Breakthrough In Virginia

Not every dream deferred dries up like a raisin in the sun. In politics it can sometimes ripen and harden into a tough kernel of ambition, as the unimaginable slowly becomes transformed into the attainable. Such a gradual course requires patience, guile and discipline, rather than flamboyant words and heroic poses. But the subtlety of these stratagems should never mask the majesty of the dream or the boldness of the dreamer.

So it was with a Virginia political trailblazer named Douglas Wilder. Back in 1975, when Wilder was the only black in the state senate (and the first since 1890), he gave voice to his overarching aspirations, a notion of empowerment far beyond what seemed plausible amid the genteel conservatism of the Old Dominion. "If people will elect you Lieutenant Governor," Wilder predicted with startling prescience, "they'll elect you Governor. I would think it would be an interesting test somewhere along the line for a black to run for one of those positions so as to put prejudice right on the line."

Fourteen years later, election night 1989, Wilder himself provided Virginia voters -- and, by implication, the nation as a whole -- with the most ambitious referendum on black political progress since Jesse Jackson first dabbled in presidential primaries. With Wilder, the grandson of slaves, battling to become the nation's first elected black Governor, it seemed almost commonplace that black mayoral candidates from Seattle to New York City were winning their own landmark races.

Faithful to his prediction, Wilder had clambered onto the statewide leadership ladder with his election as Lieutenant Governor in 1985. In contrast to Jackson's often divisive politics of prophecy, Wilder was now the candidate of consensus progress and a united Democratic Party. If successful, he would become the model for future black crossover politicians who could triumph in places like Virginia, where the electorate was 80% white.

No longer did Wilder risk racial polarization by talking about putting prejudice to the test. Now 58, his hair silver, his manner reassuring and his smile infectious, Wilder had grown far too adroit to speak of racial issues in anything other than soft, almost dulcet, tones. Throughout the 1980s, Wilder had consciously shaped his persona to make his blackness and ground-breaking achievements seem almost boring and quietly inevitable. He did not disown his racial identity, tossing off laugh lines like, "How can I not think of myself as a black man? I shave." His style, rather, was to envelop the historic implications of his campaign in a protective cloak of Bill Cosbyesque banalities.