Wilder, a Democrat, defeated his Republican opponent, former state Attorney General J. Marshall Coleman, in the 1989 election. Wilder served only one term.
State law prohibits Virginia governors from serving a second term.
Va. His father's parents were slaves. Wilder graduated from Virginia Union University with a bachelor's degree in chemistry. In 1952, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He earned a law degree in 1959 from Howard University in Washington, D.C., and soon became a successful trial lawyer in Richmond. In 1969, Wilder became the first black elected to the Virginia Senate since 1877, when federal control ended after the Civil War.