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#Election11: Mary Norwood, proud robo-call queen

Norwood is a candidate for mayor who only entered politics after a previous life in the robo-call business abruptly crashed.
An Atlanta voter questions Mary Norwood about police profiling

ATLANTA -- She is in her element at Goldberg’s, an eatery a few blocks from her home in Buckhead. “Loved your ad, the shoe ad,” a customer enjoying breakfast tells Mary Norwood. “And these are the shoes!” Norwood adds, looking down at the four-inch heels underfoot.

Norwood is a candidate for mayor who only entered politics after a previous life in the robo-call business abruptly crashed.

“We were this close to being an international company in 2000 when the dot com bubble burst and I came back to Atlanta because all of that money went away. The angel money went away, the venture capital money went away. You either had just made it or you just missed it. And I just missed it,” Norwood said. Asked if she lost a fortune, she answered that she didn’t lose anybody’s money but her own.

An Atlanta voter questions Mary Norwood about police profiling

It’s an entrepreneurial story that might ordinarily drive Republican ideology. Yet Norwood fiercely identifies publicly not as a Republican but as an independent, in a town where much of the leadership is Democratic.

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“Well it’s a town that that’s elected Mary Norwood three times,” she retorts. As an at-large city council member, Norwood’s constituency has been citywide. And sometimes, the questions have been uncomfortable.

“Do you recognize that white (police) officers racially profile African American men?” an African American man asks Norwood as she’s hunting votes at a Southwest Atlanta shopping center. It reflects a question that gave Norwood trouble at a recent debate aired on V-103 radio. “I think we’ve got plenty of evidence of that throughout the entire country. I think we’ve all seen that. There’s no question,” Norwood answers. Norwood says she voted for Hillary Clinton last year, Barack Obama before that.

And while working on the city council, she has retained an interest in the robo-call business. Prior to our visit, she’d recorded a robo-call, reminding people to vote early.

“The thing about the city is that it’s still a small town. If I’m at Goldberg’s, I see lots of people I know. If I’m at the Beautiful (Restaurant) in Southwest Atlanta, I see lots of people I know,” Norwood says. “We are a small town in so many ways because we are a small part of a great big region.”


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