The city’s focus has now shifted from Mary Sheffield’s bid to become mayor to the powerhouse transition team she’s put together that will help guide her focus for her first 100 days in office.
But before she was elected by the city to be its next mayor, there was a different team –one led by Black women – that helped lead the now-mayor-elect to one of the largest landslide victories in the city’s history.
History rarely announces itself before it arrives, but it offered an early signal on an otherwise ordinary night when Brittni “Bee” Brown — Senior Director of PR + Events at 98Forward and the communications lead for Mary Sheffield’s mayoral campaign — sent a text message to then–Council President Sheffield about her interview schedule the following morning.
Sheffield expressed that she felt a sickness coming on. Brown urged her to rest. Sheffield refused.
“I can’t take a day off until I win,” Sheffield said.
Brown sat with that line. It was clarity. And she realized something in that moment too: “If she can’t rest, I can’t rest either.”
That quiet insistence, exchanged through a late-night message with no witnesses, captured the ethos of a campaign that would soon deliver Detroit’s first woman mayor — and reveal the Black women who held its structure, its narrative, and its pace behind the scenes.
Standing behind Sheffield’s rise was 98Forward — Detroit’s longest-standing Black-woman-led public relations firm — whose strategy, discipline, and protection work formed the scaffolding of a campaign that understood both the weight of history and the work required to meet it.
With 429 of 430 precincts reporting, the Associated Press and CNN called the Nov. 4 race for Sheffield, who won 77 percent of the vote to Triumph Church Pastor Solomon Kinloch Jr.’s 23 percent.
For the first time in Detroit’s 324-year history, a woman had been elected mayor. And it was more than a moment for Detroit. It was the first time a major U.S. city (with a population over 200,000 residents) had elected a Black woman as young as Sheffield to become its mayor.
That milestone did not arrive in isolation. It sits atop generations of Black women whose labor shaped Detroit politics without ever being granted full executive authority.
Congresswoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick ran one of Detroit’s sharpest political machines, directing millions in federal investment back home while fielding scrutiny tied not to her work, but to controversies surrounding others. Her accomplishments rarely made headlines. The suspicion did.
Irma Henderson became the first woman — and the first Black woman — to serve as Detroit City Council President in 1977, presiding over a chamber still controlled by men who would go on to lead the city.
Community organizers like Rev. Dr. JoAnn Watson and Maureen Taylor mobilized voters block by block, carrying the political weight of neighborhoods long after elections ended.
Sheffield’s victory is not simply historic because she is first, it is historic because it interrupts the long-standing expectation that Black women deliver power but never inherit it.
A campaign can win on message, money, or machinery. This one won on control of narrative, discipline, and of the quiet work that kept the campaign from ever being defined by forces outside of it.
“We felt the weight of the world, honestly,” said Brown. “From the start, we understood this campaign wasn’t just about winning an election it was about shaping history and doing so with integrity.”
For years, Detroit’s mayoralty — even under Black leadership — remained a male-dominated institution, while Black women served as the strategists, fundraisers, turnout engines, and crisis managers who made electoral victories possible. When Brown says weight, she is naming a generational truth: if they failed, the door behind them could close for an entire generation.
Brown had known Sheffield since 2016, long before the mayoral speculation began. Her job on this campaign required a pace that blurred the boundaries of a workday: two calendars at once — Sheffield’s council commitments and her mayoral schedule — each requiring preparation, legal precision, talking points, tone setting, community sensitivity, and never-ending adjustments.
“For my role, it was making sure she was well prepared from top to bottom,” Brown said.
In May, Brown fully inherited campaign communications leadership. It was the moment she realized she had crossed from brand building to movement stewardship.
“The hardest shift was remembering that this wasn’t a campaign about image — it was a movement about impact,” she said. “When you’re used to working with brands, you think about awareness or engagement. But this was about representation, trust, and what it means for Detroit to be led by someone who truly reflects its people.”
That difference showed up in the moments no campaign camera recorded.
Brown remembers a young man who walked into the campaign office one afternoon and admitted he had never voted before. There was no sales pitch. Sheffield asked him what he believed, what he wanted his neighborhood to look like, and whether he understood what it meant when other people made decisions for him. Brown recalls how this moment was far from a performance, but much more of political education happening in real time. Detroit has always taught democracy this way: one person explaining to another why their voice matters, long before it ever shows up in a precinct tally.
Detroit campaigns have always lived in these spaces. Coleman A. Young earned votes in union halls and block club meetings. Mothers registered neighbors between overnight shifts. Political participation in this city has never been abstract, it is face-to-face, memory-driven, rooted in who shows up and who stays when the national cameras leave.
For decades, Black women built and maintained that political machinery without ever being allowed to lead it. Now, even with Black women finally running the operation themselves, bias still found its way in.
“Being a Black woman managing another Black woman’s historic run — you feel every win and every hit personally,” Brown said. “You don’t get the luxury of separating the work from the weight.”
Black women in political communications do not simply manage message — they absorb blowback. They correct falsehoods, contain disrespect, and withstand the scrutiny that male campaign leads are never asked to answer for. “We move with grace, never distractions,” Brown said.
“There were times when things were said that were not factual or flat-out disrespectful,” she said. “I had to remind myself: this is bigger than that. Protecting her peace and staying focused on purpose became just as important as managing the message.”
The communications operation behind her was small by national campaign standards but airtight in execution.
Though Brown, Miranda Bryant, and Cydney Foster formed the core leadership team, the full 98Forward agency supported the campaign in phases from December 2024 through November 2025. The communications roster included Brown as lead strategist, managers Miranda Bryant and Cydney Foster, associate strategist Cheri Hollie, and support staffers Ernest Wilkins and Nat Synowiec. Every person touched messaging, logistics, or narrative development at some stage of the campaign.
The size of the team mattered less than its cohesion.
“The biggest internal risk was keeping the chaos organized — making sure our team stayed intact, that trust never broke, and that we met every deadline while protecting the Mayor-Elect’s peace of mind in how we showed up,” Brown said.
Their media strategy was designed around one central principle: Sheffield would control her own narrative.
Every interview, press request, and media placement was filtered through a structured communications framework that centered two pillars — her proven record of leadership and her forward-looking agenda for Detroit. They refused to chase visibility for its own sake. Instead, they chose interviews strategically, phrasing every message to reinforce her priorities, values, and long-standing credibility with Detroiters.
“We wanted to make sure that all messaging aligned with her vision for Detroiters,” Brown said.
That decision, to speak only when it served purpose, not performance, allowed Sheffield to remain the narrator of her own story rather than the subject of commentary.
Every modern Detroit victory has had this kind of scaffolding: unseen, disproportionately carried by Black women, rarely credited in the official story. This campaign did not break that tradition. It exposed it.
Behind the scenes, messaging decisions followed a strict internal process.
Talking points were drafted to reflect the issues Sheffield had already been fighting for, housing stability, economic equity, community-rooted development, and reviewed with campaign leadership for clarity, resonance, and alignment.
Every public appearance had a purpose. Every answer was designed to reinforce the same narrative: that Sheffield was not running to become something new, but to continue the work she had already proven she could do. The result was consistency — not just in tone but in trust.
Earlier in the cycle, Antonice Strickland, Vice President of PR & Business Development at 98Forward, provided early vision and structural leadership before shifting back to oversee agency operations.
“Watching Brittni’s diligence, expertise, creativity and ability to rally the troops anchored each moment of this campaign,” Strickland said.
When asked directly how the communications strategy helped Sheffield win, Brown’s answer was blunt: “By making sure the messaging never drifted from what Detroiters care about most.” They did not try to reinvent her. They made the political press catch up to the leader she already was.
Election night revealed the emotional architecture of all that labor.
Brown was not standing beside Sheffield when the Associated Press called the race. She was upstairs, ensuring Sheffield’s grandmother — the person she wanted to hear it from first — was in place.
When the alert finally hit her phone, Brown allowed herself what she had avoided for nearly a year: stillness.
Later, in an elevator surrounded by security, she watched Sheffield close her eyes and whisper, “Thank you, Heavenly Father.” A moment of stillness no strategist could script.
“This experience stretched me in every way possible,” Brown said. “Purpose isn’t always pretty — sometimes it’s pressure, sometimes it’s patience.” She added, “It reminded me that alignment is everything.”
Alignment — not just message alignment, but ancestral alignment. Political lineage aligned with lived experience. Skill aligned with calling.
98Forward has been here before. The agency’s founders served under Coleman A. Young. They shaped narrative during the Dennis Archer and Kwame Kilpatrick eras. They helped elect Michigan’s first Black woman to the state Supreme Court, Kyra Harris Bolden. They have navigated Detroit’s political evolution for nearly 30 years — mostly unseen.
Mary Sheffield’s election will be recorded as the moment Detroit finally elected a woman mayor.
The truer story is this:
Detroit did not simply elect a woman. It elected the generation of Black women who carried this city through bankruptcy, emergency management, mass school closures, predatory taxation, and resurgence. It elected the strategy of Irma Henderson and the political muscle of Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick. It elected the block club captains, the PR women writing statements at 2 a.m., the organizers who held rallies when no cameras showed up, the daughters who inherited political rooms they were never allowed to lead.
Sheffield will raise her hand alone when she is sworn in.
But she did not arrive alone.
And history will remember — if this story is told honestly — that Detroit’s first woman mayor was not delivered by miracle, but by Black women who refused to rest until she won.
