Governing the Withheld: Black Mayors from Fayette to Jackson

In the summer of 1969, Charles Evers took the oath as mayor of Fayette, a small town in Jefferson County, and became the first Black mayor of a racially mixed Mississippi town since Reconstruction. Fifty-six years later, Jackson's mayors still govern a capital where the state controls the police in part of downtown, has tried to appoint judges for its residents and, for a time, watched the federal government take over the water system. The distance between those two moments is the story of what happens when Black voters win cities and white-controlled legislatures keep the power to say no.

Fayette, 1969: Winning the Town Hall

Evers came to Fayette after his brother Medgar was assassinated in Jackson in 1963. He took over Medgar's work as NAACP field secretary and organized boycotts and voter registration drives in the southwest corner of the state. When he won the mayoralty, national reporters came to watch. He hired Black police officers, recruited industry and pressed for federal grants for a town that had almost no tax base.

Fayette showed both the promise and the limits of local victory. A mayor could open city jobs and public spaces. A mayor could not fix a county economy built on extraction and exclusion, or force the state to send fair shares of road, school and health money. Evers' later turns, including his independent runs for governor and Senate, grew partly out of that frustration.

Other firsts followed. Unita Blackwell, a sharecropper and organizer with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, became mayor of Mayersville in 1976, the first Black woman elected mayor in Mississippi. Small Delta towns such as Mound Bayou, founded by formerly enslaved people in 1887, had long had Black leaders, but the post-1965 wave brought Black mayors to biracial towns across the state.

Jackson, 1997: The Capital Changes Hands

Harvey Johnson Jr., a political science professor at Jackson State University, was elected Jackson's first Black mayor in 1997. By then, white flight had remade the city. Families and businesses moved to Rankin and Madison counties, taking tax revenue with them, while Jackson kept the costs of an aging capital: old pipes, crumbling streets and state buildings that pay no property tax.

Chokwe Lumumba, a human rights lawyer and longtime organizer with the Republic of New Afrika and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, won in 2013 on a platform of cooperative economics and participatory budgeting. He died less than a year into his term. His son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, won in 2017 and served two terms. In 2025, Jackson voters elected state Sen. John Horhn.

The county map above shows Hinds County at the center of Mississippi's Black population, surrounded by suburban counties with much smaller Black shares. That geography is central to the struggle over the capital. Jackson is majority Black. The legislature that governs its finances is drawn from the whole state, and its majority does not answer to Jackson voters.

Governing the Withheld

The Jackson water crisis of 2022 made that clear to the nation. After flooding knocked the main treatment plant offline in August, tens of thousands of residents lost safe running water. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Justice Department intervened, and in November 2022 a federal judge appointed an interim third-party manager to run the system. City leaders argued that the state had steered federal infrastructure money elsewhere for years. State leaders blamed city management. The NAACP filed a civil rights complaint charging that the state had discriminated against the city in water funding.

In 2023 the legislature passed House Bill 1020. It expanded the Capitol Complex Improvement District, where state-run Capitol Police operate alongside the city police, and created a new court in the district with judges appointed by the chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court rather than elected. Critics compared it to the appointed governments of the post-Reconstruction era. In September 2023 the Mississippi Supreme Court struck down the provision creating appointed circuit judges, while leaving other parts of the law in place.

This is what preemption looks like in practice. When Black voters gain control of a city, state lawmakers move key powers out of the city's reach. Police, courts, water, taxes and school funding become state questions. The mayor keeps responsibility without full authority. The pattern is not unique to Mississippi. It has played out in Birmingham, Atlanta, St. Louis and Houston, and it shapes the governing test for every Black mayor across the South.

Why It Matters for the Senate Race

Jackson and Hinds County gave Scott Colom more votes than any other county in the state. Many of those voters live with the consequences of state preemption every day. When Colom talks about federal infrastructure money that goes directly to cities and counties, rather than passing through a hostile state government, he is speaking to that experience.

The fight over municipal power also shows why a Senate seat matters. A senator cannot run Jackson's water system. A senator can push for federal grants that reach local governments directly, for civil rights enforcement when states discriminate in funding, and for oversight when federal money disappears, as it did in the Mississippi welfare scandal.

The Long Arc

From Fayette to Jackson, Black mayors in Mississippi have won elections only to discover that the office is smaller than the vote. Their successors have learned to combine city hall with federal partnerships, lawsuits and statewide organizing. Each generation has expanded what a Black mayor can do, and each has met a new form of resistance. That cycle is the clearest evidence that local victories need statewide and federal power behind them.

Factbook: Black mayors in Mississippi

1969: Charles Evers elected mayor of Fayette, first Black mayor of a biracial Mississippi town since Reconstruction.

1976: Unita Blackwell elected mayor of Mayersville, first Black woman mayor in Mississippi.

1997: Harvey Johnson Jr. elected Jackson's first Black mayor.

2013, 2017, 2025: Chokwe Lumumba, Chokwe Antar Lumumba and John Horhn elected in Jackson.

2023: House Bill 1020 expands the Capitol Complex Improvement District; state Supreme Court strikes appointed judges.

Further Reading on HistorianSpeaks

• Guarding the Door: Scott Colom, "Sinators," and Medgar Evers
• The Delta's Quiet Firewall