After lawsuit, a town elects first Black leaders in its 200-year history
In a community where about 43 percent of the population is Black, the election of Black leaders was long overdue, said residents and civil rights leaders
By Joe Heim
and
Erin Cox
October 1, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Brandy James made history by becoming one of the first two Black people elected to the Federalsburg, Md., town council. (Jeremiah Cephas)
Small-town elections where just a few hundred people cast ballots typically don’t get much outside attention. But Tuesday’s vote in Federalsburg, a 200-year-old enclave of about 2,800 people in Caroline County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, made history as residents elected the town’s first Black council members.
In a community where about 43 percent of the population is Black, the election of Black leaders was long overdue, said residents and civil rights leaders who celebrated the wins. Black people had run for election in the town before, but never won. Over the past year, the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union pushed for changes to election laws that they said had diluted Black political strength in Federalsburg and allowed an all-White leadership to remain in place.
Brandy James, one of the two newly elected Black council members along with Darlene Hammond, said she was thrilled with the win and is ready to dive into governing when she is sworn in on Monday. At the top of her list were revamping the senior center, making the absentee ballot process less restrictive and addressing affordable housing shortages in the community.
James, 44, a crisis intervention manager and adjunct criminal justice professor at Chesapeake College, said she felt the historic importance of her election and acknowledged the suffering that others endured for her to represent her community.
“It makes me feel proud that I’m able to pay homage to those who paved the way for me as a Black person to vote,” James said. “Those who lost their lives, were spat on, had to test or read at a certain level when they’d had no education. Those who marched.”
The fight to upend Federalsburg’s voting system began in 2022 with the ACLU’s routine review of whether census data matched representation in Maryland communities. “When we saw the town is half-Black and there’s no Black representation, we reached out to the community and asked, ‘What did you think about this?’” said Deborah A. Jeon, legal director for the ACLU of Maryland.
The ACLU has been trying to reverse minority vote dilution in towns across the Eastern Shore, which was once home to the plantations where Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass were enslaved. The civil rights organization said it successfully advocated for new district boundaries that led to Black leadership in two counties and nine municipalities, including the town of Hurlock, where James’s father was the first Black mayor.
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By August 2022, the civil rights organization had created a coalition of local and state leaders, hired a demographer to propose new boundaries and sent a strongly worded 10-page letter to Federalsburg’s elected leaders outlining what they viewed as violations of the Voting Rights Act.
“Failure to address this issue is indefensible as a matter of racial justice, and would clearly subject the Town to legal liability for minority vote dilution, so we urge you to act promptly to remedy this ongoing civil rights violation,” the letter said.
Under a judge’s supervision to create a plan that does not violate the Voting Rights Act, town leaders this summer changed the election from at-large representation into a two-district system. The new plan would have two of the four town council members from the predominantly Black part of town.
Running and winning, James said, “made me determined that I want to be the best that I can be on the council because I want to show other young people, people of color and other ethnicities that just because we’re a small town, you know, you can do this, you can step up, you can help lead this community forward.”
The election of James and Hammond to the town’s four-member council may not have happened were it not for the concerted efforts of civil rights organizations and activists to push Federalsburg to change how it conducts elections.
Despite several rounds of public meetings to come up with a new way to elect leaders, the civil rights organizations were persuaded that the town was unlikely to come up with a suitable plan, Jeon said.
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They filed a federal lawsuit in February that contended that one core way the city maintained a “white stranglehold on municipal power is its long-standing use of a racially dilutive at-large, staggered term election system, rather than a racially fair system that would afford Black Federalsburg voters an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.”
The suit said the town’s voting system was out of compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which bans practices that give racial minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”
In their lawsuit, which is still pending, the ACLU alleged that “Federalsburg’s election practices and structure unlawfully conspire with patterns of racial polarization in voting to empower the Town’s white majority to override and dilute the influence of Black voters, suppress Black candidacies, and prevent Black residents from electing their chosen representatives.”
In the at-large race for mayor, incumbent Kimberly Abner, who is White, easily bested her challenger, Jeffrey Stevenson, who is Black and was running for office for the first time. Despite the loss, Stephenson said he was “still determined to change the community.” Abner did not respond to interview requests.
Carl Snowden, a longtime Maryland civil rights activist and former head of the Maryland attorney general’s civil rights office, said the situation in Federalsburg underscores the relevance of the nearly 60-year-old Voting Rights Act and its ongoing impact not only in Maryland, but across the country.
“It’s hard for people to imagine in 2023 that there are African American communities like Federalsburg, which for 200 years had no representation, none, zero, on the town council but has a population of 43 percent,” Snowden said. “I think when most people hear that they find it incredible. But when you contrast that with what’s going on nationally, it is really part of this ongoing struggle.”
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He pointed to Alabama where the U.S. Supreme Court recently rejected the state’s bid to redraw its congressional map in a way that lower courts had ruled unfair to Black voters.
Snowden, who has served several terms on the Annapolis city council, said the push for voting reform in Federalsburg reinforces the importance of having a government reflect the makeup of the community.
“It’s a big deal and makes a huge difference,” Snowden said. “I think the saying is true, ‘If you don’t have a seat at the table, then you’re likely going to be on the menu.’”
The lawsuit and push to overturn the election process in the town was not well received by some in Federalsburg.
William Beall, who is White and served as Federalsburg’s mayor from 2011 to 2015, said the effort “has created an unnecessary divide between Whites and Blacks. The lawsuit also cost our town thousands of dollars we don’t have. Personally, I have never based anything I have ever done on race and do not intend to start now.”
But Beall, who said he had long encouraged Black residents of the town to run for office, said he was pleased with the election results. Everyone was well represented, he said in a text, “to make Federalsburg the best it can be.”
Willie Woods remembers going to movies at the theater in Federalsburg when it was still segregated — and she and other Black customers had to sit in the balcony. Those memories have stayed with Woods, now president of the Caroline County branch of the NAACP, but she said she looks for ways to make corrections and ask others to do the same and to always push forward.
“Ultimately, we are looking at how we as people treat each other and we look at the humanity of one to the other,” she said. “And we need to rise up and do our best at all times and at all points and stages of our lives.”
As the town celebrates its bicentennial this year, Woods said, looking for ways to address past racial injustices and improve them by amplifying the perspectives of those who had been disadvantaged would be a good way to mark the milestone.
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