Two cities, one election day
On November 7, 1967, voters in Cleveland, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana, elected Black mayors. Carl Stokes in Cleveland became the first Black person elected mayor of a major American city, and Richard Hatcher in Gary became mayor of a smaller industrial city whose population was majority Black. Both took office in January 1968. The results came in a year that also included riots in Newark and Detroit, and they offered a different picture of Black political life: not protest in the streets, but victories at the ballot box.
It is worth being careful about the word “first”. Black officials had held local offices for many years, and in some smaller places there were Black mayors earlier. The significance of Stokes and Hatcher is that they won in large industrial cities where, in the era of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Black voters were becoming a decisive bloc. Walter Washington was also appointed to run the government of the District of Columbia in 1967, though he was appointed by the president, not elected.
Carl Stokes in Cleveland
Carl Stokes was born in Cleveland, grew up in poverty, served in the Army, became a lawyer, and was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives in 1962. He ran for mayor in 1965 as an independent and lost narrowly to the Democratic incumbent, Ralph Locher. That near miss showed that a Black candidate could be competitive in a city where Black residents made up a large share of the electorate, though not a majority.
In 1967 he entered the Democratic primary and defeated Locher, who had been criticised for his handling of the city’s problems after the Hough disturbances of July 1966. In the general election Stokes faced a Republican, Seth Taft, a lawyer and grandson of President William Howard Taft. The race was close. Stokes won by a small margin, with strong turnout in Black neighborhoods and a meaningful share of white votes, which was crucial in a city that was not majority Black. His brother Louis Stokes later served in Congress from Ohio for many years.
Richard Hatcher in Gary
Richard Hatcher, a lawyer and a city councilman, had a harder path. Gary’s Democratic organization, led by the county party, backed the incumbent mayor, George Chacharis, in the primary. Hatcher won that primary in May 1967 against the organization’s wishes, and then faced a general election in which many party leaders declined to support him. He defeated the Republican candidate, Joseph Radigan, by a narrow margin in November. Observers at the time described his victory as especially notable because the local party apparatus had worked against him.
Gary was a steel town on Lake Michigan, with a large Black population drawn there by industrial jobs. Hatcher’s election came with national attention, and he was to remain mayor for two decades, which is a clue to how firmly he established himself.
What the victories meant
Three broader developments helped make both wins possible.
- Black migration to northern cities over several decades had left the electorate in many of them with a large Black share.
- The Voting Rights Act of 1965, though aimed mainly at the South, helped energise Black political participation throughout the country.
- The wave of urban unrest, widely covered in 1967, made some white voters and civic leaders more willing to seek new leadership for the cities.
Stokes in particular campaigned on the idea that a Black mayor could build trust between neighborhoods and city hall. At the same time, the language of Black Power, popularised that year by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, was reaching a wider audience, and electoral politics was one route by which that idea turned into practice.
Governing was harder than winning
Neither mayor found the job easy. Both cities faced shrinking industrial employment, loss of middle-class residents to the suburbs, and tight budgets. Stokes brought in federal funds and started new housing and job programs, but his term was shadowed by a violent gun battle between police and a group of armed Black nationalists in Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood in July 1968, which led to deaths and a bitter dispute about the police response. He did not seek a third term and left office at the end of 1971, later working as a television news anchor in New York and as a judge and diplomat. He died in 1996.
Hatcher dealt with a hostile local party structure, strained relations with some white officials, and an economy dependent on the steel industry. He supported efforts to organise Black political power nationally, and in 1972 Gary hosted the National Black Political Convention. He remained in office until 1988.
The longer story
After 1967 the number of Black mayors in the United States rose steadily. Over the following years, large cities including Detroit, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Newark and Washington elected Black mayors, and Black officials won office at many levels. The 1967 results are therefore best understood as an early and visible example of a larger shift rather than a single turning point. The question of what elected office could achieve against economic decline remained difficult, but the idea that Black voters could win the highest municipal offices in the country had been demonstrated in two cities on one November evening.