Anthony Foxx – Charlotte Mayor

Washington, D.C. – Decades after working in Washington as an aspiring attorney in the U.S. Justice Department, Anthony Foxx recently returned as a leader.

Charlotte’s second African-American mayor – the first Democrat in two decades – shows up at the Capitol Hilton with a plastic folder full of agendas, notes and a Blackberry fixed to his rapidly scrolling thumbs. He’s a minor-leaguer in many respects compared with his seasoned counterparts and powerful political figures attending the 78th Annual U.S. Mayors’ Conference.

Yet Foxx, 38, the youngest mayor ever elected in Charlotte, after two terms on the City Council, works the room as though he’s never left the district. He networks his way into meetings with the U.S. secretaries of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development and schedules back-to-back meetings with congressional delegates throughout the week.

On this trip, Foxx opens doors for Charlotte and a big one to the next chapter of his young political career. His connection to politics goes back to his boyhood and the influences of his grandparents, who helped raise him.

Foxx’s grandfather, James, was a high school principal in Charlotte and a heavy hitter in the Democratic Party. His grandmother taught junior high French. Together they taught Foxx the importance of community.

“Their mentality was: Do whatever it takes to help a kid to learn,” he recalls. “It was not unusual for students of theirs to come by the house and get an extra lesson or for my grandparents to visit the homes of students they had and talk to their parents.”

Foxx says that the examples set by his grandparents greatly dictated how he viewed and still views himself today.

“You know, I could be a minister, a teacher … I could be a doctor, I could be just about anything, but whatever I would have become, somehow it would have connected back to the community,” he says.
And he was destined to drift into politics under the wing of his granddaddy, who was a guru of all things political. Foxx says he got lassoed into many conversations by virtue of being a kid hanging around the house after his single mother moved away to further her education and work. He also was an extra pair of hands during election time and a cute half-pint-tag-a-long at the polls.

Foxx remembers putting out signs in support of Harvey Gantt, Charlotte’s first African-American mayor and close family friend.

“At the time I didn’t really know all about who Harvey Gantt was; I just knew my grandfather was supporting him so he pulled me in the car and we went out and I was doing what he was doing,” Foxx says.  “I learned about that later.”

One of his most vivid memories of that time was when his grandfather – using a staple gun to fix campaign signs to wooden posts – stapled his thumb by accident.

“It looked like the most painful thing you could ever imagine, but he just stopped, pulled out the staple and kept going,” Foxx says. “I thought to myself right then that he was made out of something different than I would ever be made of … it just showed me how committed he was to what he was doing.”

Foxx graduated from West Charlotte High School and then Davidson College, where he was the school’s first black student body president. He later earned his law degree from New York University and returned briefly to Charlotte before going to clerk at the U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.  Foxx then went on to work in the voting section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department and was counsel for the House Judiciary Committee.

He returned to Charlotte in 2001 and worked as a litigator for Hunton & Williams for years until recently becoming general counsel at Design Line.

Foxx dropped jaws when he ran for an at-large City Council seat with no experience in 2005. That was seen as a far-reaching goal because, historically, the best launching pad for serving on the City Council has been district representation.

“You know, one of my basic philosophies of life is not to complicate the simple,” he says. “I had a desire to represent the entire city in the same way in which I saw it represented when I was a kid, which was leadership that understood all of the push-pull in the community, that took it all into account but dug down deep to make decisions and to communicate those decisions to the public in a way in which everyone felt fairly treated.”

With all of Charlotte’s rapid growth, some people in the community feel like our politics have gotten lost, Foxx says.
“I felt a deep obligation to try to do what I could to restore it,” the Charlotte mayor says.

Foxx was re-elected in 2007 and says he can’t really pinpoint when he decided to run for mayor.

“Did you ever think to yourself, ‘I want to be mayor one day’?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

I try to dig into his thought process a little more. He doesn’t indulge.

“I guess something misfired,” he says, laughing.

But the ball seemed be rolling long before 2009.

Chatter whirled as early as 2007 while former Mayor Pat McCrory was making headlines for wielding his powers while assigning council members to committees. Democrats – including Foxx – billed the assignments as politically motivated, questioning the qualifications of some of McCrory’s choices. The Republicans, including John Lassiter, who ran against Foxx for mayor, criticized Foxx and other Democrats behind the scenes – chiding them for stirring unnecessary debate.