The number of blacks and Hispanics elected to office in American cities has grown dramatically. The media frequently report on their victories in local elections and run features on black and Hispanic mayors. From none in 1960, there are now 27 black and three Hispanic mayors of cities with populations over 50,000 (Joint Center, 1985; National Association of Latino Elected Officials, 1986).

The trend is obvious, its significance disputed. Is it likely to continue, or can we already see signs of reversal? How much power do local black and Hispanic officials have? How was it achieved? And what difference does it make in any case? Can blacks and Hispanics in office strike a better bargain with the investors and financial institutions they depend on for development than previous administrations? In a period of fiscal stringency and reduced federal spending, can they carve out a larger piece of the municipal pie for minority populations? Can minority officeholders make any headway against the growing tide of unemployment and poverty, as help from the federal level is dismantled? Although the growing number of minority officials suggests political integration and racial/ethnic succession, do the limited powers of cities in a federal system and a capitalistic society render that apparent gain more symbolic than real?

Protest Is Not Enough is partly a report on the politics of black and Hispanic mobilization in ten northern California cities and partly an effort to formulate a theory useful for the study of minority mobilization and its significance in cities generally. The cities are San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Sacramento, Stockton, Berkeley, Richmond, Hayward, Vallejo, and Daly City. We did not expect to generalize the particulars of our ten cities to others, but we did try to cast our concepts and fundamental relationships at a sufficiently general level to encompass a wide variety of cities, and we hoped that the application of our framework to other cities would suggest ways in which it should be extended or altered.

The Theory

We wanted a conception of minority political action and position that linked mobilization to policy, that demonstrated the connection between the passions, interests, and actions of mobilization and the governmental response—if any. It was apparent that blacks and Hispanics achieved a much stronger and more positive response to their interests in some cities than in others. It was apparent also that minority representation in elective offices, the customary way of describing their political position, did not capture the strength of the minority position in the more responsive city governments. The key to the higher levels of responsiveness was not representation but coalition: minority inclusion in a coalition that was able to dominate a city council produced a much more positive governmental response than the election of minority council-members who were not part of the dominant coalition.

In their 1984 book Protest Is Not Enough Browning, Marshall, and Tabb suggest that biracial coalitions are powerful vehicles for achieving minority incorporation in the political life of cities. They argue that black electoral mobilization and subsequent incorporation depend on both the relative size of the black community and white support. Similarly, Hispanic incorporation is a function not only of the percentage of Hispanics in the population but also joint membership with blacks in a liberal coalition (pp. 245–246).

Their optimistic view of biracial and multiracial coalitions contrasts strikingly with the more common pessimism about cross-racial politics. Racial polarization in such major cities as New York, Chicago and Philadelphia (as well as in a number of medium and smaller-sized cities) has fed the belief that the black protests and white backlash of the 1960s have doomed biracial politics.

Protest Is Not Enough focuses on ten small and medium-sized Northern California cities. The largest, San Francisco, is the 16th most populous city in the U.S. But biracial coalition politics has been most advanced in Berkeley, a city of only 103,328 in 1980. Thus the book's argument is vulnerable to the challenge that full-blown biracial politics worked only in a rather small, unusual city and otherwise had a significant impact in cities of only moderate size in the traditionally liberal Bay Area.

Rufus Browning, Dale Marshall, and David Tabb present some straightforward and convincing theses in their admirable work Protest Is Not Enough. Urban policy responsiveness to minority interests, they argue, depends not so much on the direct impact of protest as on the advent of a dominant liberal coalition in which blacks and Hispanics have some role. Where such coalitions have not succeeded, racial exclusion and policy resistance tend to hold sway. Where blacks or Hispanics have played a leading role in bringing such a coalition to power, or in Browning, Marshall and Tabb's terms where political incorporation has been greatest, then policy results favor minority interests. Political incorporation depends on protest and electoral mobilization among blacks and Hispanics combined with favorable white attitudes toward minority interests. The size of the minority community and its leadership capacity in turn explain minority political mobilization.

By these propositions, New York City should be characterized by substantial black and Hispanic political incorporation and the resulting targeting of policy outputs on minority interests. In the 1980 Census, New York's population was 23.9% black and 19.9% Hispanic; these numbers may have been substantially undercounted. In any case, two-thirds of a decade later New York is clearly a majority minority city. Black political participation dates from Adam Clayton Powell and Benjamin Davis' election to the city council in 1941 and 1943. The first Puerto Rican assemblyman was elected on the Republican and American Labor Party lines in 1938. Subsequently, both groups have had a long and sophisticated history of political participation. From the 1960s onward, a new generation of leadership led both groups to assert their political demands more strongly. The Lindsay administration afforded a national model of how a new liberal coalition could experiment with new forms of political incorporation. Voting in state and national elections would suggest the city is on the liberal end of the urban political spectrum. In short, by Western lights New York should be a model of strong minority incorporation and the consequent targeting of city policies toward minority interests. The problem, however, is that New York City has not incorporated minorities and, depending on what indicators are chosen, has not produced policies that are especially aimed toward minorities.

The election of black and Latino mayors in big cities during the past five years has provided the opportunity to critically examine the role of minority mobilization and coalitions. The focus of this study is on the election of four minority mayors, Henry Cisneros in San Antonio in 1981, Federico Peña in Denver, Harold Washington in Chicago, and Wilson Goode in Philadelphia, all in 1983. The pioneering study by Browning, Marshall, and Tabb (1984) highlights the significance of minority mayoral elections in the context of the struggle for political equality. We have placed our analysis in the context of the three central questions underscored in their theory of political incorporation: How open are urban political systems to minorities? How does minority political incorporation occur? Does political incorporation make a difference for minority interests? Although the four cities we examine are different in some respects from the Northern California cities covered by Browning, Marshall, and Tabb, their findings are generally applicable with modifications.

Chicago

How open is the system? Machine politics have dominated Chicago for over fifty years with decidedly mixed results for the city's black population. Black political power remained disproportionally small and subordinate throughout the machine's existence. Thus, Harold Washington's election in 1983 marked a structural transformation of the electoral system as well as a political coming of age for blacks. Washington inherited a city council divided along ideological and racial lines. Although Washington could not command a majority of the city council when he was first elected, the 1986 council races left him with an even split. Of the 50 council seats, 25 represent liberal votes and 25 are identified with the more conservative Democratic party machine, 16 are black and 4 are Latino. Washington, as mayor, holds the deciding vote.

In January 1986 Bruce Boiling, a member of the Boston City Council, became the first black president in the council's 166-year history. Boiling's presidency marks the culmination of the slow, but steadily growing empowerment of blacks in Boston politics. While blacks have always been present in Boston politics they have more often been observers, rather than participants as the Yankees and the Irish have dominated the political stage. In order to understand the role of blacks in Boston it is necessary to have some background knowledge of how Yankee paternalism retarded black political development and how Irish displacement of the Yankees resulted in the exclusion of blacks from Democratic party politics.

Historical Antecedents

Boston politics has its roots in the historical relationships among the Yankees, the Irish, and the blacks. Under Yankee domination colonial and pre-Civil War blacks experienced racial harmony in an atmosphere where they could enjoy civil and political rights. Wealthy Yankee traders viewed free blacks paternalistically, as a low income class of people (Lupo, 1977, p. 124). Since Yankees were members of the political and cultural elite they did not perceive blacks as an economic threat to their position. Consequently, blacks could freely operate businesses, buy property, and run for office (Horton, 1979).

As slavery became an increasingly important issue in the 1850s free blacks and Yankee abolitionists formed integrated organizations to end slavery. Abolitionist organizations provided an opportunity for free blacks to learn organizational and political skills. Yet, blacks often found that their efforts to become leaders were thwarted by white patrons who expected blacks to work only as obedient followers. A notable case among many was the conflict between white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, a former slave, over the crucial issue of the future role of blacks in electoral politics (Quarles, 1969). Frederick Douglass broke with Garrison who felt that blacks should not be encouraged to vote in a political system where the Constitution protected the rights of slaveholders (Horton, 1979, p. 86). Douglass adamantly advocated electoral participation and pulled some black abolitionists from Garrison's ranks. Douglass felt that participation in the electoral process was a necessary step in the political development of blacks. To affirm his convictions Douglass ran on the Liberal ticket for an office in New York state.

Blacks hold governmental power in Atlanta. They have a two-to-one majority on the city council, and Andrew Young is in his second term as the city's second black mayor. Moreover, blacks are a substantial presence in the civic life of Atlanta. They have held the presidency of the Chamber of Commerce, and are to be found among the membership of every important board and commission in the public life of the community. The political incorporation of blacks in Atlanta is now strong enough for Mayor Young to entertain the possibility of city-county consolidation. Even with such a move, blacks presumably would remain at the center of public life in Atlanta.

How such a seemingly strong form of political incorporation came about is in part a familiar story. Key facts in the city's political history are widely known:

1. In 1946, Georgia's white primary was invalidated. A voter-registration drive in the black community brought nearly 20,000 new voters onto the rolls, making the black community more than a quarter of the city's electorate (Bacote, 1955).

2. Atlanta's mayor at the time, William B. Hartsfield, recognized the potential for taking on Atlanta's black community as junior partners in a coalition built around the mutually reinforcing themes of economic growth and racial moderation. He and his successor, Ivan Allen, Jr., profited electorally from that coalition over the next twenty years (see Jennings and Zeigler, 1966).

3. Atlanta's black community entered a new and more assertive phase in 1960 as direct-action protests signalled the end of the era of quiet accommodation between established black and white leaders (Walker, 1963).

4. The 1970 census reports show that Atlanta's population balance had tilted to a black majority, and, in 1973, Maynard Jackson was elected as Atlanta's first black mayor. Jackson was reelected by a comfortable margin in 1977, and he has been followed by Atlanta's second black mayor, Andrew Young. Mayor Young was reelected in a landslide in 1985.

On March 20, 1986 many South Florida Hispanics were disappointed yet politically emboldened by the result of a close U.S. House vote on President Reagan's Nicaraguan Contra aid bill. Although the proposal was defeated in a 222–210 vote, the outcome was viewed locally as a Latin victory because Miami's moderately liberal Democratic delegation broke ranks with House leadership by voting three to one in support of the President's proposal. It is apparent that pressure felt from Miami's Cuban and Nicaraguan exile communities, as well as from the Florida Commission on Hispanic Affairs and the Cuban-American National Foundation, was decisive in compelling locally elected Democratic House members to support the President over their party.

Two days after the vote, 200 protestors gathered in downtown Miami in a demonstration against Contra aid. Alpha 66, a militant anti-Castro organization, called a counter-demonstration attended by about 2,000 angry Hispanics who threw eggs, rocks, and insults at the smaller group of protestors. Miami riot police escorted the anti-Contra demonstrators away from the scene in buses in order to prevent their injury. The fractious counter-demonstration was broadcast live by a Spanish language radio station and was attended by several local and state officials, including the three Cuban-Americans who constitute a majority on the five-member Miami City Commission. These events underscore an increasingly visible phenomenon in Miami's volatile politics.

Is anything enough? The authors of this forum are in agreement that the political incorporation of blacks and Hispanics achieved thus far is not enough. Not only is protest not enough: they question whether any of the political arrangements by which members of these groups have been brought into city governments are sufficient to meet the goals of the civil rights movement—political equality and the alleviation of poverty. They have much to say about ways in which the incorporation of blacks and Hispanics falls short and about the conditions that block further strengthening of their position.

Is any theory enough—the theory of Protest Is Not Enough, in particular? The answer to the particular question is partly Yes, but the articles of this forum suggest qualifications and additions; we discuss these below. There are two answers to the general question, both of them No. No, because a theory of variations across cities does not fully meet the need for an understanding of possibilities or of leadership, agenda, and strategy over time in a particular city. And No, because the largest cities must be understood on their own terms, as we would seek to understand a nation or a war on its own terms.

Nevertheless, a theoretical structure of the sort in Protest is useful to practitioners and researchers because it focuses attention on a limited number of main factors and relationships, permits systematic and standardized comparisons between groups of cities, provides a way to summarize the main structure of causal factors and conditions in a given city, and allows us to estimate the levels of minority mobilization and incorporation and of governmental responsiveness that we should expect in a city on the basis of the experience in other cities.