Cincinnati elects first black mayor (since Tillery)

The story of Tuesday's election in Cincinnati -- to the outside world, at least -- got portrayed as if the election of an African-American mayor was unheard of in the Queen City.

CINCINNATI (AP) - Four years after riots tore this city apart, Cincinnati voters elected a black mayor for the first time.

State Sen. Mark Mallory defeated Councilman David Pepper, both Democrats, in a nonpartisan mayoral runoff Tuesday to lead Ohio's third-largest city.

Rioting broke out in 2001 after an unarmed black man was shot and killed by a white police officer trying to make an arrest. While racial tensions have calmed, crime, safety and revitalizing downtown remain leading issues.

That led to headlines like "City Elects First Black Mayor" in Yahoo! News and the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

True, Cincinnati was slow to embrace a black mayor -- even changing its system of electing council members in 1957 in order to thwart Ted Berry's ascent to the mayor's office for another 15 years.

And it's true that Berry, who finally became the city's first black mayor in 1972, and Ken Blackwell, selected as mayor in 1979, were elected as council president-mayor by their peers on City Council, not by voters.

But you can't say that Dwight Tillery (right), who was the top vote-getter in 1991, wasn't popularly elected as mayor. That was the whole point of the 1987 charter amendment that gave voters more of a voice of who the mayor was.

The system changed again in 2001, to remove the mayor from the council field entirely and have him directly elected on a ballot for mayor. Mark Mallory is the first African-American mayor under that four-year-old system.

That is, unless voters approve an executive mayor system and elect someone else as the first black, directly elected, executive mayor in the city's history.