The Black History of the White House (42 page)

In the Mainstream: Black Democratic and Republican Candidates

Shirley Chisholm

The most important though under-acknowledged pioneer of a serious run for the presidency by an African American was Representative Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm (NY-D) who ran for president in 1972. Ahead of her time, she challenged the prevailing notions of gender, race, and, due to her Caribbean background, ethnic stereotypes. Chisholm had been a teacher prior to becoming involved in politics, winning a seat in the New York State Assembly in 1964. She initially made history by being the first black woman to be elected to Congress when she won in Brooklyn's Twelfth Congressional District in 1968. In her first speech before the House of Representatives on March 26, 1969, she began by pointing out the contradiction between millions being spent on defense by Nixon and the social needs of the nation, “Mr. Speaker, on the same day President Nixon announced he had decided the United States will not be safe unless we start to build a defense system against missiles, the Headstart program in the District of Columbia was cut back for lack of money.”
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After asserting that she was not a pacifist, she sharply objected to the war priorities of the Nixon administration and famously vowed:

to vote “No” on every money bill that comes to the floor or this House that provides any funds for the Department of Defense. Any bill whatsoever, until the time comes when our values and priorities have been turned right side up again, until the monstrous waste and the shocking profits in the defense budget have been eliminated and our country starts to use its strength, its tremendous resources, for people and peace, not for profits and war.
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In January 1972, Chisholm audaciously declared herself a candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. In her declaration, she stated, “I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States. I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women's movement of this country, although I am equally proud of that. I am not the candidate of any political bosses or special interests. I am the candidate of the people.”
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Dismissed by many as a whimsical run, she received scant support from women's organizations, black groups or prominent individuals. A multitude of variables existed that harmed her
effort, including committed black political support for George McGovern or Hubert Humphrey, inability to raise funds, and lack of a national base. But nearly all of these issues could be linked into perceptions regarding her race and gender, as well as her ideologically progressive views. Virtually unknown outside of New York and black political circles, Chisholm had little chance to win white votes, particularly those of men. While she did win endorsements from some women's groups, such as the National Organization of Women, most did not support her. And there were some black men who felt it was an affront that a black woman should run for president before a black male. She did receive the endorsement of the Black Panther Party, and when she was pressured to reject their support, she refused to do so.
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Despite all the forces against her, Chisholm opened the door and made the contemporary notion of a black person running for president normal. She campaigned in twelve states and won more than 400,000 votes, and had 151 delegate votes at the National Democratic Convention.
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She won the New Jersey primary with 66.9 percent of the vote, and got 23 percent of the vote in Massachusetts.
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In reflecting back on her campaign, she wrote, “I ran because someone had to do it first. In this country everybody is supposed to be able to run for President, but that's never been really true. I ran
because
most people think the country is not ready for a black candidate, not ready for a woman candidate.”
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Referring to herself as “unbought” and “unbossed,” the title of her book on her campaign, she was a genuine groundbreaker.
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In Democratic Party politics, Shirley Chisholm was followed by the high-energy and certainly much more popular campaigns of Reverend Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. Jackson ran in an era when defeat of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were paramount among mainstream Democrats, including black Americans. The Reagan administration on both foreign and domestic policy represented a setback for people of color, women, peace activists, working and poor people, and pretty much anyone who sought economic and social fairness in the 1980s America. Rather than challenge the conservatism of Reagan, many Democrats believed that moving toward the political center was the best strategy for defeating his bid for a second term.

Despite massive opposition from the black political elite that in 1984 was mostly committed to Walter Mondale (who eventually became the nominee), Jackson ran a credible campaign for a first-timer and won 3.5 million votes in the primaries, electrifying the progressive wing of the party's base. Jackson won about, 18 percent of the total, and five primaries and caucuses, including Louisiana, the District of Columbia, South Carolina, and Virginia. Jackson raised issues of democracy and inclusion within the Democratic Party as the campaign quickly realized the challenges it faced from the party elite and the structure of U.S. politics. His platform included support for D.C. statehood, curtailing the Defense budget, ending Reagan's tax cuts, sanctions against the Apartheid government in South
Africa, nuclear disarmament, universal health care, and other popular progressive demands.

Jackson was also at the center of the National Rainbow Coalition, a dominant force in the progressive wing of the party. The Rainbow Coalition was comprised of progressive civil rights, labor, women, peace, environmental, and human rights activists from across the racial spectrum. With Jackson's relative success in 1984, a number of elected officials also participated in and joined the organization including individuals like California's Rep. Maxine Waters. In fact, the sudden interest in Jackson's possibilities left many progressives feeling squeezed out of prominent roles in the organization.

Jackson returned to the trail in 1988 with more experience, skill, support, and capacities. In fact, he started off as the frontrunner, and even appeared to be headed toward victory after winning the all-important Michigan caucus. He captured almost seven million votes and won primary contests in Alabama, Washington, D.C., Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Puerto Rico and Virginia and four caucuses in Delaware, Michigan, South Carolina and Vermont. One direct consequence of Jackson's challenge was that Ron Brown, an African American, became chairman of the Democratic Party in 1989, a first for a major party.

Yet, however legitimate he may have seemed to black communities and some in the civil rights, ethnic rights, labor, environmental, women's, human rights, and other social change movements, for much of the rest of the country he was still viewed as a black candidate with a black agenda. Regardless of how much Jackson and the campaign addressed other issues—from workers' rights to foreign policy—he could never escape his civil rights past (and present). This meant that even within the narrow confines of the Democratic primaries, he could not
win enough non-black votes to defeat the relatively unknown and hapless governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis.

Jackson's campaigns for the White House were pivotal, however, in providing rule changes that would benefit Obama in 2008. After the 1984 primary season, when he had some leverage over how peaceful and cooperative the Democratic National Convention would be, Jackson argued that winner-take-all primaries and caucuses were patently unfair. He was able to win rule changes that allowed for proportional distribution of delegates for those candidates who won 15 percent or more of the vote. This important rule change was so critical to Obama's campaign that it is difficult to see how he would have won without it. As discussed in Chapter 9, although Hillary Clinton was winning big states in the primaries, Obama was still gathering delegates because he was coming in a close second. That, in addition to the small and Republican-oriented states that he was winning that the Clinton and other Democrats abandoned, were his numerical keys to victory. The Obamas owe that strategic opening to Jackson.

The major impact of the Jackson campaign was to invigorate the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and to inject a more progressive discourse into the national political debate. Liberals in the party were cowed by Reagan's popularity and were reluctant to promote a progressive agenda. For African Americans, Jackson represented the most significant challenge to the party's racial politics since the days of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Democratic Party in the 1960s. He mobilized millions who would later be the basis for victory for local and state candidates around the nation. And just as Obama would do two decades later, he motivated countless young and old to become involved in electoral politics and community activism.

Jackson, however, undercut a potential future run and the
establishment of a formal progressive element in Democratic politics by demobilizing the National Rainbow Coalition after the 1988 race. At a turbulent meeting at the Democratic National Convention following the nomination of Dukakis, Jackson told his followers that they needed to fold into the Democratic Party structure for the campaign, support the party's candidate, and not act independently. That fateful decision pushed away many activists who were wary of Dukakis and the Democrats, and politically fractured the Rainbow Coalition.
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The Rainbow was eventually merged into Jackson's Chicago-based organization Operation PUSH. Jackson teased with the idea of running again, but then ultimately decided not to run in 1992.

Doug Wilder

Many of the more popular Democrats, perhaps including Jackson, felt that President George H. W. Bush was in too strong a position to be defeated and declined to enter the race. This left the door open for some lesser known candidates to run, candidates such as Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and Virginia Governor L. Douglas Wilder. On September 13, 1991, during the middle of his term as Virginia governor, Wilder, the first African American elected to that position, declared himself a candidate.

Wilder's victory in Virginia, in November 1989, perhaps foreshadowed his presidential hopes. Leading Republican J. Marshall Coleman by fifteen points two weeks before the election, Wilder only won by 6,854 votes out of nearly two million cast, less than 0.37 of one percent.
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In New York that same year, African American candidate David Dinkins had been leading by 18 percent but only won the mayor's race by 2 percentage points.
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The gap between pre-election polls and election-day reality has been called by some political scientists the “Bradley effect” in reference to the experience of Tom Bradley in California
in 1982. Former Los Angeles mayor Bradley, who was African American, ran for governor and according to polls was likely to win. However, on election day he lost a close race. Postelection analysis seemed to demonstrate that many white voters were hesitant to tell pollsters that they would not vote for an African American candidate, but on election day that is exactly what happened, i.e., the “Bradley effect.” These elections stood out because Bradley, Wilder, and Dinkins were all moderate, race-neutral candidates. By 2008, however, it was believed that both more whites were willing to vote for a black candidate and that polling sophistication was better able to account for respondents who lied.

In a basically traditional announcement speech where he put himself forward as a savior of sort, Wilder stated:

In seeking the Presidency, I recognize that I am the longest of long shots. I may not win. I may not get but a few votes. But I would not be doing my job as Governor—indeed, I would not deserve to be who I am—if I failed to step forward at this critical juncture in our nation's history. For if we fail to heal this nation in 1992, it may not be healed in my lifetime. If we fail to put this country on a sound fiscal posture in 1992, then order may not be restored in my lifetime. If elected, I pledge to all of you that I will do everything in my power to heal the growing divisions among us; to restore economic vitality...so that more people can enter the middle class...and to secure peace around the world through American economic and military strength.
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