Ella Jones, who has served on the Ferguson City Council since 2015, was elected to become mayor of the city on Tuesday night, becoming its first Black mayor as well as the first woman to ever serve in the role.
Jones, 65, defeated her opponent Heather Robinett, winning 54 percent of the vote to Robinett’s 46 percent.
Ferguson is a city where nearly 7 in 10 residents are Black. When asked what her win represented, Jones responded, “One word: inclusion.”
She also recognized she had her work cut out for her.
“I’ve got work to do — because when you’re an African-American woman, they require more of you than they require of my counterpart,” Jones said. “I know the people in Ferguson are ready to stabilize their community, and we’re going to work together to get it done.”
Jones, who is also a pastor in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, first became a member of the city council in 2015. She previously ran for mayor in 2017 against James Knowles III, who was unable to run this year due to term limits.
Jones became involved in local politics after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, who was shot by former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. The city’s residents rose up in protest over Brown’s death — which spread across the country — condemning it as yet another example of racism in local policing practices.
Ferguson gained worldwide notice for the uprising, which continued for months after a grand jury refused to prosecute Wilson for shooting and killing Brown and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) also refused to intervene in the case.
As a result of the protests, former President Barack Obama established a task force charged with producing recommendations for policing in the 21st century. That task force recommended, among other items, that independent prosecutors investigate civilian deaths relating to officer-involved shootings, and that cities remove policies that promote or reward police actions that arrest or convict citizens.
A DOJ report in 2015 found that police targeted Black residents in Ferguson more than they did white residents, doing so as a means to raise revenue.
Jones said that initially she received only timid support from protesters in her city, as many did not view her short tenure on the council at the time as indicative that she could deliver change.
“If you’ve been oppressed so long, it’s hard for you to break out to a new idea,” Jones explained after she lost her first mayoral bid. “And when you’ve been governed by fear and people telling you that the city is going to decline because an African-American person is going to be in charge, then you tend to listen to the rhetoric and don’t open your mind to new possibilities.”
Jones has pledged to continue pushing for reforms in her city that began in the wake of Brown’s killing. Like many other cities across the country, Ferguson has also seen protests over the May 25 killing of George Floyd, after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.