Mayor and Jackson Adviser

The Institute of Politics (IOP) could not have found anyone more involved with the current political scene than Richard Hatcher. Now serving part-time as a senior advisor to Presidential hopeful Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, Hatcher was the vice chairman of Jesse Jackson's national campaign this year and chairman of the Jackson campaign in 1984.

Hatcher, a five-term mayor of Gary, Indiana, will be leading a study group called "Politics of Black America: The Jackson Campaign and Beyond," in which he will be tracing the rise of Blacks in American politics.

Elected mayor in 1967, Hatcher says he had a rough start in politics. He says he was encouraged to run for mayor by civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. at a time when Blacks were trying to strengthen their voice in politics.

But at that time many Black politicians--including Hatcher--found themselves under investigation by authorities, ranging from local police to the FBI, without ever being subpoenaed. In his case, he says, city workers under investigation for transgressions were told charges would be dropped if they could help incriminate him.

"Eventually, I decided I had about had it, and I asked for an appointment with Attorney General [John Mitchell] of the United States," Hatcher says. "I told him this has to stop. If there is anything in your files that justifies these investigations, indict me. He looked into my file...and there was just a lot of newspaper clippings. That was the end of it."

While mayor of Gary, Hatcher says, he also became involved in the movement to get a Black person elected president.

"A very logical aspiration I think for any group of people that is politically active in this country is to see one of its own, to see all of the barriers taken down so that there would be no office that a Black could not run for, just as those American who were Catholic felt very good when John Kennedy was elected president," Hatcher says. "Well, Blacks have similar aspriations. I have always felt that until we elect a Black president, then the whole issue of racism will continue to be with us."

Hatcher participated in a series of tumultuous meetings in 1983 in which the Black political community met to decide whether to field a candidate in the 1984 presidential race. After a good deal of controversy, Hatcher says, a group of Black leaders first decided in Chicago to support a Black candidate and picked Jesse Jackson some what later. Hatcher says a number of other Blacks were considered, including Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young.

Many of the people the group considered were simply not willing to be the first Black candidate for president." The risks inherent in a Black mounting a serious campaign for president are significant," he says. "They range all the way from the obvious physical danger--the danger of assassination--to the fact that this is not the kind of thing that the political establishment of this country really welcomes with open arms. So people who felt they had a stake, for example, in the Democratic party saw this--the idea of a Black running or even supporting a Black for president--as a very traumatic and destabilizing thing with respect to their own involvement with that party."

However, Hatcher chose to get involved with Jackson's run for the presidency and was appointed chairman of the 1984 campaign. Since then, he has served as vice chairman of the Democratic party and helped to form the Black Caucus of the Democratic party. In short, he says, "I have been very involved in the effort to increase the presence of Blacks at all levels of the Democratic party."

As a top adviser to Jackson this year, Hatcher sat in on many of the key meetings at the Democratic convention last July, in which Jackson and Dukakis resolved their differences and agreed to join forces in the Massachusetts governor's quest for the presidency. He says, however, that the relationship between the two campaigns has occasionally been strained.

"Following the convention, some mistakes were made, but because the people invovled are essentially reasonable people and kept working to resolve the problems and correct the mistakes, [in] the last months or so the tensions and problems have pretty much been eliminated," Hatcher says.

The Jackson adviser says one of Dukakis' key mistakes was his failure to tell Jackson he had selected Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen for the vice presidential spot.

The Dukakis campaign asserted at the time that Jackson could not be reached, but Hatcher counters that The secret service is able to get hold of any presidential candidate at any time. Hatcher adds, however, that the mistake was due to the relative inexperience of the Dukakis organization rather than some "ulterior or sinister motive."

In his study group, Hatcher says, he plans to look at certain watershed events in recent American history which have contributed to the rise of Blacks in politics. For example, 1967, the year in which he was elected mayor, was the year in which Blacks "moved away from the street [demonstrations] and moved towards the electoral arena," he says.

Other important events which he plans to discuss include the formation of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1970, the National Black Political Convention in 1972 and, of course, Jesse Jackson's bids for president in 1984 and 1988.

The former mayor of Gary says he will also be working on his own research project while he is at Harvard. Hatcher is designing an economic plan he calls the "Black Common Market," in which participating American cities would be designated to produce specific goods, and all of the city governments would agree to purchase those products from member cities.

The point is, Hatcher says, that "Black companies" would be producing most of these controlled goods. However he adds that "white companies" would be allowed to participate if they engaged in fair hiring practices--employing a proportion of minority workers equal to the representation of minorities in the city in which they operate.

"Blacks continue to be among the poorest of the poor in this country after 100 years of so-called emancipation," Hatcher says. "Through the Black Common Market, you can seriously address that problem. I'm talking about giving people a means of sustaining and mainataining themselves. It's as American as apple pie."