From the West End to City Hall? O’Neal seeks to become Durham’s 1st Black woman mayor.

As a judge, Elaine O’Neal did much of the talking. But as she’s campaigned to become Durham’s first Black female mayor, she said, she’s been doing a lot more listening.

The youngest of five children, she has been surrounded by family and community on Durham’s West End all her life. She attended Lyon Park, Morehead Elementary, Rogers-Herr Middle School and in 1980, graduated from Hillside High School with honors.

O’Neal earned a B.S. in mathematics from N.C Central University in 1984 planning to become an electrical engineer. She went on to earn her J.D. from the NCCU Law School.

Her upbringing, around the time Durham had just desegregated its school system, eventually led to politics, when Billy Marsh asked her to volunteer for the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People. The civil rights attorney represented the “Royal Ice Cream Seven” and was a former District Court judge in Durham.

“At that time when a community elder told you to do something, you did it,” O’Neal said. “[Marsh] came and told me that [I] would be the chair of the legal redress for the Durham Committee, and that was my entry into politics.”

Now, after serving as a district and superior court judge and as an interim dean of the NCCU law school, the 59-year-old O’Neal is poised to become mayor.

Her challenger, City Council member Javiera Caballero, suspended her mayoral campaign after O’Neal topped the seven-member primary field with 68% of the vote to second-place finisher Caballero’s 25%. Both women’s names will be on Tuesday’s ballot, however.

Caballero has two more years on her term, so if O’Neal wins, Durham would have its first Black woman mayor and the continued service of its first Latina council member, a point some of O’Neal’s supporters made during the primary.

Current Mayor Steve Schewel chose not to seek a third term.

O’Neal’s early years

O’Neal’s parents were active in the Morehead Avenue Baptist Church. Her grandmother gave sewing lessons to the women in the neighborhood, and her siblings served as Durham Public Schools leaders.

O’Neal opened a law practice and was still managing a mentoring program at Hillside High where her sister, Eunice Sanders, was the school principal. Sanders later became an assistant DPS superintendent.

“We saw early on that she had a lot of leadership skills and that she was really smart,” Sanders said in an interview. “And back then they didn’t have separate classes for the exceptionally bright kids, but they were starting a pilot for it and my mom did not let her do it because she wanted us to be well-rounded.”

“She just felt like if you’re smart you’ll stand out wherever you are, and that was the case with Elaine,” Sanders said.

O’Neal became the third woman on the district court bench. She served for 17 years before becoming the first woman in Durham County to be named Chief District Court Judge.

“I wasn’t the most senior judge — as a matter of fact, I was probably the youngest age-wise and the least experienced, but the person who was in line for it decided he didn’t want to be chief and I was next in line,” she said.

When another judge told O’Neal he was going to recommend her, “I was like ‘OK, if you think I can do it,’” she said. “And he was like, ‘Yeah, you can do it.’”

It was an unusual path, O’Neal says, looking back.

“My career has been different because I hit the bench so early,” she said. “I spent three years in private practice and 24 years on the bench — that’s not normally how it’s done.”

‘God-given children’

By the mid-’90s, O’Neal was divorcing her first husband and looking for stability for herself and only biological son. She has two other sons and a daughter whom she calls her “God-given” children.

Her sons came to her through marriage while her daughter came to her through one of her cases.

“It was just something about that little girl that touched my heart, and so I ended up recusing myself from her case and she became apart of my family when she was 15-years-old as an orphan,” O’Neal said.

“She is now 40-years-old and has an 18-year-old son — I saw him come right on out — and he is now a senior at UNC Charlotte,” O’Neal added.

O’Neal has two grandchildren. She had to explain to them how she got into their lives without being a blood relative, even though she says they resemble her.

“I guess when you feed them long enough they start to look like you,” she joked.

One of O’Neal’s sons was convicted at 18 of first-degree murder and served an 18-year sentience in prison. He was released in 2020.

He had two trials, O’Neal said. The first ended in a hung jury; the other “he was tried and convicted at the same courthouse that [I] was holding court in.”

In 2011, O’Neal was elected the first woman Superior Court Judge in Durham County.

The race for mayor

After retiring from the bench in 2018, O’Neal was appointed interim dean of the law school. That same year, Schewel asked her to chair the city’s Racial Equity Task Force, where she led a group that created policy and budget recommendations on complex issues.

““She really is the embodiment of Durham, and you felt her presence in that way on the task force, which was critical for our work because she knows it [the city] so well,” said Kaaren Haldeman, an anthropologist and social activist who served on the group.

Haldeman described the task force as 17 individuals who did not all know each other and had to come up with recommendations for how to make more equal opportunities for people of all races in Durham.

“One meeting, we were all trying to unload and figure out what that could look like,” said Haldeman. “And she said, ‘This is pioneering work, and no one has ever seen what a racially equitable society looks like’ and that stuck with all us because she felt like it wasn’t hopeless.”

If elected mayor, O’Neal says community safety will be her top priority. And although she has an idea about what needs to be addressed, she’s going to continue to let Durhamites tell her what the needs are.

“That’s like asking me to try a case, before I know what all the facts are,” O’Neal said. “I’ve got to know what the issues are, what rules are going to govern my behavior, and then I will have an analysis and can come up with conclusions.”

O’Neal said she does plan to establish an Office of Gun Violence Prevention to work with different communities on solving the increase in gun violence around the city.

Since campaigning, O’Neal said she has found many Durham residents feel their concerns are not being addressed and that issues that are important in one neighborhood may not matter as much in another.

She debated for six months before announcing her campaign for mayor.

“I’ve retired twice now,” she said. “But when your community — that has been so good to you — says we really need you to think about it because we are at a crucial juncture, I had to consider it.”

Election Day is Tuesday. In addition to the mayor’s seat, the council’s three ward seats 1, 2, and 3, are also up for election.

This story was originally published October 30, 2021 at 1:08 PM.