Near the end of her concession speech as mayor of St. Louis, Tishaura Jones provided a message to young women who may follow in her footsteps.
Jones, the first Black woman to become St. Louis’ mayor, had just lost in a landslide to Alderwoman Cara Spencer. Despite her defeat, Jones said she was “committed to encouraging young girls and young women, Black, brown, Hispanic, Asian, and anyone else from any marginalized group, who has been looking for representation in our city's highest office.”
“You can do anything you set your mind to and your heart to,” she said. “I may not have been successful this evening, but I'm confident that soon one of you will be able to take my place.”
But Jones’ loss is part of a trend in St. Louis-area politics over the past couple of years. After ascending to some of the most powerful posts in local government, several Black female political figures either left office or were defeated in elections. None of their replacements was a Black women.
In a wide-ranging recent interview, Jones said both her defeat and U.S. Rep. Cori Bush’s primary loss last year should produce “a reckoning” when it comes to “the leadership of Black women in the Democratic Party and in the progressive movement.”
“They want our votes, but they don't want our leadership. And we need to have a serious conversation, and a hard conversation, as to why,” Jones said. “You know, 92% of African American women voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. And yet we saw not only with my race, but several races around the country, where we were losing Black leadership at the local level.”
Both Jones and Bush struggled to keep diverse coalitions together during their unsuccessful reelection bids and faced credible, well-funded opponents who pounced on some of their vulnerabilities.
“I would say to everybody who aspires to be an elected official political leader, that fundamentally politics is a real simple business,” said Mike Jones, a former St. Louis alderman who spent decades working in city and county government. “Just because you want it, doesn't mean you own it. And just like you came for somebody, somebody will always be coming for you.”
Others contend that Jones does have a point, especially about how some voters, political insiders, the media and other politicians treat Black women harsher than their white counterparts.
“I think it's just an insult that Black women cannot hold leadership positions in this region,” said John Bowman, a former state lawmaker and the head of the St. Louis County NAACP. “Even on a national scale, look at what they did to Kamala Harris. I just think we're in a society that does not recognize the strength and leadership skills that Black women have.”
Bush, Jones and Gardner
Hours after Jones lost the St. Louis mayoral election, state Rep. Marty Joe Murray, D-St. Louis, posted a photo on his Facebook page.
It was an August 2020 picture of Jones, Bush and St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner in front of the Arch made by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Robert Cohen. Those three women had just scored election wins the night before, prompting Jones to declare that a “wave of Black girl magic” had hit Missouri.
“And the frame, in my mind, kind of represented the progressive movement from like the people that are fighting for Black liberation all in one photograph,” said Murray, who served as a committeeman before winning a state representative seat last year.
In what @tishaura called "a wave of Black girl magic", three black women that won their races gather under the @GatewayArchSTL. Left to right are @StLouisCityCA , @tishaura, @CoriBush congratulated by @Ohun_Ashe. pic.twitter.com/mdqESeLF3u
— Robert Cohen (@kodacohen) August 5, 2020
But Murray said the contrast between that moment and where St. Louis politics is in 2025 is striking.
“I think from a voting perspective, people are burnt out at the federal level, like we're getting hit from every single angle,” Murray said. “And I think there's like a hopelessness, where people want to see something happen.”
Jones, Bush and Gardner are all gone from elected office:
- Gardner resigned in 2023 after she faced an avalanche of criticism over how she managed the office. Had she not stepped down, it was possible a judge could have ousted her after Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey sought her removal. She was accused, among other things, of taking nursing classes when she was supposed to be working.
- Bush lost to Bell in one of the most expensive Democratic primaries in United States history. Bush won the city of St. Louis by a comfortable margin but lost St. Louis County decisively.
- Jones lost in a rematch with Spencer by nearly 30 percentage points. Spencer had a notable financial advantage throughout the contest, and a relatively simple message that hit on city residents’ frustration with services like trash collection, street repair and snow removal.
And while she was not considered part of any faction, St. Louis Comptroller Darlene Green lost her reelection bid last month to Donna Baringer. That ensured that for the first time in decades, there would be no African American representation on the powerful Board of Estimate and Apportionment, which makes major financial decisions about the city.
Fractured coalition
Both Jones and Bush prevailed in their past elections by piecing together a multiracial coalition of white progressive and Black voters. But both Bell and Spencer managed to take advantage of that coalition’s fracturing.
Bell, for instance, won a number of majority Black townships in St. Louis County — a reversal from 2022 when Bush won them all against state Sen. Steve Roberts. Bell also won in largely white areas that backed Bush in either 2020 or 2022, such as southwest St. Louis and the city’s central corridor.
Bush didn’t make herself available for an interview for this story, but during a 2024 episode of the Politically Speaking Hour on St. Louis on the Air, she attributed her loss to the huge influx of money from groups supportive of Israel. Those political action committees spent millions of dollars in ads to boost Bell and attack Bush, especially after she became one of the most vocal critics of Israel in the war in Gaza following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.
Jones’ fortunes also dwindled in south St. Louis. And while she won north St. Louis, her margins were much lower there than in her 2021 victory.
Jones said the results came down to two things: white fear and Black expectations.
Despite presiding over a time of declining crime rates, Jones said her detractors used arguments against her like the "city didn’t feel safe." And while Jones had conceded that her administration missed the mark in handling a January snowstorm, she added that critics papered over how the city rarely plowed narrow and car-laden side streets.
“That's what the people wanted back in 2021 — they were talking about crime, crime, crime, crime,” Jones said. “Well, we decreased crime, and then they moved the goalpost to something else: to potholes and trash and snow removal, not realizing or having some level of amnesia about snow removal and how we do it in the city of St. Louis.”
Jones pointed out that other Black female mayors recently lost reelection, including London Freed of San Francisco and Sharon Weston Broome of Baton Rouge. She said “there is a huge disconnect within the party about our vote versus our leadership.”
“My dad always told me: ‘There’s the old phrase that Black women have to work twice as hard just to get half as much.’ Well, I feel like we work five times as hard to get nothing in return,” Jones said. “And so, that says there’s a serious conversation that I think not only we need to have locally, but nationally as well.”
After the April election, there are now six Black women who hold city-based offices in St. Louis. Four of them, Alisha Sonnier, Pam Boyd, Shameem Clark-Hubbard, Sharon Tyus, and Laura Keys, serve on the Board of Aldermen. One, Mavis Thompson, is the city’s license collector.
Sonnier said that St. Louis would “all be lying to ourselves if we don't acknowledge the higher standards for Black leaders.” She said that St. Louis never reelected any Black person to the mayor’s office.
“I do absolutely agree that we do not get the grace periods that other leaders get, and especially there's high criticism levels,” Sonnier said. “I've gotten emails from people saying, ‘You speak in Ebonics, and this is not the ghetto.’ I've had comments from people on my hair. ‘It's too long.’ ‘Why is it that color?’ People comment on my nails and how long my skirt is. Someone who is a counterpart that might be a white male could come in in a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops, and nobody's going to really comment or say anything.”
But Sonnier added “racism and sexism, those things existed before I was here. They're going to exist while I'm here.”
“And I'm not going to let those be the reasons that I'm not successful,” she said.
Representing the entire city
During a St. Louis on the Air interview, Spencer pointed out that she spent a lot of time trying to get votes from Black residents and support from African American elected officials.
Several of them lavished praise on Spencer the day before she took the oath of office, including Tyus.
“I think you're going to show the city that you represent the city, the entire city,” Tyus said. “Not the progressives, not the Blacks, not the whites, not the conservatives — all corners of the city.”
Keys said she appreciated the work that Jones and Green provided to the city. But she also added she wants to work with Spencer to improve city services for the 11th Ward, which encompasses a portion of majority African American north St. Louis.
“I give no allegiance to a progressive. I give no allegiance to a conservative,” Keys said. “I give no allegiance to any of that, because my focus and my allegiance is to the people of the city of St. Louis and the people of the 11th Ward.”
Progressives' future in St. Louis
Jones, Bush and Gardner were all what’s commonly known as progressives. Still, some don’t believe that the progressive movement in St. Louis is mortally wounded after the departure of Green, Bush and Gardner. Bush won the city of St. Louis comfortably. Aldermen who are often placed in the progressive camp, like Sonnier, easily won reelection despite having well-funded opposition.
And Spencer herself often aligned with the progressive faction on key issues, including opposition to having a private operator run St. Louis Lambert International Airport and building a riverfront football stadium.
“I think that the dividing lines in city politics are the ones that we create,” Sonnier said. “I think, from my experience, if you actually go from community to community, neighborhood to neighborhood and you talk to people, most people actually feel very similar about things. I think that in a lot of ways, sometimes as leaders, we do a disservice when we buy into these binaries rather than pointing out all the things that we actually do have in common and all the things that we mutually want to see.”
Some of Sonnier’s colleagues agreed that the idea of being progressive in St. Louis politics is a lacking descriptor, especially since every elected official on a local, state and federal level is a Democrat.
Alderman Tom Oldenburg said the term, at least recently, had more to do with who was close with Jones and who was willing to oppose her.
“This election underscores that progressive, moderate, liberal, what have you — all those terms are not necessarily important when it comes to electing someone who's willing to just make the practical decisions that a city needs to function day in and day out for its residents,” said Oldenburg, who added that he worked with Jones on matters such as safety improvements to the street in front of the iconic Ted Drewes Frozen Custard stand.
Ninth Ward Alderman Michael Browning also said he tries to stay away from labeling himself in a specific way.
“It is a little bit of a moving goalpost, right? What progressive was in 2016 is a little bit different than what progressive is now in 2025,” Browning said. “But I would say it's a set of values. It's about making sure that everybody, no matter their status or where they come from in our city, has access to the same resources and has access to representatives.”
“It’s about making sure we're taking care of things that really affect people's lives, and that we really embrace the diversity of our city, that we embrace just everybody who is trying to make our city better,” he said.
