MOBILE, Alabama — For the fifth straight mayoral election in this port city, Mobilians on Aug. 24 showed that people (even supposedly antediluvian Southerners!) are discerning enough to let considerations other than race drive their votes.
Incumbent Sandy Stimpson, one of those dreaded white conservative Republicans who is supposed to be inherently guilty of systemic racism, won a third term in a landslide against four opponents. His 57% of the vote nearly doubled the 29% of six-term city councilman Fred Richardson, who is black. In all three of Stimpson’s elections, the number of black people registered to vote exceeded white registration. In the two elections prior to Stimpson’s, when Mobile was still a white-majority city, it elected black Democrat Sam Jones as mayor — the first time when black registration was just 43%.
Maybe, just maybe, plenty of good people view the world without looking through racial lenses.
Stimpson certainly has given Mobilians reason to transcend race, even as the outspoken but hard-working Richardson spent a quarter-century yelling “racist” at every opportunity. In his eight years in office so far, Stimpson has assiduously tried to defuse any racial aspect to disputes while genially visiting and working in every neighborhood in the city. He made a priority of condemning, clearing title to, and improving blighted properties. He worked deals to reopen parkland access to Mobile Bay while protecting new acreage for environmental protection, to move the city’s commercial air hub to a much more accessible location, to reattract the cruise ship industry, and to serve in numerous ways as a mid-Gulf Coast transportation hub.
Stimpson cut the city’s bonded indebtedness in half while increasing tenfold what had been a meager reserve fund. He worked with the city council to update the fleets of police cars and fire engines, improve the rate of identifying criminal perpetrators, drastically improve the quality and safety of public parks, and dedicate well over $200 million to improved infrastructure. And he did it all with what Rob Holbert, the co-publisher of the centrist “alternative” weekly Lagniappe, once called an “excited, joyful, honest, and positive approach.”
Purveyors of critical race theory say that “whiteness” is an evil. For a majority of Mobile voters, though, “whiteness” and “blackness” aren’t even things that matter. Instead, conduct and character count. A guy known as MLK once said much the same thing, but maybe he was just some sort of racist.
