Mayor. Michael A. Nutter
But interesting things were happening at the council meetings, nonetheless. I would recommend that citizens try to attend a City Council meeting or two, if they can. In our case, Robert and I recognized a lot of council members from the Impulse club, where they were having fundraisers and parties.
One day I walked into the office of one of the elected officials that I met at the disco, Councilman John White Jr. His father, John White Sr., was a leader of the Black Political Forum.
“This political thing is kind of interesting,” I said, “but I don’t really know that much about it. How would I get involved?”
After we talked for a while he asked me, “Where do you live?”
“The Wynnefield section of Philadelphia,” I responded.
“Oh! Right next door is one of my best friends who lives in Wynnefield and he’s looking to recruit some folks to get involved in his political organization. Go next door, tell him I sent you, and you guys should talk.”
I didn’t know who he was talking about. His name was John C. Anderson, and he was a member at-large in his first term on the City Council. Anderson had a long family history in Philadelphia. His father was a prominent African American Episcopalian priest, and his mother was the matriarch of the family. There were three boys in the family: his younger brother, Louis, had died and his other brother, Jesse, was also a pastor. John C. Anderson was a very articulate, smart, and tremendously handsome man. He was also gay, which was unknown to many at this time in the early 1980s. As progressive as our values are in 2017, that same spirit was not the norm in Philadelphia in the early 1980s. A few people knew about Anderson’s identity but most people did not, and as I started working with him, I would see the strain of holding that secret. From time to time, he was also threatened with outing and blackmail that would have damaged if not ruined his career in that era, so I saw the effects of that coercion, too.
I was a stranger to Anderson, but in December 1981, I knocked on his office door. Others have said that I don’t lack for confidence, but I’m sure I was a bit nervous. Although I didn’t even know what Anderson looked like, I was used to meeting new people and political figures all the time, from my work at the club. Anderson was in; I explained who I was to his staff, and he actually saw me. We chatted and he asked me exactly where I lived. At the time I was living in these wonderful apartments down on Conshohocken Avenue in the Wynnefield Heights neighborhood of Philadelphia. The bilevel apartment was all the rage at the time, and Robert and I lived in one on top of a Chinese restaurant right by a Pathmark supermarket and the ABC Channel 6 TV station. Our building housed a young, up-and-coming crowd, while the other two apartment buildings in the area were largely senior citizens.
After this conversation I started volunteering in Anderson’s office. Anderson was running for ward leader, which is a neighborhood position, and the Democratic Party and the Republican Party each have leaders who comprise the local party leadership. The ward leader is responsible for helping to get out the vote on election day, distributing literature, shuffling a candidate’s volunteers and resources from one location to another as needed, and being a liaison. When it’s not election season, they might do things such as organize neighborhood events or cleanups, or put residents with problems in touch with their City Council member. Philadelphia is divided into sixty-nine wards, and each one has a ward leader. I lived in the Fifty-Second Ward, and Anderson needed ward committee people who were pledged to his candidacy and would support him. The committee person is the lowest elected office in the city. The ward committee is mostly responsible for voter registration and turnout in the ward, and choosing the ward leader. I happened to live in a division where they were looking for someone. So I ran for committee person to help my new friend, the councilman, become ward leader.
At this point, Marian Tasco became something of a “political mother” to me, as she has to so many other aspiring political candidates. I can think of no stronger, more politically astute and enjoyable political figure. Marian supported me early on when I was starting out as a committee person, and played a major role in my subsequent campaigns, including my candidacy for City Council in 1987 and beyond. No single person in Philadelphia, perhaps with the exception of Congressman Bill Gray, has helped, supported, encouraged, advised, and more forcefully supported more candidates for office than Marian Tasco.
I ran against an older woman, Lillian Levinski, who had been in office for probably about twenty years, in a division where many of the people on the voter registration records had dates of birth such as February 3, 1898, or March 20, 1901. In other words, it was a slightly older population—and I was just about to turn twenty-five in 1982, about a month after the election. I figured I had some challenges. But I worked hard and I campaigned.
Ms. Levinski beat me by 282 to 48, or somewhere in that neighborhood. But this was a first run. I ran again, and I did a little better. And then I deployed some of my Penn training and knowledge: I created this complex chart and regression analysis and figured out that if I kept running, I could beat her in about forty years at the pace I was going.
So I made maybe my first important political decision: I moved.
I had been watching Councilman John Anderson’s public service from the time we met in 1981, through the 1982 ward leader race, and into his reelection campaign of 1983 (ward elections at the time were held every two years in Philadelphia). Anderson asked if I would be his campaign manager, and at first I declined, because I think it’s really important in life that you know what you don’t know—and I knew nothing about managing a political campaign. But Anderson and his team, Obra Kernodle III and Saul Shorr, persuaded me. I wanted to be helpful, I wanted to be involved, and I came to realize, of course, that I had a lot of free time and they would not have to pay me very much because I didn’t know very much. But mostly, I agreed because I was interested in politics, and I wanted to support him.
I’ve lived in Philadelphia all my life, but Anderson took me to new places across this city—to neighborhoods and institutions that I’d never seen, and I met folks that I’d never heard of, didn’t understand, or know anything about. Before this point, my world in Philadelphia for much of my life had often been no more than three or four blocks around my house. Going to high school at the Prep did take me to North Philadelphia, but I was a West Philadelphia guy my whole life, and had almost no incentive or reason to travel even to other parts of the city—this was not unusual. Why would I go to those places? I wasn’t going to shop there, I didn’t know anyone there, and in some cases they were not welcoming neighborhoods for African Americans. My neighborhood was my comfort zone, but with Anderson running for an at-large, citywide position, we went everywhere in the city. And, everywhere we went, people loved him.
Even more than that affection for him, I really saw the impact that Councilman John C. Anderson had on other people. They looked to him to lead, to stand up, to speak out, and to pass legislation. Through this campaign I started to better understand “power,” but not power for the sake of power. Rather, I mean the impact that a person can have on others’ lives through public service. This insight resonated with some of my earlier, altruistic motivations to enter the medical field. John was effective in his service for a variety of reasons. He was a risk taker, creative, bold, and kind. He was impatient about progress and cared very passionately about justice. Anderson took on the big challenges and was keenly attuned to the plight of others. He could have a short temper, but it was always sparked by his quest for excellence.
In the meantime, Mayor Green announced on election day in November 1982 that he was not running for reelection. The next day, the African American managing director for the city government, W. Wilson Goode Sr., resigned his office and announced that he was running for mayor.
Philadelphia had yet to elect a black mayor. State Senator Hardy Williams, who had helped to found the Black Political Forum in 1967 and had been the first African American varsity basketball player