Albert Wheeler and the Civil Rights Reckoning
Near Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ann Arbor had a reputation for liberalism that did not always match its daily reality.
Through the nineteen fifties and into the sixties, Black residents faced discrimination at restaurants along Main Street. Theater balconies were the designated seating for Black patrons, who were not permitted in the lower sections. The University of Michigan, for all its intellectual ambition, had a Black population of roughly three percent among students and a single Black faculty member in the medical school as late as the early nineteen sixties.
Albert Wheeler changed some of that through decades of sustained pressure. Wheeler was the first African American to receive tenure in the university's microbiology department, earning it in nineteen fifty-nine. He and his wife Emma, a nurse, had been organizing in Ann Arbor since the nineteen forties, helping found the predecessor to the local NAACP chapter. Emma Wheeler led protests that ultimately produced Ann Arbor's Fair Housing Ordinance.
In April of nineteen seventy-five, Albert Wheeler ran for mayor as a Democrat. The election used instant-runoff voting, the first mayoral race in American history to do so. The Republican incumbent received forty-nine percent of first-choice votes to Wheeler's forty percent. But the Human Rights Party voters had ranked Wheeler as their second choice, and under the instant-runoff rules, Wheeler won by one hundred twenty-one votes. He became Ann Arbor's first Black mayor.
The same political moment that produced Wheeler's victory had already made Ann Arbor a different kind of laboratory. In nineteen seventy-four, Kathy Kozachenko, running on the Human Rights Party ticket, became the first openly gay candidate elected to public office in the United States, winning a city council seat. Jerry DeGrieck and Nancy Wechsler had come out while serving on that same council two years earlier. The city was doing things before the country had the language for them.
Wheeler served until nineteen seventy-eight. Wheeler Park on the city's west side carries his name.
