Bowser had run in 1975. Bowser was a dynamic, energetic lawyer and community activist who fought against racism in Philadelphia for years and was known as a brilliant trial lawyer. So, there had been a couple attempts already to become that first African American mayor of Philadelphia. Everyone thought that Wilson Goode was poised, finally, to achieve this distinction. Goode came from a family of tenant farmers in Seabord, North Carolina, and had moved to Philadelphia early in his life. His political career began as the manager of Hardy Williams’s unsuccessful 1971 mayoral bid, and his subsequent position as the first African American commissioner of the Public Utility Commission. Goode really built a following and made himself visible as the managing director, so that by 1983 he had endorsements from all but two ward leaders and most of the unions.
The mayor’s primary race was a headliner, between Goode and Frank Rizzo. Rizzo was a controversial and polarizing figure in Philadelphia politics, and one of the last examples of the old urban machine politics in the Democratic Party. He was from South Philadelphia and had risen through the police department to become police commissioner. He became a touchstone in the 1967 mayor’s race between Jim Tate and Arlen Spector, when Tate was repeatedly asked if he would keep Frank Rizzo as police commissioner if elected. In fact, this was among the first campaigns in which police commissioners became prominent and politically important in mayoral elections. Tate won the 1967 election but was term limited, so Rizzo ran and won in 1971.
His tenure was a fearful time for African Americans in Philadelphia, as Rizzo had confrontations with the black community and the Black Panthers, and his administration was marked by incidents of police brutality, in addition to controversies around cronyism, massive tax hikes, and corruption. Among other issues, Rizzo had botched the huge bicentennial celebration in 1976 by calling in the National Guard and making people afraid to come to the city for the festivities. He tried to change the city charter to run for a third term, and was the target of a recall effort. The City Council was becoming more engaged and activist during Rizzo’s term, which created a great deal of antagonism between the mayor’s office and the council. The mayoral legacy can be long lasting, far beyond a couple terms of office: Philadelphia is to some extent still dealing with the vestiges of Rizzo’s time as mayor, through union work rules that he implemented in the 1970s that were incorporated thereafter and are very difficult to undo.
By 1983, Rizzo wanted to stage a political comeback, running against Goode, so this election was vitally important to the city of Philadelphia. It was a serendipitous time for Philadelphia to elect its first African American mayor. We were on the same election cycle as Chicago, where Harold Washington had become the first African American mayor of that city. Tom Bradley had become the first African American mayor of Los Angeles starting in 1973, so the ceiling on black mayors in major, large cities—there had already been a few in medium-sized cities—was beginning to crack.
And Goode had a lot of qualities that made him an obvious choice for the city’s first African American mayor, and seemed the clear opposite of Rizzo. First, the city had reached a breaking point with Rizzo and was eager for change. Rizzo was tied to the past and corruption, and Goode was new and clean cut; where Rizzo was a polarizing, divisive figure, Goode cobbled together a formidable coalition, a true rainbow, of Philadelphians who were black, white, and Latino and who came from many different backgrounds.
The entire City Council was running at the same time, and there were fifty-six other candidates for the at-large council position. John Anderson and I were running all over the city on the campaign. We had a lot of fun together, though. With Anderson, during the campaign, I went to my first Penn Relays, the oldest track and field competition in the United States, which has a carnival atmosphere. We were slated to do several events that day, and John decided that we’d only go to the relays and give ourselves a break from the relentless pace. On election day Wilson Goode won the Democratic nomination for mayor, and Anderson came in first out of fifty-seven candidates, which had nothing to do with me or my nonexistent campaign management experience. It was all him: his record, campaigning acumen, and his ability to communicate and connect with people.
On that night in May 1983, at twenty-five years old, I made a decision that this is what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to serve. I wanted to be a public servant. This came more like an epiphany than a gradual realization. I was enjoying what I was doing. I loved working on the campaign and seeing the positive impact that Anderson had with his work, but this was the first campaign I had ever worked on, and this was my first experience of election night victory, albeit vicariously. I was in a room alone for a moment, and as I sat there feeling the sweet joy of winning I said to myself, “This is what I want to do.”
Over the course of that summer, Anderson and I made plans for the next cycle of elections, four years later, in 1987. We strategized that I should run for City Council in the district race. In Philadelphia, there are seventeen members of the City Council. The city has ten council districts, with one city council representative each, and seven members at-large. Anderson was an at-large councilman, so I didn’t want to be in that race because theoretically I would be running against him. We decided that I should run in the Fourth District, where I lived. The district included Wynnefield, Overbrook, West Philly down to Market Street and Fifty-Fourth, Roxborough, Manayunk, and East Falls. I used to say of the Fourth District, to recall a popular movie, that “a river runs through it.” The Schuylkill River cuts the district in half. West Philly, Wynnefield, Overbrook, and two public housing developments are on one side of the district, and on the other, neighborhoods such as East Falls, Manayunk, North Philadelphia Roxborough, and two public housing developments, as well as a fair amount of green space. On the east side of the district, even in the early 1980s, there were English Tudor homes worth anywhere from $300,000 to $500,000. The Fourth District was majority white, but it was changing in the 1980s because of West Philadelphia, Wynnefield, and Overbrook.
Just five months after John and I devised this plan, and a month before election day, Councilman Anderson died. He had been in and out of the hospital over the summer, and had a persistent cough. In September, he was back in the hospital. I saw him a couple of times there, the last time just a few days before he passed away. He was in great spirits that Thursday. But on Monday, when my phone rang, I knew what I’d be told. Two deaths have had a huge personal impact on me: my grandmother Edythe, and John Anderson. I realized that his staff would be as devastated as I was, so I went to the office, and this was the first time that I ever spoke to the news media.
Anderson’s funeral was held at his father’s church, and it was a typical political funeral, attended by family, real friends, and the political poseurs and faux friends who show up for all of these funerals. The funeral itself was a very difficult lesson for me in how the political universe operates. People engaged with me, or not, in a very different way now that my guy was dead and I was at the bottom of the political pecking order. I was at a loss: to have been attached to someone so beloved and then to have this suddenly end, and to become, overnight, a nonperson in the world of Philadelphia politics.
Anderson’s death left a vacancy on the City Council and on the general election ballot in November, of course. Under these circumstances, the Democratic Party gets to replace the person—and the party replaced Anderson with someone who was the complete opposite of the social progressive politics that Anderson stood for. This happened because the replacement, Francis X. Rafferty, was the chair of the public property committee, and in 1983, the City of Philadelphia, like many other big cities, was trying to figure out cable television. Cable TV fell under the purview of the public property committee. The mayor’s office and the City Council were at an impasse over cable TV. The mayor wanted one cable company for the entire city, and the City Council wanted to carve the city into four cable franchise areas. They also insisted that one franchise be African American or a minority-owned company. A battle was raging over the franchising of Area 2, between two African American cable TV companies.
The Democratic powers that be wanted support for one of these franchises over the other, and the council would have a vote on each of these four cable districts. The cable franchises had to be approved by the city, and that legislation ran through the public property committee, of which Rafferty was the chair. He had just lost the primary as an incumbent, and was going to be out of office, but the council needed his vote to prevail on the cable TV franchise. So they filled Anderson’s vacant seat with Rafferty, with what