Double Duty: A Small Group of African Americans are Serving Simultaneously as Scholars and Elected Officials
By Ron Taylor

When Dr. Mamie Locke conducted an independent study seminar at Hampton University last year, her 10 political science students got more than an Ivory Tower approach to the art, craft and science of winning and holding elected office. Because their instructor, Locke, a political scientist by training, is also the mayor of Hampton, Va. Locke, who was elected mayor in May, has been the dean of the school of liberal arts and education at Hampton since 1996. Locke is part of a small group that crosses the line between the practical and the theoretical. She is part of an estimated 200 Black elected officials in the United States who also are professors or administrators at an institution of higher education, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
Barely noticed among the estimated 8,000 African American elected officials and a half-century after the dawn of the civil rights movement, these double-duty officers reflect both the rise of Black scholars and the evolution of Black political power in the United States, say political observers.
Unsurprisingly, there are Black officials who also wear the cloak of political science teacher, says David Bositis, who has studied Black elected officials at the Washington, D.C.-based Joint Center.
As scholars of the art of politics they "are well situated for running for political office." After all, Bositis, says, "if plumbers' sons are most likely to become plumbers, it should come as no surprise that those who study politics wind up holding office."
The evolution of the small group of political scientists who put their knowledge to work by holding office is one of the little noticed by-products of an era that saw African Americans emerge from the wars of the civil rights era as community leaders, says Dr. Diane Pinderhughes, former president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.
The men and women who studied political science during that turbulent era were not just interested in the theory of power, she says. "The core of the people who taught in the 1950s and 1960s were interested in crossing the line between theory and practice." The result was a cadre of activists who were well versed in both lofty principles and winning elections, she explains.