The nation’s first elected black woman mayor: 'I believed in God and I believed in myself.'
Lelia Foley-Davis, the mayor of Taft, Okla., stands in front of town hall in 1980. By Gillian Brockell Gillian Brockell Staff writer for Retropolis Email Bio Follow April 2 at 9:10 PM Chicago voters made history Tuesday night when they elected Lori Lightfoot to be the city’s first black woman mayor.Lelia Foley-Davis knows what that feels like. Nearly five decades ago, she made history as the first black woman to be elected as a mayor in the United States.
With $200 from friends, she got her mayoral campaign underway, going door to door in the town of 500 and introducing herself in churches. According to a 1973 Jet magazine profile, detractors “questioned the fact that all five of her children were born before she was married.” Some also questioned whether she could be mayor with only a high school education.
She told the New York Times that September that “working to get the city straightened out has taken all my time, so I’ve been continuing to draw my unemployment.” “The president’s dog, a golden retriever, was running around the White House and everyone was petting the dog,” Foley-Davis told the Northeastern in 2018. “I looked at the president and said, ‘I did not come here to play with a dog, I came here to talk to you about housing for my community.’”
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