Evelyn Nephew served as Mayor of Guthrie beginning in 1997, when she succeeded to the office as vice mayor after Mayor Don Hardin resigned to take a state government job. She won re-election in 1999 by a 37-vote margin and, as of early 2001, was the longest-serving member of the city council.

Notable initiatives

Anti-racism campaign and MLK Day celebration

Nephew led an effort to establish and grow Guthrie's Martin Luther King Day celebration into a multi-day event with statewide attention from the African American community, working with Logan County NAACP chairman Hersey Hammons. In her 2001 re-election campaign she made an "undoing racism" initiative central to her platform, including sending city staff and the police chief to a taxpayer-funded training led by Harvard Law School's Charles Ogletree.

Council leadership style

An OSC editorial writer contrasted Guthrie's city council meetings, run under Nephew, with those of neighboring cities, noting that Guthrie meetings routinely ran past 11 p.m. and that citizens were regularly permitted to exceed standard time limits and question councilors directly from the floor, a practice not observed in nearby communities' more tightly run meetings.