Ferguson residents voted to add two African Americans to the City Council, a move that diversifies an elected body that was overwhelmingly white in a city with a majority-black population.
Ella Jones, Brian Fletcher and Wesley Bell captured three seats on the Ferguson City Council. Jones and Bell are African-American, while Fletcher is white. The six-member council will now have three black members for the first time in its history.
Jones won nearly 50 percent of the vote in a four-way race that also featured Adrianne Hawkins, Mike McGrath and Doyle McClellan. Fletcher captured about 57 percent of the vote against Bob Hudgins. And Bell took in nearly 67 percent against Lee Smith.
Eric Fey, the Democratic director for the St. Louis County Board of Elections, told St. Louis Public Radio reporter Jo Mannies that the turnout on Tuesday was around 30 percent. That surpasses recent municipal elections in Ferguson – and nearly doubles the roughly 16 percent turnout in the rest of St. Louis County.
Bell said he was heartened by the sturdy turnout – especially since prior elections had featured dismal voter participation.
“We knocked on doors. We were all about community outreach and staying positive. And it brought out the highest turnout in the history of Ward 3,” Bell said. “That’s what I’m most proud about – that we reached out to citizens. Residents who have not felt a part of the process. And they came out. And they came out and they spoke loudly.”
Many were critical of the fact that the majority-black suburb had only one African-American member on the six-person council. (The city’s mayor also votes on proposed ordinances.) And many of the city’s key staffers that resigned recently – including the police chief, city manager and municipal court judge – were white.
Jones, an African American who quit her job at Mary Kay to run for council, said the results represent a big turning point for a city rocked by months of racial discord.
“For some people, it means hope,” said Jones, answering a question about what it will mean for the council to have three black members. “For some people, it means a new face for Ferguson. And for some people, it means that it’s time for us to get together and do the work we need to do to build our city.”
Fletcher, a former mayor of Ferguson, went even further, saying, “We’ve moved like a century’s worth of past history in one night.”
Under normal circumstances, Ferguson’s City Council elections wouldn’t have received much publicity. But the candidates received unprecedented coverage from local, national and international media outlets because of the attention that Ferguson protest movement received.
While some activist groups backed Jones, they were not supportive of Bell and Fletcher. Some distrusted Bell’s role as a city prosecutor and municipal judge in other North St. Louis County cities, while Fletcher was at times openly critical of the protest movement.
Fletcher said Tuesday’s results were a significant rebuke to protestors.
“We’ve had a lot of things canceled or postponed over these last several months because of the unrest,” Fletcher said. “And I think it’s a signal to the protesters that they want their city back. The citizens do.”
Bell said there were “all kind of daggers being thrown at us” during the campaign. But he went onto say “we made a point that we’re going to stay on our message.”
“Because if you’re going build back and rebuild this community, you’ve got to bring people together,” Bell said. “So, we were focused on bringing people together. And everyone that had misgivings about me, that did not support me – I want to earn that support.”
Selecting a new city manager will be high on the agenda for the new council. The new members will also have to decide how to proceed in the wake of a Justice Department report harshly criticizing the city’s police department and municipal court.
While many national figures have suggested that Ferguson should dissolve its police department and contract with St. Louis County, none of the eight candidates for the City Council supports that idea.
“In order for Ferguson to hold its own identity, we need to keep our own police department,” Jones said.
Terry Jones, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said that because of the way Ferguson is structured, the winners of Tuesday’s elections will have limited power.
“The council’s biggest decision, not its only decision, is hiring a city manager,” Jones said. “This new council will do that because there’s an interim city manager.” But the City Council does not have comparable powers to the state Legislature or U.S. Congress.
“It has some symbolic representation for other issues,” Jones said. “But much more is being made of it than it actually is.”
Edited for length and reprinted with permission from news.stlpublicradio.org.
