Sharon Owens, by an overwhelming margin, was elected Tuesday as mayor of Syracuse. She became the first Black candidate to capture that position since the city was incorporated in 1847. In her victory speech at the downtown Palladian Hall, she called for a galvanized and energized civic personality, even as the mayor-elect built into a note of climactic gratitude:
Owens thanked the “elders of our community” who had waited a lifetime, she said, “for a mayor that looks like you.”
That was a foundational element, certainly, in an address capping one of the biggest days of her life. But Owens, 61, had already put that appreciation into practice much earlier on Tuesday, when she spent over an hour moving from group to group during an annual election morning breakfast at the Syracuse Dunbar Center on State Street — a gathering primarily of women and men who shared the same long vantage point on life she would praise later that day.
Here, for instance, were Milton and Lillie Fields, both retired school administrators — with Lillie, decades ago, becoming the first Black school principal in Liverpool. A few tables away: Marion Ervin, a Vietnam veteran and New Process Gear retiree who’s been involved over the years in countless volunteer community initiatives, including the effort to sustain Dunbar.
And moving swiftly around the hall, on Dunbar business, even as Owens campaigned: Liz Page, a retired school social worker who started volunteering at Dunbar when she was a teen.
They all had family histories that gave them intimate understanding of why Dunbar — a century ago — was often called a “settlement house,” a place of transition and refuge for Black families arriving in Syracuse from the grinding poverty and Jim Crow conditions of the South.
Lillie Fields and Ervin were both born in South Carolina, where Lillie remembers wanting badly as a child to drink from “white only” water fountains, wondering if that mysterious water somehow had a different, better taste — and how her father, fearing what could happen if she made that choice, passionately warned his daughter against it.
Page’s grandfather was born into enslavement in Georgia. Family history holds that he made it to New York by connecting during the Civil War with a doctor in the Union Army, a doctor whose family lived in Baldwinsville — which was the grandfather’s eventual route both to a steady job and freedom.
Yet the word “freedom” itself, when they were young, was always qualified. Page and Lillie Fields and Ervin all recall the time — some 60 years ago or more — when Black families in Syracuse were basically confined to life in the city’s 15th Ward, when many trades and occupations were impossible for them to access, when they faced barriers if they tried to rent or buy in other neighborhoods, when people of color marched in the streets simply for the right to earn a basic job at the old Niagara Mohawk.
In that era — to them, hardly so long ago — the idea of a Black mayor in this city seemed inconceivable. Many longtime Black residents lived their lives and died, often after harrowing travels just to be here, without ever seeing such a moment come to be.
Now here was Owens, the heavy favorite, moving through the crowd at Dunbar about 12 hours before she stood at a downtown microphone and offered that first triumphant speech.
“It means a lot,” said Lillie, remembering a childhood in which almost every avenue of business and entertainment and athletics was dominated by white faces. Her own career, she said, was profoundly influenced by the Black teachers she saw each day in segregated schools, teachers she knew were directly concerned about her well-being and her future.
She watched what they did. She chose the same career. Even now, Lillie said she is confident a girl or boy in the heart of Syracuse might see Owens on election day — on television or on a digital screen or most powerfully, in person — and would understand on a core level:
That could be me.
Owens explained her presence at the breakfast in this way: “You can’t have Syracuse without the Dunbar Center,” she said. She meant it literally and philosophically: The place remains a living symbol of the 20th century exodus from the South for thousands upon thousands of African-Americans in this city, many with living memory of those hard journeys.
Historians call that motion “The Great Migration,” and Owens spoke of how her own family story — though she was raised in Geneva — represents that saga.
The revelation that carried her to the Palladian on Tuesday opened up when she was a young mother, at a moment of family pain. More than 30 years ago, Owens was working as a social worker at the old Hilltop housing complex — tasked with trying to roll back an infant mortality toll that was unbearably high in the city’s Black community — when she gave premature birth after 27 weeks to her first son, Shaun Jr., named for her husband.
The baby died after five days, a devastating loss for the young couple. Owens already knew her child – his every motion, an impossibly intimate sense of who he was – from his time in her womb. “I was so hurt,” she recalled of those harsh days. She understands now that she was overwhelmed with depression, wounded by the unanswerable question of how her work each day was focused on saving infants, and yet she had lost her own son.
During that time, while she was still on leave from her job, her mother — Ester Daniels — convinced Owens to join her on a trip back to Florida, where Daniels had grown up in relentless poverty. Owens, sensing her mother knew the journey would somehow aid in healing, packed up for herself and her then-3-year-old daughter Simone, and went along.
Owens had been there several times as a girl, but somehow everything came together on this trip — a journey that remains an emotional and spiritual pivot. Her mom showed her the tiny house — overgrown with weeds — where she spent her childhood. Seeing it brought home to Owens the enormity of what Daniels risked as a teenager.
At 19, her mother climbed on a bus — more exactly, the back of a bus — and began a grueling and solitary ride toward Geneva, N.Y., and whatever opportunities awaited her there. In Geneva, Daniels worked as a hairdresser while raising Owens and two younger siblings. In the same way as so many parents who survived brutal Jim Crow segregation, she told her daughter that any chance for achievement demanded one fundamental passion and commitment:
Education.
Daniels, facing some struggles with her health, was unable to be at Tuesday’s joyous and noisy victory party. Even so, Owens emphasized that all of it was only possible because of the staggering courage demonstrated by her mom.
During the period when Owens wrestled with whether to run — she had worked for the last eight years as deputy mayor to Ben Walsh, who must leave office due to term limits — she said she looked for guidance from God, her husband and children and finally, in one last pivotal conversation, from her mother.
Daniels had no doubt. She told Owens: You’ll wonder for the rest of your life if you don’t try.
That was it. In a couple of months, the oldest child of the teenager who made that long bus trip alone will become the 55th mayor of Syracuse.
At Dunbar Tuesday morning, Lillie Fields — who’s lived such a similar family story — was already eager to hear the election returns. She remembered a South Carolina childhood in which authorities used suffocating laws, cruel restrictions and utter social separation in an attempt to make Black families question their own worth, their essential value as human beings.
Her husband Milton — whose parents were raised in the South, then met in Syracuse — was born in this city. He and Lillie started dating when they both attended Clark Atlanta University. Married now for 66 years, the couple moved to Syracuse and settled in the 15th Ward, on Renwick Place — a street and neighborhood soon obliterated by the combined impact of Urban Renewal demolition and construction of the Interstate 81 bridges.
“What they’re taking down now,” Lillie said of a $2.25 billion citywide interstate transformation, “they were putting up then.”
Lillie would eventually make Liverpool history as a building principal, and she and Milton both retired as school administrators. They are now in their 80s, and Lillie — watching as Owens shook hands around the room, at Dunbar — vividly remembered when her own parents feared violent reprisals if they showed up at a polling place in South Carolina.
“This is powerful,” she said of the unimpeded right to vote, “and something you should never take for granted.”
None of this, at Dunbar, felt like history: It was living memory as lesson, inspiration, appreciation – and now motion. Marion Ervin, who spent much of his youth in the 15th Ward, arrived in this city as a 4-year-old, from South Carolina. After the Army sent him to Vietnam he returned to Syracuse, where he raised a family with his wife Linda, who served for years as an Onondaga County legislator.
Ervin was thrilled at the idea of witnessing an Owens victory, but he also emphasized she deserves some patience on the job. “She’s inheriting a hell of a lot of problems,” he said. He was thinking of the hardships faced by so many large American cities — child poverty, the cost of housing, the trauma and addiction that push people to the streets and countless other daunting challenges.
Owens said the strength and setbacks of her own life experience will guide her, that her best hope in building true community as mayor is to use her own experience to govern “with my heart.”
No mother ever forgets the death of a child, Owens said, a searing memory she carries every day — and one that binds her to anyone with similar pain. That left her thinking on election day of the influence of all three of her children: Shaun Jr., the son she and her husband lost at only a few days, as well as the joy and insight of their daughter Simone — an artist and a poet — and the gifts of their youngest, Isaac, whose name carries specific inspiration… as a promised child, born of consolation… from the Bible.
When Isaac was maybe 3, Owens and Shaun Sr. realized the little boy was a person with autism. Owens said the situation required embracing entirely new skills and awareness in parenting, but she now can clearly see that everything Isaac teaches her involves wonder — especially, as she described it, to see God in what he sees, to hear God in what he hears, to feel God in his touch.
Wrap together all those lessons, Owens said — then meld them with the unfathomable “courage and fortitude” her mother showed on that solitary journey from the South — and she believes she’ll find communion with an awful lot of people in many different neighborhoods, across this city.
That communion was already on display at every table, during the breakfast at Dunbar.
Marion Ervin, for his part, volunteered to check in guests as they arrived for the meal and for the chance to meet Owens. Once everyone was seated, he joined his wife Linda in roaming the room to visit with many old friends until the event began breaking up and Ervin walked outdoors, into bright November sunshine.
The young child who left the Jim Crow South for Syracuse would watch the tight neighborhood where he grew up get bulldozed into rubble. Still, Ervin remained a true believer who returned from military duty to spend decades as a volunteer in his time away from work, embracing a life of service and celebrating every step forward or quiet breakthrough, which he saw as epitomizing the whole core mission at Dunbar.
Tuesday, just before he left, he was asked what it will mean to finally experience Syracuse with a Black mayor.
“That’s the way the Earth moves,” said Ervin, among so many generations of elders praised by Owens for lifetime statements, built on faith.
Editor’s note: Columnist Sean Kirst, a Syracuse resident since 1990, has known almost all of this year’s mayoral hopefuls for many years. Since Kirst’s son Liam was a campaign aide to Owens — and to avoid any perception of a conflict — Kirst refrained from writing about specific candidates until Tuesday, when the race was clearly decided.
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