Amy Worden, Philadelphia Inquirer
- Kim Bracey was only 5 when the riots brought soldiers, barricades, and fear to her hometown. But she remembers the National Guard tanks rolling down the street, the shotgun blasts echoing through the neighborhood, and her parents hiding her in a back room when the sun went down, lest she get caught in the cross fire.
Today – 40 years after York erupted in racial violence – Bracey, a retired Air Force sergeant, is poised to become the first African American mayor of this working-class central Pennsylvania city.
“York had a horrific time then,” said Bracey, 45, a former economic-development official who has spent the last decade trying to revive a downtown that has, for the most part, languished since the riots. “But I am ready to be the mayor for everyone.”
