San Francisco elects first Black female mayor
London Breed makes history in the city as runner-up concedes
SAN FRANCISCO— The election of London Breed as mayor of San Francisco, which was all but made official Wednesday when Mark Leno, the runner-up in the election, conceded defeat, was a remarkable victory.
Breed is the first African-American woman to hold the post in San Francisco. And San Francisco is now the largest U.S. city with a female mayor.
For many Black people in the city, Breed’s election has a special resonance, one that rekindles the hope that the long and steady decline of San Francisco’s African-American population might be stanched or even reversed.
“We were fast becoming an invisible people in this city,” said the Rev. Amos Brown, pastor of Third Baptist Church, where Breed is a congregant. “Maybe we can now stop this hemorrhaging.”
John William Templeton, a historian of Black culture and business in San Francisco, said he hoped Breed could serve as a beacon and a magnet for Black entrepreneurs across the United States.
“The campaign got a lot of people around the country interested in San Francisco who wouldn’t have thought about it before,” he said. Templeton contrasts the many individual successes of Black people in San Francisco with the collective poverty of African-Americans overall in the city. Black people have a median income that is a fraction of that for whites or Asians.