Mayor-elect Ella Jones, currently a city council member who was elected mayor on Tuesday, will become the first black and first female mayor of Ferguson, Mo.

Jeff Roberson/AP

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Jeff Roberson/AP

Mayor-elect Ella Jones, currently a city council member who was elected mayor on Tuesday, will become the first black and first female mayor of Ferguson, Mo.

Jeff Roberson/AP

Ella Jones will be sworn in as mayor of Ferguson, Mo., next week, becoming the first black mayor — and the first woman — to lead the city that gained national attention when police killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2014.

Still, nearly six years after Brown's death, Jones says the protests against police brutality — this time in response to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis — feel the same.

Jones thinks that despite the work Ferguson has done, her city — which has a population that is two-thirds black — still feels like the center of the discussion around police violence in the U.S.

"Even though we are striving to do better, Ferguson is considered as ground zero," she says, "and anything that happens in the United States, they're gonna always come back to Ferguson."

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