The Election of Blacks to City Councils

In the next decade, as in the last, change is likely to be the central fact of urban black politics. During the 1970s events are almost certain to challenge the accuracy of many of the traditional axioms which now underpin discussions of the subject. As examples, center cities' changing racial mixes and rising black political consciousness offer prospects for greater, perhaps approaching equitable, levels of black representation in urban government and a more active and politically sophisticated black electorate. As James Q. Wilson (1965: preface) has written: any book on Negroes, particularly on their politics, ought to be published in a loose-leaf binder, so that it can be corrected and updated on a monthly basis. Students of black urban politics, in their efforts merely to keep abreast of ongoing events in the nation's diverse urban settings, must digest large, multidimensional masses of data which accrete almost daily, and certainly with each municipal election.