Build the Country We Want
Insiders At Last: With 42 African Americans in the House of Representatives, the Congressional Black Caucus has real political clout. Photo by Lawrence Jackson – AP/Wide World.
Representative Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D-MI) issued an impassioned challenge for change as she took the helm of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in January. “Are you ready to stand up, rise up, and build? To join something? To put your dollars where your mouth is?” she asked a standing-room crowd at the Library of Congress, on a day when the national spotlight was on new Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
Build the country you want, Kilpatrick told them. “Don't look for Malcolm. Martin is gone. Sojourner did her part already. Mrs. King — God bless her….” And action is needed not just nationally but in all towns and cities. “Take your neighborhood back…. Stand up and be something.”
In an interview with NRTA Live & Learn, Kilpatrick reiterated the message: “People can no longer sit on the sidelines,” she said. “We've got to reach out and step up. America is in crisis.” The focus can't be on just the black community; the whole country needs leadership for its young, old, and vulnerable.
What's at Stake Today
Kilpatrick is tall and elegant at 61, with a career that spans teaching, community activism, 18 years as a Michigan state representative, and a decade in Congress. She is the fifth woman to chair the caucus. This former high-school teacher from Detroit takes over the CBC when the stakes are enormous, not just for the newly-empowered congressional Democrats but for the 2008 presidential race. A record 42 House members, plus Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), are members of the caucus. They are taking key committee posts and will help set the agenda, from the inside. “This has not happened in the history of our country,” says Democratic strategist Donna Brazile.
Coordinating CBC goals with the overall Democratic caucus will be a tightwire act. The federal budget is $2.8 trillion. Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost $500 billion never included in the military budget. “All this money and our children can't get a decent education,” says Kilpatrick, who's on the House Appropriations Committee; she laments a health system that forces too many older citizens to “choose between medicine and the rent.”
Using Her Teacher's Skills
Kilpatrick says she learned to organize her life as a child but she honed those skills as a teacher in Detroit high schools for 8 years. What translates from the classroom to a political career? “I continue to use that skill of organization as well as coalition building,” she says.
Georgia state legislator Calvin Smyre, president of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, has watched her apply those skills for decades starting when she was in the Michigan legislature. She “understands discipline and planning,” Smyre says, and she believes in “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” but also shows compassion “in giving people a second chance in life.”
Kilpatrick's mom was a homemaker, her father an auto worker who started his own carpentry business. Marvell Cheeks, now 87, attended the CBC inaugural as did her son Kwame Kilpatrick, the recently reelected mayor of Detroit. She also has a daughter, Ayanna, and five grandsons. Growing up in West Detroit as the middle of five children with many aunts and uncles, she encountered racism for the first time when she ran for class president, the first African American to do so in her majority-white high school. She ignored critics and won. “I never let it slow me. I think discrimination is a fact of life, unfortunately. I think you persevere – being the best, organizing yourself and your life and seizing the opportunities that come.”
She's done just that. After working briefly as a secretary, she returned to school: from Ferris State to Western Michigan University for a bachelor's and to the University of Michigan for a master's in education. She aimed to be a school principal.
Kilpatrick also armed herself with political skills as an activist in her church, the Shrine of the Black Madonna, a powerhouse in Michigan African American politics. In 1978, after she tried unsuccessfully to recruit someone to run for an open seat in the state legislature, she was drafted to run herself. She won.
It was a good fit, and for 18 years she not only nurtured education financing but mastered the intricacies of the state's overall finances. She sought out key financial committees and was the first African American woman on the Michigan House Appropriations Committee. In 1996, she won the primary over a black congresswoman beset by ethical and financial troubles. She has had minimal opposition since then. Hers is an unusually diverse district, from inner city Detroit to wealthy suburbs, with constituents who include Jews, African Americans, Latinos, Poles, and the nation's largest bloc of Arab Americans. Today, both her son and her sister hold elective office in Michigan.
Economic Savvy
She focuses on economic independence issues: helping medium-income people buy homes, getting more venture capital to minority-owned businesses, bringing a NASA engineering and aeronautics program into district schools, winning federal funds for the nonprofit National Biofuel Energy Lab which seeks to commercialize alternative energy technologies, including for the auto industry.
Kilpatrick educates and cajoles and scolds – not as a teacher but as a lawmaker. She has held town hall meetings and forums to look at barriers to minority-owned advertising agencies in getting mainstream business dollars. She has urged African Americans to donate more organs, for they constitute over a third of those waiting for kidney transplants but make up less than 12 percent of the donors. She has met with then-Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi about ways to prod nonminority House members to hire more African Americans.
New Role Calls for Patience
Her CBC colleagues praise her as a leader with a vision, as “a very no-nonsense type of person” who quickly gets to the heart of an issue and has minimal tolerance for gab. They'll be looking to see whether she can rally caucus members, all of them leaders in their own states, behind a common agenda. Outgoing CBC chair, Representative Melvin Watt (D-NC), says Kilpatrick will need more patience. “She has the intelligence, commitment, knowledge, skills – everything else is there.“
Kilpatrick concedes that she's a “right-now person" but knows that "you have to listen, to hear people's ideas,” even when they go off-message. “You can't shut them down and then ask for their support later.”
In addition to upgrading the CBC's ability to give and get information from the grass roots, she wants to get members out of Washington more, and she wants to partner with local folks, including retirees, not just to publicize their problems but to use their talents.
She's raring to go. “It's Organization 101. Let us rise up across racial and gender and geographical lines. When we do, our country will be better; our lives will be better.”
About the Author
After many years in Warsaw, Poland, Peggy Simpson now writes from Washington, DC.
This article originally appeared in NRTA Live & Learn, Winter 2007.
