Black leaders do well in large cities

The exception was Toledo, where the city's first black mayor lost his re-election bid.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Newly elected mayors in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Youngstown reflect a surge in big-city black leadership in Ohio and provide the hard-luck state Democratic Party with a growing bench of prospective candidates for statewide office.
In Cleveland, which became the first major U.S. city to elect a black mayor in 1967, City Council President Frank Jackson ousted a fellow Democrat, Mayor Jane Campbell, with 55 percent of the vote to become the city's third black chief executive.
In Cincinnati, Democratic state Sen. Mark Mallory became the city's first popularly elected black mayor, winning with 52 percent of the vote. Dayton Mayor Rhine McLin, a Democrat, won a second term with 54 percent of the vote.
In Youngstown
And Youngstown elected its first black mayor, Jay Williams, a 32-year-old first-time candidate and Democrat who ran as an independent and beat a political fixture, Democratic state Sen. Bob Hagan. Hagan said Williams' appeal defied traditional voting along racial lines in the city.
They join Michael B. Coleman, two-term mayor of Columbus, Ohio's largest city, and a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2006.
The pattern was broken in Toledo, where Jack Ford, the city's first black mayor, lost his re-election bid to his predecessor, also a Democrat. Former two-term Mayor Carty Finkbeiner won with 61 percent of the vote.
Williams said voters in Youngstown, where the population dropped more than 3 percent since 2000 to an estimated 79,271 in 2003, wanted a change.