CAMBRIDGE, Md. (AP) – This Chesapeake Bay city of idled crab processing plants and costly vacation homes has had a not-too-distant history of racial strife. But when Cambridge elected its first black mayor this week, residents said their worries about joblessness and the economy were foremost on their minds, not the race or gender of the winning candidate.

Decades after the demise of segregation, this sleepy city on Maryland’s Eastern Shore has elected not only its first black mayor but also its first woman to the post. For Cambridge, the choice of Victoria Jackson-Stanley signaled just how much times have changed.

“I didn’t set out to make history, but here it is,” said the 54-year-old social worker, who ousted an eight-year incumbent in a nonpartisan election.

Cambridge has only 11,000 residents. But in the history books it looms large as the birthplace of Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman.

“It’s a very beautiful, diverse, multicultural place now,” Jackson-Stanley said of her hometown, where blacks make up just over half the population. “It wasn’t always like this.”

“Attitudes here have changed,” said William Nichols, a machinist who became the first black Dorchester County Commission president a few years back.

Nichols, 49, grew up in Ward Two and remembers watching flames from his bedroom window in 1967, when a speech by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Chairman H. Rap Brown ended with a segregated elementary school set on fire. The blaze spread, destroying black-owned businesses as an all-white fire department refused to douse the flames.

As evidence of progress, locals said, race played little role in the campaign between Jackson-Stanley and the incumbent, Cleveland Rippons, a white man.

“I didn’t make anything of race, and I never heard that she did, either,” said Rippons, who lost by about 150 votes.

Cambridge is becoming a gentrified resort town a couple hours east of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. For locals, times are tough as costly vacation homes and yachts supplant the crab processing houses that once employed most area residents.

Fresh from her winning door-to-door campaign, Jackson-Stanley signaled she can’t wait to take office next month.

“We have lost so many jobs,” she said, eager to tackle today’s issues.