Every CT city has a white mayor. Will that change?
From Bridgeport to New Haven to Hartford, the campaigns for mayor in Connecticut’s cities are heating up and we hope to see a diverse range of candidates.
Will the election results next November reflect the state’s racial diversity? Hartford has a very strong chance of voting in a mayor of color, as the seat will be open and a powerful Black politician declared his candidacy last week, with a local leader of South Asian descent set to announce.
For now, however, and for the last several years, Connecticut holds a remarkable and unfortunate distinction: All 19 cities in the state have white, nonHispanic mayors. Every single one of them, as far as I can tell — though I didn’t ask each one how he or she identifies.
All 19 cities. That includes Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, Waterbury and New Britain, where minority residents are the vast majority.
Consider: The state’s eight largest cities – the five above plus Norwalk, Danbury and Stamford – are two-thirds minority overall, ranging from 48 percent in Danbury to 85 percent in Hartford. And yet, among those eight, only New Haven and Hartford have ever elected a Black or Latino mayor, at least in the modern era.
Several causes are in play including the fact that white-dominated political culture and tradition prevails in almost every city and town. Unlike, say, the lack of affordable housing or the high cost of electricity, there is no possible statewide solution, nor should there be. But groups such as the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities are working on ways to change the picture.
“Connecticut is supposed to be this progressive state and we are pretty trending as it relates to policy, but it’s not reflected in our leadership,” said Danielle Wong, the Black and Asian mayor of Bloomfield, a town of 21,000 with a Black population over 50 percent.
Apart from the 19 cities all headed by white, nonHispanic mayors, the state’s 150 towns have, to my knowledge, a grand total of three Black, Latino or Asian chief elected officers. We have Mayor Wong in Bloomfield, Groton Mayor Juan Melendez Jr. and Beacon Falls First Selectman Gerry Smith.
Three out of 169.
I might have missed one or two because there’s no central clearinghouse for these things and we can’t know how a person identifies unless we ask. But whatever the number, the political culture, at least for top municipal elected officials, has not caught up with changing demographics in a state with 52 cities and towns that are at least one-fifth minority and 19 that are 40 percent or more.
“It’s a real problem that you don’t have Black and Latino mayors,” said Matthew Hennessy, a public affairs consultant who was a top aide to former Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra, who lost a re-election bid in 2015. “It harms trust in local government.”
‘I’ll always be a white man’
That question of trust is different than the debate over what kind of job these mayors are doing. Obviously, urban issues do not divide by race. On some levels, why should the race of the mayor matter in comparison to the work he or she does?
The point of the concern is that representation matters for its own sake. Connecticut has never elected a Hispanic statewide official, has elected one of Asian descent, Attorney General William Tong, and just elected the state’s first Black constitutional officer other than Treasurer — Secretary of the State-elect Stephanie Thomas.
As for mayors, it’s no coincidence that former state Sen. Eric Coleman, who represented Bloomfield and Hartford in the legislature and later sat as a superior court judge, launched his campaign Wednesday not at city hall, but in the capital city’s North End at the Artists Collective — the center of Black culture for the region.
“Representation Matters,” is, in fact, the name of a program aimed at aspiring minority elected officials organized by the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities along with Yale University. This winter will be the third year of the online program on successive late-winter weekends.
Joe DeLong, the CCM president, believes the state has seen progress in elected positions on city and town councils. A former majority leader of the state legislature in his native West Virginia, DeLong is keenly attuned to race and equity issues – and aware of the barriers.
“At the end of the day I’ll always be a white man. And there will be a level that, while I can learn and grow, I can’t walk in the shoes of a Black woman,” DeLong told me. “It is our job to prepare a seat at the table for everyone. It is our job to help people understand what they need to do…to be successful.”
But he added, “It is not our job to tell people to come and sit down.”
Money, families and the will to run
A shortage of candidates has been an issue keeping the number of Black and Latino town leaders down, at least in some places.
“There’s a lack of time. I’m an unpaid mayor,” said Wong, in Bloomfield, a data protection project manager who’s also a single mother. And while we’re all short of time, “Oftentimes people of color have a little more to deal with in society as it relates to making it in the professional world,” Wong added.
Another reason: “The fact that money plays such an important role in these races I think puts a homegrown African American candidate at a disadvantage,” said Hennessy, the consultant, who named some white mayors with a significant financial network outside their cities.
And yet another: The dominance of a small handful of families in some cities. “My father was mayor. People don’t like change necessarily,” said former longtime Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton, now the state tax commissioner and infrastructure czar – though he, like others, sees minority candidates catching up.
Mayor Juan Melendez Jr. in Groton also feels optimistic. “We have a wonderfully diverse council of women, Hispanics, African Americans,” he told me. “From where I sit and where I stand, Groton does a great job of electing representatives that are representative of the city as a whole.”
In overwhelmingly white, non-Hispanic Beacon Falls, First Selectman Gerry Smith, who is Black, says it’s a matter of people taking the plunge, not assuming their race or ethnicity will hold them back. That’s not the whole answer but it’s a piece of it.
“You know, get off your ass and run,” he said. “You can’t sit home and talk about it.”