In Atlanta, String of Black Mayors May Be Broken

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In Atlanta, String of Black Mayors May Be Broken
October 21, 2009
By SHAILA DEWAN
The New York Times

ATLANTA — Since 1973, this Southern capital has elected a succession of black mayors, sometimes to the consternation of residents in the largely white, prosperous neighborhood of Buckhead in the north.
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David Walter Banks for The New York Times

Mary Norwood, who has served on the Atlanta City Council for eight years, is the front-runner in the six-way race for mayor.

But the current race to succeed Mayor Shirley Franklin in the Nov. 3 election has upended expectations here in what Chris Rock, in his new documentary, “Good Hair,” calls “the city where all major black decisions are made.” The front-runner, Mary Norwood, is one of Buckhead’s own, a white Junior Leaguer running as a populist outsider.

The three top candidates in the six-way race have each maintained that Atlanta has moved beyond using race as a qualification for public office. But the ascendancy of Ms. Norwood may also reflect the decline of the city’s black majority and the recession’s sour effect on the mood of the voters.

The city has changed significantly since Mayor Franklin squeaked to victory without a runoff in 2001. It has grown by more than 100,000 people since 2000, according to census estimates, and the influx of many whites and Hispanics has narrowed the black majority to 56 percent from 61 percent.

Atlanta is still a draw for black professionals, and the percentage of blacks in the metropolitan area has grown slightly, but in the city itself the pool of likely black voters is estimated at just barely a majority. Many of the city’s public housing projects, where black votes once could be marshaled in a bloc, have been demolished.

Ms. Norwood, who has held an at-large City Council position for eight years, and tirelessly attended neighborhood meetings across the city, has galvanized white voters and managed to attract significant support among blacks. Though she has often voted in Republican primaries in this heavily Democratic city, some polls show her with more black support than either of her two top opponents, who are both black: Lisa Borders, the president of the City Council, and Kasim Reed, a lawyer and former state lawmaker who resigned his office to run for mayor.

The election will probably result in a runoff between Ms. Norwood and Mr. Reed or Ms. Borders, although Ms. Norwood is so far ahead in polls that there is talk she could win outright.

“It would be a major game change in this town if a Buckhead Betty became mayor,” said Tom Houck, a former newspaper columnist here, who is white, using a mocking term for the well-heeled women of the north side. “Atlanta is a symbol for black Americans, more than Los Angeles, more than Chicago, more than Baltimore.”

Mr. Houck spoke recently to a primarily black audience at a forum about race in the campaign, where some of those present were intent on electing a black mayor and others asked what good, exactly, black leadership had done the city.

Ms. Norwood has addressed the race question only obliquely, though her campaign photographs and videos emphasize her interactions with black voters.

“Dr. King said we should be evaluated on who we are, not what we look like,” she said in an interview on Tuesday. “I’m focused on public safety, city service delivery, quality of life issues and growing the city. That’s what the citizens of Atlanta are interested in.”

Ms. Norwood has set the tone by relentlessly attacking the Franklin administration’s record on crime and city finances, forcing the other candidates to distance themselves from the mayor.

“When you attack City Hall, you’re also implicitly attacking, to a degree, black politics,” said Michael Leo Owens, a political science professor at Emory University. “And this is a message that in some ways plays well with the white electorate.”

At a time of high anxiety over taxes and crime, it also resonates with voters of all races. The candidates have spent the bulk of their time in debates and forums arguing over who has the experience necessary to fix the city’s money problems and who has the best public-safety plan.

Some voters, particularly younger ones, seem to agree that race should not be a factor in their choice at the polls.

“This is a majority white country and Barack Obama’s president,” Tyronia Morrison, a 30-year-old lawyer who is black, said after a candidate forum in southwest Atlanta. “We need to rise above that and get back to the issues.”

Asked if she thought black voters cared about the race of the mayor, Ms. Borders said: “Folks that do not have what they need, who’ve been marginalized in some way, they want someone that they think, ‘Hey, I can relate to them.’ If you feel like you’ve been treated fairly, then your sensitivity is not that high.”

Ms. Borders and Mr. Reed condemned a memo from an ad hoc group, the Black Leadership Forum, that surfaced in August suggesting that blacks unite behind Ms. Borders, whom the memo described as the most electable black candidate.

The controversy over the memo obscured the fact that, as Steve Suitts, an Emory lecturer, wrote in an op-ed article Wednesday in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “White voters, not black voters, end up voting most often for a candidate of their own race in the South.”

This mayoral election is the first for an open seat since the death of Maynard Jackson, the city’s first black mayor and a political kingmaker, in 2003.

“Maynard basically was able, because of the esteem in which he was held, to pick his successors,” said Bob Holmes, the author of a new biography of Mr. Jackson. “If he endorsed them, then the black community united behind them. And he’s no longer here.”

Presumably, the mantle of the Jackson machine would have fallen to Mr. Reed, who ran Ms. Franklin’s campaigns and who has been endorsed by Andrew Young, who succeeded Mr. Jackson as mayor. Mr. Reed has raised the most money, according to the latest filings, but has lagged behind in the polls.

Both Mr. Reed and Ms. Borders have battled voter fatigue after the presidential election and struggled to differentiate themselves with recession-size campaign treasuries. “None of them is considered a charismatic leader,” Mr. Holmes said of the three candidates.

That bodes well for Ms. Norwood, who has positioned herself as the candidate of change.

“In this instance,” Mr. Owens said, “difference equals white.”