Parker defended her plans to increase policing by invoking her portfolio of successful policies for Philadelphia. She’s worked in government since she was seventeen years old. “I’m not some Johnny-come-lately,” Parker retorted. “The city deserves proactive policing as part of a holistic approach.”
Parker, who calls herself a member of the O.A.M., “the Old-Ass Mom’s club,” named her son Langston, after her literary hero and a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance. (I first met Parker through her son, who attended second and third grade with my own.) “Langston Hughes represents dignity,” Parker told me. “I, too, sing America.” Her favorite poem, Hughes’s “Mother to Son,” opens, “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” and speaks to the challenges Parker has faced. “Every policy prescription I have is deeply rooted, to be quite honest, in pain that I experienced as a child,” she said.
Her mother was sixteen when she gave birth to Parker, in Philadelphia; her biological father was rarely around. When she was eleven, her mother died; Philadelphia’s mayor-elect was raised by her grandmother, a domestic worker, and her grandfather, a disabled Navy veteran, along with a larger communal network. “Sometimes your bloodline isn’t enough,” she said. “You need your loveline. The loveline is the village.”
To raise their granddaughter, her grandparents relied on ninety-eight dollars in cash assistance every two weeks, along with food stamps. “I hated that shit as a child,” she said. “Those food stamps messed with my confidence, but my grandmother would use reverse psychology and say, ‘Oh, so those richer people are better than you?’ ”
Before the mayoral race, Parker had never told these stories in public. To her surprise, she found that her experiences resonated. “When you talk about food insecurity, I know what it was like to get a five-pound block of surplus cheese,” she said. As she described how the cheese didn’t slice right, she watched heads nod.
Parker was stunningly clear, however, that her personal biography wasn’t intended to serve as an appeal for pity. “I wasn’t a throwaway,” she said. “There was great expectation for me. Whatever I did, my grandmother and grandfather wanted me to do it exceedingly well.” The solution wasn’t about outsiders “coming in to save—or feeling sorry for—Cherelle.” “No,” she said. “You wanna help Cherelle? Put her in an A.P. class.”
For Parker, education provided a way out economically and intellectually. “Before I could fall in love with Shakespeare and Beckett and ‘The Canterbury Tales,’ and understand the value of those mainstream classics, I had to find a sense of self,” she said. Her favorite high-school teacher introduced her to African American literature. “When I talk about my best friends and role models Maya Angelou, Ntozake Shange, and Sonia Sanchez, people ask if I still see my teacher in church,” Parker said gleefully. “They are shocked to learn that she was a white woman.” She loves to confound easy assumptions, particularly regarding race. “My village was diverse,” she added.
Parker’s political career began in high school, when she won an oratory contest, based on a speech she wrote about the power of African American women’s literature. The prize included a trip to Senegal. She also received an internship with Marian Tasco, the former city-council member and one of Philadelphia’s most powerful Democratic politicians. Tasco taught Parker that the most important measure of a politician was the resources she brought back to her community—as Parker put it, “How are you using your politics to improve the recreation center?”
Parker attended Lincoln University, a historically Black school in Chester County that was also Langston Hughes’s alma mater. After graduating, she briefly taught high-school English in New Jersey, until Tasco recruited her as a staffer. “I viewed my students as being a part of me,” Parker said. “I didn’t want them to think that I was quitting on them.” Yet Tasco convinced Parker that working in government would allow her to strategize funding for entire school districts, broadening her impact. In 2004, Parker became the youngest Black woman elected to the Pennsylvania House. She remained there for a decade, chairing the Philadelphia delegation.
Pennsylvania’s state capital, Harrisburg, lies only a hundred and five miles west of Philadelphia, but it reflects extremely different political concerns. Along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a barn outside Harrisburg invites passersby to “REPENT” and serves as a reminder that Pennsylvania is home to fifty-two thousand farms. Yet, in Harrisburg, Parker proved highly successful in working with different contingents of her own party—as well as across the aisle—to craft economic policy that helped Philadelphia become more fiscally stable, cutting the deficit in the city’s pension funding in half and implementing a cigarette tax to fund public education.
“I couldn’t say, ‘If you don’t agree with my ideology, I’m not gonna talk to you,’ ” she told me. “We had to be willing to build coalitions of necessity.” Parker was also known for her outspoken defense of Philadelphia’s needs, arguing successfully for homestead-exemption relief, which passed into law in 2023 and required wealthier residents to pay more taxes. “I was tired of seeing folks who lived in huge houses with pools on the Main Line pay nothing,” she told me.
