Black Mayors and the Battle Over Urban Leadership
In 1967, Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, and Carl Stokes of Cleveland made history as two of the first Black mayors of major American cities. Their elections represented a new era of Black municipal power, a breakthrough that came at a moment when conservative forces were on the rise, fueled in part by backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. Politicians like Richard Nixon wielded “law and order” rhetoric to appeal to white voters uneasy with the era’s racial and social transformations, setting the stage for policies that would constrain Black political and economic power. But for these pioneering mayors, winning office was only the beginning of the struggle. Their victories brought immediate challenges: economic decline, white flight, political obstruction, and outright hostility from state and federal governments determined to limit Black self-governance. The real work lay in navigating the constraints of municipal power while trying to deliver meaningful change for Black communities that had long been excluded from political and economic opportunities.
More than fifty years later, Black mayors across the country are confronting many of the same obstacles. The rise of far-right political forces, aggressive state preemption, and systemic economic barriers have placed contemporary Black leaders in a position that, in many ways, mirrors the backlash of the post-Reconstruction era. Cities with Black leadership—Jackson, Mississippi; Chicago; Atlanta; Baltimore; Washington D.C.—are often targeted by Republican-led state legislatures that seek to curtail their authority. Black mayors working to address police reform, housing, and economic justice face not only institutional resistance but the burden of governing amid deep racial and political divisions.
While national politics dominate headlines, it is at the local level—mayorships, city councils, and school boards—where policy decisions have the most immediate impact. Black mayors today continue to face familiar struggles: economic disinvestment, policing crises, and state preemption.
Yet, as conservatives have reached the zenith of political power, controlling both chambers of Congress, the executive branch, and holding a majority in the United States Supreme Court, the stakes have grown even higher. Still, history offers a roadmap. The first wave of Black mayors in the post-Civil Rights era found ways to wield municipal power to advance Black political and economic interests, strategies that remain relevant today.
Carl Stokes, as the first Black mayor of a major U.S. city, understood that political power meant little without economic and institutional reform. Facing the challenges of industrial decline and racial unrest in Cleveland, he prioritized transforming the Cleveland Police Department. In response to widespread complaints from both residents and African Americans on the force, Stokes hired more Black officers, assigned them to work in Black neighborhoods, and pushed for the establishment of a civilian review board to hold the police accountable—an initiative that remains a model for cities grappling with police violence today. He also worked to make local government more accessible, creating neighborhood government centers that gave Black residents direct access to city officials and services.1 His belief in engaging the community as active participants in governance provided a counterpoint to the exclusionary politics that had long dominated urban America.
In Gary, Indiana, Richard Hatcher took an even more radical approach, viewing economic self-determination as the foundation of Black political power.2 He redirected city contracts to Black-owned businesses, ensuring that municipal development would benefit the city’s Black population rather than reinforce racial inequality. At a time when federal urban funding was shrinking under Nixon, Hatcher fought for affordable housing initiatives to prevent displacement and keep Black residents in the city. But he also understood that Black mayors alone could not dismantle institutional problems, so he helped create the National Conference of Black Mayors, a coalition that allowed leaders to coordinate strategies, share resources, and push for national policies that addressed the specific needs of Black urban communities.
Perhaps the most transformative of these early Black mayors was Maynard Jackson in Atlanta, who made economic justice and the expansion of the Black middle-class a centerpiece of his administration.3 His landmark policy requiring that 25 percent of city contracts go to Black businesses reshaped Atlanta’s economy, creating new opportunities for Black entrepreneurs and establishing the city as a hub of Black economic power. But his vision extended beyond individual policies—he worked to institutionalize Black leadership, ensuring that future generations of Black political and business leaders would have a place in Atlanta’s power structure.
Faced with conservative backlash and federal retrenchment, Black mayors in the 1970s and 1980s relied on a mix of coalition-building, strategic federal engagement, and grassroots organizing to push their agendas forward. Recognizing that direct federal aid was dwindling under Nixon and later Reagan, mayors like Hatcher and Jackson turned to alternative funding sources, leveraging public-private partnerships and negotiating with corporate leaders to secure investment in Black communities. In Atlanta, Maynard Jackson’s administration pressured banks and developers to reinvest in Black neighborhoods, using city contracts as leverage to force businesses to adopt more equitable hiring practices. Meanwhile, in New Orleans, Mayor Ernest “Dutch” Morial—a former civil rights attorney—fought against efforts by Louisiana’s conservative legislature to limit his authority, using legal challenges and mobilizing Black voters to resist preemptive state policies. These mayors also worked to institutionalize Black political power beyond their own administrations, appointing Black officials to key city positions, supporting the rise of Black political organizations, and creating networks of urban governance that could sustain their policies beyond a single election cycle. By balancing radical demands with pragmatic governance, they were able to implement policies that directly benefited Black communities, even as conservative forces sought to undermine their authority.
The lessons from these mayors remain strikingly relevant today. Black-led cities continue to struggle against economic disinvestment, state intervention, and political opposition designed to undermine their autonomy.
In Jackson, Mississippi, Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba has faced relentless efforts by the state legislature to strip the majority-Black city of control over its own police, courts, and infrastructure. In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s push for progressive policing policies has been met with fierce resistance from both police unions and conservative political forces eager to weaponize crime as a means of undermining Black leadership. Across the country, Black mayors are fighting against gentrification and housing displacement, the same battles that Hatcher and Jackson sought to address through public housing initiatives and affirmative action in city contracts.
What remains clear is that Black political power, once gained, is always met with backlash. Just as the gains of Reconstruction were systematically dismantled through legal and extralegal means, today’s Black mayors must contend with the modern tools of political suppression. Yet history shows that even within these constraints, Black leadership at the municipal level has been one of the most effective tools for securing progress. Stokes, Hatcher, and Jackson demonstrated that Black mayors and local leaders could effectively build infrastructures of resistance—whether through economic empowerment, community engagement, or institutional reform—that lay the groundwork for long-term transformation.
- Leonard N. Moore, Carl B. Stokes and the Rise of Black Political Power (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 114. ↩
- Richard Hatcher, “We Must Pave the Way’: An independent Black Political Thrust,” in The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader, ed. Clayborne Carson, David Garrow, Gerald Gill, Vincent Harding, Darlene Clark Hine (New York: Penguin, 1991), 482. ↩
- Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 438. ↩
