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Advocates in Southeast Raleigh are calling for the city to name a stretch of New Bern Avenue for Clarence E. Lightner, the city’s first popularly elected Black mayor, paying tribute to a “trailblazer” on a major urban gateway.
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Longtime activist Octavia Rainey said she hopes Raleigh can honor Lightner on signs from Person Street to WakeMed, an inside-the-Beltline corridor that passes through neighborhoods where Lightner held sway for decades — long past his mayoral term from 1973-75.
Rainey said she and backers from College Park, Oakwood and other neighborhoods that run up against New Bern will meet with city, state and federal officials on Thursday at 1 p.m. to discuss what requirements or hurdles might be involved. That stretch of New Bern includes both a downtown post office and the Terry Sanford federal building, meaning the name would affect their addresses.
“Clarence Lightner was a trailblazer,” Rainey said Wednesday of Raleigh’s only Black mayor. “He was elected right after the Civil Rights Act was passed and the Voting Rights Act was passed. … He worked on housing. He worked on transportation. He really promoted Black businesses because we were going from segregation to integration.”
Lightner belonged to the “Oval Table Gang,” leaders who joined civil rights pioneers Ralph and June Campbell for meetings in their kitchen, where they strategized ways to end segregation peacefully.
Lightner was elected to the City Council in 1967, the second Black member to serve, and helped bring voting districts to what had been an all at-large seat system for Raleigh elections.
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In 1973, he attracted national attention by winning the mayor’s seat in a large Southern town, but he shifted the power in City Hall away from generations of bankers, real estate developers and businessmen from Hayes Barton who had long dominated Raleigh politics.
Though Rainey concedes that he supported the destruction of Fourth Ward, an urban renewal project that eliminated a Black neighborhood to the south of downtown, he changed his mind in later years and spoke out against housing lost to gentrification.
Lightner died in 2002.
Rainey’s proposal comes as New Bern Avenue is midway through a massive transformation that will bring a high-speed bus line, the first of its kind in North Carolina.
A meeting to discuss the possible street name change will be held at 1 p.m. Thursday in room 305 at Raleigh City Hall.
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This story was originally published October 14, 2026 at 5:39 PM.