Cities: The Negro's New Force

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One tangible result of the civil rights movement has been to teach the U.S. Negro the power of unified action. Putting that lesson to good use, Negroes in several cities across the nation last week made themselves felt by voting for their own causes and candidates. In Springfield, Ohio, a Negro got the biggest vote of the five candidates for city commissioner, thus qualifying for the mayoralty; Buffalo elected three Negroes to its 15-member city council. The most dramatic expression of the Negro's new force occurred in Cleveland's mayoralty race.

There, a four-way race for mayor developed in which the principal contenders were Democratic Incumbent Ralph S. Locher, 49, seeking his second full term, and Negro Carl B. Stokes, 38, popular, articulate native Clevelander who is one of two Ohio Negro state representatives.

Normally, Locher would have been re-elected easily, but Cleveland's Negroes had cause to be, unhappy with him. When local civil rights groups demanded an audience with the mayor last summer after a supposed slight by the chief of police, Locher refused. The result: a three-day sit-in at City Hall in which four Negroes were arrested for trespassing. Running as an independent, Stokes came within a whisker (2,458 out of a total 236,977 votes cast) of beating Locher.* As it turned out, he polled 36% of the vote, which is almost exactly Cleveland's Negro-to-white voter ratio.

Clearly, for the first time in a major U.S. city, dissatisfied Negroes had turned away from both major parties to back a candidate from their own ranks who would tackle their own problems. Said one political expert: "This wasn't an election; it was an uprising."

A "Must." The Negro-bloc vote was also felt in Detroit, where Negro Minister Nicholas Hood, 42, a member of Detroit's N.A.A.C.P. Board of Directors, was elected to the city's all-white nine-man common council. Hood was not the first Negro ever to be elected to the council, but his election was considered a "must" by much of Detroit's white community, which feared that unless the city's nearly 500,000 Negroes had some representation in the municipal government, racially tense Detroit might ignite. Hood had a powerful helping hand from Detroit's able incumbent mayor, Democrat Jerome Cavanagh (TIME, Sept. 24), who himself easily won re-election over a little-known Republican opponent, 295,409 to 144,852.

Negro voters in both Philadelphia and Louisville helped Republicans overcome their disastrous nationwide showing in the presidential election last year. In Philadelphia, 35-year-old Arlen Specter, assistant counsel of the Warren Commission, which investigated President Kennedy's assassination, used implausible means to achieve the seemingly impossible. A registered Democrat, he ran for district attorney on the Republican ticket, with the support of Americans for Democratic Action. Specter won, despite a 2-to-l Democratic registration edge and hoots of "Benedict Arlen" and "Specter the Defector" by his former Democratic colleagues. Specter not only assailed the inefficiency of Incumbent D. A. James