politico-social context within which black leadership seeks to confront these problems. With regard to the former, typically cities with black leadership are older, poorer, and blacker than most in the United States. Problems of poverty long predate black political ascendancy and are usually not mitigated by federal or state income transfer policies. These problems have a ripple effect, hurting ghetto business, black and white, and diminishing choice with regard to housing, education and health care. With regard to understanding the socio-political context within which urban black leadership is exercised, the important factors are: (a) the political and moral inaccessibility of certain policies theoretically available to white leadership (for example, the "planned shrinkage" of low income communities via cuts in service as an alternative to citywide cuts in services); (b) the fiscal strain of varying degrees of severity; (c) the apportioning of power among city offices as reflected in the structure of city government; (d) the character of state and federal initiatives; and (e) racism as it is manifested in institutional and affective forms. This paper explicates each of these factors, addressing the policy impact of urban black leadership and the capacity of the formal political system to promote ghetto reform.

Black Officeholding and Political Development in the Rural South

Black officeholders in local governments in the rural South have not had significant success in reordering the priorities of the bodies on which they serve and they have enjoyed only limited success in increasing the black community’s share of benefits and services within the constraints of present priorities. Given their acute minority status this may be understandable.