Our Weekly Op-Ed: ‘Kissing babies’,We don’t support Dr. Mark Ridley-Thomas because he kissed babies. We support him because he took care of business.
Support for Dr. Mark Ridley-Thomas
By Joan V. Crear, Gloria Davis, Harry McElroy and Sonya Vasquez
Guest Op-Ed
We don’t support Dr. Mark Ridley-Thomas because he kissed babies. We support him because he took care of business.
When the few grocery stores left in South Los Angeles were burned down after the 1992 acquittal of LAPD officers who savagely beat Rodney King, MRT worked tirelessly to see that the stores were rebuilt and other supermarkets were recruited to serve the food desert in his district. After they were opened he would go shopping, usually late at night, and insisted that market managers at the newly opened stores restocked shelves and cleaned aisles. Babies’ parents deserved the respect and dignity any customer deserves, no matter the ZIP code or neighborhood in which they lived.
We don’t support Mark Ridley-Thomas because he kissed babies. We support him because the health of babies mattered to him.
Mark Ridley-Thomas led the years-long effort to restore patient services at the Martin Luther King hospital after being shuttered in 2007 by incompetence and indifference. Babies and their families deserve quality patient care when they are sick. He encouraged establishment of school-based health clinics so that when those babies grew to be school age, the health care they needed was accessible. And during a once-in-a-century pandemic in 2020, Mark Ridley-Thomas insisted that disparities in access to life saving vaccines were addressed immediately.
We don’t support Mark Ridley-Thomas because he kissed babies or butts. We support him because he kicked butt. He stood on principle.
From police accountability to criminal justice reform, from transit to social service delivery, we could count on Mark Ridley-Thomas to speak OUR truth to power. He insisted on accountability and high standards in the delivery of services regardless of income or social status. Beyond emotional rhetoric, attention getting sound bites and demagogic appeals to emotion, we could count on him to translate grievance into governance.
His stinging critique of Daryl Gates led to the LAPD chief’s 1992 retirement and replacement, a federal consent decree and the decades-long movement to reform the city police department. While others were content to lament misconduct by LA County’s deputy sheriffs in the jail and on patrol, MRT led the effort to establish the LA County Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission and advocated for subpoena power that would make investigation of misconduct genuine. The County Probation Department!s One Stop Reentry Center on Vermont Ave. and the MLK Urgent Mental Health Care Centers are just a few examples of his ability to find and enact practical solutions to seemingly intractable problems.
We don’t support Mark Ridley-Thomas because he kissed babies. We support him because he contributed to their parents' livelihoods.
He authored minimum and living wage increase ordinances for IHSS workers and the employees of local government contractors; local hire practices that paid prevailing wages, offered construction career training and gave employment preferences to workers from the neighborhoods he represented; and increases in the minimum wage of low wage workers at fast food restaurants, retailers and hospitality establishments and other service-oriented jobs.
We don’t support Mark Ridley-Thomas because he kissed babies. We support him because he values literacy.
He funded as many as 10 Freedom Schools attended by school age youth during summer months to encourage reading and to boost self-esteem.
We don’t support Mark Ridley-Thomas because he kissed babies.
We support him because he worked to ensure our communities were more livable.
He made sure the communities he represented received their fair share of public sector investment so that the neighborhoods in which babies and their families live had the parks, libraries, recreational facilities and community centers they deserve. The Mark Ridley-Thomas Constituent Service Center, Magic Johnson Park, the Park to Playa trail, the Florence Firestone Service Center, Lennox Community Service Center, new or renovated libraries from View Park (Bebe Moore Campbell) and East Rancho Dominguez to Culver City and Willowbrook, and the Stoneview Nature Center are testaments to the priority he attached to improvements in neighborhood infrastructure.
We don’t support Mark Ridley-Thomas because he kissed babies.
We support him because he worked overtime to address the housing insecurity they and their parents face — the scourge of homelessness.
He was the driving force behind the quarter cent sales tax increase designed to finance supportive services for the chronically homeless. While others did the electric slide in existing public housing, he was helping to deliver hundreds of new units of affordable housing.
We don’t support Mark Ridley-Thomas because he kissed babies. We support him because he advocated equity in the distribution of resources.
We don’t support Mark Ridley-Thomas because he kissed babies.
We support him because he faced us and didn’t fear us. He listened to us. He didn’t loathe us. He encouraged our participation with hope, not cynical abstention. Like a caring OB-GYN devoted to the health of a precious newborn, we support Dr. Mark Ridley-Thomas because he delivered.
DISCLAIMER: The beliefs and viewpoints expressed in opinion pieces, letters to the editor, by columnists and/or contributing writers are not necessarily those of OurWeekly.
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