The White Men's Club Leading America's Largest Cities

For a brief period beginning last December, London Breed had gained entry into a club that has, of late, almost exclusively belonged to white men: the ranks of big-city mayors.

Breed, a 43-year-old African American woman and president of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, had automatically become the city’s acting mayor following the sudden death of Ed Lee, who had served for seven years before succumbing to a heart attack on December 12.

Only two women have ever served as mayor of San Francisco, and both of them originally took office not by election, but after a death. The first was Dianne Feinstein, who assumed the mayoralty after the assassination of George Moscone in 1978. She stayed in office for a decade, turning her accidental ascendancy into a two-term stint as mayor, and she used that perch to launch a bid for Senate, where she is now running for her fifth full term.

Breed was the second. But she was gone just six weeks later, ousted by the same Board of Supervisors that had twice elected her as its president. In her place the Board installed Mark Farrell, who is white, to serve as temporary steward until a citywide election in June. Officially, the Board was concerned that incumbency would give Breed a leg up in her campaign for mayor over another member running, Jane Kim. Yet Feinstein was allowed to enjoy the same advantage four decades earlier, and some of Breed’s supporters thought the decision smacked of racism.

“There’s no ‘thought’ here—I know,” said Reverend Amos Brown, the civil-rights activist and longtime pastor of San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church. “I’ve been a pastor here for 42 years, and San Francisco has gotten by with the image, an untruth, that it is liberal and progressive. But it mirrors that sin, America’s original sin, of race.”

Breed is now campaigning to reclaim the mayor’s post, and if she wins the June election, she’ll once again become the only woman of color in a club that remains entirely male and overwhelmingly white.

America’s largest urban centers are its bastions of diversity and progressive politics—most are overwhelmingly Democratic, and in many of them, whites no longer make up a majority of the population. But that diversity is not represented in City Hall.