Grassroots efforts in city stand out for candidate

By Ernie Suggs

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The alarm goes off at 5 a.m.

Mary Norwood stirs, gets dressed, makes calls — 7,000 and counting — and is out of her Buckhead home by 7 a.m. No breakfast.

When she finally sits down for lunch she is famished. But when her sushi arrives, she asks for a takeout box. There are still people to see, hands to shake and necks to hug for the woman who wants to be Atlanta’s next mayor.

“Mary is probably the hardest working candidate I have ever known,” said Angelo Fuster, who has been involved in city politics for five decades. “She works morning till night, and she is very focused. Anyone who takes her for granted makes a huge mistake.”

In some ways, people have taken Norwood for granted most of her life — to their detriment.

“I am not big, but I am feisty,” said the 5-foot Norwood. “I get in the weeds and get things done.”

For some observers, Norwood has been running for mayor for at least eight years, dating back to when she first was elected to the City Council in 2001.

She is a grassroots activist in designer suits, who earned her street cred by pounding the pavement and working on projects in nearly every neighborhood in town since the 1970s. When she entered the race to succeed Mayor Shirley Franklin, her chief competitors were City Council President Lisa Borders and State Sen. Kasim Reed (D-Atlanta), both natives of Atlanta and both black.

Although race hasn’t been a dominant issue, it is apparent that Norwood stands a good chance of being Atlanta’s first white mayor since Sam Massell left office in 1973.

She has avoided talking about race, and repeatedly said all people come in packages when asked about it.

“I would be saddened if Atlanta, which is such a progressive city, would judge on anything other than who the best candidate is,” she said.

As mayor, Norwood said she would focus on public safety, fixing the city’s finances, improving service delivery and promoting growth.

“My next big idea is the redevelopment of the city, but we have to get the city safe first,” Norwood said. “Government needs to work for us again.”

By her accounts she has worked on 105 projects for more than 35 groups in the city. She led the fight against infill housing and has chaired an alphabet soup’s worth of civic and city sponsored organizations.

“Senior advocate Helene Mills said Norwood is the only politician to actually return her phone calls personally.

“I met Mary when she was running for council. She listened to us, took notes and kept her open-door policy. She doesn’t speak out of both sides of her mouth,” said Mills, the namesake of the Helene Mills Senior Multipurpose Center. “It is time for a change. I am tired of the same string of politicians. I want the string broken.”

Mary Norwood was born March 7, 1952, in Augusta to Bill Bush, a brick manufacturer, and Frenchie Battey Bush. The oldest of six children, Norwood said she was never really involved in politics growing up.

After a two-year stint at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, she transferred to Emory, where she graduated in 1974 with a degree in history.

She landed a job in radio, starting out as a secretary, before becoming COO within a few years. She has been married for 25 years to Felton Norwood, a pediatrician for Piedmont Hospital for 40 years.

But she has always been defined by her neighborhood work — particularly with infill housing.

“I wanted to have a thoughtful review when changes are being made,” Norwood said. “Everything always went well, until I brought things to the City Council. That is when things got more complicated.”

She said she finally got the political message when she was fighting for a project for the Tuxedo Park Historic District and was told to have 400 telegrams on the mayor’s desk by morning or risk losing by one vote.

“I couldn’t do it,” Norwood said. “I lost by one vote.”

Stung by the loss, she started one of the first Internet-based voice messaging companies in the country, which makes marketing and political campaign phone calls to a lot of people in a short amount of time. She also got more involved in neighborhood planning units and neighborhood associations.

By 2001, she decided, “Maybe I need to see if I can get a vote on City Council,” and ran for the at-large council Post 2 seat.

She raised $250,000 for the race and her 42,510 votes were more than any candidate, including Franklin.

“That encouraged her to run here,” Fuster said about Norwood’s 2001 success.

But instead, in 2005 she sought re-election on the council and again raised $250,000 for the race. No one bothered to challenge her.

As a council member, she was a constant thorn in Franklin’s side on funding the multibillion sewer project. In one of her first major votes, the 2002 budget, she voted against a $426.3 million spending plan that raised property taxes in the city. The budget passed 10-5.

A year later, saying that it was “unreasonable,” Franklin vetoed a resolution by Norwood that would have directed the city’s Watershed Management Department to provide detailed information on how to contain and cut project costs.

She has had her share of success, like the campaign forcing bars to stop serving alcohol at 2 a.m., which has changed the face of Buckhead.

But in her eight years on the council, Norwood has never chaired a standing committee.

Veteran council member C.T. Martin, said she is one of the council’s hardest workers.

“Hard work is one thing. Getting legislation passed is another and she hasn’t authored much,” said Martin. “She has tried, but hasn’t been able to get through. A lot of people probably felt that she was running for mayor and were not necessarily jumping on her bandwagon.”

Norwood said good council members either initiate legislation and fight for ones they believe in.

“With me, it is not about I go create it,” she said. “It is about getting it done.”

Martin, who has co-sponsored several bills with Norwood, said at times Norwood didn’t push hard enough.

“You wouldn’t put her in the mainstream, but that is not her fault because she didn’t play in that league,” Martin said. “They didn’t let her in, and she wasn’t aggressive enough.”

Fuster doesn’t agree that Norwood has been timid. Instead, he said at times, she might be too aggressive.

“She is an intelligent woman, and she knows her stuff well. But she suffers from wanting to convince the public of how much she knows,” Fuster said. “Sometimes people get tired of listening to everything she has been doing.”

Norwood didn’t seriously consider a run until after a news article was published, saying she wasn’t running. After getting calls from people all over the city asking her to run, she explored the idea in more detail and decided she was in.

Norwood is emerging as the unique candidate with a broad base, but no base at all. There is not a single, broad group that experts say Norwood can depend on – yet, she has wide support all across Atlanta. She has raised more than $1 million, more than any other candidate in the race, from every corner of the city. In a review of her campaign contributions, 90 percent of the money has come from inside of Atlanta and 98 percent from Georgians.

“People think, here is this white woman running for mayor in a majority black city with black candidates,” Fuster said. “But she is very organized all across Atlanta. “She is not banking on white votes or Northside votes to get in office. She has votes everywhere, because she has the neighborhoods and knows the value of organization. She never stops.”