Richard Hatcher

Richard Gordon Hatcher was born on the tenth of July 1933 at Michigan City, Indiana, the second-youngest of thirteen children of Carlton Hatcher — a worker at the United States Steel Pullman plant — and Catherine Hatcher, a homemaker. The Hatcher household was working-class Black in the segregated north-central Indiana steel-mill belt. He completed Michigan City's Roosevelt High School in 1951 and the bachelor's at Indiana University at Bloomington in 1956 on a state scholarship. He completed the LL.B. at Valparaiso University Law School in 1959.

He entered private legal practice at Gary, Indiana, in 1959 and was appointed Deputy Prosecutor of Lake County in 1961. He was elected to the Gary Common Council in 1963 and served four years.

He stood for mayor of Gary in the Democratic primary of May 1967 against the incumbent A. Martin Katz and won by under two thousand votes. The November 1967 general election against Republican Joseph B. Radigan — held on the same night as the Cleveland general election of Carl Stokes (placed in this archive) — produced a 1,389-vote Hatcher victory. He took office on the first of January 1968 simultaneously with Stokes, making the two men the first African American mayors of major American cities elected the same night.

He served five consecutive four-year terms across twenty years to 1988 — the second-longest mayoral tenure in Gary history.

His decisive national contribution was the convening at Gary in March 1972 of the National Black Political Convention. The Convention — held at the Westside High School of Gary across three days and attended by approximately eight thousand delegates from across the United States — produced the Gary Declaration, the founding document of the modern Black political-mobilisation tradition that subsequently produced the Jesse Jackson 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns and the Congressional Black Caucus electoral expansion of the 1980s.

He lost the 1987 Democratic primary to Thomas V. Barnes.

He died at Gary on the third of December 2017, at eighty-four.

He is honored here as the convener of the Gary National Black Political Convention.