Tishaura Jones elected St. Louis’ first Black female mayor

ST. LOUIS (AP) – St. Louis Treasurer Tishaura Jones, who has been outspoken in her criticism of the criminal justice system’s “arrest and incarcerate” model, won election Tuesday and will take over as the first Black female mayor in a city beset by yet another wave of violent crime.

Jones defeated Alderwoman Cara Spencer in the general election with 51.7% to Spencer’s 47.8%, based on unofficial results posted on the city’s website. She will be sworn in April 20.

“St. Louis: This is an opportunity for us to rise,” Jones said in her victory speech. “I told you when I was running that we aren’t done avoiding tough conversations. We are done ignoring the racism that has held our city and our region back.”

Spencer, in her concession, noted the historic achievement of her opponent.

“This is something we should all celebrate,” Spencer said. “Our city broke a glass ceiling tonight, a ceiling that shouldn’t have been there.”

Jones, 49, is a former state representative who has been treasurer since 2013. She will replace incumbent Mayor Lyda Krewson, who announced in November that she would not seek a second term. Krewson, 67, is the city’s first woman mayor.

In her new job, Jones faces many challenges. The population that peaked at 856,796 in 1950 is now just above 300,000, and people are still leaving for the suburbs. Businesses, including downtown restaurants and shops, are still struggling to recover from COVID-19 shutdowns.

But Jones and Spencer agreed that no crisis is as important as curbing violence, especially killings. Police statistics show that 262 people were killed in St. Louis last year – five fewer than the record of 267 set in 1993. But because the city’s population has declined sharply since 1993, the per capita homicide rate was much higher in 2020.

Already, 2021 is shaping up to be even worse. The city has recorded 46 killings through Tuesday, about 10 ahead of last year’s dangerously high pace.

Jones has pledged to bring in more social workers, mental health counselors and substance abuse counselors, rather than adding more uniformed officers.

Krewson, whose husband was fatally shot in a 1995 carjacking, ran in 2017 on a pledge to battle crime, but the city saw a staggering increase in killings during the coronavirus pandemic.

About 48% of St. Louis residents are white, 45% are Black. While both Jones and Spencer are Democrats, Jones in a recent debate questioned if another white mayor could adequately lead the city, noting that a “white person doesn’t have to worry about their children getting hit by a stray bullet when he’s outside.”

“While I appreciate the role of white allies in this movement of progress, I don’t believe that they have the lived experiences to lead a majority-minority city,” Jones said in the debate.

Her victory speech focused largely on overcoming racism and bigotry.

“I will not stay silent when I spot racism,” Jones said. “I will not stay silent when I spot homophobia or transphobia. I will not stay silent when I spot xenophobia. I will not stay silent when I spot religious intolerance. I will not stay silent when I spot any injustice.”

Until this year, St. Louis hosted Democratic and Republican primary elections in March, with the winners competing in April.

But St. Louis is so heavily Democratic that the general election became an afterthought. City voters in November approved a new nonpartisan format in which all candidates compete against each other in March, with the top two vote-getters advancing. Jones received the most votes in the primary, and Spencer edged out two other candidates for the other spot.

The Cherokee Nation acknowledges that descendants of people once enslaved by the tribe should also qualify as Cherokee

TAHLEQUAH, Okla. – A longstanding dispute over who can be considered a citizen of the Cherokee Nation finally came to a conclusion this week.

The Cherokee Nation Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the tribal nation remove the phrase “by blood” from its constitution and other tribal laws. That change formally acknowledges that the descendants of Black people once enslaved by the tribe — known as the Cherokee Freedmen — have the right to tribal citizenship, which means they are eligible to run for tribal office and access resources such as tribal health care.

The recent decision by the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court is a response to a 2017 ruling by a US district court, which determined that the descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen are entitled to full tribal citizenship rights under a treaty the Cherokee Nation made with the US in 1866.

“Freedmen rights are inherent,” Cherokee Nation Supreme Court Justice Shawna S. Baker wrote in the opinion. “They extend to descendents of Freedmen as a birthright springing from their ancestors’ oppression and displacement as people of color recorded and memorialized in Article 9 of the 1866 Treaty.”

Enslaved Black people journeyed on the Trail of Tears

The history of the Cherokee Freedmen is an example of just how complex and layered issues of race, inequality and marginalization are in the US.

Many Native Americans were enslaved alongside African Americans during the colonial period — Brown University historian Linford D. Fisher estimates that 2 million to 5.5 million Native people were enslaved from the time of Christopher Columbus to around 1880.

But some wealthier tribal citizens, particularly in tribes in the Southeast that had adopted certain norms of White settlers, also practiced slavery themselves. That includes the Cherokee people, some of whom in the early 1800s had started to enslave African Americans.

Then in the late 1830s, the US government forcibly expelled the Cherokee from their homeland and ordered them to relocate to present-day Oklahoma — an exodus known as the Trail of Tears. What’s not as widely known, though, is that enslaved African Americans made the journey along with the Cherokee citizens who enslaved them.

About 4,000 enslaved Black people were living among the Cherokee people by 1861, according to the National Museum of the American Indian.

The tribe abolished slavery in 1863. And shortly after the Civil War ended, the Cherokee Nation signed a treaty with the US government that granted full citizenship rights to those formerly enslaved by Cherokee citizens.

But in practice, Freedmen were often denied those rights and excluded from the tribe, wrote Lolita Buckner Inniss in a 2015 article published in the Columbia Journal of Race and Law. Over the past several decades, Cherokee Freedmen have fought to protect those rights through various legal proceedings.

Freedmen have long been fighting to protect their rights

In 2007, the Cherokee Nation amended its constitution to restrict tribal citizenship to those with “Indian blood.” That expelled about 2,800 descendants of Cherokee Freedmen from the tribe, the website for the National Museum of the American Indian states.

Chad Smith, the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation at the time, argued that the tribe was a sovereign nation and should therefore have the right to determine who qualifies for tribal citizenship. But the Freedmen pushed back, resulting in a series of legal battles over the next decade.

In 2017, a federal district court ruled in favor of the Freedmen — a decision that the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court has now reaffirmed.

“The ‘by blood’ language found within the Cherokee Nation Constitution, and any laws which flow from that language, is illegal, obsolete, and repugnant to the ideal of liberty,” Baker wrote in the recent opinion. “These words insult and degrade the descendants of the Freedman much like the Jim Crow laws found lingering on the books in Southern states some fifty-seven years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”

Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. commended the decision.

“Cherokee Nation is stronger when we move forward as citizens together and on an equal basis under the law,” he said in a statement on Monday. “…The court has acknowledged, in the strongest terms, our ancestors’ commitment to equality 155 years ago in the Treaty of 1866. My hope is that we all share in that same commitment going forward.”

About 8,500 descendants of Freedmen are currently enrolled as citizens of the Cherokee Nation, according to a news release from the tribe.

Black ice causing increased demand for vehicle repairs

JOPLIN, Mo. – The owner of Snodgrass Collision Center in Joplin says black ice is the most common culprit behind winter weather wrecks.

They say they’ve received several calls for drivers already needing repairs due to road conditions. Some just need alignments for minor incidents and others are involved in roll overs.

Ditch type damages, a lot of those a wheel will get drove back, said Dana Snodgrass of Snodgrass Collision Center. “You’ll hit a cold brick, a lot of suspension problems. If you go off in a ditch,  you should always bring your car into a shop and have an alignment check on it.”

Several other shops in the area also say they’ve received multiple calls from drivers whose vehicle sustained damage due to road conditions.