Childhood experiences inspire Baltimore Mayor-Elect

By Madeleine Mosher
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer

Before Brandon M. Scott was 10 years old, he’d witnessed a shooting in his Baltimore neighborhood of Park Heights.

By that time, he knew he wanted to be mayor someday. According to his family, he has been planning since age 5 to run the city.

Scott was elected Baltimore Mayor on Nov. 3 and will take office Dec. 8. During his campaign, he focused on public safety, government accountability, a strong economy, and an effective COVID-19 strategy. To Scott and those who have worked alongside him, his childhood prepared him to understand and face Baltimore’s issues.

“When you think about my service,” said the 36-year-old Scott, “it is a direct result of growing up young, Black and not wealthy in Baltimore.”

Scott’s campaign director, Marvin James, said Scott knows what it’s like to live in Baltimore and pay bills, experience violence in his community and be part of a family that’s working to create a better life.

“[Scott’s] story is everybody else’s story,” James said.

Scott said he carries his family’s legacy in himself, starting with his mother’s mother – maternal grandmother, who moved when his mother was a toddler from Virginia to Baltimore for more opportunity. This legacy is continued in his mother, who worked two jobs during his childhood to help keep the family out of poverty.

Scott’s father left behind Jim Crow racism in North Carolina and moved to Baltimore. He first worked as a janitor and later was hired by a relative who started a heating and air conditioning business, Coldspring Co. Inc. He now owns the business.

The mayor-elect said that one of his plans for his term as mayor, as outlined on his campaign website, is to allocate more support and assistance for small businesses. Inspired by his own family struggles, Scott said his family worked hard and modeled community involvement. His parents and many of his uncles coached community sports teams, teaching Scott the importance of taking responsibility for others as well as oneself.

“It was never just about you,” said Scott, who is single. “It was about how you can help everyone.”

In the Democratic primary, Scott ran against 23 other candidates, claiming the majority  with 43, 972, or 29.6%, of the votes. In the general mayoral election, he ran against Independent candidate Bob Wallace, Republican Shannon Wright, and Working-Class Party candidate David Harding, winning with 133,004, or 70.6%, of the votes.

Long before participating in an election, Scott began attending Roland Park Elementary and Middle School in fifth grade. He graduated from Mergenthaler Vocational Technical High School in 2002 and four years later, earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

After college, Scott worked for then-City Council President Stephanie Rawlings Blake, representing her at meetings and updating her on issues in parts of Northeast Baltimore. In 2011, he was elected to represent Baltimore’s Second District at the Baltimore City Council, where he then held positions on the Budget, Appropriations, Judiciary and Legislative Investigations committees and chaired the Public Safety Committee. He became City Council president last May.

Baltimore City Councilman Isaac “Yitzy” Schleifer worked with Scott during Scott’s time on the City Council. Schleifer said in an email that Scott’s childhood in Park Heights gave him a “front row seat to the challenges we face as a city.”

Referencing these challenges, Scott described his childhood as facing violence, loss of friends to addictions and attending school in buildings with no air conditioning or heat.

His mayoral campaign addressed these challenges, promising to target networks that repeatedly inflict violence on neighborhoods in the city. He also promised on his campaign website to require the Department of Finance to create a plan for more funding for public schools and to develop stronger mental-health care for people traumatized by violence and addiction.

James said Scott ran for mayor because he wanted to make changes — and always has.

“I think that anybody could see [Scott’s] ambition, not to be in charge or to be elected,” he said, “but really just as somebody that wanted to solve problems.”

Scott said he’s driven by a sense of responsibility and initiative instilled in him by his family that came before him.

“I knew that if I wanted Baltimore to be different,” he said, “then it had to be me, it had to be my generation because no one else was gonna save us.”