(CNN) The man who will be Montgomery, Alabama's first African American mayor wants his tenure to signal a new narrative for his 200-year-old city, he told CNN on Thursday.

"We want to be seen as a part of the New South," Steven Reed told CNN's Alisyn Camerota on "New Day." "We want to turn the page and change the narrative, and that's what this election was about."

Reed was born and raised in Montgomery and in 2012 became the first African American elected as probate judge in Montgomery County. In Tuesday's mayoral runoff, he defeated TV station owner David Woods, who is white.

Montgomery, where 60% of residents are black, has a complicated racial history . It is the birthplace of the civil rights movement but also was the first capital of the Confederacy. It later became the site of Rosa Parks' bus boycott and the destination of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery protest marches. The nation's first memorial for more than 4,000 victims of lynchings opened last year there.

While the mayor-elect told CNN that it might have been a number of factors that delayed the state capital city's election of a black mayor, it's now time to move forward.

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