Word: mayors
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sheila Murphy Cockrel, a member of the Detroit city council, has never been afraid to swim against the tide. She opposed proposals to create "Africa Town," a district exclusively for black-owned businesses in the heart of downtown. She regularly sparred with the city's former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, who resigned in 2008 amid enormous legal problems. Just last month, she drew headlines for abruptly leaving the council's chambers to protest a rushed measure, backed by Christian conservatives, to restrict alcohol sales at Detroit's strip clubs. "It was an act of democracy to walk...
Much of Cockrel's attention shifted to various social-justice causes, particularly the fight against police brutality. That's how she met Ken Cockrel Sr., an African-American attorney whom she eventually married. In the early 1970s, the couple supported the efforts of Detroit's first black mayor, Coleman Young, to integrate the city's police force. That led to the appointment of Detroit's first black police chief and, eventually, the suspension of a unit known for harassing young black men. Cockrel helped her husband win a city-council seat, and he was viewed as a leading potential successor...
...Officially, Cockrel says she will teach public policy at Wayne State University. But many political observers expect her to be a formidable candidate for the congressional seat currently held by Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, a Democrat and the former mayor's mother. Kilpatrick is vulnerable, observers say, mainly because of her son's persistent legal problems. Still, if Cockrel decides to run for the 13th congressional district seat, she will face an uphill battle: the district was gerrymandered mainly to ensure an African-American majority...
...rights activists were buoyed. "The fact that an openly gay candidate wins for mayor in the nation's fourth largest city, in the South, in Texas, shows that when Americans get to know gay people as people, not as stereotypes, their resistance to treating gay people equally reduces," Evan Wolfson, director of Freedom to Marry, a gay-marriage advocacy group, told USA Today. (See a two-minute bio of Annise Parker...
...fortune and lose one. Only 40% of greater Houston area residents live inside the Loop, the freeway that defines Houston's city limits, and only 1 million of the city's 2.2 million residents are registered voters. Many are immigrants who cannot vote. The key to winning any Houston mayoral race is coalition-building, and Parker's political career has been deliberate, "low risk" and "canny," according to Richard Murray, a veteran political analyst and political science professor at the University of Houston. Her political journey echoes, to some degree, that of Houston's only other female mayor, Kathy Whitmire...