Selma's First Black Mayor - James Perkins - Brief Article

Ebony, Dec, 2000 by Zondra Hughes

JAMES Perkins was 12 years old when Alabama State Police savagely attacked civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, setting off a series of chain reactions that changed Selma and the United States forever.

Like many Selmians, Perkins knows exactly where he was on that fateful day, March 7, 1965--aka "Bloody Sunday"--when the beatings began. He was sulking in the Brown Chapel with tears in his eyes because his mother, fearing the worst, had refused to let him join the big march.

Perkins may have missed the beatings, but he didn't miss the aftermath. Today, some 35 years later, he is the city's first Black mayor, and once again, the whole world is watching Selma and the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

The road from "Bloody Sunday" to September 13, 2000--the night Perkins won the election after eight years of running--was long, tiresome and treacherous for Perkins, the son of two of Selma community leaders, Etta Perkins, a nurse, and James Perkins Sr., a retired educator.

After the national furor subsided, Perkins graduated from Parrish High School, earned a degree from Alabama A&M, and then started his own computer consulting firm in downtown Selma. In 1984, he married Cynthia Page, a parent facilitator in the Selma public school system.

Eight years ago, dissatisfied with the slow pace of desegregation in Selma, Perkins ran for mayor and lost to incumbent mayor Joe Smitherman, 70, a former devout segregationist who had been in office since 1964.

Marie Foster, a loyal Perkins supporter, who was one of those beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was shocked by the defeat.

"All of us should have gotten behind a Black candidate and got Smitherman out of office," she argues. "We could have had Perkins in [office] the very first time he ran. And the poor fellow just had to run, run, and run."

Perkins ran again in 1996, this time facing another Black opponent and Mayor Smitherman. The face-off between two Black opponents split the vote and Smitherman survived again. "I was consistently and perpetually running for mayor, and in 1996 I really was ready to just put it down and move on," Perkins recalls.

The third election showdown between Perkins and Smitherman was this/close to not happening because Perkins grew tired of running and tired of the "lies and slanders" circulated by his critics. Then one night at a dinner reception, the community pulled together and convinced him to try it one last time. But it was Perkins' wife who changed his mind.

"The third time, he was leery and I told him that I didn't think that he should stop now," Cynthia Page-Perkins says. "If he stopped, he would always walk around and wonder 'What if?' And I couldn't be with someone who would forever walk around wondering, `What if?.'"

The third time proved to be the charm for Perkins, who received a whopping 57 percent of the vote to Smitherman's 43 percent. After the votes were tallied, Perkins' supporters filled the streets and took the celebration to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a fitting christening of the new era in Selma to come.

Now that he's mayor, Perkins admits that he's still reeling from the gravity of his new post. Some people are calling him Moses. "There is a very spiritual aspect to all of this, and it's humbling," he says. "It's scary that someone would say that `James Perkins is our Moses.' It's a tremendous responsibility to be called Moses because I know who he is."

Perkins considers himself "just a regular guy who seeks peace in my home, loves to eat seafood and watch the Discovery Channel." He's a genuinely modest man who scoffs at the media frenzy his historic inauguration has caused.

"I see why a lot of our superstars and youth get sidetracked," he laughs. "All of the cameras--I'm really going to have to keep God close."

Unlike many other small town mayors across the nation, Perkins' new job doesn't stop with making sure the streets are paved and the streetlights are working; his administration has inherited quite a few formidable problems.

Selma's current unemployment rate--12 percent--is three times the state and national averages. The city's population has been on a steady decline since the 1978 closing of the Craig Air Force Base (current population: 21,000).

Perkins wants to turn all of this around. He wants to make Selma a tourist spot for families and to let the world know that the Selma of 2000 is very different from the Selma of 1965.

"Selma has been touted as the hate and racist capital of the world. But as it relates to race relations, Selma's probably better off than Chicago," Perkins argues. "But we've been forced to live with ours. The world forces us to look at ours, and the world puts ours on the pedestal."

Perkins says he wants to put the ominous events of the Edmund Pettus Bridge into perspective: It is a part of Selma's history, the nation's history, but it will no longer be the first thing people think of when they mention his city.

"The problems that are going on all across the country are going on in Selma," Perkins explains. "But we will make Selma the Mecca of Reconciliation."