Civil Rights (and wrongs) at Duval County MLK Jr. Breakfast

The Mayor’s Policy Proposals Get Criticized from the Right, as His Non-Position on Courthouse Weddings Gets Critiqued Elsewhere

Jacksonville’s 28^th Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Breakfast, held at the Prime Osborn Convention Center today, seemed like it would be a relatively anodyne affair at the outset. But this is the political season in Jacksonville and even the most expressly non-political events take on a distinctly partisan patina. The MLK Breakfast may be remembered, in the end, as much for what wasn’t said as what was.

The Mayor’s Office used this event as an occasion to launch what it called “crime prevention and intervention strategies” that focused on keeping “young people out of trouble” as a “next step for Renew Jax.” These strategies include the following:

— Re-opening community centers and extending community center hours
— Expanding summer urban parks initiative
— Developing a Youth Sports Initiative
— Increasing summer job opportunities for teens
— Adding Neighbor Accountability Board in Arlington for first-time juvenile offenders
— Establishing an evening reporting center for juvenile offenders
— Partnering with faith-based leaders
— Organizing “neighborhood-based community empowerment days.”

These strategies are consistent with the Brown Administration’s longstanding approaches to crime prevention and urban renewal. That said, there are open questions in the community as to how successful these will be. Most locals are aware of the endorsement of Brown’s principal opponent, Lenny Curry, by Sheriff John Rutherford, a key early endorsement that, to many casual observers of the scene, speaks to a larger disconnect between the Mayor’s Office and the leadership of the law enforcement community.

This is a belief that Lenny Curry shares.

“Recent reports tell us Jacksonville had 121 homicides in 2014 and 115 in 2013. Those are the highest they’ve been since before Alvin Brown took office. Other violent crimes show the same catastrophic trends,” Curry maintained in a written response after the event, when asked about the proposals the mayor made today.

“Sheriff Rutherford in his endorsement of my campaign explained that there are 147 fewer cops on our streets than when the mayor took office. In other words, Alvin Brown’s fiscal mismanagement resulted in more crime on our streets. Another series of press releases and photo ops 2 months away from an election is not the solution. Sadly for many Jacksonville families, Brown’s interest in crime is too little, too late.”

On paper, the proposals look rather tepid. That said, when Brown spoke from the dais, he delivered his message with an urgency and passion that connected with the largely faith-based community in attendance this crisp Friday morning.

Early in his oration, he set the tone with the call “let’s give the Lord a hand,” delineating his devout Southern Baptist beliefs, upbringing, and persona with rolling cadences. Denoting his concern for the city as a “mayor, husband, and father,” Brown issued the clarion call to “save every generation in this city – do you agree with that?”

And who would disagree with that statement? It is classic Alvin Brown: the kind of statement that sounds good, but that critics will lambaste as being long on emotionalism and short on specifics.

Keynote Speaker Marc Morial, the CEO of the National Urban League, had some interesting comments related to this election season MLK Breakfast also.

Telling the crowd that “Dr. King was not focused on the election cycle or on the news cycle” – a statement that will be news to those familiar with the history of Dr. King as it relates to the Nixon/Kennedy race of 1960 – Morial made an interesting assertion that he knew that Alvin Brown wanted to “build bridges” as “Citizen #1 of this City”.

And yes, his proposals will do some good in beleaguered urban communities, and will help kids who may have been at-risk to get on the right path. That said, the post-event press conference deviated from the script and moved toward a discussion of a civil rights issue that is very salient to Alvin Brown’s cadre of LGBT and Straight Ally supporters: Clerk of Court Ronnie Fussell’s unilateral decision earlier this month to stop the longstanding practice of courthouse weddings, which famously made his staff feel “uncomfortable” when they involved same-sex couples.

Stephen Dare of MetroJacksonville.com got the ball rolling, asking Mayor Brown his position on courthouse wedding ceremonies, at which point the mayor reiterated the non-answer he’d been giving local media since the Fussell decision, saying that it’s “very clear that the court has made a decision, and [we] have to respect and follow the law” – an utterly ambiguous bowl of word salad with passive-voice dressing that said precisely nothing.

As the press conference was being concluded, this reporter posed a follow-up question to Dare’s, asking the mayor whether he supported or opposed the Fussell decision, in the hopes of getting, finally, a clear position stated.

Mayor Brown mentioned that “judges are now having weddings” in chambers and that the American Bar Association has stepped up and filled the void that Duval County left when it decided to deny the longstanding public accommodation of courthouse weddings. Interesting that, on a day devoted to commemorating Doctor King’s long, often lonely fight for civil rights, a war that left him slain by an assassin’s bullet in 1968, Jacksonville’s mayor dodged the question of whether LGBT members – who pay taxes and helped to finance our city’s $500M courthouse – are entitled to the simple courtesy of a courthouse wedding.

Dare and I talked after the event, where he compared Brown’s comments re: courthouse weddings to the comments made by former Jacksonville Mayor Lou Ritter, when the decision was made to destroy public pools rather than abide by judicial mandates to integrate them.

This policy divide in the Duval Democratic Party speaks to a larger fission between liberal whites and African -American Democrats on this issue. Many people say, in private, that the mayor is opposed to same-sex marriage on religious principles, and that influences his inability to be candid on this issue despite repeated questions on it from the media in the last couple of weeks. Perhaps issuing licenses will be enough to mollify some supporters. But for others, who expected Mayor Alvin Brown to stand by them on issues like this and the Human Rights Ordinance earlier in his term, this consistent refusal to take a position will be a dealbreaker.

Mayor Brown went into this event with a clear agenda, and found it questioned from the right and the left at the end. Perhaps that is centrism that appeals to the Silent Majority. But when former Republican mayors of the city are more fully evolved and consistent on the simple issue of allowing same-sex couples to have a civil wedding ceremony in a publicly funded courthouse than the Democratic incumbent, it is clear: Alvin Brown’s attempts to mollify social conservatives are out of step with the times and with the donor class, and are a primer on how to alienate former supporters and put his re-election bid at risk.