Elected Officials

The Right to Vote

After the Civil War, black men were granted the right to vote through the enactment of the Fifteenth [Page 286]Amendment to the Constitution. In the Reconstruction period that followed the war, the power of the black ballot in the South resulted in the election of a number of African Americans to the U.S. Congress, as well as to state and local offices.

Following the end of Reconstruction (1866–1877), however, a combination of legal devices—the poll tax, literacy tests, whites-only primaries, and the grandfather clause, which exempted whites from certain voting requirements that were then imposed on blacks—and also illegal means, such as violence and threats, effectively denied African American suffrage.

By 1910, southern state legislatures had effectively removed all blacks from elected office, and neither the U.S. Supreme Court nor Congress moved to restore the franchise for blacks. Black voters and black elected officials would not become equal political participants again until the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which led to the enactment of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed poll taxes and literacy tests, which had been used to deny blacks their right to vote. Voting rights alone did not account for a groundswell of black elected officials at this time, however. Demographic changes, especially in northern cities, also had a significant effect on electoral politics.

Electoral Victories

The right to vote, along with black majorities in some northern cities, led to the election of blacks into office in unprecedented numbers in the 1960s and after. In 1966, Edward William Brooke III (a Republican from Massachusetts) became only the second African American elected to the U.S. Senate. (The first was Hiram Rhodes Revels, who was elected from Mississippi during Reconstruction.) In 1968, Shirley Chisholm (Democrat from New York) became the first black woman ever to be elected to Congress when she won a seat in the House of Representatives.

From 1970 to 1998, the number of black elected officials in the nation increased sixfold, from 1,469 to 8,868. In 1999, the thirty-seven seats that blacks held in the U.S. House of Representatives accounted for about 9 percent of all seats in the House—a percentage almost equal to that of the black population (11 percent).

Despite this progress, however, blacks have still not achieved adequate representation in the very highest levels of government. Only one black governor, Douglas Wilder of Virginia, and two black senators, Edward Brooke and Carol Moseley-Braun (Democrat of Illinois), were elected in the last half of the twentieth century.

Even in lower level elected positions—such as school board members, sheriffs, and county tax assessors—blacks also have been significantly underrepresented. Moreover, a report conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a political think tank in Washington, D.C., concluded that there has been a slowdown in progress in recent years. According to its report, the majority of black officeholders are concentrated mainly in five states—Mississippi, Alabama, Illinois, Louisiana, and Georgia. This is due in part to changes in racial demographics, including an influx of Asian and Hispanic immigrants.

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