Tragedy, triumph for Baltimore mayor
39-year-old handles city’s unimaginable disaster
No one had seen a big-city mayor quite like Brandon Scott before.
He was 36 when he won his race in Baltimore in November 2020, becoming the youngest mayor in the history of a city that’s half a century older than the United States.
Of course, no one had seen a November like the one in 2020. It was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Scott wore a mask to his swearing-in ceremony. Nobody attended except his parents. He rocked an Afro he had grown because the barbershops were closed.
“As your mayor,” Scott said at his swearing-in, “I will not waver or hesitate to make decisions that save lives and protect our economy.”
Three years and four months later, the mayor’s phone rang in the middle of the night with the unimaginable: a hulking container ship had careened into a tower of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. In a matter of seconds, the iconic bridge plunged into Baltimore’s harbor. Nobody knew, in those first predawn moments, how many people might have been killed, or what would happen next.
“This is a tragedy that you could never imagine,” Scott said at a Tuesday news conference. “Never would you think that you would see – physically see – the Key Bridge tumble down like that. It looked like something out of an action movie.”
Reporters immediately wanted to know about the future, about rebuilding. Scott wanted to remain rooted in the present. He was emotional.
“We shouldn’t even be having that discussion right now,” he said. “The discussion right now should be about the people, the souls, the lives that we’re trying to save.”
It’s a heavy burden. The weight of 30,000 cars and trucks every day, of six bridge workers lost in 48-degree water, somewhere in the dark.
But there’s a greater weight than that in Baltimore.
Scott, who grew up in northwest Baltimore, is 39 now, a mayor who has spent a full term working to save people’s lives. I talked to him about that very thing, not so long ago.
Baltimore has historically been a violent city. More than 300 murders a year, every year. Yet Scott has been fighting that narrative and winning.
Just Monday, he delivered his State of the City address, touting the largest single-year decline in homicides the city has ever seen. The 20% reduction marked the first time in nearly a decade that Baltimore saw fewer than 300 homicides a year.
I wanted to know how America’s mayors respond to such unexpected adversity, especially after riding a high.
So I called Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas.
A leader’s highs and lows
Lucas, too, was recently riding a high: His Chiefs had won the Super Bowl, and his city had readied a victory parade. Then a shooting at that parade left one person dead and about two dozen wounded, including nine children.
Scott and Lucas are friends. They met while serving as council members in their respective cities, long before they became mayors. They are the same age. They are Black men in public service who want to change the narrative – poverty, crime, poor schools – for their constituents.
“There was already kind of just a natural ‘Black dude running a city’ thing,” Lucas told me Tuesday. “And in a way we wanted to be a breath of fresh air in terms of how a number of things are done. Some of which relates to how transparent we’ll be, how authentic we might be and frankly, presenting and bringing a new generation in cities that sometimes were controlled by those who may represent vestiges of the past.”
Lucas said he texted Scott on Tuesday but didn’t expect a response. He certainly wasn’t going to call him in the time of crisis. He just wanted Scott to know he had support.
He described Scott as “one of the better mayors in our country, and certainly one of the more exceptional young leaders in our country.”
“It’s easy to try to run in front of cameras,” Lucas told me. “I’ve met many leaders, many a mayor, who does that sort of thing. That is not Brandon.”
In this tragedy, Lucas said, Scott will lean into his compassion for people and his desire to see his city soar.
“He’s somebody who actually isn’t looking past you,” Lucas said.
The bridge and the future
The bridge disaster has been devastating for Scott, a man who has been vocal about his love for his city. He has a 3-month-old baby boy – his first child – named Charm after his beloved hometown, known as “Charm City.”
When I interviewed Scott in December, he spoke passionately about the Baltimoreans who lifted him up and encouraged him to dream.
“I have the total city showing me and telling me that I had to be better because it wasn’t just about me,” Scott told me. “It was about me being a representation of all of them.”
Scott is running for reelection, one of 13 Democratic candidates in the May primary. It’s hard to imagine that’s his main focus now as he navigates this crisis even bigger than COVID-19 or city homicides.
On Wednesday night, there was yet another news conference, this time more certain and more sad. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and others promised support for the families of those who died, and asked the world for support in return.
Then Scott, the mayor, stepped forward. Amid a line of suits and uniforms, he was the one wearing the purple sweatshirt that read: FROM BALTIMORE WITH LOVE.
“To each of the families,” he said, “know that my heart and the heart of the entire city of Baltimore is with you, and will be with you forever.”