Despite what some viewed as the `ideal’ Black leadership team, education gains were limited during Wilder administration
The 1989 election of L. Douglas Wilder as governor of Virginia
proved exciting to the nation. When Wilder became the first African
American governor in the commonwealth, and the first in the nation
since Reconstruction, many Black Virginians had high hopes for his
administration. Those hopes were especially high for expected
improvement in educational opportunities for minorities.
Wilder served as governor from 1990 to 1994. In the arena of
education, Wilder appointed Jim Dyke, an African American attorney, to
serve as the commonwealth’s secretary of education — a move that
signaled, to many, the governor’s concern for ensuring educational
access for all Virginians.
“The push for affirmative action and access was greater then than at any other time in Virginia history,” Dyke claims.
Dyke, who is chair of the advisory committee for the Miles To Go
report by the Southern Education Foundation (SEF), says that despite
the commonwealth’s plunge into a deep recession in the early 1990s, the
Wilder administration should be remembered for policy developments that
laid the “framework” for making Virginia’s public colleges and
universities more accessible to African Americans.
For example, even as state officials approved deep cuts in the
state’s budget, they managed to increase funding for need-based student
financial aid during Wilder’s tenure as governor, according to Dyke.
Recommendations for making public higher education systems more
accessible to African Americans that were included in Redeeming the
American Promise, the 1995 report by SEF, grew out of Dyke’s
experiences as education secretary in Virginia.
