In 1996 a record number of African-Americans went to the polls–more than 5.5 million are registered in the south, an all-time high–and they were asked once again by many black candidates for their votes because they’re the same color.
Dickerson too tried to attach himself to FDR’s coattails, but his campaign had two fatal flaws, the first of which was his light color. His honey-hued skin wasn’t much darker than my tan, and the opposition camp whispered that he wanted to be white. He was also attacked for sending his daughter to a private white school on the north side. Avowedly militant darker politicians have on occasion pointed to light skin color as a sign that an opponent’s racial loyalty was doubtful. Chicago’s bombastic former representative Gus Savage derided the late secretary of commerce Ron Brown by calling him “Ron Beige.” When Roy Innis ran for mayor in New York against incumbent David Dinkins, he argued that he deserved African-American support because “I’m blacker than he is.” It was the kind of sniping that once led Shirley Chisholm to describe New York’s black politicians as “crabs in a barrel, crawling all over each other so nobody gets to the top.”
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Dickerson’s second fatal flaw was his intellectual bearing. With his pedagogic demeanor, his clipped speech, and his elitist, bespectacled appearance, he was an easy mark for Dawson’s label, “Earl the High Hatter,” which was echoed in the pages of Dawson’s Second Ward Voice. (“The Voice Covers the Ward like the Morning Dew,” the paper’s slogan boasted.) The campaign rhetoric sank low in the Voice. Dickerson “is rapidly becoming known as a four-flusher, bullshooter and publicity craver,” read one issue. “He hires publicity agents and photographers to follow him around and record the oh-so-clever phraseology of his marvelous vocabulary, designed to enthrall the intelligentsia of all races into a state of mind bordering on insomnia by reason of the magnitude, longitude and latitude of his erudite erudition.”
The finale of the primary campaign was marked by sleazy trickery that I didn’t learn about until after it was done. The First District included some of Chicago’s Loop office buildings, the black ghetto south of the Loop, and a small number of white precincts, which usually would be in the bag for the machine nominee, in this case Dawson. But a third candidate, an independent white, was in the contest, and some of Dickerson’s associates devised what they figured was a sure way to win these votes for the white candidate–and deprive Dawson of them.
Dawson defeated his Republican opponent by some 3,000 votes, and he would hold on to his congressional seat for 28 years, until his death in 1970 at the age of 84. At his headquarters on election night I was amazed as the vote count came in from ward heelers. Listening to the tabulations, I could occasionally hear someone on the phone ask, “How’s the vote going? How many for Dawson?” The response was sometimes “How many do you need?”
In his many terms in office Dawson was continually under fire. He was often branded an Uncle Tom and was openly accused in newspaper exposes of everything from perjury to being “a tool of the syndicate” to collecting bribes for his campaign from gambling places in his district. In truth Dawson was no better or worse than many of the black legislators who followed him into offices (or the whites who preceded him).
Black mayors have been replaced by whites in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Only four major cities now have black mayors–San Francisco, Washington, Detroit, and Baltimore. “The era when it was a matter of racial pride to elect a black mayor is gone,” says David Bositis, a researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington think tank.
