Mr. Happy Man Goes to Washington
Ron Kirk would like to ride his record as the mayor of Dallas and his jovial personality into the U.S. Senate. Alas, the Republicans keep bringing up race—and so do the Democrats.
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The mood is more somber at the El Paso Youth Tennis Center, which Kirk, trailed by the omnipresent TV cameras, visits during a break from the convention. The center, a partnership between the city and the private sector, rewards athletes who stay in school with college scholarships. About 75 squirming, sweating kids have gathered under a shaded patio to hear Kirk praise the program while the camera crews grind away. “We’re doing this because we love you boys and girls,” he says. “All this helps you be a better person.” Once again, when the camera turns on, Kirk seems to turn off. Afterward, he is signing tennis balls when a handsome thirteen-year-old Hispanic boy confesses that he has dropped out of school. Kirk’s pen freezes in midair. “Uh-oh,” he says. “Come on over here.” They walk over to a picnic table away from the crowd. He sits next to him, leans his face close to the boy’s ear, and drops his voice to a whisper, his forehead furrowed with intensity. Later, I ask him what he said. “I just wanted to tell him not to be afraid to go back,” he says. “Don’t let being macho or embarrassed keep him from going back.”
When the media event is over, he steps into the sun for his umpteenth television interview of the day. “I glow like a lightbulb when you get me out of the shade,” he jokes to the interviewer while he mops his bald pate. Then it’s back on camera and on message. “It’s not enough to tell kids to just say no,” he says. “We have to give them something to say yes to.”
IN KIRK’S OWN LIFE, what he had to say yes to was, most of all, his mother. Willie Mae Kirk, now eighty, still lives in the unimposing brick house on Austin’s east side the family moved to when Ron was around ten. His father died in 1982. Unlike the house, she is imposing. Sitting in her immaculate family room, she leans back in her chair and gives me a look perfected by 32 years of teaching fifth graders. “Don’t argue with your kids,” she says. “You have to mean business. I stuck to my guns. When I’m ready to go, you be in that car. I’d go off and leave them in a minute. If you start talking, you’re lost.”
It is apparent that Willie Mae Kirk is never lost. Through segregation, through her husband’s slide into alcoholism, through the civil rights revolution, she maintained a home of strict discipline, strong neighborhood ties, and high expectations for her children. She grew up in nearby Manor, the next to last of fourteen kids. Orphaned when she was twelve, she was raised by a sister in Austin. After she graduated from high school, she marched into the president’s office at Sam Huston College (today, Huston-Tillotson), a small all-black school a few blocks from her sister’s home, and announced that she couldn’t enroll without financial aid. She got a scholarship that day. At school she met Lee Kirk, and they soon married. World War II had begun, and Lee enlisted in the Army upon graduating. By the time he was transferred to Washington, D.C., Willie Mae was pregnant. After the war came a second daughter, then two sons (Ron is the youngest). Lee had ambitions to go to medical school, but they were shelved as his young family grew. Instead, he went to work at the post office, where he was the first black mail clerk in Austin. But, Willie Mae adds, he was passed over for promotions because of his race: “They just weren’t going to have a black supervisor.”
The humiliation, she says, led to her husband’s alcoholism. Lee Kirk’s acumen in math and science had won him admission to Sam Huston at age fourteen, but it couldn’t get him a promotion. His kids never saw him drunk. Whatever effect it had on the family, Kirk keeps to himself. “My father was an alcoholic who never missed a bill,” he says, “never missed a day’s work.”
Both Kirks became leaders in the emerging civil rights struggles of the fifties and sixties. Saundra, the eldest of the children, remembers the day she was called to the principal’s office with the five other black students at her junior high and told she would be getting a day off from school. The rest of her ninth-grade class, which by that time was integrated, was going swimming at Barton Springs, which was still whites-only. “We reported it to our parents,” Saundra remembers. “My father and the other parents went to school. It was determined we would be allowed to swim.” Saundra and the other black kids became the first non-whites to swim at Barton Springs. Her mother was so excited that she bought her a brand-new bathing suit.
Eventually Ron would become one of the first black lifeguards at Barton Springs, but before that he had his own brushes with segregation. Once, around the age of eight, he attended a movie at the Paramount Theatre downtown. “The black kids went upstairs to the balcony, and there was an elderly gentleman with a little crate who would sell us snacks,” he recalls. “And I said, ‘Isn’t this neat that we don’t have to go downstairs and get in line for our snacks?’ My brother said, ‘You are an idiot. You can’t go downstairs.’”
He remembers the East Austin of his childhood as a close-knit community, a place where his family helped build his uncle’s church by hand—Ron toted cinder blocks, a cousin laid the concrete. The community had its own special rituals, like the Saturday morning trip to a nearby barbershop; if any of the kids had achieved something, Clyde the barber would tell everybody about it. “I remember how special it was to get into that chair,” he says. “You had the attention of the neighborhood on you for fifteen minutes.” Saundra describes the neighborhood as intimate. “We were close to the parents of our friends,” she says. “I accepted their discipline and values and code of conduct. People were not afraid to tell somebody else’s child how to behave.”
Willie Mae had an open-kitchen policy. Neighborhood kids ate there, as did visiting black entertainers. Ron remembers that the Supremes were Willie Mae’s guests; Saundra still has a photo of Louis Armstrong, another guest, which he autographed. On Sundays Willie Mae would send her children out with plates of food for elderly neighbors. In the summers she worked as a playground supervisor and often brought home children who had no lunch. “Sometimes I would have to split one wiener down the middle to put between two buns to provide for everyone,” she recalls. “I didn’t have to say to my kids, ‘You must share.’ They saw it growing up.” Stuart King, a childhood friend who now operates a mortuary in East Austin, says, “He was always doing stuff for kids who didn’t have school supplies, didn’t have lunch money. This was even in first and second grade.” This practice proved useful, says King, when Kirk began his political career in the sixth-grade race for student council president: “We took candy to all the kids to vote for Ronald, and he won.”
But change was coming to East Austin, as it was coming to every black neighborhood in America in the sixties: school integration, civil rights laws, school busing, riots in the urban ghettos, black power, and issues of racial identity. In junior high Kirk was thrust from his cocoonlike world when his parents sent him across Interstate 35 to University Junior High, on the UT campus, where the student body was one third Anglo, one third black, and one third Hispanic. “We had the riot of the week,” says Kirk. “One week the whites and Hispanics would beat up the black kids, the next week it was the whites and blacks beating up the Hispanics.” Things weren’t any easier when he returned home. “The kids from Kealing [the all-black neighborhood junior high] picked on us for going to school with white kids. At school we were too black for our classmates, and then all of a sudden, we weren’t black enough. They said I ‘talked white.’ I said, ‘My mother’s a schoolteacher; I have no choice.’” Those years, Kirk now says, “were an important journey for me. I learned that good friends were special enough that you ought not to be preoccupied with the package they come in.”
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