L. Douglas Wilder, a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc., made history in 1990 when he became the first Black person elected governor of a U.S. state.
Lawrence Douglas Wilder was born on January 17, 1931, in the Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Virginia Union University, the historically Black university in Richmond, in 1951. He served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, where he earned a Bronze Star, and later earned his law degree from Howard University School of Law in 1959.
Wilder is a brother of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc., which was founded at Howard University in 1911. He is a 1950 initiate of the Zeta Chapter at Virginia Union University and a longtime member of the Phi Phi Chapter in Richmond, Virginia.
His political career began in 1969, when he was elected to the Virginia State Senate, becoming the first African American state senator in Virginia since Reconstruction. In 1985 he was elected Lieutenant Governor, the first Black person elected to statewide office in the commonwealth since Reconstruction.
On January 13, 1990, Wilder was inaugurated as Virginia’s sixty-sixth governor. According to the National Governors Association, he became the first African American elected governor of a U.S. state.
Wilder served a single four-year term that ended in January 1994. As Encyclopedia Virginia notes, much of his governorship was spent managing the state budget during a national recession, and he made budget cutting a hallmark of his administration. In 1993 he signed a law limiting handgun purchases to one per month, which, according to VPM, was aimed at curbing gun trafficking along the I-95 corridor…