Kim Janey becomes Boston’s first Black and female mayor

(BOSTON, MA) BREAKING: Kim Janey, the 55-year-old city council president, took the reins Monday night from Martin J. Walsh, who officially resigned the post after the Senate confirmed him to be the nation’s next labor secretary. While she plans to hold a swearing-in ceremony on Wednesday, Janey immediately became acting mayor — and made history as the city’s first Black mayor, as well as its first woman mayor.

It is, of course, typically Boston that this particular historically significant moment came as a kind of accident. By contrast, major cities around the country have been electing Black and/or women mayors for almost a century now. The first Black Americans to be elected mayor of a major city were Richard Hatcher, who became mayor of Gary, Indiana in 1967, and Carl Stokes, who was elected mayor of Cleveland the same year. Bertha Landes of Seattle was the first female mayor of a major city.

She was elected mayor of Seattle in 1926. Boston brings up the rear even among Massachusetts municipalities; Westfield elected a female mayor in 1935, but it wasn’t until 2012 that a city in the state elected a Black citizen of either sex for its mayor.

In the meantime, there was Mel King, a Boston political activist who ran a good, strong race in 1983 against Ray Flynn for the right to succeed Kevin White. The Campaign was an ugly one—not because of the two candidates, but because of their supporters, who were still steeped in the memory of the racial violence over busing in the mid-1970s. Nevertheless, King was a formidable candidate and his presence in the race helped force Flynn to abandon for good his provincial South Boston view of the city and its issues.

Of course, Janey will have to run for a full term, if she wants one, and the city is gearing up for one of it’s peroiodic electoral hooleys this November. But history already has been made. Now, it just needs to be shaped.