New Mayor in Town

The residents of Prichard, a decaying and listless town of 41,000 people on the outskirts of Mobile, had not known such excitement since Alabama Governor George Wallace last gave his rousing annual Labor Day address in a local park. There, behind the screaming sirens of the escorting police motorcycles, came four Lincoln Continentals, a white Cadillac, a marching band and an ROTC drill team. The town, almost equally divided between blue collar whites and impoverished blacks, was parading to inaugurate its new and unlikely mayor: Algernon ("Jay") Cooper Jr., 28, a smooth and sophisticated Northern-educated black.

Morale. The election of Cooper, an Alabama-born graduate of Notre Dame and New York University's School of Law, seemed to signal a new era of interracial cooperation in a community in which only one black had held an appointive position in the municipal government. One of Cooper's first postelection acts, in fact, was to visit the disabled Wallace and invite him to speak again in Prichard at any time. Preaching conciliation rather than proclaiming black power, Cooper had unseated the lackadaisical twelve-year incumbent mayor, Vernon Capps, 62, by applying some of the organizational expertise he had acquired as a campaign aide to Robert Kennedy.

Although Prichard's whites initially held about a 55%-to-45% edge over blacks in voter registration, partly because there are 1,900 more voting-age whites, Cooper and a team of friends managed to add another 2,000 blacks to the voting rolls, closing the gap. At the same time, he so thoroughly denounced Capps for allowing industry to leave the town, roads to deteriorate and police morale to sag that whites felt little incentive to vote at all. Cooper won by 544 votes out of 10,648 cast.

Cut in the Julian Bond style of the handsome and articulate young Southern black politician, Cooper has earned the support of the predominantly white Prichard police force by promising to get more federal aid for pay and equipment. In a city where the median income is under $5,000 a year, any help he can bring in through his knowledge of federal aid programs is sorely needed. His personality and promises have earned some grudging white support. "He may be a nigger," said one police sergeant, "but he's sure the smartest mayor we ever had." Explained AJ. Lawler, a 25-year resident: "Don't get me wrong, I don't love him. But I tell you, if he does half the things he says he'll do, I'm behind him all the way."

At his inauguration, Cooper, who is light-skinned (his great-great-grandmother was the mistress of Confederate General Jean Jacques Alexandre Alfred Mouton and is buried beside him in Lafayette, La.), pledged that his administration would offer "equal opportunity in everything" to both races. With his London-educated wife Mado at his side, the new mayor conceded that a swimming pool in a black neighborhood was "psychologically and realistically inaccessible" to whites and that "white kids are swimming in a polluted creek." He would get the money, he promised, to build a new pool convenient to both races, but "they'll have to learn to swim together."

It did not take long for the town's long-dominant white politicians to demonstrate that they are not all that ready to work in harmony against financial and civic decline. At the first meeting of the five-man city council, which contains one newly elected black, a three-man majority voted themselves control of all the town's supervisory committees and threw out the black officeholder.

Cooper, hoping to enlist whites who desire change, vows to fight back, but he foresees a potentially divisive struggle. If it comes to that, he is confident that he will prevail, yet fearful that in the process many whites might leave town. In the end, Cooper predicts, the racial dilemma will dissolve because "the whites who remain are going to learn that blacks won't treat them badly."

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