Lori Lightfoot Becomes Chicago's First African American, Openly Gay Woman Mayor

Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot celebrates Tuesday during her election night party in Chicago. Image: Kamil Krzaczynski /AFP/Getty Images

The day after Chicago Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot became the frst black woman to lead America’s third largest city, Lightfoot addressed head-on her view of the city “most pernicious problems: entrenched segregation, gun violence and economic inequality” writes NPR.

The mayor-elect cited the “fractured relationship” between the Chicago Police Department and the public as a “critically important safety issue.”

The nature of policing by the department "has not adequately taken into account the segregation in our city and that race does matter," she said in an interview with NPR's Morning Edition. That disconnect "has left many people feeling like the police are an illegitimate occupying force and we've got to change that around because literally lives depend on it."

Chicago Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot from her campaign website.

Lightfoot will be Chicago's first openly gay mayor, after winning Tuesday's runoff election against Cook County Board President and county Democratic Party leader Toni Preckwinkle. Both African-American women ran as progressives, operating outside the sphere of Chicago's legendary,

As public member station WBEZ reported, "The free-for-all campaign represented a sharp contrast to almost every past election in a city that has been synonymous with Democratic machine politics and bossism for nearly a century." well-moneyed political machine.

Lightfoot said she is struck by the magnitude of the moment.

"I think that the people who come from communities like me as an African-American woman, as a member of the LGBT community, we haven't sat in the corners of power," she said.

"It's quite the opposite. We've been discriminated against. We've been locked out, and we've been excluded. And to have someone like me representing these multifaceted communities now be on the cusp of being the mayor and what I think is the greatest city in the world, I think gives a lot of people a lot of hope --and it is a milestone in a long journey that will continue to demonstrate though that we're making progress."

Lightfoot cited another goal, that of "Breaking the back of the Chicago machine, it's quite monumental." Here is a campaign video from Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot’s campaign website.

Lori Lightfoot joins 12 other African-American women who are governing some of the largest US cities. They include Acquanetta Warren, Fontana, Ca; Catherine Pugh, Baltimore; Deborah Robertson, Rialto, Ca; Keisha Lance Bottoms, Atlanta, Ga; LaToya Cantrell, New Orleans; London N. Breed, San Francisco; Lovely A. Warren, Rochester, NY; Muriel Bowser, Washington DC; Sharon Weston Broome, Baton Rouge, La; Toni N. Harp, New Haven, Conn; Vi Alexander Lyles, Charlotte, NC.