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Newbern, Alabama is a small town. At it's heyday in the 1880s the population was 562. Today just about 150 people live there, with the population falling by 20% per decade for the past two decades.
It's a tiny town but there are residents who care about its future. One is Patrick Braxton, who started to question how the town was being run when working as a volunteer firefighter and during the early days of COVID.
The official leadership seemed unresponsive and even hostile.
1/
Newbern is majority black, but like many small towns in the Black Belt the town leadership is all white. Newbern has historically not had elections for Mayor--
Some residents from First Baptist Church of Newbern are fed up. Braxton among them. The small funds the Mayor controls are not spent with transparency. COVID supplies were squandered. When Patrick Braxton put up signs encouraging people to get vaccinated the signs were thrown in the burn heap.
So Braxton decided to run for mayor. 2/
There is a process to have mayoral elections, Patrick Braxton found the paperwork despite obstruction from the city council. The existing mayor Haywood “Woody” Stokes III ignored him and didn't bother to run so Braxton won by default managing to get recognized by the county. Then, shortly after, the white town council met secretly and reappointed (??) Haywood “Woody” Stokes III as Mayor. It's an old typical situation. Here's the best article I found:
One other thing:
This kind of annoying headache inducing super local nit picky local politics is *the most important kind of political battle right now*
Power is built from these tiny councils up-- and the structures that keep all manner of "outsiders" from participating, or even knowing what they are doing need to be destroyed -- one little town at a time. Get the school board too.
If you live in a small town and don't know who the mayor is or what he does.
Maybe YOU should be the mayor.
Also, don't assume that living in a big city means there isn't "local politics" -- it's a slightly different animal but find out what an 'alderman' is. Shocking how many levers of political power just sit around gathering dust... or are manned by the dullest rock in the barrel.
I don't know why anyone even runs for congress-- You can do so much more by being on the community reporting group to the Department of Sanitation.
(for example insist they put more trash cans by the public high school)
>"I don't know why anyone even runs for congress"
For the most part: money.
Mhairi Black, a UK MP who is standing down at the next election, said that another MP said that if you were not a millionaire by 5 years, you were doing it wrong!
Weird.
I'd want to be in congress so I could make important political decisions and hopefully do a better job than most of the chumps who are there.
But for an extreme introvert even running for city council is beyond my skillset. But, I can go to SO MANY meetings.
Oh, definitely! My grandmother attended all the town council meetings with a tape recorder and asked annoying questions. (She had also been on the council herself, and her husband and FIL had been mayors at one point, but by the time I was around she was definitely not in the local power structure.)