“As the mayor of Georgia’s largest city, I expressed opposition to Gov. Brian Kemp’s recent order allowing certain businesses—dine-in restaurants, gyms, hair and nail salons, barbershops, tattoo parlors and bowling alleys—to reopen before health experts say doing so is safe.

However, Lightfoot is grappling with many young people being non-compliant with the shelter-in-place orders her city is aggressively enforcing in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19 in its neighborhoods; black neighborhoods, in particular.

As the nation’s third largest city’s first black woman and first openly gay mayor, she has had to struggle with the virus’ disproportionate impact on the black community.

Dr. Henry Louis Taylor, a professor of Urban and Regional Planning and the director of the Center for Urban Studies at the University of Buffalo, said we should not give these mayors a pass or holding them partly responsible for the catastrophic impact the pandemic has had on the black communities in their cities.

Given these African American mayors’ knowledge of their black communities and its social demographics they should have been better prepared for the deadly pandemic regardless of what the federal or state leaders did, Taylor said.