The tireless Carol Coe rocked the boat in Kansas City, but her heart was in it
Carol Coe was one of the most important Kansas City politicians of the last 50 years. She was brilliant, aggressive, tireless. Also: controversial, argumentative, sometimes contradictory.
I covered Carol most closely while she served on the City Council. She didn’t give reporters a break very often. Her answers were a rapid-fire mix of fact, accusation and exasperation. You had to be ready.
If she didn’t like a story, she would tell you, and then suggest your error reflected either a deep moral failing or simple ignorance, or some combination of both.
She tangled with her colleagues constantly. Coe served one four-year term on the City Council largely because she angered then-Mayor Emanuel Cleaver and his allies for refusing to be a loyal member of his team.
Her disputes cost her the endorsement of the once-powerful political club Freedom, Inc., which likely explains her defeat in 1995.
Here’s the thing: Carol wasn’t on anyone’s team, except for the people she represented. For them, she fought over issues large and small — more money for her district, more Black lawyers and engineers and advisers on city contracts, more protection from shootings and murders.
Disrespect was never tolerated. Carol Coe never swallowed her tongue.
Thirty years ago, Coe invited colleagues to spend the night with her in an apartment in the T.B. Watkins public housing project. Public housing was a dangerous disaster back then.
It was classic Coe: an important issue dramatized for best effect. It took a while, but the quality of public housing in Kansas City improved. Carol is a reason why.
She was politically complex. Did you know Coe — a lawyer — initially supported Clarence Thomas for the U.S. Supreme Court? “People assume Blacks are for abortion,” she said in a news conference backing Thomas. “They’re wrong.”
She was lukewarm about integration — or, more correctly, believed Black self-sufficiency and empowerment were more important than sitting in the same room with white people. That argument put her at odds with many local Black leaders during the desegregation years, but she was not deterred.
Coe was worldly, well-traveled, equally at home in the White House or at Gates Bar-B-Q. She knew the politician’s trick of asking for twice what you want so you can settle for half. She backed down from no one.
Her colleagues knew all of this. But it wasn’t the Carol Coe most of the public knew, which is sad, and unfair.
Coe could not keep herself out of trouble. She tangled with a federal judge while representing a firefighter accused of dealing drugs, earning an official reprimand. She was accused of, and eventually punished for, misusing campaign funds. She had other scrapes with the law.
Once, Coe took part in an “American Gladiator”-style charity joust with a local radio host. The padded-stick fight turned ugly, her son jumped in, so did police, so did Coe. Charges were brought. A jury found her not guilty.
It was never clear if Coe’s battles were tactical or accidental. Did she want to keep her name in the papers, or was it just her nature to fight about everything? Even today, it’s hard to say.
Sadly, though, the incidents turned her into a caricature, daily fodder for a shock jock, political cartoonist, columnist or TV reporter. Her real work was forgotten. That’s a tragedy, and it isn’t how she should be remembered.
After her public political career ended, she would surface from time to time with advice or help for the next generation of Black leadership. Those who were paying attention listened, as we should listen now.
In 1996, Carol Coe said she had turned to God for help. “When you live your life in a fishbowl, you become a frantic personality,” she said at the time. “I choose to go serve the Lord.”
One guesses she is with him now, and doing most of the talking. He’d better be ready.
