The presidency wasn't the only elected office on the ballots around the country on Tuesday.
Scores of other political contests were held – and several of them produced some history-making results for black office seekers. In Richmond, former Virginia governor L. Douglas Wilder came out of retirement to win election as mayor of the city that once served as the capital of the Confederacy. In 1990, Wilder was sworn in as the state's first black governor.
Eighth-grade teacher Mike Blake also won a mayoral contest Tuesday when voters in Cocoa, Fla. made him that city's chief executive officer. Residents of Cocoa, whose population is 60 percent white, also elected a majority-black city council.
In Louisiana, state Sen. Melvin “Kip” Holden was elected mayor-president of East Baton Rouge
Parish, which includes the city of Baton Rouge. He defeated the city's white incumbent mayor by nearly 15,000 votes. The parish's population is 60 percent white and 40 percent black. Holden, a Democrat, beat Republican Mayor Bobby Simpson with the support of white voters.
“That’s a really big deal,” Wallace McMichael, a political scientist at Virginia State University, told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “We can’t forget the importance of that kind of accomplishment. It’s special. Those are critical races, and [black men] winning them doesn’t happen everyday.”
In other elections around the country, former Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry made a return to the political arena in dominating fashion. Barry, who spent six months in jail after being arrested for drug use in a 1990 FBI sting, won the city council seat in the city’s 8th ward. Barry won a landslide victory over his Republican opponent, Cardell Shelton, by taking 95 percent of the vote. Barry served four terms as mayor of the nation’s capital.
In Colleton County, S.C., George Malone became the first black man to be elected sheriff 36 years after he became the county’s first black deputy. Political observers said Malone, 60, won because he was able to get voters in a county that is nearly 60 percent white to cross both partisan and racial lines and vote for him.
Baltimore’s Democrat mayor won re-election Tuesday. Martin O’Malley, who is white, was re-elected mayor of the Maryland city with 87 percent of the vote. Blacks make up 65 percent of the city’s population.
In Georgia, Houston County’s Willie Talton became the first black Republican elected to the state House of Representatives since Reconstruction. Talton ran unopposed.
Also in Georgia, Eldrin Bell, the former Atlanta police chief under the late Maynard Jackson, was elected Clayton County’s first black commission chairman.
Bell, a Democrat, who worked the streets as a cop during the infamous Atlanta Child Murders, earned 75 percent of the vote. Bell’s father died when he was 7 years old. His stepfather used to tell him stories about how blacks weren't allowed to walk the streets of that county after 7 p.m. when he was a child. In the last 15 years Clayton [population 217,000] has gone from being a rural, mostly white county, to one that is 52 percent black. Bell becomes the first black to lead the Clayton commission, which will be a majority black body for the first time.
“Thank God, and our form of government, that I can now be the chairman of the Clayton County Commission,” said Bell, who is the father of “American Idol” star, Justin Guarini. But the history-making victory of the day came when Wilder, 73, took 79 percent of the vote and became the first Richmond mayor elected at large in six decades. He swept all nine districts in defeating incumbent Rudolph C. McCollum Jr.
“When it came to Doug Wilder, in Richmond, he was a shoo-in,” said McMichael. “The other candidates didn’t have a chance, and it wasn’t just because he is the former governor. I think his election is attributed to people in the city who were motivated to get rid of all the crime problems here. [Wilder] pledged that he would do that, and I think that made people willing to listen.”
In Baton Rouge Parish, Holden, a Democrat, won 54 percent of the vote. John Howell, assistant professor of political science at Southern University in Baton Rouge, said race did not dominate in Holden’s case. Holden not only garnered support across racial lines, he also persuaded voters to cross party lines, said Howell.
“He did something rather difficult in getting quite a bit of cross-racial support,” said Howell. “In my opinion, Holden did that by winning the support of the business community, which is mainly white. That says a lot to the ordinary voter. It says that this is ‘not some kind of a monster here; this is a good guy, a guy who we can depend upon to promote things like economic development to keep this city strong and make it stronger.’ That's where I think Kip Holden succeeded. He de-racialized the campaign.”
In Cocoa, Fla., Blake, a former city councilman, beat out three opponents. The city has the highest concentration of blacks – about a third – in Brevard County. Blake took 48.2 percent of the vote.
“From our perspective, it just means a number of voters saw someone that they feel can lead the city in the right direction,” said William Gary, president of the North Brevard branch of the NAACP. “Mike had served as deputy mayor during his last term on the [city] council. That meant that people had some indication that he could handle the job.”
Correspondent Tracie Powell contributed to this report
