Mboka Mwilambwe
American politician who serves as mayor of Bloomington, Illinois
Mboka Mwilambwe (born 1970) is a Congolese-born American politician who was elected in 2021 as the first African-American mayor of Bloomington, Illinois.
Biography
Mwilambwe was born in Kinshasa, Zaire during the dictatorship of Mobutu, one of seven children. His father worked for UNICEF and Mwilambwe lived in various countries as a youth with stays in Senegal, Ivory Coast, and the Republic of the Congo. In 1990, he moved to central Illinois to attend Illinois State University earning a B.S. in mathematics in 1994 and a M.S. in education in 1996. After school, he accepted a position as the assistant director of the Office of Equal Access and Opportunity at Illinois State University. In 2008, he became a U.S. Citizen. In 2011, he was appointed by then-mayor Steve Stockton to fill a vacancy in Ward 3 on the Bloomington City Council. He was re-elected to a full four-year term on the City Council in 2013 and 2017. Since 2019, he has served as mayor pro tem.
In 2021, he ran for mayor against Mike Straza, Jackie Gunderson, and write-in candidate Misty Metroz.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mboka Mwilambwe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.