Seven Mayors, Three Crises, One Text Thread

A brotherhood of Black mayors, mostly from the South, talk to one another on a group chat. As COVID-19, a cratering economy, and mass demonstrations sweep the nation, they're finding that these conversations are a lifeline.

Seven Mayors, Three Crises, One Text Thread You see how nice the office is in Montgomery?" asked Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. "You see that? They gave him the Oval Office in Montgomery. You're on mute, Steve."   That's Steven Reed, the mayor of Montgomery, Alabama, whom Lumumba was busy ribbing over Zoom. Reed was not the first to catch some light heat as we waited for the rest of the cohort to get on the call. Mayor Levar Stoney of Richmond, Virginia, was informed moments earlier that he could use a visit to the barbershop. "From my first campaign to my second one, I looked at my old pictures," Lumumba added by way of consolation, "and I wouldn't have voted for me." He's got jokes, but Lumumba is also, as Mayor Frank Scott of Little Rock, Arkansas, would later say, "the scholar of our group." The group in question is an extraordinary one: a network of young Black men—most in their thirties, some in their forties—who serve as mayors of cities across the country, and act as friends and sounding boards to one another. Few mayors in this nation's 244 years have been hit with the gale forces of history quite like these men have, and the fact is that there are only so many mayors to talk to in the first place. It's a smaller group still who know what it means to be both a mayor right now and a Black man in America always.   They've had the odd phone call through the three crises facing us all—the coronavirus pandemic, the accompanying economic turmoil, and the massive movement for racial justice following the killing of George Floyd by officers of the Minneapolis Police Department—but they primarily operate via text. They've got a group chat going, and that's where they say they turn whenever they're stumped, need advice, or want to hear a voice that doesn't have an interest in their local city politics. Sometimes they just need a laugh. Seven of the mayors in the group were represented here, all from the South except for Quinton Lucas of Kansas City, Missouri, aka "Mayor Q." Many of the others now lead cities that once served as capitals in the Confederate States of America. They mostly met through the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative and other mayoral conferences. Reed, forty-six, is Montgomery's first Black mayor; Lumumba, of Jackson, is thirty-seven; Richmond's Stoney is thirty-nine; and Scott, thirty-six, is Little Rock's first Black mayor. 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