The Nation - News from July 28, 1986

The number of black elected officials at all levels of government increased last year, yet blacks held only 1.3% of the nation’s 490,000 elective offices, the Joint Center for Political Studies said in Washington. Blacks held 6,424 offices at the end of 1985, a 6.1% increase over the number a year earlier. L. Douglas Wilder was elected lieutenant governor of Virginia, the first black since Reconstruction to win a major statewide office in the South, and Alyce Clark was elected to the Mississippi Legislature, the first black woman to win such an office in that state.