THE 'LILY BLACK' TICKET Depending how you read history, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears would be the first Black person nominated by Republicans for Virginia governor.
Or the second. Apparently not in dispute: Earle-Sears would be the first Black woman — in the nation — nominated by the GOP for a governorship. And with Earle-Sears, the first Black Republican and first Black woman elected statewide in Virginia, expected to face another woman in the general election, retiring Democratic U.
S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, our state is guaranteed to install its first female governor.
It would do so 36 years after Doug Wilder became the nation's first elective Black governor Earle-Sears' anticipated nomination in 2025 would follow by 104 years the selection by Virginia Republicans of two candidates for governor — both Richmonders: one, a White corporate lawyer, Henry Anderson, who embodied the establishment; the other, a Black newspaper publisher, John Mitchell, who routinely railed against the establishment. These two men presented themselves as the GOP's 1921 nominee for governor because there were, in effect, two Republican parties. And that was because White Republicans declared that they wanted nothing to do with Black Republicans, whose loyalty to the party was forged through the hard-fought freedom from slavery delivered a half-century earlier by President Abraham Lincoln.
In renouncing Black Republicans and adopting as their own the avowed racism of the state's dominant Demo.
