USA TODAY International Edition
Montgomery, Ala., elects city’s first black mayor
Reed wins runoff by more than 2- to- 1 margin
MONTGOMERY, Ala. – Montgomery, a city where more than half the population is black and known as the birthplace of the civil rights movement, elected an African American to the highest position in municipal government for the first time in its 200- year history.
Steven Reed, the Montgomery County probate judge, on Tuesday beat television station owner David Woods in a runoff, gaining 32,918 votes to Woods’ 16,010 votes, according to incomplete, unofficial returns. Reed will be sworn in Nov. 12.
Reed was the first African American elected as the county’s probate judge in 2012. In 2015, he was the first probate judge in Alabama to issue same- sex marriage licenses.
“This election has never been about me,” Reed said in his victory speech. “This election has never been about just my ideas. It’s been about all the hopes and dreams we have as individuals and collectively in this city.”
Montgomery is one of only three cities in six Deep South states with a population of 100,000 or more that had not previously elected an African American as mayor. Beginning in the late 1960s, the election of black mayors in Cleveland; Newark; Detroit; Gary, Indiana; and Los Angeles manifested black power, said Derryn Eroll Moten, chairman of Alabama State University’s Department of History and Political Science.
The city being led by a black mayor is an achievement pushed forward by defining moments during the civil rights movement. The outcome of Tuesday’s election is a product of the key figures who fought for civil rights from Alabama’s capital like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, E. D. Nixon and Johnnie Carr.
“Civil rights leaders promised that an unencumbered black vote would bring real changes in American society,” Moten said.
Moten said the election of Montgomery’s first black mayor wouldn’t be possible without groups that pushed for African- American participation in local and state politics – the Women’s Political Council, the Dallas County Voters League, Rufus Lewis’ Citizens Club and the Alabama Democratic Conference.
Changes materialized in the South in the wake of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, with the election of Sheriff Lucius Amerson in Alabama and the election of Julian Bond to the Georgia House of Representatives. Both were elected in 1966 and became the first African Americans to hold these offices since Reconstruction.
Some say it’s a paradox that Montgomery is both the birthplace of the civil rights movement and the cradle of the Confederacy. Others say it shows the resilience of African Americans that a city with a history of slavery, lynchings, white supremacy and Jim Crow laws elected its first black mayor Tuesday.
Montgomery is going through a noticeable transformation. Last year, the Equal Justice Initiative opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum in downtown Montgomery to honor victims of lynching. The memorial is adjacent to the slave market site in Montgomery. It has brought several hundred thousand visitors here, many of whom wouldn’t have visited the Deep South otherwise.
There are outside investors building downtown hotels for those visitors, and a new whitewater park and outdoor center is planned near downtown. The multimillion- dollar investment is in a near west side neighborhood inhabited predominantly by black families. It’s one of the poorest areas, in need of development but often overlooked.