The number that got the most applause at a Black History Month event on Wednesday night: 1,183. That’s the tally of total years that it took eight small metro-Atlanta cities to elect a Black woman as top executive.
“It feels amazing to be in this room—a lot of contagious energy, and we want it to catch fire because now is the time for change in all of our municipalities,” said Mayor Marci Fluellyn of Lovejoy, a town of 10,000 in southeastern Clayton County.
Fluellyn addressed a crowd of hundreds who packed a “Meet the Mayors” event at the McKenzie Office Park in College Park. She was joined by seven other current Black women mayors from the Atlanta area.
Around the country, Black women have been elected to political office in record numbers over the last decade. The Huffington Post called 2017 the Year of the Black Woman Mayor, responding to the historic high of nine Black women serving as mayors of the nation’s 100 biggest cities–including Atlanta’s former mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms (the city’s second Black woman mayor after Shirley Franklin), former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, and current Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles.
Wednesday’s event was proof that smaller towns are electing Black women as well. Even so, many of the mayors said they didn’t break glass ceilings and color barriers without a fight.
“Change is hard,” said Donya Sartor, who was elected Jonesboro’s first Black mayor in March 2023 for a partial term, then reelected in November. “And my election as the first Black mayor was hard for some, but the residents spoke and determined who they wanted to sit in their seat. And I think at that point, you should accept defeat graciously instead of fighting with false allegations to smear your name or your reputation.”
That remark was a veiled reference to the recent controversy surrounding her own administration. In November, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation concluded an investigation into criminal allegations including assault, intimidation, and quid pro quo against Sartor and found no wrongdoing.
One Jonesboro cop, Godreque Newsom, said Sartor pointed a gun at him while they were alone in her office, and another reserve officer, Solomon Carter, claimed the mayor sent him text donation requests after talking to him about a fulltime job. The GBI determined that Sartor actually moved a gun from her desk into her purse and that the texts were generic donation requests from Sartor’s campaign.
Sartor and two other mayors at the Feb. 28 event–Fluellyn in Lovejoy and Angelyne Butler, who was re-elected mayor of Forest Park in 2021–are from Clayton, a suburban county with one of the fastest growing Black populations in Georgia, increasing from 120,000 in 2000 to over 200,000 in 2020.
Beverly Burks said being mayor of Clarkston, a city of 13,000 in DeKalb County with a long history as a haven for refugees, is particularly challenging, because its residents come from 50 different countries and speak over 70 different languages. That’s even more true at a time of political strife over immigration, the mayor said.
“My community is a community of resilience. And for people who are newcomers or refugees, we are all in it together,” said Burks. “I like being, as they like to call me, the international mayor–Mother Mayor.”
The other mayors who spoke at the event were Teresa Thomas-Smith of Palmetto and Bianca Motley Broom of College Park in Fulton County, as well as Rochelle Robinson of Douglasville in Douglas County, and Sandra Vincent of McDonough in Henry County.
Fluellyn, who was elected mayor of Lovejoy in September, called herself the “newest of the bunch,” and said she was inspired by the other women in the room with her. “These ladies have been blazing the trail and letting us know that not only can the job be done, but done with excellence,” she said. “So that gave me the courage to go on and come right behind them.”
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