Councilman John Courage — once known for his liberal politics — is running for mayor as a centrist, touting his years of experience on City Council as evidence he can find agreement on an array of difficult problems facing San Antonio in the coming years.
“The demographers have pretty much told us we’re going to have another million people here somewhere in the next 20 to 30 years,” Courage told reporters outside City Hall after his Thursday campaign launch.
“This city needs to be prepared to provide for them the services that they will expect,” he said, listing public safety, transportation, public health, housing and opportunities for work as examples.
Courage, who represents District 9, is the first current City Council member to join the 2025 mayoral race, while at least three others are weighing potential bids.
His Northside district accounted for roughly 18% of the total votes cast in the 2023 municipal election, and is the only council district Republican Gov. Greg Abbott carried in the November 2022 midterm election.
Among the council members thought to be eyeing the mayor’s job, Courage and Councilman Manny Pelaez (D8) are term-limited from seeking reelection to their council seats, and Mayor Ron Nirenberg is serving his fourth and final term.
“I have more to offer in the way of reasonableness and being responsive to the community and just using common sense in the decisions that need to be made,” Courage told reporters of his goals to continue serving in elected office. “I think that’s an important ingredient in future councils.”
A rocky start to politics
Courage has long been active in Democratic politics and ran for office multiple times before he was elected to the City Council in 2017.
He grew up in Lynn, Massachusetts, and started college with plans to become a teacher. As a student, he protested the Vietnam War in 1970, but left college a year later to enlist in the Air Force, and moved to San Antonio for basic training.
After leaving the military in 1975, Courage worked for St. Peter-St. Joseph Children’s Home, the county mental health entity now known as the Center for Health Care Services, and later he sold real estate before returning to school for a teaching certificate.
His first political campaign was in 1980, when he was elected to the Alamo Community College District board of trustees. He later ran unsuccessfully for the City Council in District 10 in 1989 and 1991.
“My shortcoming was I didn’t understand what it took to run a campaign like that,” Courage said of the council races.
After that experience, Courage said he became more involved in local Democratic politics, volunteering on various campaigns for a decade before launching a campaign for Congress in 2002. He ran as a Democrat against U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith in Texas’ 21st Congressional District.
Courage took 25% of the vote in the deeply Republican district, which is now represented by U.S. Rep. Chip Roy. He ran again unsuccessfully in a 2006 special election, again taking 25% of the vote.
Amid the campaigns, Courage went back to school for a teaching certificate, and was working as a special education teacher when he launched an unsuccessful campaign for a state Senate seat in 2012 — again in Republican territory — against Donna Campbell.
“I was idealistic,” Courage recalled of those races in an interview last year with the San Antonio Report. After five failed campaigns, he said, “I swore then, I was done.”
But as Courage was planning to retire from teaching in 2016, his wife, Zada True-Courage, encouraged him to give politics one more shot, Courage said. True-Courage is a financial analyst for CPS Energy, and the couple combined families when they married in 1985.
“She had two daughters and I had two sons from my first marriage, so we became like a Brady Bunch,” Courage said.
The opportunity to follow his wife’s encouragement would soon present itself. In fall 2016, Councilman Joe Krier announced he wouldn’t seek reelection in District 9.
Courage won the seat in a runoff with Marco Barros in 2017, and held it through three tough reelection races, including a contentious 2021 contest against a conservative activist backed by the police union.
With five successful campaigns and five losing ones under his belt, “I’m batting .500,” Courage said.
From radical to consensus-builder
Despite a successful record of winning tough races in recent years, Courage’s campaign launch near the City Hall steps Thursday could offer an early glimpse of the challenges to come in a citywide race.
His speech was immediately interrupted by pro-Palestinian activists calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war, many of whom criticized Courage as having lost his progressive credentials.
Courage continued his speech, which was all but drowned out by protesters shouting over him with megaphones.
It’s the second time in the past year that Courage has found himself on the opposite side of progressive activists who made political gains on the council in 2021. Courage also opposed their so-called “Justice Charter,” which 72% of voters rejected in the May 2023 election.
“They have the right to be here and to say their piece. … Many years ago, I was very passionate about a lot of issues,” Courage told the San Antonio Report after the announcement.
But Courage doesn’t believe San Antonio’s City Council should get involved in the geopolitical conflict, and said that a survey completed by 1,200 of his constituents indicated 90% of them agreed, which he believes is more representative of the city as a whole.
That’s an approach Courage said he plans to continue if elected mayor. Though he’s been largely supportive of Nirenberg’s agenda over the past six years, he wants to revisit whether some of the city’s efforts to address problems like housing shortages and workforce development are meeting the mark.
“We need to get a greater consensus from the entire community that they support these issues,” Courage said. “And if they don’t, then we need to maybe re-target what the community really wants.”
So far, none of the potential candidates current serving on the council have raised much money, and the race has attracted interest from a number of outside candidates.
A recent campaign finance report showed Courage had about $9,200 on hand as of Dec. 31.
Courage’s campaign says he emptied his reserves while running against a well-funded opponent, amid other political headwinds, in his May reelection race, where he took 63% in a four-way race.
His campaign sent out an an email appeal last week asking supporters to donate to retire an old $25,000 loan Courage and his wife made from their retirement account. The most recent campaign finance report showed his outstanding loans totaled $32,000.
This article has been updated to correct the name of Councilman John Courage’s wife. It is Zada True-Courage.
