Posted on 05/31/2005 9:11:54 PM PDT by Dan from Michigan
Ex-Detroit Mayor Archer backing ex-aide Hendrix for job
5/31/2005, 6:31 p.m. ET
By DEE-ANN DURBIN
The Associated Press
DETROIT (AP) — Former Mayor Dennis Archer endorsed his former aide Freman Hendrix in the Detroit mayor's race Tuesday, saying Hendrix has the honesty and integrity for the job.
"Rarely if ever has a candidate for mayor been so well-prepared for the job," Archer said. "Freman has the experience and maturity to lead this city forward and he has the judgment and temperament to bring everybody along."
Archer also presented the Hendrix campaign with a $10,000 check at a Tuesday afternoon news conference.
Hendrix formally entered the mayor's race earlier this month. He was deputy mayor for most of Archer's 1993-2001 term and served in a variety of positions with the Wayne County and Detroit governments before that.
Archer said Hendrix helped his administration achieve eight straight balanced budgets and attract billions in private investment. The city's bond ratings also rose from junk status to investment grade under Hendrix's watch, Archer said.
"Freman's fingerprints are all over the major successes of my administration," Archer said.
Detroit's nonpartisan mayoral primary is Aug. 2. The top two candidates face off in the Nov. 8 general election.
Besides Hendrix, City Councilwoman Sharon McPhail also is challenging Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick this year. McPhail lost to Archer in 1993.
Archer didn't seek a third four-year term in 2001 and didn't endorse Kilpatrick or his challenger in that November's election.
In an interview Tuesday, Kilpatrick told The Associated Press that he wasn't close to Archer before his election and rarely has talked to the former mayor during his term. Kilpatrick said he last met with Archer about six months ago.
"I knew that his deputy mayor was preparing to run against me about a year and a half ago, and I knew that (Archer) was going to support him, so I was very careful to not overextend myself," Kilpatrick said. "I respect the job that he did. I think every mayor who came here did the best with what he had."
Kilpatrick said he plans during his re-election campaign to talk more about the problems that accumulated during Archer's term and the improvements he has made since then.
"I would never beat him up, and I probably never will, but I have to show some contrast," Kilpatrick said.
As for "Navigator" Kwame - he needs to go.
Detroit is even deeper into the cesspool of racial politics than Atlanta. Good luck!
I'm almost at the point of 'Anyone but Kwame' for this post. The image of this sleaze, surrounded by a throng of thugs masquerading as a security detail says it all. He's a mini dictator and a crook IMO and the "Navigator" and credit card misuse are simply the tip of the iceberg. Again, IMO, the corruption is palpable and the City is being bankrupted by it.
Any relation to Jimi?
"As for "Navigator" Kwame - he needs to go."
Given the brain drain amongst the voters of Detroit, I'm not optimistic. Coleman Young "needed to go" for his last 4 terms or so, after all.
A lot of folks out there may not realize it, but Detroit actually USED to be a fairly Republican city (as was St. Louis). I don't think the city has had a great Mayor since, what, Albert Cobo ?
Brother... Coleman Young was probably in the top ten (if not top three) worst Mayors in America in the 20th Century. I can only recall John Lindsay (1966-73) of NYC being worse (if only because 1 million New Yorkers fled on his watch).
You're kidding, right???
STL has been a Donkeycrat fiefdom for time immemorial.
St. Louis was Republican until the '40s/'50s (Detroit was as well). My cousin was St. Louis's record-setting longest-serving Mayor from 1913-1925, Henry Kiel. Kiel was also a Republican and ran a "clean" city (in stark contrast to the corrupt Kansas City and Chicago) and as a builder, was responsible for many of the city's major capital projects (back when the city had nearly 1,000,000 residents, 3 times what it has today), and he is generally considered to be the city's greatest Mayor. Had the Depression not occurred, he would've ended his political service in the U.S. Senate. Alas, I didn't get to meet him as he died 30 years before I was born.
He was a contemporary of my great-grandfather and grandmother as they lived in St. Louis at the time he was Mayor.
That would make him a great-uncle, not a cousin, right? Unless some experimental work was being done on freezing & storing sperm was done at the end of the 19th century.....
Not a big deal, I just found the line funny. (I was looking through the archives for articles on Dennis Archer, to see how he compared to Kwame the (Killer?) Klown.)
I seem to remember hearing that Detroit's large Scots-Irish and German populations tended to support the GOP, as did the blacks until the second half of the century.
Nope, not a great uncle. Technically, he’d be a cousin twice(?) removed. My grandmother told me the story a quarter century ago while we were riding around St. Louis. She said, “Did you know your cousin was Mayor ?” Of course, she didn’t mention that he’d left office about 58 years earlier.
I never heard Cobo was corrupt. What accounts I’ve read of him, he’s cited as having been the last successful Mayor before the proverbial dam broke.
I thought his successor upon his death, Louis Miriani, was a Republican, but they’ve had him listed in every source as a “Non-Partisan”, but after Miriani’s upset loss to 33-year old (White) Democrat Jerome Cavanagh in 1961 on the strength of the Black vote, the city went downhill rapidly.
Cavanagh was their equivalent of John Lindsay who was actually a true-blue believer in liberal big government solutions, but it was like dropping napalm. Cavanagh, like Lindsay, though he was going to be President by the 1970s. When the city was racked by rioting at the end of his 2nd term (the irony was that Cavanagh quite literally bent over backwards to accommodate Blacks and the Civil Rights Movement, only to discover that didn’t stop them from rioting, looting, and burning down their own neighborhoods) and with Whites fleeing en masse, his political career ended. He died before the ‘70s concluded at just 51.
Roman Gribbs, the last White Mayor, served a single term after Cavanagh, but he got out of Dodge ahead of Coleman Young. He was more noteworthy in that he stopped Richard Austin from becoming the first Black Mayor (Austin got a nice consolation prize, the next year he was elected MI Secretary of State and held it for the next quarter century), Austin had previously lost out to John Conyers for Detroit’s newly-created 2nd Black majority district in 1964.
I doubt Austin would’ve been much more of a success than Coleman Young (as it was, Young had a singular distinction of seeing 500,000 people move out on his watch — half as many that moved out under Lindsay, but the nearly 1mil that left NYC in that period was only 1/8th the population, 500k was 1/3rd of Detroit’s population and it was practically all the remaining White citizens and a chunk of the Black middle class).
You know, with Detriot’s population loss, I’m wondering how much longer it’s going to be able to sustain two congressional seats. This keeps up, and one of those two seats is going to get scooted almost completely out of the city limits, and that’s probably not going to play well with the black leadership, especially if it costs them one of their own.
Detroit is going to lose the seat, like like CT and MA will lose one or two.
Detroit, population-wise, only has enough people to cover a single district with a small amount left over. They’ve been having to augment the size of the districts in keeping the two that are there now. Several decades ago, Detroit had several House districts.
To give you an idea, John Dingell, who succeeded his father upon his death in 1955, started out in an inner-city Detroit district. That district doesn’t exist anymore, Dingell had to keep moving westward to hold onto his seat and now is all the way out in Ann Arbor !
Even Conyers’s district has had to move westward and he effectively is based out of Dearborn. Carolyn Cheeks-Kilpatrick (Kwame’s mommy) who represents the oldest Black district in the state (which started in 1954 with Charles Diggs, Jr., who later went to prison and was then replaced with an infamous old Black Communist named George Crockett, who then in turn was replaced by the rabidly racist (who publicly declared she hated the White race) Barbara-Rose Collins (now back on the Detroit City Council)) has the bulk of Detroit itself, though has to spread north and south down the Detroit River and contains (to the chagrin of its residents) the tony White enclaves of the Grosse Pointes. It has also become Whiter, and now is only 61% Black (whereas before it was 70%+).
The two seats will just expand further out, but the Justice Department will demand both seats stay as Black as possible to ensure electing rodents, but MI’s likelihood of shedding a seat means those districts will likely continue to get Whiter. The Kilpatrick seat already went from roughly a 70-30% Black to White ratio to 60-40, and another round could see it at above 55% or so.
We discussed the CT & MA situation in another thread. CT will not lose a seat in 2013, they just lost one in ‘03. MA will definitely lose one seat in 2013, but not two.
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