Real? Absolutely. Resilient? You bet. But some wonder: Is India Walton ready?

Buffalo mayoral race hits final stretch with star power and blue stamps

"Look to your right. Look behind you," she said. "There are children here. There are elders here, there are millennials and middle-aged folks. There are people from every race, class, creed, gender. This is the rainbow coalition. This is Buffalo! This is our city, our time. The name, the title of this event this evening, is 'A City Hall for All.' "

And with that, Walton gestured to one voter after another, saying: "A City Hall for you, a City Hall for you, everyone gets to City Hall!"

Walton may get there herself if she beats back Mayor Byron W. Brown's furious write-in bid for an unprecedented fifth term.

Byron Brown's primary loss sparked a political battle. Some wonder: Has he hit his shelf life?

And if she's proven one thing over the course of her 39 years and the vicious four-month campaign since she upset Brown in the Democratic primary, it's that the second part of her campaign slogan is true. A mother at 14 who's been poor for much of her life – including during a campaign when she's supported herself in part by driving DoorDash – Walton is nothing if not resilient.

But is she, as her slogan promises, ready? Is she ready to trade the trash talk of the community activist for the more polite ways of a mayor? Is she ready to work with the Common Council only a year and a half after insulting one of its members on Facebook with a profane and speculative description of the most personal part of his anatomy?

Walton said she most certainly is. In a recent interview, she apologized to North District Council Member Joseph Golombek, the target of her ire on Facebook, and likened working together in City Hall to working with the suburban soccer moms she worked with as a nurse at Children's Hospital.

"Running for mayor has matured me a lot over the last year," she added. "I learned new language to express my frustration. And I look forward to being a much more effective communicator in the future."

Real

Walton may be new to the campaign trail, but her passion for politics is both real and lifelong. Her mother, Doris Siddiq, remembers her daughter first expressing her interest in running for mayor when she was 8 years old.

"When she started out, she was saying she was going to be president," Siddiq recalled. "And then, as she got a little bit older, she started saying: 'I'm going to be mayor of Buffalo one day.' "

She took some detours first. Pregnant at 14, she chose to live in a group home to raise her baby. Married a few years later, she gave birth at 19 to twins who were months premature and who struggled to survive. Eventually, she earned a nursing degree and started a career – and emerged as a community activist on Buffalo's East Side.

After graduating from Open Buffalo's leadership program, she fought for a parking permit system in the Fruit Belt. She pushed for reform of the state's marijuana laws. She became executive director of the Fruit Belt Community Land Trust, working to provide affordable housing in a gentrifying part of the city. And last year, as protesters filled Niagara Square in response to George Floyd's murder, Walton rushed to the forefront.

To hear Walton tell it, Brown ignored the protests – a sign, she said, that the city needs new leadership. By last November, she was a mayoral candidate.

"I said: 'If he can ignore a thousand people screaming in the streets and pretend like everything is OK, surely he's going to ignore a primary challenge from me,' " Walton said.

She offered voters something different from Brown: police changes that would shift funding to mental health services, developing community land trusts citywide to promote affordable housing and promising to be a "strong and involved partner" with the city schools. 

Walton – who describes herself as a "church girl" – barnstormed the city with that message and the passion of a preacher, especially winning converts on the West Side.

"The first time I heard her speak, I felt really moved," said Victoria Misuraca, who quickly signed on as one of Walton's first campaign volunteers. 

"She's warm, approachable, honest, authentic, unafraid," said Catherine Schweitzer, who's been hosting events where Buffalonians can get acquainted with the Democratic nominee.

Resilient

Walton ended up winning the primary by 7 points, shocking the political world and prompting Brown to wage a write-in campaign for the general election that, like her life, has forced Walton to prove her resilience.

The first challenge she faced is one she knows well: making ends meet. Left without an income when the Fruit Belt Community Land Trust let her go after her mayoral ambitions became public, Walton was on unemployment until August. Now she's relying on loans from her mom and the gig economy.

"From time to time, I drive DoorDash," the online food delivery service, Walton said last week. "I've got to feed my children."

Customers always recognize her as the candidate for mayor, telling her: "My God, what are you doing?"

"And I'm just like: 'Here's your food. Don't make it weird,' " Walton said. "But a lot of people are just, like, happy. It's just amazing how impressed people are that I do normal things."

Out on the campaign trail, some voters have forced Walton to defend her democratic socialist philosophy. She said she tells them she doesn't want to turn Buffalo into Venezuela or Cuba or take away their homes. She just wants to run Buffalo differently than what she calls "corporate Democrats" such as Brown. She wants to use public resources to address the city's poverty.

Kirsten Gillibrand backs India Walton for mayor

"I'm a Democrat – have been all my life," she said. "And 'socialist' just means your government should work for you."

Walton also had to prove her resilience as reporters delved deeper into her life story. The Buffalo News reported that in 2018, Buffalo police investigated a complaint that a man was selling drugs from Walton's Fruit Belt home, and that she was arrested in 2014 in connection with a threat she was alleged to have made to a co-worker at Children's Hospital. WKBW reported that she was charged with food stamp fraud in 2003, that she had failed to pay city taxes a year later and that she was caught driving with a suspended license in 2014.

And then, this month, Walton's car got impounded for more than $600 in unpaid parking tickets and an expired inspection.

All of which prompts the question: What would India Walton say to voters who think she's already proved herself too irresponsible to be mayor?

"I know how to solve problems because I've had them all," Walton said. "You know, I think that a lot of the things that I've experienced have have built my character and help me grow into a resilient person, but more importantly, a person who is very empathetic."

Ready?

Another question lingering over Walton's head stems from her unconventional political resume. She has never held political office and never run anything bigger than a land trust that built two homes with the help of Habitat for Humanity on the city's East Side.

So is she ready to be mayor?

Supporters say yes, absolutely.

"Her ability to organize people, her ability to draw people into a shared vision, her ability to build something out of nothing, is pretty unparalleled," said Tori Kuper, a longtime friend of Walton's who co-founded and serves as president of the board of Cooperation Buffalo, which pushes worker ownership of businesses in Buffalo.

"I believe she is more willing to work with folks who differ from her than the current administration would be," said Alexander Wright, founder and president of the African Heritage Food Co-op and a member of Walton's advisory panel who has known her for seven years.

But others aren't so sure.

"She has an angry temper. I've seen it at meetings," said Veronica Hemphill-Nichols, founder of the Fruit Belt/McCarley Gardens Housing Task Force and one of Walton's most vehement critics. 

Walton indeed has a history of using raw language in protests and elsewhere. For example, she attacked Golombek, the Common Council member, with intimately impolite language referring to his race and male anatomy when he criticized her call for cutting police funding.

"I shouldn't have said that," Walton said in an interview about the remarks she wrote on Facebook.

That's for sure, Golombek said.

"Imagine if I called her what she called me," Golombek said. "People would demand that I resign from the Council. I'd have lost my teaching job at Buff State."

Not surprisingly, Golombek is supporting Brown's re-election, fearing that an activist like Walton just isn't cut out for politics.

"You know, you're an activist, you yell and you scream, that doesn't really accomplish much," he said. "If you think that you're going to become an elected official and yell and scream, you're not going to get anything done, and I don't think that's a risk that is worth taking in the city of Buffalo."

But Walton said she's not aiming to become mayor to yell and scream. She's said she's ready to reform Buffalo, to hire the best and the brightest to help her alleviate poverty and renovate neighborhoods and give people a reason to stop calling Buffalo one of the nation's poorest cities.

"It's not about making India Walton mayor," she said at an East Side rally earlier this month. "This is about making Buffalo better: creating together the safe and healthy community that we all want, need and deserve."

Election 2021: Buffalo mayor