Clockwise from top left: Montgomery County Executive-elect Will Jawando, Rockville Mayor Monique Ashton, Gaithersburg Mayor-designate Lisa Henderson, and Takoma Park Mayor Talisha Searcy.
Montgomery County is approaching a historic milestone. Beginning December 7, the Maryland county’s government and those of its three largest incorporated municipalities, Gaithersburg, Rockville, and Takoma Park, will be led simultaneously by Black officials for the first time in history.
The milestone follows the election of Will Jawando as Montgomery County executive, the selection of Gaithersburg City Councilmember Lisa Henderson to succeed outgoing Mayor Jud Ashman, and the soon-to-be-certified reelection of Takoma Park Mayor Talisha Searcy. They join Rockville Mayor Monique Ashton.
The three mayors share another historical distinction: each is the first Black mayor in her city’s history. Henderson, who has served on the Gaithersburg City Council since 2021, was selected by her fellow councilmembers to replace Ashman after his election to the County Council. She takes office November 9 and will serve until the November 2027 municipal election. Ashton was elected Rockville mayor in November 2023. Searcy, first elected in 2022 after five years on the City Council, is certain to secure another term (with 866 ballots left to count, Searcy leads by 3,104 to 1,899).
Jawando, who takes office December 7, will become the county’s second Black county executive, following Ike Leggett.
Black political leadership in Montgomery County is not new. Leggett broke significant barriers when he became the first Black person elected to the County Council in 1986, two decades before winning the executive’s office. Black officials have long served on the County Council and Board of Education, in the Maryland General Assembly and in municipal governments. The current concentration of Black leadership at the top of the county’s largest local governments marks another chapter in that longer story.
Yet the moment also invites a more measured reading. Representation at the highest levels of local government is significant, but it is not the same as transformed outcomes. Persistent gaps in housing affordability, educational opportunity, and economic mobility continue to shape daily life for many Black residents even as the faces of leadership change. Demographic shifts, particularly the long decline in the non-Hispanic white share of the population and the growth of Black, Hispanic, and Asian communities, have altered the political landscape. Those numbers alone, however, do not explain the results. Organizing, coalition-building, and sustained political work by residents and candidates made the current leadership possible.
By December, the county and its three largest municipalities will have reached a visible milestone. Whether that milestone produces deeper institutional change remains an open question, one that will be measured less by who holds office than by what those offices deliver for the communities they serve.
