When Hulan Jack won the Manhattan borough president’s race in 1953, newspapers across the country carried the news. It was the most powerful municipal office in the United States held by a black man — 10 years before Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington.

While most white news outlets ran the news as a brief item, the black press celebrated it as a watershed moment — an unquestionable sign of the African-American emergence on the political stage in the North, amid the rapid demographic change of the Great Migration and the first gains of the postwar civil rights movement.

Front pages across the country were effusive: “First in Big City History,” from The Baltimore Afro-American; “N.Y. Negro Wins Top Post,” in The Pittsburgh Courier; “It Happened in New York,” read The Philadelphia Tribune. And “Meet Hulan E. Jack, President of the ‘Capital of the World,’” exclaimed The Chicago Defender, calling him the “boss of Manhattan.”

It was a job that wielded serious clout at the time — not to mention a $25,000 salary (10 percent more than that of a United States congressman), a staff of some 1,300 and a voice in all major decisions in the city.

“He was a big shot,” said Charles B. Rangel, the 88-year-old former congressman from Harlem. Though Mr. Rangel, an uptown political fixture for more than 50 years, added that Mr. Jack “has a complex legacy.”

And that’s why Mr. Jack rarely gets mentioned today, even during Black History Month. While his election was a landmark, many of his higher achievements were eclipsed by the elections of subsequent black mayors and the waning power of the borough president’s office. In his lifetime, he was undone by remnants of old-line political machinery, a cynical version of identity politics, and the changing landscape of urban power — in addition to his own failures of judgment and the scandals that followed.

In 1953, New York City politics were in a flux. The Irish and Italian heavies of the Tammany Hall machine — who had run much of city politics for decades — still held considerable sway. At the same time, Tammany and the other halls of power in the city realized the black vote was ascendant. Between the 1920 and 1950 censuses, the black population of Manhattan went from 5 percent to 20 percent. And Mr. Jack found himself one of five candidates in a field of all black men.

Among his opponents were Elmer Carter, a Republican member of the state’s new Commission Against Discrimination, and Andronicus Jacobs, a longshoreman who’d fought to secure equal pay and benefits for black dock workers and ran on the American Labor Party ticket.

Born in St. Lucia, Mr. Jack immigrated to the United States as a teenager in 1923. He started out sweeping floors in a box factory while taking night classes before going on to N.Y.U. Along the way, he took an interest in politics, and began canvassing for the Democrats in Harlem.

As a dutiful Catholic and longtime party organizer, Mr. Jack was an apt choice as Tammany’s candidate by 1953. He also had a distinguished record as one of the first black lawmakers from Harlem elected to the State Assembly, starting in 1940. He voted along the Tammany line. But he also emerged as a consistent and cleareyed advocate for bills aimed at dismantling segregation and discrimination in housing, education and policing. In 1945, he helped pass a bill that made New York the first state to bar race and religious discrimination in employment.

Mr. Jack’s daily and long-term work in the borough office — whether turning vacant lots into playgrounds or supporting selective slum clearance instead of wholesale demolition — often focused on issues affecting working-class residents. He ultimately opposed Robert Moses’ ill-fated expressway across Lower Manhattan, which many now agree would have irretrievably altered the city. But he also helped facilitate Mr. Moses’ grand plan for Lincoln Center, insisting on a fairer timeline for relocating residents of the neighborhood.

He also kept a high profile amid national and international personalities: In photos from those years, he can be seen shoulder to shoulder with people like Mr. Moses, John F. Kennedy and Mayor Robert Wagner, and while in office he met with African leaders including the prime minister of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. He became a symbol to the rest of the world that a black man could rise to such a station.

But the political guard was changing in Harlem, Mr. Jack’s home base. He would end up scorched in a failed attempt by Tammany to unseat the charismatic but politically unpredictable Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a beloved Harlem figure, after Mr. Powell endorsed Dwight D. Eisenhower for president in 1956. Though Mr. Jack smartly declined to run against Mr. Powell, he agreed to recruit and campaign for another black challenger, whom Mr. Powell proceeded to trounce, with the help of the Harlem Democratic kingmaker J. Raymond Jones. Mr. Jack drew a hailstorm of brickbats and threats, harassed openly as an “Uncle Tom.”

However, Harlem stood by Mr. Jack, at least initially, when prosecutors went after him on corruption charges in 1960 with particular tenacity, appealing a judge’s dismissal of the charges and taking the case to trial before a jury deadlocked. The state retried Mr. Jack successfully — for receiving roughly $5,000 in apartment renovations from a developer he’d been friends with for years, who was also seeking city contracts — landing two misdemeanor convictions and a suspended sentence.

He remained active in the community and returned to Albany in a special election in 1968 — only to be indicted in 1970 and convicted two years later in a payola conspiracy involving the local grocery-workers union. Though he insisted he was ignorant of the scheme, he served three months in federal prison, emerging a broken man.

“Hulan Jack was really a relic of a time that had past,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a strategist involved in New York City politics since the 1960s. “He was in the crossfire of a political war. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And no one remembers him because there was no sex, there was no violence.”

Or as Mr. Rangel put it, more pointedly, “He got screwed. He went to Mass every morning, and Jesus left his ass holding the bag.”

Mr. Jack’s daughter, Julienne, now 64, remembers her father, once his political demise had begun, as dressing in a suit each morning, only to go sit alone in Central Park.

Though the offenses were too mundane and too hard to untangle to rate as anything more than a footnote in the overstuffed annals of political scandal, they were enough for Mr. Jack to be shunned in his day and forgotten soon afterward.

As his 1986 obituary in The New York Times put it, “Mr. Jack established a record as the untiring author of legislation for human rights and against racial discrimination of any type.”

But unlike many of his contemporaries and successors who have parks, schools and streets named after them — Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Percy Sutton, Shirley Chisholm, to name a few — there is no permanent record of Mr. Jack on the map of Manhattan.

Nor, as his daughter, Julienne Jack, points out, many other places. “He’s not in school curriculums,” she said. “He’s not in books, he’s been wiped from the political rolls.”

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