Virginia: Sacrificial Lamb

When Virginia Republicans convened in Roanoke last week and picked black Businessman Maurice Dawkins to run for the U.S. Senate, they handed him the dubious opportunity of serving as a sacrificial lamb in a contest against the state’s most popular and best-financed Democrat: ex-Governor Charles S. Robb. A Chicago native and onetime preacher with a rousing hellfire brand of oratory, Dawkins, 67, captured the nomination by getting more votes than two white candidates combined. Declaring that he would run a “conservative” but not a “black” campaign, Dawkins, a former Democrat who left the party in 1972, declined to accept the widespread assumption that nobody can beat Robb, a son-in-law of Lyndon B. Johnson. Says Dawkins: “I am a preacher. I believe in miracles.”