President of Leading Black Think Tank Strives to Remain Nonpartisan

Eddie N. Williams is constantly on the phone these days, what with black politicians so much in the news.

Is Jesse Jackson maintaining his hold on black voters?

How did L. Douglas Wilder, Virginia’s first black governor, manage to get himself elected?

How is the indictment of Mayor Marion Barry playing with the voters in the mostly black District of Columbia?

Those are the kinds of questions regularly put to Williams, who is president of the Joint Center for Political Studies, a research institute he has built into the nation’s premier black think tank.

The center’s staff of 60 studies and develops data on the social, political and economic activities and concerns of African-Americans. It is best known for its annual “Roster of Black Elected Officials,” in which the number of blacks in public office has risen from 600 in 1970 to more than 7,000 this year.

The center occupies a special niche at a time when black candidates and voters are gaining influence in politics at all levels.

The mainstream is the “new frontier” for blacks seeking public office, Williams says, citing the elections in 1989 of both Wilder and David N. Dinkins, the new mayor of New York.

“That’s where the jobs are,” he said. “All of the positions that are in predominantly black jurisdictions have just about been filled.”

Largely disenfranchised in many Southern states until the mid-1960s, black voters can claim credit for recent elections of Democratic senators in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina.

The mayors of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia are black.

The black electorate remains overwhelmingly Democratic, but two photographs on a wall of Williams’ office show how jealously he guards the center’s political neutrality.

One is a picture of Williams with President Bush; the other shows Williams with two-time Democratic presidential contender Jackson.

“People don’t knock the Joint Center as being liberal or conservative or Republican or Democratic, and that’s a very difficult position for a black organization to maintain,” said Robert Bates, a Mobil Oil Co. lobbyist and close friend of Williams.

“It’s a good role to be in, to call the shots as you see them,” Williams said. “I’ll comment on the Republicans and I’ll comment on the Democrats. I let the chips fall where they may.”

Rep. Augustus F. Hawkins (D-Los Angeles), the oldest and most senior black in the House and chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, said that he often makes use of statistical data and analyses from the center on a variety of issues, “to focus on a minority viewpoint or get the specifics.”

One question Williams is asked frequently is whether Bush and other Republican Party leaders will be able to win black voters over to GOP candidates.

The opportunity is there, Williams said, “but until the Republicans can succeed in recruiting some visible black leaders with a following, and until they disabuse themselves of the notion that they can create a black leader, they’re going to only be modestly successful.”

Williams, 57, was born in Memphis, Tenn., the only child of Ed Williams, a one-armed jazz piano player, and his wife, Georgia.

From his mother, who worked as a maid, Williams learned the value of learning and assembling information. She would often bring home books, clothes and other articles from the households in which she worked.

“This is what that white boy’s reading. Now, you ought to be reading it,” she would tell him. Thus Williams was able to read books not available to black children in the segregated school system.

And he credits Bebe Bowers Fingall, a high school English teacher whose students called her “Mama,” with helping him develop a competitive spirit and self-confidence. As one of “Mama’s pets,” he said, he was drawn into reading all kinds of writings and speaking anthologies and plays.

He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Illinois and did graduate work in political science at Atlanta and Howard universities.

He was director of the Center for Policy Studies at the University of Chicago, a director of the U.S. Office of Equal Employment Opportunity and a State Department foreign service reserve officer.

Then, 18 years ago, the president of the University of Chicago was startled to hear that the school’s vice president for public affairs was leaving to head an obscure research organization.

“The challenge to me is to make you hear about it,” Williams told him.

The unofficial link between black elected officials and the institute dates to its beginnings in 1970, when psychologist Kenneth Clark and several leading black politicians of the time started it with a $2-million grant from the Ford Foundation. Today, the center is supported by $3 million a year from private foundations and corporations, and Williams is working to raise $5 million to match a Ford Foundation pledge of $5 million.

The institute’s mission has been to supply technical assistance to the emerging cadre of black elected officials from the ranks of teachers, preachers, farmers and local community activists.

“Our role was to help them better understand the processes of governance, to share some information and some expertise about administration, planning, budgeting, identification of resource acquisition--those kinds of technical things,” Williams said.