“I have a daughter that’s very active, and one day I was on a walk and I called her up and I said, ‘I truly think that President Trump wants to destroy Black people,'” Lyles recalled. “And she said, ‘How long did it take you to get there, Mom? How long did it take you? Sometimes you’re a little bit slow.'”

Alexander-Young made headlines earlier this year when she tweeted that she had “no words to describe how devastatingly disappointed” she was “in every Democratic mayor who has endorsed Michael Bloomberg, particularly the Black ones, and especially the ones closest to me,” after her mother’s endorsement of the former mayor and then-Democratic primary candidate.

Lyles also referenced criticism she has received from Corine Mack, head of the Charlotte chapter of the NAACP, who spoke before her, and the ACLU’s Kristie Puckett-Williams, who was in attendance livestreaming the event, which you can find below. The mayor called out Puckett-Williams as a leader in the community, part犀利士
icularly for her work in the area of restorative justice.

“Now I have to tell you, between Kristie and Rev. Mack, I catch a little bit of H-E-L-L,” the mayor admitted. “You know, the best thing about them, is that…all of us, the three of us, we understand respect, and we understand being a Black woman, and we all got to a place where we need to step up our game.”

“We’re not always going to agree, but we all know that there isn’t a Black family in this country that hasn’t experienced the difficulty of being Black in America, and that includes Kamala Harris,” added Lyles, who is one of 14 Black mayors featured in a recent Biden-Harris campaign ad.

Lyles pursued the 2020 Republican National Convention, with Charlotte being the only city who wished to hold the event, which eventually took place in a scaled-down version due to the pandemic. She faced criticism from fellow Democrats and from activists, which only intensified after protesters were met with police brutality at the hands of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, whom she thanked in a tweet for, in her words, keeping them safe.

“I’m glad that the false narrative that other system actors have tried to paint about me, and others who’ve criticized the city, as being unhelpful, unnecessary, and unprincipled is not shared by the mayor,” Puckett-Williams told Current South of the shout-out from Lyles.

“I’m also thankful for her daughter, who is doing the labor of teaching her mom,” she continued. “I think she’s spot on about the racism we see from this administration.”