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THE MAYORS' PL ATFORM www.ourmayors.org I n 1868 when Pierre Caliste Landry from Donaldsonville, Louisiana and Stephen Swails from Kingstree, South Carolina were elected to serve as mayors of their respective cities, it was the year the 14th amendment to the US Constitution was adopted. It took another 100 years for an AfricanAmerican to be elected mayor of a large US city, in 1970, Newark, NJ and Dayton, OH Today, more than one third of America's top100 cities are headed by an AfricanAmerican mayor. One of them is John Hohrn. MAYOR JOHN HOHRN A SON OF THE MOVEMENT, A VOICE FOR OUR STORY There is a lineage in Black America of leaders who were forged at the intersec tion of politics and art — men and women who understood that the plat form and the stage were never two different places. Mayor John Horhn of Jackson, Mississippi, belongs squarely to that lineage. He is, by his own description, "a confluence of the creative elements and public service," and that single sen tence carries the weight of generations. The politics came first from blood. Horhn's father rose from factory work to become only the second African American elected to a union presidency in Mississippi his tory, leading IBEW Local 2262 — and he did so under the direct mentorship of A. Philip Randolph, the architect of the modern Civil Rights Movement and the organizer of the Pullman Porters. Horhn's father went on to lead the A. Philip Randolph Institute for Voter Education and Voter Participation in Mississippi. That is the soil Mayor Horhn grew out of — a household where union organiz ing, voter participation, and political consciousness were the daily air. But running alongside that political inheritance is an artistic one just as deep, and just as deliberate. Horhn holds a degree in Dramatic Arts and English, is a celebrat ed spoken word artist, who earned his Screen Actors Guild card, and founded the Mississippi Cultural Arts Coalition to promote music, poetry, and visual art across the state. In that, he stands in the same current as Paul Robeson, the oratoractor who made the stage a place of political reckoning; as Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement, which turned spoken word into a vehicle of consciousness; as Dick Gregory, who carried comedy directly onto the campaign trail as an instrument of change; and as Harry Belafonte, for whom artistry and activism were never separate callings. Horhn is, in a real sense, a Mississippi inheritor of that same tradition — the artist who becomes the public servant because the art demanded it. That trajectory carried him into the machinery of the state itself. As Mississippi's Film Commissioner, he helped bring Mississippi Burning and Mississippi Masala to the screen. As head of the Governor's Office of FederalState Programs, he became the signatory for every federal dollar entering Mississippi. As State Tourism Director, he pioneered heritage tourism — work that functioned as a cultural ambassadorship for the state, in the spirit of Jackson's own Margaret Walker, author of the novel Jubilee and Founder of The Institute for the Study of History Life and Culture of Black People, now the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University. That history now informs how he leads Jackson. As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, Horhn warns that "freedom is more fragile now than it's ever been," and that the country is once again in the grip of "revisionist history" that must be resisted as it was 100 years ago. That same instinct shapes how he now talks about Jackson's future. He points to sites "40 minutes from Jackson" where the siege of Vicksburg "broke the back of the Confederacy," and to towns just an hour away where the murders of Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, and civil rights workers Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman "showed America a side of itself it had never seen before." The next generation calls for "selfawareness, self belief, selfknowledge" — "that's when we're going to be hard to handle a force to really be reckoned with." From the union hall to center stage from the State Senate to Jackson's city hall, Mayor John Horhn carries the full weight of that lineage forward knowing Jackson sits at the center of a story that changed the nation and he intends for that story be told whole, finally, in its own voice, " it's imperative that we tell our own stories and not let it be told about us." 32 B M & T ••• July/August 2026 ••• www.blackmeetingsandtourism.com BA 250 Special Edition