ABSTRACT
According to the orthodoxy, minority mayoral candidates must form a coalition with white liberals in order to succeed. The political relationship between white liberals and minorities has received a remarkable amount of attention inasmuch as it amounted to little more than a brief fling. Prior to the civil rights movement, the outlook of white liberals toward minorities in general and blacks in particular generally ranged between skeptical indifference and decided hostility. The conventional path to the mayor's office for minority candidates is to form a coalition with white liberals. At the outset, this appeared to be the path that Washington would follow. Accordingly, the lakefront liberal wards are an excellent laboratory in which to examine the structure and composition of the white liberal-minority coalition that emerged during the 1980s. Black reform politics, in contradistinction, possesses a distinct moral dimension, which revolves around an ethic of equity, as opposed to the machine's ethic of power and white reform's ethic of efficiency.
