A fight for rights and control in a Black Belt town without elections

This is an opinion column.

Newbern, Ala., is not the proverbial one-redlight town. The flashing yellow light in front of the old post office merely warns folks to slow down. With a population of about 200, it’s an easy place to miss even when you drive right through it.

If you kept to the speed limit, you could pass from one end to the other in a couple of minutes. If you were a little less cautious, you might make it in one. Earlier this year, though, I stopped.

By the side of the road, I pulled out my phone to call the man I’d arranged to meet, but before I could retrieve his number, a black GMC pickup truck pulled up next to me and the driver waved.

“When I saw that Jefferson County license plate, I knew that had to be you,” Patrick Braxton shouted through his open window.

That’s how small Newbern is.

Braxton, who is Black, is one of two men who claim to be mayor here. The other, Woody Stokes, is white. Eights folks lay claim to the city’s four council seats.

Now control of Newbern town government is at the center of a lawsuit in federal court alleging blatant disfranchisement — a case that focuses, not on control of Congress or the delegates to the Electoral College, but over who gets their roads paved when there’s money for it and their ditches cleared after storms.

What also makes this an odd place for an election law case is that, as far back as anyone can remember, Newbern has never had an election.

Instead, the mayor and council have acted as a sort of self-appointing board. Stokes’ full name is Haywood Stokes III, who inherited the job from Haywood Stokes Jr. Likewise, other officials have passed control to new people after incumbents moved away, retired or died. The town is about 80 percent Black but most of these officials have been white.

And that has been how this town has worked, at least until Braxton qualified to run for office.

Braxton, a contractor and volunteer firefighter, has spent most of his life living either near or in Newbern. A few years back, he had the idea to put up some American flags around town for the 4th of July. Town officials seemed indifferent, he says. Braxton scratched together the money to do it anyway, and folks seemed to like them, he says. It was then he had the idea to run for mayor.

Ahead of qualifying to run, Braxton learned what sort of paperwork he’d have to fill out and the deadlines for filing with the town clerk. But when he approached the incumbent, Stokes, for the forms, he started to run into problems. According to Braxton, Stokes told him Newbern didn’t have elections.

“His words to me were, ‘We don’t have no ballots and we don’t have no voting machines,’” Braxton recalls.

I called Stokes to get his side of this story and left messages, but those calls have not been returned. A lawyer for Stokes and the council members allied with him, Rick Howard, told me they would not comment on pending litigation and deferred to what was already in the court record.

Court records show that much of what Braxton says about the election is uncontested.

Stokes told Braxton he would have to fill out qualifying papers from the town clerk. Neither Stokes nor the clerk made it easy, but after trips back and forth between Newbern, the Hale County Probate Court in Greensboro and the bank where the clerk worked, Braxton managed to get the paperwork taken care of and a cashier’s check cut for his qualifying fee.

Meanwhile, Stokes doesn’t seem to have done any of those things. When election day came, Braxton was the only candidate to qualify and was named the new mayor.

It’s what happened next where the accounts begin to diverge somewhat.

Not only had Stokes not qualified, but neither had any of the incumbent city council members. Under Alabama law, the mayor gets to fill vacancies by appointment. Braxton recruited some folks he knew who were interested, and when the day came for him to take the oath of office, the county circuit judge swore in Braxton and what we’ll call Braxton’s council together.

Little did they know, the lame duck mayor, Stokes, and the incumbent council members had done something peculiar — they had held a special-called election without Braxton and the Braxton council knowing about it.

Here’s what the Stokes side would have you believe, according to their court filings: In a town of about 200 people and all 1.5 square miles of it, a place so small that Braxton found me within seconds after I got there — the Stokes council voted, posted notice, and opened qualifying for a special council election. Not only a special election but the first election this town seems to have ever had.

All without Braxton or his future council appointees hearing about it.

Only the incumbent council members qualified and so they declared themselves the winners.

The Stokes council and the Braxton council both claim to be the rightful council members. At first, both councils recognized Braxton as the real mayor, although that would change, too.

Braxton wouldn’t meet with the Stokes council, as doing so would lend it legitimacy. The Stokes council declared Braxton AWOL and his office vacant. The Stokes council then re-named Stokes the interim mayor.

Which brings us to two mayors and eight council members in a town of less than 200 people — all without anyone having voted for any of them.

After the non-election election, Braxton says, strange things began to happen. One day he was run off the road. He says his wife began to notice drones following them around town, which he thought was crazy, until he saw them, too.

Braxton has tried to get access to the city’s bank accounts, but the bank denied him access. The same thing happened at the post office, he says. He has named both as defendants in the lawsuit.

Braxton says he won’t be deterred. He’ll run for office in the next election cycle if he has to, but he’d rather resolve this fight before then, in federal court.

Small-town power struggles aren’t as great as big-city politics, or pitched battles for national power — in some ways, they are much more intense. These aren’t political parties warring with faceless others, but neighbors at odds with neighbors, people they have known all their lives. It’s personal.

It takes less than half an hour for Braxton to give me a full tour of the town in his truck. He showed me where he lives and the homes of the other folks involved, before making our way back to town hall. Until recently, the most notable thing here has been Auburn University’s Rural Studio, an off-campus architecture school focused on sustainable design for out-of-the-way places. It’s the reason the post office looks like something from a movie set and the town hall and fire station something from a mountain tourist town, not the poverty-stricken Black Belt.

Since the last “election,” each side of the Newbern power struggle has changed the locks only to find the locks somehow changed on them — a bizarre war of wills that both sides now seem to have given up. The bespoke space for civic life sits mostly empty but for the dirt dobbers and spider webs taking over.

Between the town hall and the fire station is a barbecue pit and a small yard meant for community gatherings, only there aren’t any picnic tables or park benches. I point out the omission to which Braxton who chuckles grimly and then sighs.

“There’s no place here for people to come together,” he says.

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