Mayor Solomon Proclaims September 16 as Mayor Glenn D. Cunningham Day
Mayor Solomon Proclaims September 16 as Mayor Glenn D. Cunningham Day
City honors the 43rd mayor — a Marine, a police captain, and a U.S. Marshal — on what would have been his 83rd birthday
JERSEY CITY, N.J. (September 16, 2026) — Mayor James Solomon today celebrated September 16 as Mayor Glenn D. Cunningham Day in Jersey City, honoring the city's first Black mayor on the anniversary of his birth.
"Mayor Glenn Cunningham looked at a city with a skyline going up on one side and disinvestment on the other, and he refused to call that success," said Mayor James Solomon. "He said it out loud: the Gold Coast and the Golden Neighborhoods. Both. He defined what it meant to be a representative for all of Jersey City. He earned that legacy — twenty-five years on the JCPD, a Marine, a U.S. Marshal, and a man who never moved out of the city that raised him."
Glenn Dale Cunningham was born in Jersey City on September 16, 1943, and never left. He went to P.S. 29, P.S. 14, and Snyder High School. He served four years as a United States Marine during the Vietnam era. He came home and spent twenty-five years in the Jersey City Police Department, retiring as a captain. He served on the Hudson County Board of Chosen Freeholders, represented Bergen-Lafayette on the City Council, rose to Council President, and was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 as United States Marshal for the District of New Jersey.
In 2001, he was elected the 43rd Mayor of Jersey City — the first Black mayor in the city's history. He died in office on May 25, 2004, at 60, while also serving as State Senator for the 31st District.
Cunningham took office at a moment when Jersey City's waterfront was booming and much of the rest of the city was not. He refused to accept that as the natural order of things. His answer was the "Golden Neighborhoods" plan — the argument that the same investment reshaping the Gold Coast belonged in Greenville, Bergen-Lafayette, the Heights, and Journal Square.
Weeks into his term, Cunningham led Jersey City's response to the September 11 attacks, opening the city's waterfront, hospitals, and shelters to a wounded Lower Manhattan. In November 2001 he launched an anti-crime initiative that paired enforcement with jobs and counseling for at-risk youth and treatment for first-time drug offenders. He pushed affordable housing into the Powerhouse District and broke ground on sites that had sat untouched for two decades.
The proclamation also recognizes Senator Sandra Bolden Cunningham, his wife and Jersey City's first African American First Lady, who was elected in 2007 to the same 31st District Senate seat her husband had held. She served sixteen years, rising to Deputy Majority Leader and President Pro Tempore of the New Jersey Senate, and continued the family's work through the Sandra and Glenn D. Cunningham Foundation.