murders and hundreds of bombings, assaults, and arsons, before a fifth trial
resulted in a life sentence in 1998.
Such isolated violence did not stop blacks from going to the polls in the
same proportion as whites. Three years after the Voting Rights Act, a major-
ity of blacks in Alabama and Mississippi could vote. Through VEP’s renewed
efforts, two million more blacks voted within ten years, producing a phenom-
enon not seen in a century – black officials. Within twenty years, the num-
ber of black officials nationwide rose from 103 to 3,503. In 1967, Cleveland’s
Carl Stokes became the first black mayor of a major American city, leading
the way for black mayors in other northern cities, including Chicago,
Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia. Within Dixie, Atlanta,
Birmingham, New Orleans, and eventually Selma voted in black mayors too.
SNCC veterans John Lewis, Marion Barry, and Charles Sherrod won election
as Atlanta’s congressman, Washington’s mayor, and Albany’s city councilman,
respectively. With a large pool of black voters in his camp, Jesse Jackson
made the first serious black campaigns for the presidency. In 1989, Douglas
Wilder of Virginia became the first elected black governor.
Black voting strength became so significant that even George Wallace and
Strom Thurmond kissed black babies, hired black assistants, and funneled
government aid to black areas. Wallace acknowledged that his racist rhetoric
was wrong and crowned a black homecoming queen at the University of
Alabama ten years after he had stood in the doorway to keep blacks out.
He received an honorary degree from Tuskegee University for his political
conversion.
Selma taught powerful lessons to all involved. With black voting realized,
white liberals moved on to other causes, not recognizing that racial justice was
far from achieved. Having lost so badly, racists avoided similar confronta-
tions, lest the federal government help blacks further. The breach between
young SNCC activists and King’s SCLC widened to an unbridgeable chasm.
SNCC regarded King’s refusal to violate federal court injunctions as a betrayal
of the movement’s basic philosophy. Moreover, SNCC resented King’s ‘jug-
gernaut’ for taking over areas that SNCC cultivated for years. In a rebuke
of SCLC’s here-today-gone-tomorrow tactics, Stokely Carmichael promoted
a third party in Alabama – the Lowndes County Freedom Organization – to
encourage indigenous, poor, and uneducated people to escape racism on
their own. With a snarling panther as its emblem, the Black Panther party
sought to seize political power with an all-black slate of candidates, which
lost as a result of wholesale election fraud. The nonviolent civil rights move-
ment for equality and integration was largely over. It did little, if anything,
for blacks north of Dixie, and their impatience erupted in deadly riots.124 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT