A black man who claims to have been elected mayor of a small Alabama town has filed a federal lawsuit against the municipality, alleging that a cabal of white residents prevented him from taking office.
The plaintiff, Patrick Braxton, 57, claims that he submitted the proper paperwork required to contest the 2020 Newbern City election, and that he won fairly.
When the situation became clear, the filing states, the incumbent mayor and city council held an unpublicized, illegal secret election to keep him in office and prevent Braxton from taking office.
The unusual situation relates to the rural town of just 133 residents, which has been run by a group of white residents for decades, who preside over the predominantly black population without holding elections.
The civil rights lawsuit insists that Newbern has failed to conduct a proper election “for decades” and instead left “the office of mayor.” [to be] ‘inherited’ by a handpicked successor.’
Patrick Braxton, 57, claims he filed the proper paperwork needed to run in the 2020 city mayoral election, and won fairly and honestly.
After Braxton was elected, the lawsuit describes how incumbent Haywood Stokes III, above, the acting mayor, “conspired with the other defendant to unlawfully remain in office in order to prevent a majority-black City Council from taking office.”
“Braxton alleges that he was the only candidate to qualify for any elected city office in Newbern,” reads a section of the 21-page filing that currently sits in Alabama’s Southern District Court.
It adds that four other plaintiffs named in the lawsuit, James Ballard, Barbara Patrick, Janice Quarles and Wanda Scott, had been appointed to serve on the Braxton city council once he took office, but were also denied, likely due to the fact that they were black.
After Braxton was elected, the lawsuit describes how incumbent Haywood Stokes III, the acting mayor, “conspired with the other defendant to unlawfully remain in office in order to prevent a majority-black City Council from taking office.”
“To do this,” he adds, city officials “met in secret” on October 6, 2020 “without giving notice of the meeting and adopted resolutions to hold a special election.”
Braxton, a volunteer firefighter and first responder who decided to run for mayor out of “concerns that the City Council and the mayor were not responding to the needs of the majority black community,” says no notice was ever given.
“Braxton alleges that he was the only candidate to qualify for any elected city office in Newbern,” reads a section of the 21-page filing that currently sits in Alabama’s Southern District Court.
A Facebook post explained the position in greater detail that Braxton appears to be in.
The suit claims that Newbern’s defendants, which include Stokes III and several members of his cabinet, filed declarations of candidacy before being considered the only qualified persons for the special election.
They took up their new terms as city council members in November of that year, leaving Braxton and his handpicked aides out in the cold.
The lawsuit, filed in April but only now being reported, alleges the move was intentional.
“When confronted with the first duly elected black mayor and the majority black City Council, all of the defendants took racially motivated actions to prevent the first black mayor from performing the duties of this office,” the lawsuit states.
Braxton added that he had asked black and white residents to serve on the potential city council, but no white residents agreed to join.
Overall, the lawsuit argues that Stokes III and its current council conspired to prevent the city’s first majority-black City Council from exercising legislative power before it had the chance.
The Rev. Michael Malcon, left, CEO of the People’s Council for Justice, and Patrick Braxton in May 2022, when Malcon visited Newbern.
Haywood ‘Woody’ Stokes III, pictured. Stokes’s office says that all of his actions, “at all times relevant to this lawsuit … were acting under the color of the law.”
This was done after Stokes and his council members, fellow plaintiffs Gary Broussard, Jesse Donald Leverett, Voncille Brown Thomas and Willie Richard Tucker, allegedly “met secretly to adopt [the] ‘special’ electoral ordinance before the October elections.
Because the election was not publicized, Braxton said, only Stokes and members of his council qualified.
They were then “effectively reappointed” to their positions, the lawsuit says, and “unlawfully assumed their new terms” before being sworn in in November.
Meanwhile, Braxton assembled his own council and claims that he was the only person who actually qualified for the position, as Stokes “did not bother to qualify as a candidate,” the lawsuit says.
He also claims that when Braxton approached Stokes for information on running for mayor months earlier, the mayor misled him and allegedly provided “incorrect information about how to qualify” and failed to provide public notice to residents.
Patrick Braxton, just outside City Hall, looks across the street at Newbern Mercantile, the only store there, rarely frequented by people.
Despite this, Braxton said that he still gave then-Town Clerk Lynn Williams his statement of candidacy and a qualified money order, before being outwitted by Stokes and his secret choice.
If elected, Braxton would be the first mayor of the southeast Alabama city in the 165 years since its founding.
About 85 percent of Newbern’s 130 residents are black. In more than a century and a half, only one black person has served on the city council.
As for the group of white town officials named in the lawsuit, they agreed with Braxton’s assessment that they were “effectively reappointed” to their posts, but said they did so within the limits of the law.
In a response to Braxton’s lawsuit obtained by CBS News, Stokes and his council said they “admit that plaintiff Patrick Braxton is black and a former mayor of the city of Newbern,” but denied several of the other allegations.
The defendants also conceded that initially Braxton was the only person who qualified for mayor and that no other candidate qualified for mayor or council member at the time.
They also conceded that a special election was held for city council seats and ‘that defendant Stokes became mayor of the town of Newbern after plaintiff Braxton lost office by operation of law’.
As of Sunday, it is not clear from the law that Braxton is said to have lost the job.
when he approaches CBS News This week, a lawyer representing Stokes and members of his council declined to comment but said his team had recently filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which also alleged the defendants had changed the locks on City Hall after their secret election to keep Braxton out.
Braxton said he was unable to gain access to the building until the following month, when he discovered that “someone had removed official City Council documents from the building.”
He claims he has been barred from the city’s PO Box since Lynn Theibe, also a defendant in the case, was appointed postmaster in late 2021.
In the filing, Braxton’s lawyers allege that Theibe was and is “acting in concert and/or at the request” of Stokes and his council.
The lawsuit adds that Stokes and her council have not held any public meetings at City Hall since 2020, instead choosing to hold meetings at their own private residences.
Stokes’s office says that all of their actions, “at all times relevant to this lawsuit…were acting under the color of the law.”
As of Sunday, the case is still ongoing.
