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"Hey! We got ourselves a mayor!" cried a white college student from New York. "We did it! We did it!" exulted a middle-aged Negro man. "Amen, amen," murmured an elderly Negro woman, tears starting from her eyes. It was 3:02 a.m. at a downtown hotel, and Cleveland, the nation's tenth biggest city, had just chosen as its mayor Carl Burton Stokes, great-grandson of a slave, over Seth Taft, grandson of a President.
With his swearing-in this week in the city council chamber, sinewy, stage-handsome Stokes becomes the first Negro elected to head any major U.S. city. He brings to the job not only political experience and ability but also grace, pugnacity and energy neatly packaged in a 6-ft., 175-lb. frame. In all, he is quite a change from the routine succession of organization men he succeeds. "This is not a Carl Stokes victory," he said when the results were in, "not a vote for a man but a vote for a program, for a visionary dream of what our city can become." He added softly: "I can say to you that never before have I ever known the full meaning of the words 'God Bless America.' "
Against Backlash & Bigotry. Cleveland was not alone in making last week's voting a historic off-year election. Gary, Ind., a northern bastion of the Ku Klux Klan 40 years ago, also elected a Negro, Richard Hatcher, 34, as its mayor. As in Cleveland, white votes supplied the crucial margin. In Boston, a coalition of white and Negro voters chose moderate Mayoral Candidate Kevin Hagan White over Louise Day Hicks, who had become a totem of opposition to school integration.
Martin Luther King called the three elections a "one-two-three punch against backlash and bigotry." Massachusetts' Senator Edward Brooke, who made his own racial breakthrough last year, said that "It showed the American Negro what he can achieve through lawful means." And A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany pronounced that "American voters have rejected racism as a political issue."
Judgments such as Meany's may be euphoric. In all three cities, thousands of white Democrats crossed party lines to vote against Stokes and Hatcher while Mrs. Hicks got nearly half of Boston's white ballots. "The great mass of white voters in Gary and Cleveland," observed Psephologist Richard Scammon, "voted white, not Republican or Democratic." And CORE'S Floyd McKissick, in discussing Cleveland and Gary, pointed out: "A black man is still black and the parties do not support black candidates with the same vim, vigor and vitality that they do white candidates."