What’s next for Sam Brownback? Racial reconciliation. ‘We really need to do it’
Over the past quarter-century, Sam Brownback has steadily climbed the political ladder, moving through the roles of congressman, senator, governor and finally ambassador. Until now.
Brownback, 64, stepped down as U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom last Wednesday as the Biden administration took office. It’s the first time since 1995 the Republican hasn’t either been in office or been preparing to enter one after winning an election.
Since then, Brownback, who lives on nearly 20 wooded acres near Topeka, has picked up a chain saw, taken a motorcycle ride and spent time visiting friends and family.
He’s also been thinking about how he can contribute to racial reconciliation.
“I think my side, conservatives, need to put forward a racial reconciliation agenda and how we would address it,” Brownback said in an interview with The Star.
Now a private citizen, Brownback said he plans to turn his attention to racial reconciliation in addition to continuing to promote religious freedom. He is also working on a book about religious freedom.
The interest in reconciliation marks a return to the past for Brownback. As both senator and governor, he advanced apologies for racial injustices, including sponsoring one to Native Americans that President Barack Obama signed into law in 2010.
It could also help burnish a mixed legacy. Brownback’s work on religious freedom has drawn bipartisan support. But the income tax cuts he pursued as governor left Kansas in a disastrous fiscal situation. He departed for Washington in early 2018 deeply unpopular.
During the 30-minute conversation on Friday, Brownback listed the creation of an international religious freedom alliance, the release of religious prisoners and the State Department’s labeling as genocide China’s treatment of Uighur Muslims as a among his top accomplishments as ambassador.
China represents a “huge threat,” because of how it has deployed technology — everything from cameras to GPS tracking — to persecute individuals. “That’s the future of oppression,” Brownback said.
He returned to Kansas in March as the pandemic began. While making a few trips, he’s mostly relied on video calls to carry out his diplomatic duties. He said his internet service is actually better in Kansas than it was in Washington.
“Before the pandemic, I had never done a Zoom call, ever,” Brownback said. “Diplomacy is all face to face and you’ve got to travel. I was traveling all over the place. But this has just made life a lot easier and we’ve still been able to move the ball well.”
Coy on politics
Brownback was sworn in as an ambassador in February 2018 after a nomination that languished for several months amid criticism of his record on gay rights and Islam. He was finally confirmed in a skin-of-the-teeth 50-49 vote, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tie-breaker.
Entering the State Department a little more than a year into President Donald Trump’s term, Brownback found that Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former Kansas congressman, drove the administration’s work on religious freedom early on.
“And the president was supportive of it, too, but being new to government, he just, he didn’t kind of know it very well for the first couple years and then he really took into it,” Brownback said. “But at first, it was really Pence and Pompeo and it was fabulous.”
Brownback declined to comment on any future political plans or offer an assessment of Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s performance.
“I was a diplomat up until Wednesday,” he said. “I was not allowed to comment on things like that and I think I’ll just stick with that for right now.”
Whether Brownback ultimately becomes a party grandee or pursues some other more substantive role, his mark on Kansas Republican politics endures — for good and bad of the party.
Jeff Colyer, the Johnson County plastic surgeon and Brownback’s lieutenant governor, is seen as a likely candidate for governor in 2022 after a year in the top job following Brownback’s resignation.
But Brownback’s record on tax cuts and massive budget shortfalls remains so toxic that Democrats do whatever they can to link Republican candidates to the former governor.
David Kensinger, a longtime Brownback confidant who was his first chief of staff as governor, praised Brownback’s past election victories but said for him it “was always about the ideas not about him.”
“If he sees a way to help make Kansas better, I could see him being involved in some issues such as racial reconciliation,” Kensinger said.
In the Senate, Brownback advanced an official apology in 2008 and 2009 for past violence of and mistreatment against Native Americans. It passed the Senate multiple times before a version was eventually included in a defense spending bill that became law.
Brownback was also a lead Senate sponsor on the bill signed by President George Bush creating National Museum of African American History and Culture that now sits on the Mall in Washington. He worked on its passage with Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights icon who died in 2020.
“We’ve got further to go but I think we’re getting better at it, too,” Brownback said of reconciliation. “And he used to say that to me. He could go to places in Georgia now that before they wouldn’t even allow him in.”
As governor, Brownback signed a proclamation apologizing to African Americans in 2012 during a commemoration of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, that declared school segregation unconstitutional. He also apologized in 2013 for the Potawatomi Trail of Death, a trail that ended in Kansas that hundreds in the Potawatomi tribe were forced to march as part of their removal from Indiana by the federal government. More than 40 died.
Still, Brownback’s time as governor also included enacting significant restrictions on public assistance and a controversy over the executive director position for the Kansas African American Affairs Commission. In 2015, the position was left vacant for seven months, leading to accusations that his office held the job open for partisan reasons.
Anthony Hensley, the Democratic leader in the state Senate during Brownback’s time as governor, also questioned the diversity of Brownback’s cabinet. “I don’t know if I saw or experienced Sam Brownback going out of his way to try to bring about racial reconciliation in his seven years as governor,” he said.
But Kansas Sen. David Haley, a Kansas City Democrat who has been in the Legislature since 1995, said of all the governors he has worked with, Brownback is the one most likely to be earnestly interested in racial reconciliation. Brownback’s efforts are “evident throughout every stage of his public service.”
“There are several examples that have punctuated Sam Brownback’s public service where he has sincerely attempted to make us a more race-neutral society,” said Haley, who is the nephew of “Roots” author Alex Haley.
Reconciling ‘innocent blood’
Brownback wasn’t specific on what his racial reconciliation work would entail, but he indicated a conservative agenda must begin by showcasing history and the wrongs committed. As an example, he cited Georgetown University, which apologized for its past role in the sale of nearly 300 people and is giving admissions preferences to their descendents.
“We really need to do it to get the healing we need in the land,” Brownback said.
Racial reconciliation means a lot of different things to different people, said Portia Ballard Espy, executive director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation in Jackson, Miss. Still, she emphasized the importance of relationship-building and that it should lead to some type of positive action, whether it’s policy changes or acknowledgments of past wrongs.
“I think you have to acknowledge that something has happened,” Espy said, adding that in some cases an apology is needed before people can move forward.
The death of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of a white police officer and the resulting protest movement last year “intensified the conversation” around reconciliation, Brownback said, adding that it galvanized another generation to move forward.
Brownback, a devout Catholic, painted reconciliation as a response to the spilling of innocent blood.
“In Judeo-Christian theology,” Brownback said, “that defiles the land when you spill innocent blood and has to be reconciled.”
This story was originally published January 27, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
