Alabama City That Inspired 'To Kill A Mockingbird' Elects Its First Black Mayor

A small Alabama city that’s best known for inspiring the American literary classic “To Kill a Mockingbird ” has elected its first Black mayor.

Monroeville, a city of about 5,700 residents in southwest Alabama,  elected Charles Andrews, 65, to replace incumbent Sandy Smith last week.

Andrews, in a video message posted Sunday, said he’s “honored and humbled” to be the first to break this racial barrier in his city.

“Today, as I stand on the threshold of history, the shoulders of our parents and our foreparents, we are one people, one town and one team, all inclusive,” he said.

Author Harper Lee, who published “To Kill A Mockingbird” in 1960, resided in Monroeville and used it as the basis for the novel’s fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel’s story dealt with racial inequality and injustice, with it focusing on the wrongful rape conviction of a Black man and the white locals’ reaction to the trial.

Andrew, speaking with AL.com, recalled watching as a child the 1962 movie “To Kill a Mockingbird” at a segregated Monroeville theater with his mother, as well as seeing a “White Only” sign on a water fountain at a local gas station after learning how to read.

“It didn’t strike me that we were sitting in the Black section of the theater,” he told the local news outlet. “Being a child at the time, and being the first time going to the movies, I was kind of awestruck.”

Andrews’ professional career includes years spent in public safety and law enforcement as an Alabama state trooper and chief of the Highway Patrol Division of the state’s Department of Public Safety after graduating from the University of Alabama in 1977 with a degree in criminal justice. He was appointed by former President Barack Obama to serve as the U.S. Marshal in Mobile in 2011.

Today, he told AL.com he believes Monroeville has “grown past” its segregated past and that he plans to focus on being a mayor for all of the citizens, including those who didn’t support his campaign. He will be sworn into office on Nov. 2.