When Susan Gooden was a student at Virginia Tech in the early 1990s, “on a whim” she wrote a letter to the governor to thank him for the state’s investment in her education.
To her surprise, she received a personal letter back from that governor — Douglas Wilder.
Now, more than three decades later, Gooden is dean of the school that bears Wilder’s name, the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University. On Saturday, Gooden had another unique honor, helping preside over a “National Ovation to L. Douglas Wilder” black-tie gala in Washington, D.C., that served as a fundraiser for a scholarship program that involves the three schools with which Wilder is connected: his undergraduate alma mater of Virginia Union University, his law school alma mater of Howard University, and VCU, where he has taught after leaving office.
To say the gala at the Washington Hilton was a star-studded affair is to fall back on a cliché, but it’s also an accurate description, as the photos here attest — at least in terms of political stars. Not surprisingly, since the honoree was a Democratic, so were most of the politicians in attendance, but it was announced that one former Republican officeholder was there — former Gov. and Ambassador Jim Gilmore. The list of donors included some prominent Republicans, as well. Gov. Glenn Youngkin and first lady Suzanne Youngkin are listed at the $10,000 level, the political action committee for Attorney General Jason Miyares gave $5,000 and Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears gave $1,000. Scholarships are a good thing.
About the scholarship
The scholarship is intended for VCU students enrolled in the Wilder School as undergraduates, or graduates of VCU, Virginia Union and Howard who go on to graduate studies at the Wilder School. As of last week, VCU had raised more than $875,000 — and expects more once the final tallies from Saturday’s gala are added up.
Education has always been one of Wilder’s passions (although he and state colleges often clashed during his governorship over how they should be funded). In his remarks Saturday, the 93-year-old Wilder paid homage to the two historically Black schools that made his studies possible. He noted that his family didn’t have the money for him to attend college, but his mother insisted he should go anyway — and to Virginia Union in his native Richmond. “They’ll accept what you have,” Wilder recalled, and sure enough they did, even if it was only a few dollars. Wilder said he was always aware that those bills he forked over weren’t nearly enough to cover the true cost of his education. “There were people contributing to make that happen,” he said, just as there are today.
A historical note: Wilder remains the only governor in the country to be educated wholly at historically Black universities. Another historical note: Virginia Union President Hakim Lucas says that Wilder is the only chemistry major ever to be elected a governor. The young Wilder worked for a time in the state medical examiner’s office while pursuing a master’s degree in chemistry before deciding to go to law school instead.
The keynote speaker at the gala was Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, who has the distinction of being the nation’s third Black elected governor, Wilder being the first and Deval Patrick of Massachusetts the second. The key word there is “elected” — there have been three Black lieutenant governors who have been elevated to the governorship following the death or resignation of their state’s governor, two in Louisiana during the Reconstruction era and then David Paterson in New York in 2008.
“I would not have been the 63rd governor of Maryland had it not been for the 66th governor of Virginia,” Moore said by way of honoring Wilder.
That observation underscores a certain curiosity about Wilder’s historic status: His breakthrough election as governor opened doors that only two others have passed through in the 35 years since — Patrick and Moore.
Speaking as someone who was around back then, I would have expected more to follow, if not in Virginia, then elsewhere. Some Black candidates have tried, and a few have even won their party’s nomination for governor in other states, but most of those have lost. Losing an election is a common enough thing, but to have just three Black candidates elected to their state’s highest office out of roughly 450 gubernatorial elections seems a low number to me — and highlights again just how historic Wilder’s victory in 1989 was.
Perhaps that is poised to change: There are presently seven Black lieutenant governors around the country (five Democrats and two Republicans, including Earle-Sears here in Virginia) and six Black attorneys general (all Democrats). That’s the highest number for both offices. While there are other avenues to a governorship (both Patrick and Moore were in the private sector when they were elected), the presence of so many Black officeholders in other statewide positions creates a greater chance of seeing more Black governors in the future. If that comes to pass, all of them will owe a debt to the man who proudly proclaimed in his inaugural address that he was a “son of Virginia.”
I’ve always thought that, despite his historic status, Wilder has never fully gotten his due nationally. Perhaps some of that is simply a function of being a governor, focused on state issues, rather than, say, a U.S. senator who is focused on national ones. Still, this is a small thing but perhaps telling: Stacey Abrams made the cover of Time magazine in 2018 while still a candidate for governor in Georgia. She went on to lose. Wilder won and never made the cover of Time; he was slated to in 1989 but a day after his election the Berlin Wall fell, and Wilder got bumped inside.
While Wilder’s political story is often told in terms of Richmond and race, his rise has always had a connection to the least racially diverse part of the state — Southwest Virginia.
Wilder was considered by many (including yours truly) to be a sure loser in the 1985 lieutenant governor’s race. It was simply inconceivable that Virginians then would elect a Black candidate. We were, of course, quite wrong, and we got our first glimpse of that in Lee County.
In the summer of 1985, Wilder had little money, long odds and little exposure beyond the state’s capital press corps. Paul Goldman, who was running Wilder’s campaign, came up with the idea of a statewide “station wagon” tour — a station wagon because that was the vehicle that was available. The goal was to visit every county and city in the state, which had three political advantages: It symbolically made the case that Wilder wanted to be a candidate for all Virginians, it was cheap so could conserve funds for television ads, and it put Wilder directly in touch with local media outlets who would be thrilled to interview a statewide candidate (and also ask easier questions than the capital press corps). Wilder indirectly bought himself front-page coverage in weekly newspapers across the state. Wilder also started that tour in the least expected place: the Cumberland Gap in Virginia’s southwestern tip. Southwest Virginia then still voted strongly Democratic, so Wilder was starting in friendly territory — but also in a part of the state that’s overwhelmingly white, which made for lots of coverage about how Wilder was being embraced by white voters. It didn’t hurt that Southwest Virginia, then as now, felt overlooked by statewide candidates and was thrilled to see one spending so much time in the region.
It also didn’t hurt that Wilder was a remarkable campaigner, one of the best I’ve seen in my four-decade career of following Virginia politics — perhaps the best. Many can be affable, some can be erudite, a select few can be both. Wilder could backslap with the best; he could also quote poetry and ancient philosophers. He also possessed another quality that I’ve never seen in another politician: He wasn’t afraid to improvise. Modern political campaigns are more scripted than a Broadway show; I was there the day Wilder was campaigning in downtown Norton and a man he’d never met proceeded to complain about the long delays at railroad crossings. The man offered to give Wilder a ride to demonstrate his point. Wilder didn’t hesitate. He jumped in the man’s pickup truck and rode off, leaving his campaign staff beyond, mouths agape. I don’t see any candidate today willing to get into a pickup with a stranger — nor should they, probably, but those were different days. On the other hand, that move was also classic Wilder. He’s always been fearless, a personality trait that helped him challenge racism in the Army, helped him capture 19 Chinese soldiers during the Korean War, helped him through his long political career. “Defeatism did not run through the blood of my ancestors,” Wilder said Saturday. “I will persist until I succeed.” Even in his ninth decade, he exudes energy — and that sense of persistence.
I still marvel at how well Wilder (and Democrats in general) did in Southwest Virginia back then. Wilder took 59.2% of the vote in Lee County in the 1985 lieutenant governor’s race and 54.8% in the 1989 governor’s race — inconceivable percentages for a Democrat there now. Last time around, the Democratic candidate for governor took just 12.1% of the vote in Lee County.
Wilder, in 1985, carried every locality in what we often call “coal country” with the exception of Scott County, and he came within 132 votes of carrying that county. Four years later, in the governor’s race, only Tazewell County tipped with Scott County against him. Wilder’s winning margin statewide that year was a scant 6,741 votes. Of those, 6,641 came from Wise County. Counted another way, Wilder produced a margin of 7,275 votes out of Buchanan County, Dickenson County, Wise County, Norton, Russell County and Lee County. In a close election, it’s possible to argue that everyone made the difference, but it’s not wrong to say that Southwest Virginia, the whitest part of the state, delivered the election to Virginia’s first Black governor.
I’m occasionally asked about how that happened. One answer, of course, is that Southwest Virginia was Democratic then, and we could talk about the larger forces that have realigned politics since then. Another answer is that Wilder was quite good at conveying to voters who felt left out of the state’s political structure that he was one of them, even if they didn’t share the same skin color. Sometimes Democratic candidates ask me what they need to do to win more votes in Southwest Virginia. I tell them they need to take more lessons from Douglas Wilder. Clearly, not enough have.
