Beyond the Boundaries: A New Structure of Ambition in African American Politics

In the past, African American aspirations for political offi cewere assumed to be limited to areas with sizeable blackpopulation bases. By and large, black candidates have rarelybeen successful in statewide or national elections. This hasbeen attributed to several factors: limited resources availableto African American candidates, or identifi cation witha black liberationist ideological thrust. Other factors havebeen a relatively small and spatially concentrated primarysupport base of black voters, and the persistent resistance ofmany white voters to support black candidates.

For these reasons, the possibility of black candidateswinning elections to national offi ce was presumably justa dream. Conventional wisdom conceded a virtual cap onboth the possible number of black elected officials andthe level of elective offi ce to which they could ascend.But objective political analysis has not always made sufficient allowances for the more universal phenomenonof individual political ambitions. Th e contributors to thisvolume explore the ways ambitious individuals identifi edand seized upon strategies that are expanding the boundariesof African American electoral politics.

This volume is anchored by a symposium that focuses onnew possibiities in African American politics. Both the electoralcontests of 2006 and the Barack Obama presidential campaignrepresent an emergent dynamic in American electoralpolitics. Analysts are beginning to agree that the contoursof social change now make the electoral successes of blackcandidates who are perceived as ideologically and culturallymainstream increasingly likely. The debate captured inthis volume will likely inspire further scholarly inquiry intothe changing nature and dimensions of the larger dynamicof race in American politics and the subsequent changingpolitical fortunes of African American candidates.

Georgia A. Persons is professor ofpolitical science in the School of PublicPolicy at Georgia Institute of Technology,Atlanta, Georgia. She has written articlesfor Policy Studies Review, Th e NationalCivic Review, and Phylon and is also theeditor of Transaction's series The NationalPolitical Science Review.