Word: cooperation
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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THOMAS WILLIAM COOPER...
Although Prichard's whites initially held about a 55%-to-45% edge over blacks in voter registration, partly because there are 1,900 more voting-age whites, Cooper and a team of friends managed to add another 2,000 blacks to the voting rolls, closing the gap. At the same time, he so thoroughly denounced Capps for allowing industry to leave the town, roads to deteriorate and police morale to sag that whites felt little incentive to vote at all. Cooper won by 544 votes out of 10,648 cast...
...Julian Bond style of the handsome and articulate young Southern black politician, Cooper has earned the support of the predominantly white Prichard police force by promising to get more federal aid for pay and equipment. In a city where the median income is under $5,000 a year, any help he can bring in through his knowledge of federal aid programs is sorely needed. His personality and promises have earned some grudging white support. "He may be a nigger," said one police sergeant, "but he's sure the smartest mayor we ever had." Explained AJ. Lawler, a 25-year...
...inauguration, Cooper, who is light-skinned (his great-great-grandmother was the mistress of Confederate General Jean Jacques Alexandre Alfred Mouton and is buried beside him in Lafayette, La.), pledged that his administration would offer "equal opportunity in everything" to both races. With his London-educated wife Mado at his side, the new mayor conceded that a swimming pool in a black neighborhood was "psychologically and realistically inaccessible" to whites and that "white kids are swimming in a polluted creek." He would get the money, he promised, to build a new pool convenient to both races, but "they...
...Cooper, hoping to enlist whites who desire change, vows to fight back, but he foresees a potentially divisive struggle. If it comes to that, he is confident that he will prevail, yet fearful that in the process many whites might leave town. In the end, Cooper predicts, the racial dilemma will dissolve because "the whites who remain are going to learn that blacks won't treat them badly...