Montgomery, Alabama, elects city’s first black mayor
Making history, voters in Montgomery, Alabama, decisively elected Steven Reed on Tuesday as the first African American mayor in the 200 years since the city’s founding.
Reed, already a trailblazer as Montgomery County’s first black probate judge, defeated David Woods, owner of the local Fox affiliate, in a nonpartisan runoff election with 67 percent of the vote and all precincts reporting, according to the unofficial results.
“This election has never been about me,” Reed, 45, said during his victory speech. “This election was never about just my ideas. It’s been about all of the hopes and dreams that we have as individuals and collectively in this city . . . and the way we found the opportunity to improve outcomes regardless of neighborhood, regardless of ZIP code, regardless of anything that may divide us or make us different.”
His victory reverberated well beyond Montgomery, as many celebrated the milestone in a city remembered as both the cradle of the Confederacy and the birthplace of the civil rights movement. Montgomery, where about 60% of residents are black, was the first capital of the Confederate States of America, becoming a bastion of racial violence and discrimination in the Jim Crow era, but also of protests and resistance in the civil rights era.
It’s home to the Montgomery bus boycott against segregation led by Rosa Parks, and it’s home to the Selma to Montgomery marches for voting rights led by Martin Luther King Jr. It was in Montgomery where, after the third march in March 1965, King addressed a crowd of 25,000 people on the steps of the Alabama Capitol, famously saying, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
“This is a historic day for our nation,” Karen BaynesDunning, interim president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is based in Montgomery, said Tuesday on Twitter. “The election of Steven Reed, the first black mayor of Montgomery, AL, symbolizes the new inclusive & forward thinking South that so many have worked to achieve.”
In an op-ed, the Montgomery Advertiser’s editor described Reed’s win as being “for the thousands of civil rights foot soldiers whose names we rarely say but whose legacy lives forever.”