Philadelphia elected its first Black mayor on this week in Philly history
W. Wilson Goode, a 45-year-old Democrat, was the first Black chief executive in the city’s more than 300-year history.
The Black man born in the American South stood before thousands of cheering citizens of a major Northeastern city.
And late in the night on Nov. 8, 1983, W. Wilson Goode raised his arms victory.
The 45-year-old Democrat was elected mayor of Philadelphia. He made history as the first Black chief executive in the city’s more than 300-year history.
“Goode! Goode! Goode!,” supporters chanted at a jammed Civic Center, The Inquirer reported.
He was only the second Black person to be elected mayor of a major Northeastern city, nearly 120 years after the end of the Civil War.
“I intend to be the mayor of all the people,” Goode said as the crowd, once again, chanted his name.
Goode received 55% of the vote, vanquishing Republican John Egan and independent Thomas Leonard.
Voter turnout in the city of 1.6 million was an astounding 70%, The Inquirer reported.
“All of us,” Goode said, “from all neighborhoods, from all walks of life — white, Black, Asian, Hispanic — all of us, working together, can solve the problems facing our city.”
Goode was born in a tiny North Carolina town near the Virginia border. When Goode was 15, his sharecropper father moved him and his six siblings to Southwest Philadelphia as part of the Great Migration to escape a raging Jim Crow South.
Goode graduated from Bartram High School and Morgan State University. After a stint in the Army he earned a masters in government administration from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.
He rose to become the city’s managing director in the Bill Green administration, and threw his hat into the mayoral ring when his boss opted not to seek reelection in 1983.
Goode was seen as a buttoned-down manager and thoughtful leader with a tireless work ethic.
His win was the culmination of a years-long campaign to pierce the political color barrier.
The cherry on top was Goode’s toppling of former Mayor Frank Rizzo in the Democratic primary. The former police commissioner had come to epitomize the city’s fading racist agenda.
While Goode was mayor during the 1985 MOVE bombing, and he oversaw a sizable financial crisis, his tenure was also marked by the growth and expansion of Center City, and the salvaging of several city departments, including housing and the homeless office.