The Grandson of Slaves Who Became Governor
On January 13, 1990, L. Douglas Wilder was sworn in as Virginia's governor, becoming the first elected African-American governor in American history.
In January 1990, on the steps of Virginia’s state capitol in Richmond, a 58-year-old lawyer raised his right hand and made American history. L. Douglas Wilder was sworn in as governor of Virginia — the first African-American elected governor in the history of the United States.
The oath was administered on January 13, 1990, by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. The symbolism of the setting was hard to miss. Wilder was taking office in a state that had been a cornerstone of the Confederacy, a state whose segregated law schools had refused to admit him a generation earlier. He had to leave Virginia to earn his law degree at Howard University.
Wilder’s family story reads like an American epic. He was born in Richmond on January 17, 1931, the son of Robert Judson Wilder, who was himself the son of slaves, and Beulah Richards, born to freed African-Americans. After graduating from Virginia Union University with a degree in chemistry in 1951, Wilder was drafted into the Army and served in the Korean War, earning a Bronze Star for heroism.
He entered Virginia politics in 1969 as the state’s first Black state senator, a seat he held for five consecutive terms, then served as Virginia’s first African-American lieutenant governor from 1985 to 1989. When he ran for governor in 1989, he campaigned as a moderate Democrat focused on crime, education, and fiscal discipline — and on November 8 he defeated Republican Marshall Coleman by less than half a percentage point. A recount confirmed the result.
As governor, Wilder governed as a budget hawk. When Virginia faced a projected $1.4 billion shortfall in his first year, he balanced the books through spending cuts rather than tax increases. He pushed crime and gun-control measures, won state bond issues for transportation, and in May 1990 ordered state agencies and universities to divest from apartheid-era South Africa. For his historic achievement, the NAACP awarded him its Spingarn Medal for 1990. He later mounted a brief bid for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination.
Wilder’s inauguration resonated far beyond Virginia. Newspapers around the world treated it as a milestone in the long arc of American civil rights — proof, as one observer put it, that the ballot box had opened doors that the law had once bolted shut. In a state that had once counted his grandfather as property, the grandson of slaves now held its highest office.
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