On the day the ex-councilmember and county supervisor commonly known as MRT is to be sentenced on a corruption conviction, we look back at his long career in L.A. progressive politics.
For more than four decades, Ridley-Thomas was in the middle of some of the biggest political battles in L.A. He didn’t limit himself to local issues.
Hans Johnson, president of the East Area Progressive Democratic Club, wrote in the L.A. Daily News, “The guilty verdicts mark a defeat for the public-relations campaign by Ridley-Thomas and his allies leading up to his trial that succeeded in muting criticism and, for some, muddying the waters over the federal charges of self-dealing he faced,”Johnson also likes to point out that Ridley-Thomas wasn’t always progressive — he voted to keep a Christian cross on the official L.A.
Los Angeles County Board Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas answers the media's questions in USC's Associates Park on January 19, 2013. “He thought early on that it was important that we come together and focus on our commonalities while also discussing differences,” said Villaraigosa, who co-chaired the Latino-Black Roundtable with Ridley-Thomas. He said at one point the two appeared together on the cover of LA Weekly with the headline, “The New Progressives.”Ridley-Thomas was elected to the City Council representing South L.A.’s 8th district. He served from 1991 to 2003.
“There’s a whole history of things that he supported that very few politicians would touch,” said Regalado. Semcken called Ridley-Thomas “the most effective politician I have ever met in my life, and I have met a lot of them.”A pivotal seat: the L.A. County Board of Supervisors “He was our only champion,” said Mark-Antony Clayton-Johnson of Dignity and Power Now, a nonprofit that advocates for changes at the department and in the jails. “He was the only one that was willing to push for independent civilian oversight.”
It wasn’t easy. Ridley-Thomas had to maneuver over myriad bureaucratic and political hurdles. He also wanted a project labor agreement that would give job preferences to people who lived nearby and from low income zip codes. But he couldn’t get anyone on the board to second his motion, according to his longtime chief of staff Vincent Harris.
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