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Making a prediction which turned out to be practically psychic, Essence Magazine, a publication aimed at black women, once announced 2017 as “The Year of the Black Woman Mayor.” To celebrate that designation, 19 black female mayors across the nation gathered in Washington D.C. for a celebratory event entitled, “Black women must lead.” Among those present was then-mayor of Baltimore, Catherine Pugh, a former Philadelphia TV talk show host who was elected mayor of the city in 2016 but forced to resign in 2019 for wire fraud and tax evasion.

Pugh, a smart, elegant, and body-conscious habitual jogger, struck me as a great listener when she had me on her Philadelphia show before she became Baltimore’s 51st mayor. She fell off my affection radar however when, in 2019, she ordered the removal of four Baltimore Confederate statues in the middle of the night so that her actions would not inspire protests. As an excuse for this brazen erasure of history, Pugh said that as mayor she had the right to keep the citizens of the city “safe.”

Last month Pugh was released from an Alabama prison and is now back in Baltimore, as suave as ever, wearing large peacock hats to luncheons and talking about a radio deal at WOLB 1010 AM. Life goes on. Old corruptions are forgotten.

Philadelphia’s first black female mayor, Cherelle Parker, was elected in 2023. Her promise to make Philadelphia the “safest, cleanest, greenest city in America” helped to get her elected. Her victory over left-wing candidate Helen Gym prompted a sigh of relief for many mainstream Democrats, who worried that Gym, a Columbus, Ohio native, was too radical for the job. But is Parker as mainstream or moderate as she says she is?

Despite Parker’s refusal to support the defund-the-police movement in 2020 when she was a City councilwoman — and despite her support of stop-and-frisk to help stem the tide of crime in the city — she’s said and done some questionable things that seem to put her squarely in Helen Gym’s camp.

In 2020, she involved herself in a controversy over a church-sponsored building of mixed-income housing units in the city’s East Oak Lane section. The church in question, Refuge Evangelical Baptist Church, is one of those “high praise” Baptist churches where the exuberance of parishioners on Sunday mornings rings out over the neighborhood like thunder. If you live within a two-block radius of Refuge, your Sunday mornings aren’t likely to resemble the contemplative quiet of Thoreau’s Walden Pond. But live and let live, as they say.

The church’s plan to expand into the senior housing market on a nearby property caught Parker’s attention. The proposed $15.1 million four-story apartment building with 40 one-bedroom low-cost apartments was the dream project of Pastor Wilbert Richardson, who wanted to name the project after his deceased wife. East Oak Lane is a largely middle class neighborhood composed of single dwelling, multi-level old stone homes that sit on lots with considerable acreage.

Both white and black residents in this mostly black neighborhood pushed back against Richardson’s idea. The project was out of scale, they said; it also had an institutional look that didn’t fit in with the charming stone houses. Parking was another issue. Councilwoman Parker aligned herself with the pastor’s plan, but met with members of the Oak Lane Community Action Association (OLCAA) anyway. The meetings were contentious. OLCAA members accused Parker of not listening to residents’ objections. Parker saw it as a racial issue and wanted the project built at any cost.

Meetings about the project got increasingly unpleasant. The sauerkraut hit the fan when Parker accused OLCAA members of being racists.

“So, she was calling all the black neighbors who didn’t want the building racists,” an East Oak Lane resident, a liberal Democrat, told me. “She was calling us all racists. It was unbelievable. Everybody was a racist. I do not like Mayor Parker—not at all.”

Neighborhood residents voted 83-17 against the proposal. Other local groups voting against the project included Friends of the Oak Lane Library, Oak Lane Tree Tenders and a number of block captains.

Ironically, the East Oak Lane controversy—with Parker’s use of the race card to promote high density development– never surfaced during the mayoral campaign.

Another issue that never surfaced during the mayoral campaign was Cherelle Parker’s criminal record. In 2011, State Police pulled over then State Rep. Parker for driving erratically the wrong way late one night on a one-way street in the city’s Germantown section. DA Seth William excused himself from the case in November 2012 because he was friends with Parker, after which Municipal Judge Charles Hayden dismissed charges against her with the view that arresting officers didn’t have probable cause to make the traffic stop. After this, another judge reinstated the charges after it was discovered that Parker and Hayden were Facebook friends.

Parker was found guilty in 2013 and sentenced to 3 days to 6 months in jail, and her license was suspended for a year.

One can argue that everyone deserves a second or even a third chance, yet it’s no secret that Parker is aligned with Philadelphia’s Old Democrat Guard that favors crippling tax structures, city agency inefficiencies, horrendous public schools, public parks on the brink of ruin and decay, a decaying infrastructure, and a shipwrecked economy.

Mainstream Democrats have still made the Philadelphia we see today.

The 2023 race for mayor has depleted City Council of two conservative-leaning members, Democrat Allan Domb and David Oh, the Republican candidate who lost to Parker. City Council now has a heavy leftward tilt, especially with the election of two socialist members from the Working Families Party. While Mayor Parker may not be far left like Helen Gym, Philadelphia City Council has picked up the progressive slack and become a dream Council that resembles a Helen Gym creation.

Some Philadelphians are wary of Parker’s obsession with her gender and color. Will this obsession grow as the months and years pass? Will Mayor Parker morph into a Helen Gym?

Meanwhile, Philadelphians can be grateful for some small Parker-inspired miracles, like her reputed disdain for the city’s sanctuary city status and her cancellation of Sanctuary Village, or tiny, rent-free houses for the homeless, 55 years old and up. The tiny house project was the brainchild of former mayor Jim Kenney’s administration when left-wing radicals politicized a homeless encampment on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 2020, when that group refused to leave unless the city came up with a housing plan.

While it’s reassuring that Parker nixed a project built on blackmail, her promise to transform Kensington to the way it was before the drug epidemic may be pure pie-in-the-sky.

Philadelphia’s open-air drug markets cover at least 100 blocks stretching from the Kensington, Fairhill, and Harrowgate neighborhoods. Three or four blocks in any direction from K&A, you might find 75–80 drug-block owners ready to do business. (Drug-block owners control the flow of drugs in their zone, employing runners who do the street selling. Block owners are often violent and do not tolerate competition from newcomers.) Should police arrest one block owner and his stable of runners, another team of players will immediately replace them. Arrest the replacements, and another team will pop up to fill the gap.

Eradicating this entrenched underworld network, as well as the homelessness and crime it generates, may be beyond any one mayor’s reach; the situation in Kensington has been allowed to fester for too long.