Three years after making history by being elected as the first African-American mayor of an Alabama town, Patrick Braxton has found his tenure marred by racial harassment and intimidation, preventing him from effectively governing the town.
He says the town of Newbern, Alabama, is ignoring his administration because he is Black.
Braxton alleges he is being politically bullied because of his race even though his town, made up of 275 people, is 85 percent Black. According to Braxton’s lawsuit, white citizens have been trusted to make decisions — even though they have not been elected.
The elected mayor filed a federal lawsuit, naming the current mayor and his council, People’s Bank of Greensboro and the postmaster at the U.S. Post Office as defendants, alleging white town officials violated his civil rights and obstructed his administration’s progress.
In an interview with Capital B, a nonprofit news organization, Braxton, 57, says that when he won his election during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a white woman told him that the whites in the then-166-year-old city were “not ready for a Black mayor.”
Braxton believes she was right, claiming that he has been locked out of the town hall, town mail and financial accounts used to govern the city’s budget and has been followed around by a drone.
He also pointed out that when he won, Haywood “Woody” Stokes III, the white mayor he succeeded, reappointed himself to the office by order of a secret special election where the council passed a city resolution creating a new election and moving back the deadline to file for candidacy.
By law, Braxton was the sole qualified candidate. In 2020, then a volunteer firefighter, Braxton was the only one actually to submit paperwork.
Braxton stumbled upon discarded meeting minutes at city hall. In those minutes, it was disclosed that a councilman had put forth a resolution declaring Braxton as the mayor, and this resolution had…
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