Kim Janey Sworn In As Boston's First Black, First Female Mayor

BOSTON — Kim Janey was sworn in mayor of Boston on Wednesday afternoon, becoming the first Black mayor and first female mayor.

She was introduced by Ayanna Pressley, the first Black woman to be a representative for Massachusetts in Congress, and was sworn in by Chief Justice Kimberly S. Budd, the first Black woman to hold that position in the state's highest court.

“To think that my teenage grandsons were born at a time when there had never even been a Black woman on our city council, and today my six-year-old granddaughter Rosie and other little girls can see themselves represented in Massachusetts' highest court, the halls of Congress, and now in the 55th mayor of Boston,” said Janey.

Janey said her life experience is different from the men that came before her—she remembers people throwing rocks and shouting racial slurs at her school bus when Boston schools were desegregated. Recently, she visited her old elementary school and saw kids excited to be back in the classroom. Her family lived in Roxbury for six generations, and when Janey became a mother in high school, she cleaned bathrooms in order to put herself through Smith College and give her daughter everything she needed, she said. It was then that she first got the urge to give back to her community.

“My early experiences with community organizing inspired me as a young single mother to start working on behalf of all children, because I understood my daughter’s experiences were interconnected with those of every other child across the city,” said Janey.

Janey plans to increase testing and access to vaccines as mayor, particularly in communities that have been hit the hardest by the virus, she said. She will increase the number of contracts the city has with entrepreneurs of color, and will continue to advocate for police reforms as she did as a city council president. Inequities and issues in education, housing, public transportation and more have always existed, she said, but the pandemic has made them affect even more people.

“While today is a new day, while Boston has come so far, we must also acknowledge that we have so much more work to do,” she said. “And that work starts now.”