Montgomery, Ala., Elects Steven Reed, Its First Black Mayor

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — On the cusp of celebrating 200 years as a city, Montgomery does not have too many “firsts” remaining. But on Tuesday night, the black-majority city and capital of Alabama elected Steven L. Reed as its first African-American mayor.

Mr. Reed, a probate judge, captured about 67 percent of the vote in the nonpartisan runoff election, according to unofficial results cited by The Montgomery Advertiser. He defeated David Woods, a white TV station owner, after they advanced from a 12-person election in August. (Ten of those candidates were black, and Mr. Reed received 42 percent of the vote.)

Montgomery, which was incorporated on Dec. 3, 1819, has long been a central part of the United States’ sordid racial history. It was the first capital of the Confederate States of America in 1861 and is home to the church where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. planned the Montgomery bus boycott, which made Rosa Parks a household name.

Mr. Reed’s election “will send a signal to the entire country that Montgomery is moving forward in a positive way,” said the Rev. Edward J. Nettles, a prominent pastor in the city of about 200,000 people, 60 percent of whom are African-Americans.

The mayor-elect graduated from Morehouse, a historically black college in Atlanta, earned an M.B.A. from Vanderbilt and became the first black probate judge in Montgomery County. His father, Joe Reed, has been the longtime leader of the black caucus of the state Democratic Party.

Pastor Nettles, who leads Freewill Missionary Baptist Church, said Mr. Reed’s election would also represent a generational shift. He said that Montgomery continued to be weighed down by its challenging racial history, but that a younger official would have less of that baggage.

“We are so caught up in our past,” Pastor Nettles said. “There’s a generation that’s older than him. They can’t seem to get past the politics and status quo of the past. They’re still locked in a particular mind-set.”

African-American men first started winning mayorships in the mid-1800s during the brief period known as Reconstruction. Birmingham, Ala., elected its first African-American mayor, Richard Arrington Jr., 40 years ago but he won only a small fraction of the white vote in his five terms.