Ashanti Hamilton, Facebook
It’s ridiculously early to raise this possibility, of course, but there’s good reason to consider the unanimous election of Ald. Ashanti Hamilton as Milwaukee Common Council president, which took local media by total surprise, a major step toward Hamilton becoming the city’s first elected black mayor.
Hamilton would actually be Milwaukee’s second black mayor even though some folks did their best to downgrade the permanent place Marvin Pratt earned in history as the city’s first African American mayor.
Pratt, another Common Council president and respected black leader, held the office for three months in 2004 after Mayor John Norquist resigned in a sexual harassment scandal.
America’s glacial racial progress makes the first African American occupant of any major political office a big deal, but The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel never really treated Pratt as the city’s actual mayor.
The newspaper made a point of calling him Acting Mayor Pratt, as if he were only pretending to be mayor. It never used such belittling titles as Acting Governor Scott McCallum or Acting President Gerald Ford when those men succeeded predecessors who resigned.
Pratt then surprised the newspaper by finishing first in the spring primary for a full term ahead of both former Congressman Tom Barrett, who won the final election, and the distant third place Sheriff David Clarke, the right-wing African American the newspaper always gives greater coverage than more legitimate, less extreme candidates.
Pratt’s chances against Barrett were damaged eight days before the election when District Attorney E. Michael McCann held a press conference charging Pratt with civil violations of campaign finance laws for what McCann described as “sloppy” financial records. Pratt paid a $2,500 fine, but the real penalty was the sabotage to his campaign.
Since Pratt moved into the mayor’s job from the council presidency, the black community has considered it a mayor-in-waiting position. The wait can be excruciating given Milwaukee’s history of re-electing incumbent mayors again and again, sometimes for decades.
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Ald. Willie Hines, Pratt’s decent, low-key successor, got tired of waiting and resigned in 2014 after 10 years as council president. He planned on taking a management job with the City Housing Authority but ran into complications, prompting him to leave government entirely and move into the private sector.
Few had any major problems with the two-year Common Council presidency of Ald. Michael Murphy, a white alderman. But as Milwaukee’s racial demographics continue to change, a new generation of African American leaders are assuming power and Hamilton is one of them.
That idea always drives white right-wing talk shows crazy. They start perverting quotations from Martin Luther King Jr. to argue we should choose our leaders based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
That’s easy to say for anyone who has benefited from white privilege and never had either their character or ability to do a job doubted based on the color of their skin.
That doesn’t mean decent, empathetic white liberal political leaders like Barrett and Murphy can’t make life better in this city for people of every racial background.
I’ve known decent, empathetic white liberals all my life who’ve taken action and supported policies to greatly improve the lives of people much less fortunate than themselves. Heck, I’d like to think I’ve been one.
But I also realize no white person can ever really know the true depths of the problems facing people of color growing up in our city’s most vicious economic circumstances in its most violent neighborhoods.
Hamilton and many other black leaders know them all too well. Hamilton shared that life in the excellent “Precious Lives” community media project detailing the catastrophic effects of commonplace gun violence on young lives in Milwaukee.
“I lived in a house that was shot up numerous times,” Hamilton calmly recalled. “People used to sell drugs off of the porch. ... [I had] little brothers and sisters, nieces, and nephews, all in that house. I can see the bullets coming through the window and the curtains flying.”
Hamilton speaks passionately about real solutions that go beyond ignorantly blaming the black people who live everyday with such horror and instead creating a more just community, improving educational and employment opportunities and reforming the criminal justice system so it improves lives instead of destroying hope and safety in impoverished neighborhoods.
The Journal Sentinel didn’t have a clue Hamilton would win the mayor-in-waiting job until he informed them a few days before. But if the newspaper continues covering the city under its new, outside ownership, it will learn the Common Council has a talented new leader with more reasons than most to want to make a difference.
The newspaper also should lose the patronizing condescension it sometimes adopts to imply blacks might not be up to important jobs. Hamilton won’t just be acting like he’s Common Council president. He’s for real.
