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The third analytical tendency was a structural one. This framework
assumed that the racial identities of a city’s political and economic
elites were less significant than the ways in which national and
international economic trends influenced a city’s economic fortunes.
For instance, the international market for steel would impact the
economic fortunes of the American company US Steel which in turn would
impact US Steel’s home city of Gary, Indiana. Gary’s mayor, Richard
Hatcher could do nothing to head off the decline of US Steel. Yet
Hatcher, as mayor, presided over the disastrous social costs of US
Steel’s decline. The final and most dominant tendency among students of black urban politics was to sidestep any type of critical discussion of black elected officials. Instead, black mayors became objects of celebration. They were indicators of the progress of the race. “There were no black mayors in 1950, now there are....” These scholars of black urban politics spent far more energy explaining how a certain black candidate was elected mayor as opposed to explaining whether his election meant anything substantive to the residents of the city.
Many of us did not ask simple but crucial questions. For instance, did black mayors govern in ways that differed from their white predecessors? Were black mayors good for the urban poor? Did black mayors expand housing opportunities for the impoverished? Did they commit more resources to schools in poor and black neighborhoods? Such questions should have been routinely asked and investigated but too often, scholars of black urban politics were so enthralled by the emergence of winning black mayoral candidates that they celebrated their mere elections at the expense of analytically dissecting the impact of these politicians on the broader community. Let me explain:
Before the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, elected black officials in the South were virtually non-existent. Beginning in the mid-1960s with the growth of black majorities in numerous northern big cities, black mayors began to emerge. In most instances the emergence of black mayors in big cities was but an indication of the changing racial demographics. (Tom Bradley in Los Angeles was the major exception to this rule). When the elections of black big city mayors were coupled with the growing number of black elected officials in the South, some scholars of black politics became swept-up in a tide of optimism. But decades later, we can no longer continue to embrace a naive optimism. What has been the impact of these black elected officials on the living conditions of their poor constituents?
What could be a better case study of the failure of black mayors and black elected officials than the situation in New Orleans? How has the election of black mayors in New Orleans (from Morial to Bartholemey to Morial’s son to Ray Nagin, the current mayor, advanced or protected the interests of the black poor in New Orleans? How have these mayoralties protected the interests of the stable black working classes? It is highly possible that black mayors have initiated minor benefits to the black poor but even this has to be investigated and documented.
For instance, we may discover that under black mayors police brutality against the poor is reduced. But maybe even this is an overstatement. Certainly some black mayors have tried to initiate policies that benefit the least fortunate but most black mayors have governed cities with eroding tax bases. In the hopes of improving the tax revenues, we know that many black mayors have championed a Chamber of Commerce agenda. Marion Barry, for all of his claims to be a man of the people, actually was a staunch advocate of the Washington DC Chamber of Commerce. The same can be said for the current mayor of Washington D.C., Anthony Williams.
Why do we scholars of black politics spend so much time explaining how a black became mayor if becoming mayor has so little substantive political importance? Such analyses are utterly technocratic and ultimately establishmentarian. Too often, black political figures are not held accountable by the general public and scholars. But then, this is the norm for American politics in the age of Bill Clinton and George Bush. In the case of blacks, one might wonder just what it was that the younger Morial accomplished as mayor in New Orleans that made him so qualified to chair the National Urban League. Isn’t he and his mayoralty implicated in the New Orleans fiasco? To the extent that students of black politics refuse to raise questions that go against the grain of the premises championed by elected black mayors, the substantive failures of these mayors become our scholarly failures as well.
