Word: virginia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...with a Virginia political trailblazer named Douglas Wilder. Back in 1975, when Wilder was the only black in the state senate (and the first since 1890), he gave voice to his overarching aspirations, a notion of empowerment far beyond what seemed plausible amid the genteel conservatism of the Old Dominion. "If people will elect you Lieutenant Governor," Wilder predicted with startling prescience, "they'll elect you Governor. I would think it would be an interesting test somewhere along the line for a black to run for one of those positions so as to put prejudice right on the line...
Fourteen years later, election night 1989, Wilder himself provided Virginia voters -- and, by implication, the nation as a whole -- with the most ambitious referendum on black political progress since Jesse Jackson first dabbled in presidential primaries. With Wilder, the grandson of slaves, battling to become the nation's first elected black Governor, it seemed almost commonplace that black mayoral candidates from Seattle to New York City were winning their own landmark races...
...with his election as Lieutenant Governor in 1985. In contrast to Jackson's often divisive politics of prophecy, Wilder was now the candidate of consensus progress and a united Democratic Party. If successful, he would become the model for future black crossover politicians who could triumph in places like Virginia, where the electorate was 80% white...
...anointed Wilder with a 10 percentage-point triumph. But by the time Wilder felt comfortable enough to declare victory, his razor-thin lead had stabilized about where it would end up: just 6,582 votes out of a record 1.78 million ballots cast. That was enough, however, for Virginia's Governor-elect to declare proudly, "As a boy, when I would read about an Abe Lincoln or a Thomas Jefferson . . . when I would read that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights . . . I knew it meant...
...gave it a prominent slot on the GOP docket. But as soon as they felt a shift in the political weather, they tried to dismiss the issue. "It's no longer important if it puts wind in their sails, not ours," they said, but the voters, especially those in Virginia, didn...