Michael Nutter’s ascension to the Chief Executive’s chair in City Hall seemed unlikely months ago but the reality of it has a natural feel.

A year ago, before it was a certainty that Nutter would run, conventional wisdom favored a Black man being Philadelphia’s next mayor. The question then was, will it be Chaka Fattah or Dwight Evans?

Nutter will be only the third African American voted into the mayor’s chair in Philadelphia’s 300-year history.

Many expectations surround that achievement — some good, some extravagantly bad and some outrageously hopeful. As the members of the first-ever class of African-American big-city mayors — Richard Hatcher in Gary, Ind.; Cleveland’s Carl Stokes; Washington’s Marion Barry and Kurt Schmoke in Baltimore have discovered some of those expectations are not only out-sized but often times impossible to fulfill.

In Philadelphia, a look back at the term of the first Black mayor, W. Wilson Goode, may be instructive in determining what is possible and what is not. What should an African-American electorate realistically expect?

Goode’s first term followed a tumultuous era. Frank L. Rizzo, a police chief whose reputation for toughness won him the mayor’s chair and whose remark on a visit to his Italian ancestral home about how he’d “spacco il capo,” knock the heads of criminals, opponents and pretty much anyone who stood in his political path, became for many a symbol of white opposition to Black progress.

Rizzo’s legal attack on the city charter’s provision for impeachment came after an actual impeachment challenge, and his attempt to change the charter to eliminate the two-term mayoral limit drew a wide, hostile response from African Americans across the city, setting up even more contention during the failed mayoral campaign of attorney Charles Bowser.

Former U.S. Representative Bill Green won that race, but his promise to name a Black school superintendent and a Black city managing director defused much of the tension, and his nomination of W. Wilson Goode, a community activist coming out of the Black Political Forum, set up what followed.

Goode had earlier served on the Public Utility Commission, nominated by Gov. Milton Shapp, and had a good reputation among community groups. He was seen as a pro-consumer advocate on the commission and his relations with fellow commissioners were so positive, he became the chairman.

As city managing director, Goode early on developed a style that later characterized his mayoralty: Openness, activism and a clear willingness to listen to citizen complaints. City Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller, who was working with state Rep. David P. Richardson at the time, remembers her excitement at attending Goode’s very first town meeting, in a Germantown church.

“I love the thought that he was out working in the community and he was responsive to the people,” she said.

Former Mayor Goode himself, who reached out at a workshop session in Jamaica, where he was detailing the operations of the Amachi Foundation, put it this way: “I left college (Morgan State University) and moved back home and became a block captain. I joined the Paschall Betterment League and started my career in community service. My service as a mayor was a continuation of what I did when I left college.”

The image of the MOVE firebombing looms whenever conversations turn to the mayoralty of W. Wilson Goode, but as many political speakers interviewed for this story have said, that image can tend to obscure the reality of eight years in the mayor’s chair.

Consider what City Councilman James Kenney says:

“That downtown skyline is the Wilson Goode skyline. Liberty Place and two other buildings would not have been built if not for Wilson Goode. He was a very good mayor whose real achievements for this city have been overlooked. I am a white guy from South Philly, and I voted for him, and I’m not ashamed to say it.”

Yet Goode, like Mayor John F. Street, didn’t get a lot of favorable reaction from many white Philadelphians and certainly not from the local mainstream media, particularly the print media.

That mentality that Blacks couldn’t be effective leaders lingered and once Goode or Street did or said something that dealt with the issues of African Americans, the bias began to ooze out.

“As long as Black mayors cater to the white business community, they will be treated like their equal,” said Goode. “I will never forget the minute I took on the cause of the minority set aside and said all of the personal service contracts and the other contracts must have a percentage of a minority in them, a white business leader came to me and said to me, ‘we thought you were different. We were discussing you the other day in our meeting and you are not different.’”

U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, who worked for Goode when he was city managing director, agreed that as mayor, Goode “got a lot of things done that he didn’t get credit for.”

Goode, Fattah says, not only worked out agreements to allow the erection of buildings higher that Billy Penn’s hat atop City Hall, he gets a bum rap about the financial distress Philadelphia experienced near the end of his term when bond rating agencies down-rated the city’s credit rating.

Gov. Ed Rendell, former district attorney who followed Goode as mayor, generally gets credit for rescuing city finances, especially in the out-of-town newspapers that crowned him “America’s Mayor.”

But Fattah says that the “structural imbalance” of Philadelphia’s tax capabilities was the major problem.

“Philadelphia the city fills up the entire County of Philadelphia,” Rep. Fattah said in an interview.

And so much land and buildings are tax-exempt in Philadelphia, either because they belong to an educational institution such as the University of Pennsylvania, Temple, Drexel, La Salle, St. Joe’s, Philadelphia University and the University of the Sciences, or to a major medical center, other nonprofit agencies or to the federal and state governments — including the massive establishment of the state and federal courts — that Philadelphia has a disability compared to, say, Montgomery County.

“People who live on the other side of the city line benefit from the universities, cultural institutions and medical centers here, but pay none of the taxes to support city services,” Fattah said. “It’s unfair to compare Philadelphia to the suburban communities, and it’s also unfair that Philadelphia gets so little a share of its revenues from the state.”

Rep. Fattah had a role in preventing the city from becoming insolvent, so he should know.

“I got the universities, Temple, Penn, Drexel and others, to raise money to help the city,” Fattah said. “I told them, ‘if the city goes bankrupt, it’s going to hurt you as much as the city.’”

Goode’s positive accomplishments far outweighed his missteps, Fattah said, but there were “extraordinary expectations for an African-American mayor. Goode became mayor when the Rizzo machine was still around, working against the changes he was trying to institute, so Rizzo could make a second run.

“Mayor Rendell got to cut the ribbon on the Convention Center, but it was Wilson Goode who got it built.

“It is a testament to his level of support,” Fattah said, “that he was re-elected after the MOVE Commission, which was composed of very independent people, released its report. Wilson Goode made mistakes, but he was not culpable.”

Former Mayor Goode’s son, W. Wilson Goode Jr., echoed those sentiments. Both he and his father remind everyone that Mayor Goode “opened up government to African Americans.”

Or in the words of the Goode senior, “I appointed more African Americans to significant positions in city government than all the mayors of the last 300 years combined.”

City Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds-Brown agreed.

In a telephone interview, she fondly remembered the formation of the citywide Anti-Graffiti Network.

“At the time,” Ms. Reynolds-Brown said, “there was graffiti all over everything. Mayor Goode appointed Tim Spencer, who’s now deceased, and told him ‘you know what to do, work out the problem.’ And Spencer realized you couldn’t just punish the young men who were writing all over everything, you had to give them some way to express themselves that was constructive.

“Today,” Councilwoman Reynolds-Brown continued, “Philadelphia has the most extensive group of murals of any city in America. That didn’t happen by accident, it happened because of the Anti-Graffiti Network, which got many of those young people involved in art at a professional level. There were penalties for people who continued to deface buildings, but rewards for people who joined the arts projects.”

The key thing, Councilwoman Reynolds-Brown said, was that Mayor Goode was always open to go anywhere in the city, and to make government responsive to the concerns of African Americans like never before.

Many speakers echoed that theme.

City Councilwoman Marian Tasco pointed out that the Goode administration was also very open to working with the City Council. Tasco, a City Commissioner at the time of Goode’s election as mayor, said that after she joined the Council, the Gang of Five including David Cohen, George Burrell, Augusta Clark, and Angel Ortiz struggled to help Mayor Goode get his budgets passed, but that “powerful members of the Council” such as John Street and Lucien Blackwell, frequently blocked or held up his initiatives. Others, such as Thatcher Longstreth, never signed on to the mayor’s vision.

Fattah said that this political struggle contributed to the city’s financial woes. Bond rating agencies, he said, noted the disputes as part of the reason they down-rated the city’s credit.

“When Wilson Goode was mayor,” Tasco said, “The commissioners and department heads would come to (City Council) and tell us what they were trying to do and what they needed. Now that’s gone; it’s all secretive.”

Jeremiah White, former head of the Philadelphia Development Partnership during Goode’s administration, said that Mayor Goode’s vision of inclusiveness and his drive to improve life in the neighborhoods produced the expansion of the Community Development Corporations, which have been so active in reshaping the cityscape with housing and commercial developments along major inner-city corridors.

In addition, White said, “he (Goode) really supported getting the Cultural Arts District on North Broad Street. He brought increased awareness and the creation of tools for community development.”

Goode, White and other speakers said Goode was really responsible for most of the developments in housing and downtown growth that came to fruition after he left office.

In addition, former Mayor Goode said, “I increased minority contracting to more than $500 million. I made Black millionaires.

“I also made government run efficiently, and I was all over the city, 24 hours a day,” including appearing on talk show host Mary Mason’s program to take listener calls and address problems.

People encountered on the streets of Philadelphia had varied opinions on the city’s first-ever African-American mayor, most of them favorable.

Wayne Rachman, 57, chair of the Point Breeze Community Network, composed of some 50 organizations, said Mr. Goode was “one of the first strong mayors that really came into the community. I thought he had a brilliant educational background, and he had a broad perspective from (his earlier government posts) and he had a broad perspective on how to manage the city.

“To me,” Rahman said, “he was brilliant. I met him on the elevator at the Wolf Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen law firm when Bill Green was getting ready to run for mayor. Green was meeting with a lot of people, and Wilson was one of them. I was helping to set up the campaign, and I organized the Black wards in South Philly.

“Wilson Goode started reaching out to the community. His housing people, OHCD, came out and worked with people in the community groups. That whole administration was very sensitive to the community.”

Rahman said had it not been for the MOVE incident and its tragic aftermath, “Wilson Goode would have been one of the greatest mayors the city has ever seen. He not only pushed the development of African-American communities, but he pushed Philadelphia to become a 21st century city. He brought about a helluva big economic growth piece, bringing in hotels and convention business, and he really started developing the educational system.

“Wilson Goode was one of the smartest administrators in the country. (His predecessor) Bill Green was a brilliant politician, but Wilson Goode was a brilliant administrator. He was like a 21st-century breakout mayor.”

But the MOVE firebombing set an image of Goode and of Philadelphia that could not be erased, Rahman said. “He gets (expletive) with this tragedy and his administration was getting smacked all over the country.”

Delva Lowe, 58, saw Wilson Goode on the campaign trail, and followed his career in office.

“I’m from Southwest Philly,” Lowe said, “He was a mayor for the Black people. I think he got scrutinized too harshly with the MOVE thing. There was a lot of slack let on his shoulders that he shouldn’t have had to take.”

Brian Scott, 33, of Aston, Delaware County, doesn’t live in the city, but he works as a physical therapist for a Center City health-care provider. Like others from out of town, the only news he heard about Mayor Goode was about “Osage Avenue.”

“I was a kid then,” Scott said, “I didn’t know too much about what was going on.” Still, he said, “things seem crazier today than when that happened.”

Michelle, 28, (who declined to give her last name) is a counselor and director of educational programs at a Center City community center for gay and lesbian youth, teaching life skills, job readiness, wellness and leadership classes. She and her colleague, Jay Mason, 23, grew up in other areas. Like almost all the younger people encountered, they had heard of Mayor Wilson Goode, but knew nothing about him. For them, he’s a forgotten figure from history.

David Berkey, 53, a Mount Holly, N.J. resident who works in Center City for the Simplex Grinnell architectural firm, has been involved in city construction projects for many years. Berkey, a sales engineer who installs building automation and alarm systems in commercial and industrial facilities, came to Philadelphia at a time when “the ethnic divide was very evident.” Berkey and his wife, Karen, 50, agreed that Mayor Goode did much to bridge that divide.

“I love Wilson Goode, and I love the city,” Berkey said. “I sat on boards like the Building Owners Management Association, and I got to see how he managed the city. He was a great guy that managed the city and managed city finances very well. I didn’t think he got much support. He was like Jimmy Carter — both basically good people who should have stayed away [from politics].”

Actress Rema Webb, 39, grew up in Pittsburgh but now lives in Philadelphia. She wasn’t here when the MOVE tragedy occurred, but said that Mayor Goode “probably received incomplete information” about the Southwest Philadelphia activist group, “like what happened in Iraq,” and a tragedy occurred.