The sidewalk was buckling, and green paint flaked off the home’s front steps, which she had scrubbed as a child. But, as Philadelphia became the poorest large city in the country, the neighborhood fell into disrepair. But there was enough for everybody and a desire to take care of what you have,” Parker said. During the seventies, Strawberry Mansion was a leading Black working-class neighborhood, and residents color-coördinated pots of geraniums and impatiens. “You can’t understand my passion for certain policy initiatives without knowing that this is where I come from,” she told me. This past summer, I met Parker outside the Kelly-green row house where her great-grandmother lived when she was young, in Strawberry Mansion. She also proposed that the city hire three hundred more police officers, a plan that Philadelphia magazine has called “regressive” and “wasteful.”

She was the only Democratic candidate to support stop-and-frisk policing, which, according to data analyzed by the Pennsylvania A.C.L.U., disproportionately affects Black Philadelphians. I think a whole lot of it is a bunch of bullshit.” Instead, she ran as an outspoken centrist, promising to make Philadelphia “safe, clean, and green.” During the first mayoral debate, she stated her opposition to defunding the police. “I’m not one of those people,” Parker told me. The real race was in last spring’s primary, where, at first, her prospects looked dim against better-known and better-funded candidates-including Rebecca Rhynhart, the city controller, who campaigned to the left of Parker, and Helen Gym, a community organizer and progressive darling, who received endorsements from Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. On November 7th, Parker easily defeated the Republican candidate, a former city councilman David Oh, with seventy-five per cent of the vote.

“A lot of campaign experts thought they would tell us the way we should walk, talk, and act to win an election and get votes,” Parker, who was flanked by her eleven-year-old son, Langston, and her political mentor, the former city councilwoman Marian Tasco, began. “All the time!” The crowd erupted into whoops and cheers. “God is good!” she called to the audience. Parker, who is fifty-one, was wearing a red-lace power suit. On Tuesday, Cherelle Parker took the stage at the Sheet Metal Workers hall to announce her election as Philadelphia’s hundredth mayor.

Road Defense: Outsiders instal