Ambassador Ron Kirk on the motivating forces behind his successful career

Former mayor of Dallas, a US trade representative under Barack Obama, a former Texas secretary of state and a lawyer whose professional life is motivated by one central factor: justice. 

George Mason:
Hello, I'm George Mason, host of Good God: Conversations That Matter About Faith and Public Life. What does justice have to do with the common good? My guest today is Ron Kirk, former mayor of Dallas. And he'll be talking about just that connection.

George Mason:
Welcome to Good God: Conversations That Matter About Faith and Public Life. I'm joined today by the honorable Ron Kirk. Ron, welcome.

Ron Kirk:
Why did you smile when you said honorable? You had a hard time getting [inaudible 00:00:40].

George Mason:
Well because I played golf with you, as a matter of fact.

Ron Kirk:
I tell you what, the name of God is not invoked anymore than on the golf course.

George Mason:
That's true.

Ron Kirk:
As we like to say, "walking with Jesus."

George Mason:
Well, in any case for those who might be in other places besides Dallas, or maybe even outside the US who wouldn't know who you are, let me just say that we should introduce you as the former mayor of Dallas and a US trade representative under Barack Obama, and a former Texas secretary of state, a lawyer. And Ron, you have really made a career I would say, of people who would say about you in all areas of your public life, that you are a person who brings people together.

George Mason:
This program is called Good God, and the good has to do somewhat with the common good. And so I'm wondering if you were to look at the strains of your career and how you think about public service, that whole idea of bringing people together, has that been an organizing principle for you?

Ron Kirk:
George it has, and the interesting thing when I get to be with friends like you, and I appreciate the introduction, is it's going to seem maybe entirely non believable. But most of what motivated my professional life was a desire just to make sure that every kid, at least in our country, had the opportunity to do what they wanted to do, as opposed to the lives that my parents led growing up in the segregated South and Jim Crow, and that I experienced a little bit as a kid born into the fifties and attended segregating schools.

Ron Kirk:
And so my real passion was the law, and you snuck that in. But all just around this notion that, and I'll try to shorten it because I know we're going to talk about a lot of things. But I heard somebody talk about Jackie Robinson's impact on baseball. And since we're in baseball season which tends to be dominated by statistics, and this crusty old white guy that had played ball with Jackie Robinson sat there and said, "baseball became a better game when everybody got to play."

George Mason:
Nice.

Ron Kirk:
And more than anything, I think you can apply that to America, any institution, just give everybody a chance to play. Let them determine how far they can go based on their talents and their ambitions. But sadly, that reality wasn't so when I grew up. And you mentioned, I worked under Ann Richards and we spoke at a ceremony that one of my law partners was honored for justice. And Anne used a very interesting introduction. And she talked about how all of us, at least in the Christian faith, grew up singing this song that Jesus loves all the little children. All the children of the world, no matter what color, but her point was sadly that wasn't always true in application. And that part of our mission, whether it's as a lawyer, as a public servant, whatever we do is to just make sure all these little children have an equal shot. Give them the same love, the same opportunities that our God, or whatever God we worship says each of us ought to have.

Ron Kirk:
So that was my principle motivation for being a lawyer, just the whole battle for equal rights. But embedded in that was an understanding that my parents had worked way too hard to do something as simple as have the right to vote, not pay a poll tax. And so within that, the notion of not being involved in the civic life of our communities just wasn't in my DNA. And I would say for most kids my age and I'm 64. And so I tried to carry that at least belief with me in everything I've done, that whatever we do, is it been done in a way that everybody gets to participate if they choose to?

George Mason:
It's interesting, you draw upon your own family experience and how much that was a motivator for you. I was remembering back when I was a young pastor and arguing in my denomination and in our local church for the right for women to be ordained as deacons and pastors. And someone stopped me and said, "okay, what is this with you? What's motivating you?" And I had to really think about it and realized, my mother probably was born out of season, Ron. She's probably a better pastor than I am and would have made a great pastor if she was born in a different time. And it occurred to me that, unbeknownst to me maybe, this was not just about a principal so much as it was a personal motivation, that then the principal becomes important, but you're really motivated by the story, by the nature of that what's going on in your own family history.

Ron Kirk:
Well, I think for those of us that are of the generation that have seen people denied the right to live where they wanted, love who they wanted study where they wanted, be what they wanted, just for some arbitrary decision that girls can't come here, black people can't, Hispanic... But you see that. And you realize how corrosive that effect can be on somebody's life, of having their dream denied and having to not be what God intended for them to be. It's not only hurtful to them, but it's hurtful to society. I was at a dinner Friday night with the management committee of our law firm. And it's a great law firm, [inaudible 00:06:43] say Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher. And we started in LA and our managing partner had some real nice words about me and was bragging on all that I did in Dallas.

Ron Kirk:
And I love needling and reminded my friends in California who imbue themselves with this fiction that California is so much more progressive than Texas. But I remind them that both of their African American mayors, first African American mayors, Tom Bradley and Willie Brown, were born in Texas.

George Mason:
How about that?

Ron Kirk:
And I always defined myself as the fifth first black mayor of Dallas, because Tom Bradley, who was the first black mayor of LA almost became governor, Willie Brown in San Francisco, Maynard Jackson-

George Mason:
Maynard Jackson in Atlanta-

Ron Kirk:
Was born in Dallas.

George Mason:
Absolutely. New Hope Baptist Church.

Ron Kirk:
[crosstalk 00:07:30] grandfather and Emanuel Cleaver. But one, it both shows one people that really, really are determined to do what they're going to do are going to... What's that saying? You're going to plant where you can flower. You're going to go... And when you deny people that, they're going to take their talents elsewhere. And that's part of what I find fascinating about this debate about immigration for a country that knew what we benefited from, particularly all the discrimination around the world, whether it was the Irish, or the Italians, or the Jews and all those people who came to this country after the turn of last century and flowered here and made us a better nation. We should know better.

Ron Kirk:
But to your main point, our mothers were the same. It was later in life. And my mom was a school teacher, because that's what girls could do then.

George Mason:
Exactly.

Ron Kirk:
But my mother always had a passion for law, but there were no schools that would admit women or people of color in Texas when they grew up. And of all the things she was proud of, and she was one of those lifelong teachers and there's a library name for her in East Austin, she was as proud of her service as a grand juror, as anything else in Travis County, because she had seen so many young, black and brown kids wrongly convicted. Some put to death for crimes they didn't commit, and just was determined that if she could play any little in creating a more just society that she would. And I'm not so sure a lot of that, just as your mother shaped you, flowed into my veins.

George Mason:
So let's talk about justice a little bit. I think it's a word that we use in legal settings of course, but it's also a biblical word. And it has deep roots in our biblical story and tradition about how the children of Israel were treated unjustly in Egypt. And then coming out of Egypt, they were given the law which was intended to create a just society. How do we organize society in such a way that it's just? And this has been rooted in our biblical story and all of that-

Ron Kirk:
Remember you're talking to Ron Kirk, not Gordon Keith. [inaudible 00:00:09:50].

George Mason:
I know where you go to church. That's right. Michael would get on me if I didn't push you about your faith experience too. We'll get to that in a little while. But tell me what your vision of justice is. When people talk about justice, what does it mean to you?

Ron Kirk:
It's interesting you said that, because I was privileged to preside over governor Richard's funeral, and it was decidedly a more secular service and they gave me just a few minutes to have my own personal comments about her. And I called on one of my good friends, Dale Williams, my favorite Sunday school teacher. And he helped me remember a passage from the book of Micah, that at the end of the day, all God ask of us is basically three things. Do justice, have mercy, and walk humbly with your God. And so within that... It's one of those things we can make it more difficult, but I think justice is a word that inherently means be fair.

George Mason:
Yes.

Ron Kirk:
Treat everybody the same. As a lawyer, man can we try to spin that into something else. But no. And as a kid... It's funny again, when I started thinking about the law, sadly there was only one African American lawyer in Dalston at the time. I didn't know what he did. So everything I knew about the law was based on this bad, in my mind, bodacious guy, Thurgood Marshall, who was coming into the South at extraordinary danger to himself to file lawsuits in Dallas and in Austin, against my beloved university of Texas. People only associate Thurgood Marshall with brown versus board of education, but Thurgood Marshall filed a lawsuit against university of Texas, sweat versus painter that basically said shoving black kids over in the basement at the Capitol ain't exactly the same has given them the breadth of that experience. But for me, that justice, it just starts and stops with the reality.

Ron Kirk:
Do you have at least the same opportunity than I do? Doesn't mean we're going to all get the same result. And as I was a kid, there were so many rhymes and riddles they would teach us about how unfair, and I thought, "well, it's not going to be that." Because one of the things we used to always say is, "white folks get justice, black folk get the law."

George Mason:
Ah, there it is. Right.

Ron Kirk:
So I thought well at least-

George Mason:
And who writes the laws?

Ron Kirk:
At least we're going to flip that. And there was. My bride always gets mad when I use this, but as a kid we learned this riddle. What's the difference between the Supreme court and the Klu Klux Klan? And back then the answer was the Supreme court wore black robes and scared the hell out of white people. And the idea was at least there was one place that no matter your station, your privilege, your ethnicity, that you could get justice. And you go to any courthouse, go to these rural communities, every courthouse is going to have a bunch of Latin inscriptions above the door or somewhere on the building. But in all of them is some notion of this word justice. But at its core, as you said, it goes back to the Bible and what we're all instructed is, be kind to one another. Be fair.

George Mason:
Cornell West, the academic writer about civil rights and the like said that justice is what love looks like in public.

Ron Kirk:
Yeah.

George Mason:
And I think if you go to that core notion of the duty of every religious person is to love your neighbor as yourself. Love God, but love your neighbor as yourself. And so the public expression of a religious life is this notion of justice, isn't it? And so whether you're doing it in a courtroom or in the state house, or at the mayor's office, or in Washington, somehow or other, this whole notion of how do we create a fairer society?

Ron Kirk:
Well the interesting thing that I challenge young people today when I talk because of the intersection, almost the embedding in our lives now, of social media. What happens in a Starbucks in Milwaukee is viral around the world at the time. And I used it because I tell young people, we always recognize justice and discrimination in the rear view mirror. We don't want to talk about it. But we just spent the last couple of weeks reviewing the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, [crosstalk 00:00:14:44]. It still strikes me as ironic, again going back to Ann Richards, I was sworn in as Texas secretary of state on April 4th of 1994.

George Mason:
April 4th is-

Ron Kirk:
Which is the day that Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. He was 39 years old. I was 39 years old. So it's humbling to think this guy had done all this. But I get so tired sometimes of talking about what it was like and I challenged kids to say, don't so much talk about Dr. King when you go home, ask your parents "what were y'all doing?" Because I tell you, when you look at those films from Selma, from Birmingham, and you see people riding in the pickup trucks with the guns and the sheets, that was real. Nobody ever puts on a family film and says, "okay, watch this part where the guy swings... That's uncle Bub, that's your granddad."

George Mason:
Lets pick this up in just a few moments. We're going to do a promo for a nonprofit that is dear to your heart. And so when we come back, we're going to pick it up right there.

Ron Kirk:
All right.

George Mason:
All right.

Speaker 3:
The Stewpot offers a safe haven for homeless and at risk individuals of Dallas and provides resources for basic survival needs, as well as opportunities to start a new life. For more information, visit their website. Good God salutes the Stewpot.

George Mason:
Ron, you were just talking about this whole idea of, what were our parents doing and our grandparents doing back in those days? And that really brings up a point about who we are today. We have similar challenges and it's one thing to have a historical perspective and celebrate it, but it's also how does history challenge us in the moment for what we will do?

Ron Kirk:
And that's one of the points I was making, I was taking too long, that challenge young kids now. There was an old Supreme court case about pornography and they said, "it's hard to define, but we know it when we see it." We know injustice when we see it, and my point to these young kids now, you don't have the luxury of 20, 30 years rear view mirror to say, "boy, we were wrong."

Ron Kirk:
You know it's wrong when your classmates are bullying some kid because maybe he's different. He doesn't speak the same language or he or she is struggling to define their sexuality. And the biggest petri dish for injustice and hatred is us wanting to fit in, and more importantly, sometimes just not wanting to be seen as standing outside the norm. And so I tell them, it's hard. It's always heroic looking back to say, "wow, what a hero Martin Luther King was," or "what a great man Muhammad Ali was to take his stand." But now you look at it and say, "why can't Colin Kaepernick just shut up?" Why can't women... I'm so frustrated, and I've talked to my daughters about this, to hear man and colleagues of mine going "well I don't know what to do at the office now with this Me Too thing." Really?

George Mason:
How about treat people with respect?

Ron Kirk:
Keep your pants on at work. Do you need somebody to tell you, keep your pants on, keep your hands to yourself? But we know it, but speak up. And I know it can feel a little awkward and sometimes you do it, but you'll never regret having stood up for somebody who was struggling to maybe speak for themselves, or just stepped in to somebody and said, "come on, give them a break." And so much of what we see in life is so complex. And we're covering a lot of stuff. The common denominator in all these tragic shootings in most of these schools, is a kid who's bullied. A kid who's alone, a kid that... Now some of them clearly had some serious mental health issues, but a lot of them were people crying out for somebody to say, "I hear you. I see you. You're struggling."

George Mason:
I think it's interesting that we were talking about Dr. King and others who fall into the category of our historical tendency to conceive of history as the story of great men. And it was usually men, as a matter of fact. But we tell these stories about, who are these key leaders in the history of the world? One of the things I think that's shifted in our society, for the better really, is that we have a more democratic understanding of influences of how society moves now. And instead of looking for who's the leader of the Black Lives Matter movement, for example. Well, the answer to that is you are, and you are, and you are, and they're all over the place. And it's decentralized in a sense.

George Mason:
So we now have an opportunity to start to realize that people like your mother really did make a difference.

Ron Kirk:
Oh, she made a huge difference.

George Mason:
Even though her story isn't told every April 4th, or during the month of February, Black history month, or something of that nature. But we're learning that that's really a crucially important thing. If the world's going to move forward toward a more just society, every one of us has a role to play.

Ron Kirk:
Well, I love the fact, and they don't need my plug, but the New York times has been going back and saying, "you know what? For too long story has only been told through the lens of man, but here are all these incredible women." And thank God you had a film like Hidden Figures to say girls do science. Girls have done some good science and girls practice law and try lawsuits and do other things. But that's an important lesson. And one of your points about it's all of us, and I know we're going to talk faith later, but I did grow up in a family church and speaking to my mother, she was one of 14. The only one to go to college and thank God she was able to go to Houston Tillotson college, one of our historically black colleges. Had no money.

Ron Kirk:
Her parents died when she and her twin were five or six years old. And one of my uncles got the calling in the old sense of the word, no biblical training or anything. But when you got 10 brothers and sisters who all live within five square miles, you've got an instant church.

George Mason:
That's right.

Ron Kirk:
So we grew up in this scary family church, 400 folks who all look the same. And I joke, we sang the same songs. My aunt played the piano too, she died. Then my cousin played the piano. Then my sister played the piano too. She moved away. And I tell people, all these wonderful little churches throughout the South, all you walked in had some big wooden block scriptures on the walls. But I'm sure all of them had some version of John 3:16.

George Mason:
Sure.

Ron Kirk:
And every Sunday we'd go to Sunday school and we'd March in we'd stand and we'd recite a Psalm. And then we'd recite John 3:16. So you can imagine by the time we're 14 or 15, we're like, "ah, here we go again." We'd roll eyes when my uncle would talk about, thank you for clothing me in my right mind and envision your clothes. I will never forget, I was probably 15 or 16 and we were getting ready to do John 3:16 and one of my cousins or uncles leaned over and said, "Ronald, you know what this means?" I said, "yeah, God so loved the world." He said, "God, so loved the world. He didn't send the committee."

George Mason:
Nice.

Ron Kirk:
And I've used that because, back to your point, I tell people he didn't. God uses people. And we talked about that, but we ultimately are instruments of His desires and His will. And it's ordinary people. None of them were Nobel laureates, world famous at the time. And sometimes it's just somebody that somehow summons the courage to say "enough."

George Mason:
Now, on the other hand we all need heroes. And so Dr. King was a hero and we don't have to have celebrity heroes, but in many ways you being the first black mayor of Dallas created an opportunity for a young black men and women to think that their aspirations were not thwarted, that actually they could dream about that. Barack Obama's election was one of those moments too. I know you're a movie buff, you and Matrice, so, all right. I saw black Panther last night. And here's another story though. For the first time, what we really have here are heroes that are coming out of a black community, a black nation. Intelligence, strength, technology, all these sorts of things that are helpful to a community that has been in some ways disenfranchised, in some ways, in many ways, in our country. So at the same time it's good to see the democratization of this. We need those heroes, don't we?

Ron Kirk:
You do. And that's a word I'm careful with. It's easier applied to somebody else than when I'd look in somebody. Well, my bride only likes it now because I'm old enough that kids come up and go, "Mayor Kirk, you did [inaudible 00:24:06]" well, "were you at..." Then they go, "oh no, I was in the second grade. I was in kindergarten." I'm going to get out of here. But I was cognizant of that. The closer we got to my election as mayor, the less I could escape the reality of how big a deal this was to the African American community. I wasn't blind to that. But what I said to people, particularly when I campaigned in South Dallas and that was in churches, don't ask me just to be a black mayor. And don't burden me with history.

Ron Kirk:
Do challenge me to make a difference. And what I said to them is, "if I can make a difference in our city and how we equitably, justly, do what we do so that we spend as much money on roads and bridges and sewers in impoverished neighborhoods and townhouses. [inaudible 00:24:58]. And if I can help create a city where we think more about our common dreams, where we're thinking about clean streets and safe parks. There's not a not a black white agenda." If I can do that, if I make a difference, then it will be hugely important.

George Mason:
Absolutely.

Ron Kirk:
That I was the first African American mayor, because I was also humble enough and I'd tell them, "if I don't, I know y'all will be the ones who go "well hell, it didn't make any difference that he was down there.""

George Mason:
Well, let's be honest. We had the same problem in the wake of Barack Obama's presidency.

Ron Kirk:
Absolutely.

George Mason:
We had this sense that many white people voted for Barack Obama and it gave them more a license then to be able to say, "well, I voted for Barack Obama and now I can be critical because I have my bonafide's." Now I can say "that didn't work out and we didn't bring the country together. And the country's more divided than ever. And what happened as a result of that?" So therefore the key is not electing people of color or women, the key is getting the right person. And we have this pushback about that.

Ron Kirk:
I had that debate with one of my truly closest friends. And he's a strong Republican. And I shouldn't have, because I've been at the business of politics and you've been in faith, I don't challenge your decision, who you vote. But I was like, "look, you support Mitt Romney, fine. Mitt Romney would’ve been a fine President. George Bush..." But at some point, and I did, I was like, "how can you vote for Donald Trump? This guy is so toxic." And he made the mistake of saying, "well, I feel like our country's more divided after Barack Obama." And I said, "do you think that black people got together after Obama won and said, "let's go piss white people off?"" As a general rule when race relations go bad in America it ain't because we... Because that typically has not worked out too well for us.

Ron Kirk:
And I reminded him and I will never forget, all of us will remember where we were September 11th. All of us are going to remember where we were November 20 2008. That night that Barack Obama was elected America laid down all of our ideological shields. We took off for night and we celebrated what we all knew was a wonderful American moment, that we at least in that march toward justice as Dr. King so beautifully said, the arc of the moral universe is long. But it bends towards justice. We felt like we bended a little more. And it was an expression. And we allowed ourselves to celebrate what was a uniquely American moment, because this wouldn't happen in almost any other country in the world. And I never will forget the next day when everybody was talking about what does it mean? And there was a discussion. Are we post racial now, is it over?

Ron Kirk:
And one fairly astute commentator said, "last night we got to celebrate what was best about America." He said, "but I'm also afraid that we're going to experience the worst of American." And what we're now seeing to some degree is a lot of those people who didn't celebrate that, and for whatever reason were afraid that they'd lost their country, they didn't go away. And they just went back and they retrenched. And I mean, this is a show called Good God and there's not a lot of stories I'd take from the Bible, but God always constantly reminds us why is it that the children of darkness are so much more organized? As Kurt Vonnegut said, "why is the mafia always better organized than the good guys?" And they don't go away.

Ron Kirk:
It is a constant battle and a constant struggle. And whether it's Moses or Dr. King, you lead people out of the wilderness. And then they call a meeting to say, "George, why the heck you bring us out here? We were fine. We had jobs where we were-"

George Mason:
Why don't we go back?

Ron Kirk:
"Why don't we go back?"

George Mason:
Let's go back.

Ron Kirk:
But you know what? Since we are talking faith, you've got to know this is an age old story and an age old struggle. But if you do have that higher belief in justice and the value of every person, you just never give up on those two principles.

George Mason:
Well Ron, we have so much more to talk about and we have another episode to do it in. So in just a moment, we'll pick this up again. But I'm reminded in light of this conversation, that there's a bridge across the Trinity river that is now called the Ron Kirk pedestrian bridge. And it crosses from one part of Dallas to another. And it's symbolic of just who you are. And I want to remind you that the word pontiff, we talk about the Roman Pope being the pontiff. It actually comes from the Latin and means bridge-builder. It means a person who bridges. And I see that in you. And I think a lot of people do. And that's why that bridge is named for you. And it's why we're grateful for you.

Ron Kirk:
That's pretty heavy. So I can go home and tell Matrice and Catherine. I can't get him to call me Mr. Mayor or Mr. Ambassador, so maybe I'll just get them to call me P daddy now.

George Mason:
Something like that. We'll get you a pointed hat. Okay. All right. Thank you Ron.

Ron Kirk:
Thank you, bud.

George Mason:
Okay, good.

Speaker 3:
The Stewpot offers a safe haven for homeless and at risk individuals of Dallas and provides resources for basic survival needs, as well as opportunities to start a new life. For more information, visit their website. Good God salutes the Stewpot.