‘Trailblazer’ takes her seat on City Council
Cox, first Black person ever to serve on panel, won in crowded field of candidates for District 6 seat
Teresa Cox, a 30-year resident and former Ohlone College board member, has became the first African American ever elected to the Fremont City Council in the city’s nearly 65-year history.
Cox was sworn in as the District 6 councilwoman representing the city’s historic Irvington district during Tuesday evening’s virtual council meeting.
“I am so thrilled, so excited. It’s exciting times, and you just feel also a lot of weight in making sure you’re going to do right in this new role,” Cox said in an interview Tuesday.
Cox’s election represents only the latest in a string of firsts for her, and one Bay Area political scientist said it could signal a political turning point for the large East Bay suburb, where African Americans represent only about 3% of the population of roughly 240,000.
Cox was the first African American elected to the Ohlone College board in 2008 and served there for 12 years. In the 1980s, she was the first African American woman in the nation to earn a degree in nuclear engineering, she said.
Though her race is part of who she is, it wasn’t a pillar of her campaign strategy. Instead, she focused on explaining to voters her priorities of supporting businesses, ensuring residents have access to good-paying jobs and using her networks in the region and nation to help the city work through the coronavirus pandemic, she said.
“Fremont voted for the most qualified person regardless of the color of my skin. I work with all members of the community, because you have to be able to do that, and no one can get there on their own,” she said.
She acknowledged that as the
“I would not be here without the loving support and the endless hard work of family, friends, neighbors and community leaders, and I am so grateful to all of them.”
only African American on the council, there may be more expectations placed on her to help lead the city through its response to major protests against police violence in the summer, which were touched off nationwide by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“I think the weight is on my shoulders to be able to bring this to a whole other level. And get the perspective, what does it mean to be an African American? Are you scared because you’re more likely to be pulled over by the police, misunderstood by the police?” she said.
“But I know that there are good officers (in Fremont). I’ve worked with some wonderful officers over the years. There is going to be a new perspective, a voice of change, and I look forward to working with them on some things that are based on my observations and some experiences.”
Cox works as senior procurement executive for Santa Clara County and serves on the U. S. Department of Commerce’s California District Export Council on Small and Minority Women-Owned Businesses.
She garnered more than 31% of the vote for the council seat in the Nov. 3 election, the first time it was up for grabs just three years after Fremont switched to district-based elections.
Cox beat out a crowded field of five other candidates and got 4,327 votes, nearly 1,000 more than her closest foe, Charles Liu, who had endorsements from Mayor Lily Mei, and Councilmen Rick Jones and Yang Shao.
Before coming to Fremont, Cox was raised in Dayton, Ohio, and New York mostly by her mom, an educator and president of a teachers union who was widowed when Cox was 9.
Cox was inspired by her late mother and is a single mother to two children, 20- year- old Dav id and
— Teresa Cox, District 6 councilwoman
15-year- old Jacqueline.
“I would not be here without the loving support and the endless hard work of family, friends, neighbors and community leaders, and I am so grateful to all of them,” she said Tuesday.
Although Cox is breaking a barrier, James Lance Taylor, a political science professor at the University of San Francisco, said Fremont lagged behind many other Bay Area cities that put African American leaders into power many years ago.
Even with a small African American population, and the exclusionary roots of Fremont, Taylor thinks someone with a similar background and connection to the city as Cox could have been elected decades ago.
“So why is Fremont so late? I think that has to do with the old order, and now you’ve had changes over the past 50 years,” Taylor said, as Fremont’s politics overall may have been influenced by “liberal bastion” cities nearby such as Berkeley and Oakland.
“So even though Ms. Cox … is well-positioned to continue her African American firsts and accomplishments in the city, she also represents something much larger about the history of the city and its political maturation around minority politics,” Taylor said.
Fremont’s population is 58% Asian, with Indian Americans making up about 25% of the population, and Chinese Americans at about 18%. White people represent roughly 24% of the city’s residents, Latino people are around 13% and Filipinos are nearly 7%, according to the U. S. Census Bureau.
In 2016, Mei became the first Asian American and first female mayor, and more than a decade before her, Anu Natarajan became the first Indian American on the council.
Now Fremont is “finally catching up with Bay Area cities like Richmond, Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley, that have had, more or less, minority incorporation (of black people in politics) going back two decades or more,” Taylor said.
“Fremont could potentially become a leader in terms of how a minority majority community can govern,” Taylor said, especially if Cox and other African American leaders can find common political interest and ideology with other groups such as Chinese or Indian American residents to form coalitions.
Cox’s election was hailed as a major milestone by local, state and federal officials on Tuesday night.
Rep. Ro Khanna called in from D.C. to congratulate her on the victory.
“To be a trailblazer, to be the first African American elected to the Fremont City Council, I think that speaks volumes about your perseverance, about your vision,” Khanna said.
With Cox’s election, Khanna also noted the Fremont City Council has become a “majority person of color” and a majority woman-governing body.
“When women and minorities succeed, so do our communities,” Cox said in her remarks during the meeting.
“As I’m here late at night in the capitol, not getting anything done, one wonders whether the capitol would be better off if we had the type of diversity that Fremont has,” Khanna said with a chuckle during the meeting.
“Maybe that is the answer to get more things done.”