When Karen Bass is sworn in as Los Angeles mayor next month, she’ll be making history in more ways than one.
Not only will she be the first woman to lead LA, Bass will complete a rare tetrafecta of sorts: Black mayors will be running the nation’s four largest cities, with the congresswoman joining Eric Adams of New York, Lori Lightfoot of Chicago and Sylvester Turner of Houston.
“Anytime we get a new mayor, it’s exciting,” Frank Scott, the Democraticmayor of Little Rock, Ark., said in a phone interview. “But to have another mayor, a Black woman, who’s going to lead one of our nation’s major cities? That’s a big deal.”
This marks the first time these major metropolises will simultaneously be led by African Americans — and it may be for just a brief period. The leadershipacumen of big city mayors is being tested nowin how they address issues ranging from upticks in crime, to a sagging economy and high inflation, to housing affordability and homelessness.
And this is all taking place as the cities undergo seismic demographic shifts. All four are “majority minority” cities and these Black mayors are governing municipalities where Latinos, not Black residents, make up the largest non-white ethnic group.
Hispanics accounted for more than half of the growth in the U.S. population, according to the 2020 Census. Meanwhile, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other big cities have seen their Black populations shrink in recent years in something of a reversal of what happened in the 1970s. These new migration patterns are altering political dynamics as Latinos consolidate power.
The division is particularly acute for Bass, who faces the immediate challenge of how to deal with a city still reeling from a recording that captured three Latino City Council members and a union official engaging in a racist and politically-motivated discussion about how they could manipulate voting districts to their advantage.
Karen Bass interacts with cheering supporters at a news conference in Los Angeles, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022.
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His conversations with veteran Black mayors like Turner and Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, N.J., have been insightful, particularly in their push to create an urban agenda they hope will receive buy-in from the Biden administration, he said.
“A lot of those mayors look towards me because this is a big city, but I look towards them because they’ve been here already and they have been extremely helpful,” Adams said.
While Adams points to some of the benefits of working with other mayors of color, for the mayors of the nation’s biggest cities, the job often comes with the unrelenting glare of media spotlight and scrutiny. It also comes with the added and often unspoken pressure to govern equitably but also show to Black constituents that their concerns are being addressed.
“African Americans who have been in their communities [that] have been overlooked, whether it’s been a lack of investment for decades, they want to see things happen very quickly,” Turner, the longest-tenured of the big city mayors, said in an interview. “They don’t give African Americans, you know, a long runway.”
Sylvester Turner speaks during a news conference about voting rights Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2022, in Houston. Turner is the longest-tenured of the big city mayors.