Former Tchula Mayor Yvonne Brown, the first black Republican female mayor in U.S. history, died Monday.
“She loved people, and she loved her community. Really, she was a servant,” said the Rev. James Garner, who served as vice mayor during Mrs. Brown’s first term.
Mrs. Brown served as Tchula’s mayor from 2001 to 2009. She stood out in a heavily Democratic town that, according to the 2010 census, had a population of about 2,100 that was about 97 percent black.
She also was the Republican nominee for Congress in Mississippi’s 2nd Congressional District in 2006.
“I want to thank the Lord for allowing me to be on such a wonderful journey of stewardship and leadership. It’s about serving,” she said when announcing her plans to run for Congress in 2006.
Funeral arrangements are incomplete. Century Funeral Home in Yazoo City is in charge.
Mrs. Brown’s life took a unique path; she moved from the North to the South, Democrat to Republican and Black Muslim to Christian.
Her parents, Bennie and Hilda Debro Rayford, were Delta natives — her father from Clarksdale and her mother from Tchula. Her father was the son of a state civil rights activist, the Rev. J.D. Rayford. The family moved north; Mrs. Brown was born in Chicago but raised in Toledo, Ohio.
After she graduated from high school in Toledo in 1970, her father sent her to Jackson State University. Homesick, she stayed for only a year before marrying her first husband. The couple soon became Black Muslims.
Mrs. Brown said in a 2002 interview that she began to question her faith after the 1975 death of the religion’s founder, Elijah Muhammed, who had claimed immortality. She converted to Christianity in 1976, and her husband left her.
She married her second husband, the Rev. Robert C. Brown, in 1978 in Toledo.
After he graduated from the Dallas Theological Seminary in April 1995, the couple moved to Holmes County. The Browns converted a dilapidated building in downtown Tchula into Grace Community Church.
Garner, a retired teacher and coach as well as a preacher, said the church did a lot of good for Tchula. It hosted groups during the summer who tutored children among other community outreach projects, he said.
Mrs. Brown’s parents had moved back to the South before the Browns and were living in Lexington. Bennie Rayford had managed Jesse Jackson’s Democratic presidential campaign in Toledo in 1988 and tried to get involved with the Holmes County Democratic Party, but he was rebuffed as an outsider.
That led him to join the county’s Republican Party, and he eventually became its chairman.
When elected in 2001, Mrs. Brown faced strong opposition from the town’s Democratic establishment, Garner said.
Although they didn’t always agree on everything, Garner said he supported the things she tried to do. Her biggest focus during her first term was getting a new municipal building constructed, he said.
Tchula’s former City Hall, a dilapidated two-story brick structure built in 1923, had collapsed in 2000.
Republican U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran helped Mrs. Brown get a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development to assist in building the Robert G. Clark Municipal Complex.
It was the crowning accomplishment of her tenure.
She served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 2004 and had an audience with former President George W. Bush, Garner said.
She ran for Congress in 2006 against veteran Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson. Thompson defeated her handily, receiving 64 percent of the vote to her 36 percent.
In 2009, she chose not to run for re-election and accepted a job as director of the Lowndes County Department of Human Services in Columbus.
• Contact Charlie Smith at 581-7235 or csmith@gwcommonwealth.com.
