In 1972 Johnny Ford became the first African American elected mayor of Tuskegee, Alabama. His historic victory was heralded as a sign that a new generation of young, well-educated black politicians was stepping into leadership in the years following the civil rights movement. When he took office, he was quoted by the New York Times as saying that "the South is the new frontier for black accomplishment."
Ford served as mayor until 1996, when he was elected to the state legislature. He was reelected mayor of Tuskegee in 2004. Born on August 23, 1942, in Midway, Alabama, Ford was adopted at age four by his uncle, Charlie Benjamin Ford. They moved to Tuskegee, home of the Tuskegee Institute, which was founded in 1881 to educate the children of freed slaves. During Ford's youth the famed Tuskegee Airmen—the first all-black corps of military pilots, who had compiled a noteworthy record during World War II—were a source of both local and national pride for African Americans. Yet Tuskegee, like the rest of the South, was a deeply segregated place, and Ford attended the city's all-black public schools.
A few weeks later the New York Times ran another story, "The Tuskegee Mayor and His Wife: A Very Visible Interracial Marriage," which noted that mixed-race marriages were still technically illegal in the state. Ford and his wife, Frances Rainer, a social worker from a well-connected white family in another town, had started dating during Ford's tenure with the Model Cities program. They often met in the larger city of Montgomery, about forty minutes away by car. Theirs was the first interracial marriage in Macon County. Even though antimiscegenation laws had been declared invalid by the U.S. Supreme Court three years earlier, Alabama's law was still on the books, so the newlyweds, the minister who married them, and the clerk at the county office who had issued the marriage license were subject to criminal penalties. "A lot of people marry for money," Ford told Ray Jenkins, the New York Times reporter. "A lot of people marry for class. Maybe some people marry for political reasons. But we married for love."
I love Johnny Ford and his (former?) wife, Frances Baldwin Rainer, for insisting on the right to remain Southerners while loving each other and raising a family. Journalist Marshall Frady tells their story in his excellent book, Southerner's: A Journalist's Odyssey.
Unfortunately, like many modern couples, Johnny and Frances divorced in 1970. Ford married and divorced two more times before marrying Joyce London Alexander (a judge) in 2006. Ford has three children-- Johnny, Christopher, Tiffany.
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