Editor’s note: The symmetry of 52 weeks in a year and 26 letters in our alphabet inspired us here at The Eatonton Messenger to embark on an alphabetical journey of Putnam County every other week this year, looking at something – or someone – unique, significant, unusual, or just plain interesting.
John Reid won his first election to Eatonton city council in 1992 and became the city’s first Black mayor just over a decade later. He now sits as a three-term municipal chief executive – though not consecutively – and will be up for reelection in November.
Born “across the river” in 1955 as the 11th of 13 children, Reid grew up in the Canaan community, a Black neighborhood about a 15-minute walk from Greensboro.
His father, Willie “JB” Reid, owned a lumber-hauling truck and did many other labor-intensive jobs, teaching all his kids the value of hard work, while his mother, Della, was “an excellent homemaker, especially while raising that many children,” Reid points out.
His first job came at 13 years old, pushing a lawnmower bought for him by his father. Corralling cows at the livestock barn came next, followed by a sales job under local clothing merchant Ben Weinstein, a position Reid held throughout his high school years.
Reid attended all-Black schools growing up, walking five minutes from home in one direction to F.T. Corry School for first through fourth grades, then a five-minute walk in the opposite direction for fifth through seventh, before returning to Corry for high school.
He also made countless walks into Greensboro through the mid-‘60s to 1970s, having to cross over white neighborhoods to do so.
“It wasn’t always a friendly thing,” he recalls. “I mean, most of the time things were calm, but every now and then …,” his voice trails off.
Reid’s introduction to politics came as an almost 18-year-old, just as he was about to graduate as the student deemed “Most Likely to Succeed.”
He remembers his high school track-and-field coach inviting him to attend a meeting that turned out to be about getting the first Black candidate elected to Greene County’s board of commissioners. The campaign fell short, but the experience inspired Reid to remain interested in politics and learn what it would take to run for office himself someday.
Meanwhile, Reid says he met his wife Janie, an Eatonton native and now a local city council member herself, in the early ‘70s through a mutual friend. He says they started as “just casual” for a couple of years, “but eventually we started talking … and I guess four or five years after I met her, we got married (1977) and that’s when I moved to Eatonton.”
A 13-year career at Horton Homes followed, where Reid served as a floor-construction supervisor for custom projects, a job he clearly remains proud of, pointing out specialty floors in Eatonton that he had a hand in constructing and installing.
At the end of that run, he was ready for a change, though, so Reid ran for office for the first time and earned election in 1992 to a five-year Eatonton City Council term after securing just a 15-vote advantage.
Reid says he’d actually passed up a similar opportunity four years earlier when he didn’t feel ready, but he learned a lot about running his own race just by observing the strategy and tactics employed by his opponent’s campaign manager. At about that same time, Reid also caught the attention of fellow councilman Ulysses Rice.
“We talked every day. And at first, I didn’t know why he called me, but he valued my opinion. And what was going on was, a lot of decisions that were made weren’t really being made at the table. There were three people who met every day, and he was one of the three. They talked about the business of the city every day,” Reid says.
“And then he would call me and get my opinion on things. So actually, I had more input than people really knew because he would often use my opinion. But we were learning from each other. He was my mentor to teach me a lot of things, but at the same time, he was taking advantage of the fact that I was very studious of politics in general.”
Once a councilman, Reid’s local political star continued to shine, and in 2003 he made his first successful bid for Eatonton’s top political position. He won a second term, too, but in 2014 Reid lost his mayoral election – this time by just 18 votes.
He believes two primary factors were at work leading to the loss. First, Reid had broken his ankle, which slowed him down with a medical “boot,” and he needed crutches to get around. That severely limited his face-to-face campaign efforts, but Reid says he thinks too many people also assumed he would easily win again without their help, so they didn’t turn out to vote.
Regardless, the political setback temporarily sent him in a different direction as elections supervisor for Hancock County, where he brought integrity back to the process by eliminating widespread voter suppression issues in “seven or eight” elections for various positions over the next four years.
As soon as he could, though, Reid returned to the Eatonton mayoral race in 2019, this time with two good ankles and a revitalized voter base that carried him to a decisive victory.
“I’m here to do what’s right. I’m not here to do something for myself,” Reid says. “I could make a whole lot more money living a whole lot more peaceful life if I wasn’t here to do what’s right. I came here to take care of business for the city.
“When I first looked at the books and I looked at everything that was going on, I said, ‘It’s going to take 20 years to turn this here around.’ Well, this is Year 20 and you’re starting to see activity downtown. We got the city moving in the right direction.”