Conference President Wellington E. Webb was inaugurated for the third time in Denver June 19. Mayor Webb hosted a breakfast for an African delegation from Dakar Senegal. Dakar Mayor Mamadou Diop, the leader of the delegation, made the long journey to sign a Denver/Dakar Accord which involves the two cities in a number of collaborations. A group of Senegalese businesswomen came to Denver to find business partners.

It was a special morning for me and Mayor Jesse Norwood of Prichard, Alabama, who heads up the National Conference of Black Mayors. We all had been to Africa together on the Conference of Mayors Mission earlier this year. Mayor Webb’s staff and especially city attorney Dan Muse had worked hard to bring the discussions held in Africa early this year to fruition when the Denver/Dakar Accord was signed.

It was also a special day for Wilma J. Webb, First Lady of Denver, who beamed as she made some personal comments about a man she admires and loves very much. She said, "I am so proud of my husband. When I think about him, I grin. As Gladys Knight sang, you are the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ll probably be assailed for this but I will say it - He’s the best thing that has ever happened to Denver."

Mayor Webb spoke to the group about his vision of an ongoing sustainable relationship between the United States and Africa. He talked about the special connection for African Americans in North, Central and South America. From Senegal as slaves, he stated, some Africans were sent to: Brazil where they speak Portugese, Cuba where they speak Spanish and to New York and Georgia where they speak English but with different accents. He repeated his statement he made in Dakar earlier this year that in 1619 Africans were sent to America as slaves but in 1999 African Americans came back to Africa as mayors.

Mayor Webb’s inaugural address took place after he was sworn in for his third and final time under a hot sun outside in Civic Center, a most beautiful park alongside the magnificent City and County of Denver Building. He told his citizens to be proud of what they have accomplished over the past eight years, a remarkable list, and he pointed to the future with his third term agenda which includes $1 million annually over the next four years to his "Best Babies Initiative", which promotes prenatal care and early childhood development and among others, millions to repair Red Rocks Amphitheater.

I’ve only been to two other mayoral inaugurations and it was good for me to be in Denver. Mayor Webb spoke in his mayoral address of how he will involve the leadership of the Conference to develop a new urban policy for the nation. You see and learn new things in a very political way at a mayor’s inauguration. As we start the new year together, with Mayor Webb as President and I as Executive Director, I appreciated the opportunity to be invited and to participate. The Mayor and I met the next day to discuss our September 23, 24 and 25 Fall Leadership Meeting and to receive his decisions he has made as he appoints new leaders and task forces for his term as our President.

NACo Annual Meeting

Howard County Commissioner Vernon Gray was elected to lead the National Association of Counties for the coming year. Commissioner Gray has participated in a number of joint USCM/NACo initiatives. He also knows Mayor Webb, our new President, from the days when both of them campaigned to get Jimmy Carter nominated and elected President. Commissioner Gray said sometimes your life turns around and meets you again. Together these two leaders will strengthen our city/county political bipartisan coalition.

Commissioner Gray has appointed Prince George’s County Executive, Wayne Curry, to head up the Large Urban County Caucus. Mr. Curry also has been active in the political alliance we have had with the county officials. Mr. Curry brings life, energy, and passion to this very powerful group of local elected officials representing the top 100 urban counties in population and budgets. Mr. Gray and Mr. Curry have been invited to our Fall Leadership Meeting in September where we will discuss how we continue to bring city and county officials together in a common bipartisan political alliance.

We appreciate the spirit of cooperation we continue to have with the county officials and the NACo staff. Larry Naake, Executive Director of NACo, continues to implement the vision that we both share. This vision is to focus on the strength we have when cities and counties, march hand in hand in the ongoing political task to establish without a shadow of a doubt that this nation’s economy is not being driven by state governments. Instead, as statistics now prove, this national economy is being driven by regional metro economies throughout the nation which burst through state lines and provide enormous individual metro gross products for urban/suburban areas that make the USA -economically - the most powerful country in the world.

John Kennedy - 1960-1999

I was fourteen years old the first time I saw his father and I haven’t been the same since. The 1960 campaign changed my life. That’s just the way it was. I can’t explain it. I just know that’s the way it feels. President Kennedy was killed in 1963 and the nation changed. Television brought us together for four days and nights and images of "little John John" was permanently imprinted in my mind and my soul. After President Kennedy many of us shifted to Bobby, then he was killed. Then we shifted to Teddy and the events of 1969 were tragic. In my mind there was always the little boy. As a nation we adopted him and we admired so much his mother for being the incredible mother she was. The pain of 1963 and 1968, for Bobby and Dr. King is always there. So in my heart I knew that if the boy grew up, entered politics and ran for something, then the pain would cease. I wanted him to run for Mayor of New York City one day. I didn’t want him to be a Senator. He was naturally a New York City man. His manner, style and his inclination to be truly interested in every day people, to learn from others and his sense of humor were qualities that would have made him a great mayor of New York City.

That was my hope but that hope went down into the sea last Friday night. And then they found him and scattered his ashes into the sea yesterday. People asked why the sea and I remembered what President Kennedy had said about the sea. As a young man I was struck by it at the time. He said in 1962, "I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea...I think it’s because we all come from the sea...it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean. And therefore we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean, and when we go back to the sea, whether to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came."

In New York City for a meeting at the Rockefeller Foundation, I bought two dozen white roses and in the early morning around 6:00 AM - I put the roses on top of the pile of letters, notes, flowers, photos, teddy bears, balloons, and other original personal offerings in front of his apartment at 20 North Moore Street in the Tribeca area of Manhattan. I talked to a lot of people who had come from all over. I have talked to people the same way when I was in Arlington Cemetery in 1963. And again in Arlington Cemetery in 1968. And again in Atlanta in 1968. And again in Arlington Cemetery in 1994. President Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Mrs. Kennedy. In life they drew me to them and so when they died I had to go, to be with other people who were touched in their lives like me, by these four people. We were drawn to be there to talk and renew our energy to keep on keeping on in the struggle for the same ideals through the decades of change since 1960.

From all those deaths, all those funerals, in the back of my mind, in my soul, in my heart, there was hope in the young boy who had grown up to be the New York kind of guy and who would one day enter what President Kennedy said was the highest calling - public service - yes, politics. But that hope is gone. Camelot has now ended. And the pain that never left is here to stay. May God bless and keep you John, now in heaven with your mother and father.