When retired Air Force Sgt. Kim Bracey was elected mayor of York last Tuesday, few people were happier than Charles McGee.
The 50-something Harrisburg resident lived in or near York for most of his life, and in his late teens, McGee found himself armed and deployed to York when violent race riots besieged the town.
"That was 40 years ago, and just like when Obama was elected back in November, I thought I'd never live to see this day," said McGee, who owns and operates a typesetting and multimedia design firm in Harrisburg, just 20 miles from where he stood guard over blocks of burned-out houses and businesses in 1969.
Voters in Harrisburg elected that city's first black female mayor, City Council President Linda Thompson.
Today, York, a city of 40,000, has made great strides toward racial reconciliation, McGee and others are eager to tell outsiders. Though the population has a growing number of Latinos, York is more than 60 percent white. Nevertheless, Mayor-elect Bracey, York's former director of community development, is credited with capturing a majority of the vote among all demographic groups.
"She was elected because she's considered a very capable leader, and I think that appealed to people of all races. This is a giant step forward for York," said McGee.
The riots that shook York for two weeks in 1969 still resonate in the local consciousness, McGee said.
"The region has made huge strides, but there's an extreme fringe on both sides, black and white, who won't accept that things have moved on -- and that's a shame," he said.
The old wounds briefly reopened in 1999, when prosecutors revisited the killing of a black woman, Lillie Belle Allen, 27, by a mob of about 100 white youths during the riots.
One of the men indicted in the riots turned out to be York's then-mayor, Charles Robinson, who eventually was acquitted of charges alleging that, while working as a policeman in 1969, he distributed ammunition to the people who shot and killed Allen.
It was a huge moment of civic pride and racial reconciliation for York when white supremacists who visited the town in 2002, attempting to ignite racial hatreds, drew only a few supporters.
Besides a couple of well-publicized tussles with counter-demonstrators, the people of York largely ignored that rally. They had more important things to pay attention to, such as maintaining their shrinking manufacturing jobs base.
That event, and the fact that both the Democrat and Republican candidates in the recent mayoral election were black, shows how far York has come since some residents jokingly referred to it as "a part of the South that never accepted that the Civil War ended."
"Bracey ran an effective campaign, while her opponent, black Republican Wendell Banks, he was barely visible. I don't think I saw him speak one time during the entire election," McGee said.
"York has a reputation to live down, as a place where a lot of people were intolerant, but this really is a huge step forward."
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