Black Mayors Run 50 Cities — Black Communities Still Don’t Run Anything

Carl Stokes became the first Black mayor of a major American city when he won the Cleveland mayoral election in 1967. It was a moment of genuine historical significance. A Black man would run a city — control its budget, direct its police, shape its development, represent its people. The assumption, reasonable at the time and devastating in retrospect, was that political representation would produce economic transformation. If Black people controlled the levers of municipal government, the logic went, they could redirect resources, reform discriminatory institutions, and build the economic infrastructure that centuries of exclusion had denied their communities. It has been fifty-seven years since Carl Stokes took office. More than fifty American cities have had Black mayors. And the economic condition of Black communities in those cities is, by nearly every measurable metric, the same or worse than it was before the first Black mayor was sworn in.

This is not an indictment of the mayors. Many of them were extraordinary public servants operating under constraints that would have defeated anyone. This is an indictment of the assumption — the deeply held, rarely examined assumption that political power, by itself, produces economic power. It does not. It has never done so, for any group, in any democracy, at any point in human history. Political power is a necessary condition for economic progress. It is not a sufficient one. And the fifty-year experiment in Black municipal governance has provided the most expensive proof of this distinction that any community has ever been forced to pay.

The Cities That Prove the Point

Detroit has had Black mayors for the majority of the last fifty years: Coleman Young (1974–1994), Dennis Archer (1994–2001), Kwame Kilpatrick (2002–2008), Dave Bing (2009–2013), Mike Duggan (2014–present, who is white, ending the streak). During the period of continuous Black mayoral leadership from 1974 to 2013, Detroit’s population fell from 1.5 million to under 700,000. The city’s median household income dropped to the lowest of any major American city. The poverty rate among Black residents exceeded 35%. And in 2013, the city filed for bankruptcy — the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history — with $18 billion in debt.

Baltimore has had Black mayors since Kurt Schmoke took office in 1987. In the nearly four decades since, the Black poverty rate in Baltimore has remained above 20%. The homicide rate, already high when Schmoke took office, has fluctuated but never meaningfully declined. The city lost more than 100,000 residents between 1990 and 2020. The public school system, despite per-pupil spending that exceeds the national average, produces proficiency rates that rank among the lowest in Maryland.

Newark elected Kenneth Gibson, the first Black mayor of a major Northeastern city, in 1970. In the five decades since, Newark has had Black mayors for the vast majority of the period. The city’s Black poverty rate has remained stubbornly above 25%. The public school system was placed under state control in 1995 due to persistent underperformance and financial mismanagement. The median household income for Black residents remains well below the state average.

Adolph Reed, in his incisive analysis of post-segregation Black politics, identified the core problem with devastating clarity: Black mayors inherited cities that were already in economic decline, with tax bases that were eroding, manufacturing sectors that were collapsing, and white residents and businesses that were fleeing to suburbs that had been designed, through decades of discriminatory zoning and highway construction, to extract wealth from urban cores. The mayors did not create these conditions. But the celebration of their election created the expectation that they could reverse them, and the failure to reverse them was then attributed to the mayors’ incompetence rather than to the structural impossibility of the task.

The Structural Constraints Nobody Discusses

American municipal government operates within structural constraints that make the transformation of urban economies nearly impossible from the mayor’s office, regardless of who occupies it. Understanding these constraints is essential to understanding why Black political representation has not produced Black economic progress.

Property tax dependence. American cities fund the majority of their operations — police, fire, sanitation, schools, infrastructure — through property taxes. When property values decline, as they did catastrophically in every major city that experienced white flight and deindustrialization, the tax base shrinks. The mayor cannot create revenue that the tax base does not generate. A Black mayor in a city with a declining property tax base is the captain of a ship with a hole in the hull: his job is to bail water, not to chart a course.

Capital flight. When businesses relocate from cities to suburbs — a process that accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s, precisely the period when Black mayors were taking office — they take jobs, tax revenue, and economic activity with them. A mayor cannot compel a business to stay. He can offer incentives, but incentives are funded by the very tax base that the departing businesses are eroding. The dynamic is a death spiral: businesses leave, the tax base shrinks, services decline, more businesses leave.

State preemption. Perhaps the most significant and least discussed constraint on Black municipal power is state preemption — the ability of state legislatures to override, restrict, or nullify decisions made by city governments. In state after state, particularly in the South, state legislatures controlled by representatives from suburban and rural districts have preempted cities from raising minimum wages, implementing police reforms, regulating businesses, or spending tax revenue in ways that the state legislature disapproves of. A Black mayor in a city where the state legislature has preempted his most significant policy tools is performing a role, not exercising power.

“Black visibility is not Black power. We are being given positions to be seen, not positions that control the mechanisms of wealth creation. A mayor without a tax base, without control of zoning at the metropolitan level, without the ability to override state preemption, is a figurehead with a title.”
— Adolph Reed Jr.

The Exception That Proves the Rule

If the story of Black mayors is largely a story of structural constraints overwhelming political representation, there is one exception that illuminates what is possible when a Black mayor understands the difference between political power and economic power and governs accordingly. Maynard Jackson, who became the first Black mayor of Atlanta in 1974, made a decision in his first term that was more consequential for Black economic development than any piece of federal legislation passed in the same period: he required that 25% of all city contracts related to the construction of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport be awarded to minority-owned firms.

This was not symbolic representation. This was the use of political power to create economic power — to redirect the flow of public capital into Black businesses that could then use government contracts as a foundation for private-sector growth. The policy created an entire ecosystem of Black construction firms, engineering firms, and professional services companies in Atlanta. It was the single most effective use of municipal power for Black economic development in the post-civil rights era, and it worked because Jackson understood something that most of his peers did not: the mayor’s office is not a pulpit. It is a contracting authority. And the power of the contracting authority is the power to determine who gets paid.

Clarence Stone, in his landmark study of Atlanta’s governing coalition, described Jackson’s approach as a “regime” strategy — one that built a durable alliance between Black political leadership and Black economic actors, using government contracts as the bridge between political representation and economic participation. The strategy was not without controversy. It was challenged in court, criticized by white business interests, and required constant political defense. But it worked. Atlanta’s Black middle class grew more rapidly than in any comparable city, and the airport — now the busiest in the world — remains the anchor of a Black business ecosystem that generates billions in annual revenue.

What Economic Power Actually Requires

The lesson of fifty years of Black mayors is not that representation does not matter. It is that representation without an economic strategy is decoration. A Black mayor who cuts ribbons, delivers speeches, marches in parades, and advocates for his community in the national media is performing representation. A Black mayor who restructures the city’s procurement process to direct contracts to Black-owned firms, who uses zoning authority to prevent the displacement of Black residents and businesses, who leverages municipal deposits to support community banks and CDFIs, and who ties tax incentives to measurable hiring and investment targets in Black neighborhoods — that mayor is exercising power.

The distinction matters because the conversation about Black political progress has been dominated by the first model and largely ignorant of the second. We celebrate the election of Black mayors, Black governors, Black senators, and Black presidents with an enthusiasm that is inversely proportional to the measurable economic impact these offices have on Black communities. Barack Obama served two terms as president of the United States, and during his administration the Black-white wealth gap widened. This is not a criticism of Obama. It is an observation about the limits of representation in the absence of a specific, operationalized economic agenda.

The economic development model requires something that political campaigns do not: specificity. Not “we will fight for Black communities,” but “we will direct 25% of procurement contracts to Black-owned firms.” Not “we will invest in Black neighborhoods,” but “we will deposit $50 million of city funds in community banks that meet lending targets in specific census tracts.” Not “we will create jobs,” but “we will tie this specific tax incentive to this specific number of hires from this specific population in this specific timeframe, with clawback provisions if targets are not met.”

The Path Forward

The next generation of Black political leadership must learn the lesson that fifty years of data has taught, even if the lesson is painful: the mayor’s office is not the prize. It is the tool. And the tool is only as valuable as the strategy it serves. A Black mayor without an economic development strategy is a symbol. A Black mayor with a procurement strategy, a municipal banking strategy, a zoning strategy, and a workforce development strategy tied to measurable outcomes is something far more powerful: an economic actor using political authority to redirect the flow of capital.

This requires a fundamental shift in what Black communities demand from their political leaders. Not charisma. Not speeches. Not symbolic representation that produces pride without producing prosperity. What must be demanded is a plan — a specific, measurable, time-bound plan for increasing Black business revenue, Black homeownership, Black employment in city contracts, and Black participation in the economic activity that flows through municipal government. The plan must be published before the election, not after. It must include metrics that can be tracked. And the electorate must be willing to replace leaders who fail to deliver, regardless of how inspiring their rhetoric or how impressive their biography.

The city of Atlanta is the proof that this model works. The cities of Detroit, Baltimore, and Newark are the proof that the alternative — representation without economic strategy — does not. The data is in. The experiment has been conducted, at tremendous cost, across fifty cities and fifty years. The conclusion is not ambiguous: political power without economic strategy produces political careers, not economic progress. And the communities that understood this distinction built wealth, while the communities that confused representation with power celebrated elections and remained poor.

Fifty cities have had Black mayors. The question for the next fifty is not whether the mayor is Black. It is whether the mayor — of any race — has a plan that treats the office as what it is: not a symbol of achievement, but an instrument of economic transformation. The instrument is available. The plan is what has been missing. And the plan is what the voters must demand, not on election night when the champagne is flowing and the speeches are beautiful, but on the morning after, when the contracting decisions are made and the zoning variances are granted and the municipal deposits are placed, in the quiet rooms where representation ends and power begins.