Emanuel Cleaver: minister wins in Kansas City - Newest Black Mayors

AN HOUR before his inauguration as the first Black mayor of Kansas City, Mo., the Rev. Emanuel Cleaver visited the grave of Bruce Watkins, a brilliant Black leader who died of cancer at the age of 56, a year after losing a pioneering campaign for mayor.

It was a gesture to both the past and the future.

For Watkins' ill-fated 1979 mayoral candidacy paved the way for the future triumphs of both Cleaver and Rep. Alan Wheat, D-Mo., in the predominantly White city--Blacks constitute 13 percent of the population--of 435,000.

"Bruce would have made an excellent mayor," Cleaver reminisces. "I was his handpicked selection to run for his City Council seat 12 years ago. I didn't want to start the day off without placing flowers on his grave with his family."

Having saluted the past, Cleaver rushed to City Hall where 5,000 well-wishers cheered the future he summoned in his brief inaugural address as the first Black mayor of Kansas City.

"I believe with the light of many lamps held by many Kansas Citians, I and the new City Council [12 members] will find the path through which the city must travel," he declared. "We have the opportunity to create any kind of city we want. We are only limited by our imagination."

As he spoke, the 46-year-old Cleaver felt the pride and warmth welling up from his audience. "It was so strong, it lifted up a pigeon-toed country preacher like me," he later recalled, his six-foot, 190-pound frame hinting at his glory days as a Murray State College football linebacker.

Back then, torn ligaments in his left knee from a blind-side block led to four operations and abandonment of his pro football ambitions. God redirected his life, he believes, steering him to graduaiton in 1968 from Prairie View A & M College, a master of divinity degree from Saint Paul School to Theology in Kansas City, and marriage 20 years ago to his wife, Dianne, a psychologist.

Cleaver's quite confidence as a father of four, his 12 productive years as a Democratic city councilman representing a half White/half Black district, his 18-year pastorate of St. James United Methodist Church, his civil rights activism as midwest regional vice president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference--all converged at the ballot box on March 26, the 13th birthday of his daughter, Marissa. Cleaver, who defeated Bob Lewellen, a fellow councilman and prominent White businessman, by a 53 to 47 percent margin, is one of an increasing number of Blacks elected in predominantly White cites. Kansas City has a city manager-type government.

Today, the mayor's foes are Kansas City's high unemployment, a high incidence of crime, a 47-to-55 percent school dropout rate, a municipal infrastructure needing an estimated $1 billion in repairs, 13 years of resistance to school desegregation, fragile race relations--and crack.

But Cleaver, who transcended his birth in a former slave cabin in Waxahachie, Texas, is optimistic about Kansas City's future. its finances are sound, he explains, because Missouri law prohibits cities from spending beyond receipts and eventually defaulting. Unlike many other U.S. cities where corporations and taxpayers are fleeing to suburbia, Kansas City's economy is neither wrecked nor on the verge of collapse, the minister reports. Instead, the city has completed $1.5 billion in capital improvements during the past decade, including a complete rebuilding of the downtown skyline. "I wouldn't have run to become mayor of a city in 'intensive care,'" Cleaver declares.

He intends for Missouri's largest city to grow even more and to compete with other major metropolitan areas for convention and tourist trade. "We consider ourselves," he says, "a major league city."

COPYRIGHT 1991 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group