Cherelle Parker

Cherelle Lesley Parker (born September 10, 1972) is an American politician who has served as the 100th Mayor of Philadelphia since 2024.

She is the first woman to hold the office.

In 1990, as a senior at Parkway High School, Parker won a citywide oratorical competition.

In winning the competition, she was awarded a cash prize, a trip to Senegal and Morocco, and was introduced to then-Philadelphia City Council member Marian B. Tasco, who hired Parker as an intern.

Parker graduated from Lincoln University in 1994.

After graduating from Lincoln University in 1994, Parker worked briefly as a high school English teacher in Pleasantville, New Jersey, and then returned to Tasco's office in 1995, where she did a variety of roles for a decade.

In five mayoral elections since 2003, Republicans never obtained more than 21.7% of the vote, but there had always been a debate between the Republican and Democratic candidates.

Lauren Cristella, president and CEO of the Committee of Seventy, also criticized Parker's refusal to debate Oh, saying it was the first time in 24 years without a debate between the city's two general election candidates for mayor.

Parker agreed to participate in a joint interview with Oh at the Please Touch Museum, where they took questions from children related to their vision of Philadelphia.

Parker said she wishes to see Philadelphia be the "safest, cleanest, and greenest big city in the nation, with economic opportunity for all."

Parker served in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives from 2005 to 2015, representing the 200th district in Northwest Philadelphia.

In 2005, Parker ran in a special election to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives to fill an open seat vacated by LeAnna Washington after Washington was elected to the Pennsylvania State Senate.

Parker won the election, and became the youngest Black woman ever elected to the Pennsylvania General Assembly.

She remained in that office for ten years, and for five years was chair of the Philadelphia delegation.

In the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, she supported the "Philadelphia Tax Fairness Package", a new and special tax on the purchase of cigarettes, and the Act 75, which in 2012 amended state law to allow expert testimony in sexual assault cases.

She was elected to represent the ninth district on the Philadelphia City Council in 2015 and re-elected in 2019, serving as majority leader from 2020 to 2022.

In September 2022, Parker resigned from City Council and announced her candidacy in the 2023 Philadelphia mayoral election.

She won the Democratic primary in May 2023, going on to defeat Republican David Oh in the general election in November.

Parker was born in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Northwest Philadelphia to an unmarried teenage mother.

Her mother died when Parker was 11, and she was raised by her grandparents, a disabled U.S. Navy veteran and a domestic worker who both grew up in the South.

Tasco retired from Philadelphia city council in 2015, and encouraged Parker to succeed her.

She was supported by the city's Democratic Party, and won.

As a member of the Philadelphia City Council, she led the passage of the "Philly First Home" program, which aids first-time home buyers in meeting down payments and closing costs on the purchase of a home.

In January 2020, Parker defeated Bobby Henon to become majority leader for Democrats on the city council.

In February 2021, Parker was elected the chair of the board for the Delaware River Port Authority.

On September 7, 2022, Parker resigned from the City Council and announced her candidacy for Mayor of Philadelphia in the 2023 election.

Following her resignation, she also registered as a lobbyist in Pennsylvania, and secured Longwood Gardens and Moore College of Art and Design as clients.

In the mayoral campaign primary, Parker ran as a moderate Democrat compared to her more progressive candidates.

Her campaign focused on crime and public safety, pledging to hire 300 new police officers and opposing the establishment of a supervised injection site for heroin and other injectable drugs in Philadelphia.

As a Philadelphia City Council member, Parker opposed the police tactic of "stop and frisk", also known as a Terry stop.

But during her campaign for mayor, she reversed her position on them, saying, "Terry stops are what I wholeheartedly embrace as a tool that law enforcement needs, to make the public safety of our city their number one priority. It is a legal tool."

Polling ahead of the mayoral primary found that Parker was in a statistical tie with two opponents, Rebecca Rhynhart, a former Philadelphia City Council member, and behind Helen Gym, another former Philadelphia City Council member.

Parker was endorsed by several labor unions and members of the city's political establishment, including former mayoral candidates Maria Quiñones-Sánchez and Derek S. Green.

Parker lagged in fundraising behind most of the major candidates.

Campaign finance reports showed she and Rhynhart were the only two candidates to raise a majority of their funds from Philadelphia residents.

On May 16, 2023, Parker was declared the winner of the Democratic primary, receiving 32.6% of the vote and defeating her closest opponent by ten percentage points, due to her strong support in Black and low-income neighborhoods in the city.

Parker faced Republican city council member David Oh in the general election.

For almost a month after securing the Democratic primary, Parker did not campaign, citing complications from an earlier dental root canal procedure.

Even after recovering, Parker refused to debate Oh, claiming that the 7 to 1 voter registration advantage the Democrats made any effort to interact with Oh a waste of campaign resources.

Jennifer Stefano of the The Philadelphia Inquirer called Parker's decision not to debate Oh "Trumpesque" and "a danger to our democracy."