ABSTRACT
Since 1967, when Carl Stokes and Richard Hatcher became the first African American mayors of large American cities, increasing scholarly attention has been paid to the interplay between African Americans and local politics. Considerable effort has been exerted to determine whether the advent of African American mayoralties results in tangible benefits for the Black community and to identify the demographic conditions, alliances, and thematic emphases required for Black candidates to succeed. Existing scholarship tends to explain Black success in local electoral politics and at winning satisfaction of local systemic demands as the result of interracial coalitions, the charisma and political skills of individual leaders, or both. Failure in these same arenas is argued to be due to an inability to form or sustain interracial coalitions (usually blamed on “nationalist” or overly race-conscious elements within the Black community), factionalism and disunity among African Americans, the presence of an “urban regime” that views Black demands as a threat to its economic interests and so alternately squashes and co-opts Black community demands, or by the absence of political entrepreneurs who achieve success through wile and force of personality.
