Declaring himself “underwhelmed” by the Republican field and driven more by “duty than desire,” Eastern Shore attorney and longtime Democratic figure A.J. “Jay” Cooper announced he would return to elective politics with a campaign for the vacant Baldwin County Senate District 32 seat.
Cooper said he reached the decision only after talking, in the days before the qualifying deadline, with a dozen Baldwin County residents whose politics spanned the spectrum. Their message, he said, was one of frustration: with “arrogant” officeholders, with taxes and fees that climbed even as services stagnated, and with elected officials so secretive that “citizens often didn’t find out about important matters until they were a done deal.”
A campaign built on ‘straight talk’
Education, jobs and housing topped the list of concerns Cooper said he heard, and he made them the center of his pitch. Baldwin County, he argued, “deserved better” than the choices before it. “Being the senator for District 32 is not a retirement program nor is it a place holder for career politicians,” he said.
Cooper called for a leader who would “fight for term limits” and “fight for children and teachers equally,” and who would practice “honesty in budgeting.” He tied the county’s growth pressures to concrete concerns: affordable wind and flood insurance, housing within reach of young graduates and tradespeople as well as the elderly, and roads laid out to speed hurricane evacuation “and not just to help developers.”
Too often, he charged, the big issues, from health care and prisons to roads and taxation, became “insider” matters managed by lobbyists, leaving the public “the last to find out what really happened.” He said his campaign was still organizing, with offices planned in Bay Minette, Gulf Shores, Robertsdale and Fairhope.
A crowded Republican field
The District 32 seat had come open when Bradley Byrne left the state Senate to become chancellor of Alabama’s two-year college system. Five Republicans were battling for their party’s nomination: former state Sen. Albert Lipscomb, County Commissioner Ed Bishop, Eastern Shore businessman Trip Pittman, state school board member and Gulf Shores real estate executive Randy McKinney, and Baldwin County GOP chairman and attorney Don McGriff.
The Republican primary was set for Aug. 7, with a runoff, if needed, on Sept. 11. Cooper and the eventual GOP nominee were to meet in the general election on Oct. 16.
A long record in and out of office
Cooper brought an unusually national resume to a county Senate race. Born Algernon Johnson Cooper Jr. in Mobile in 1944, he lived on the Eastern Shore with his wife, Fairhope artist BJ Cooper, in a home his family built in 1946. He was best known locally as the former mayor of Prichard: elected in 1972 to lead the city of some 45,000, he became the first Black candidate in Alabama since Reconstruction to defeat a white incumbent.
From there his career reached well beyond Alabama. Cooper was a founder and the first president of the National Conference of Black Mayors, which by then counted more than 800 members. His political apprenticeship had begun on the staff of U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of New York, and he later worked on Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign and on the re-election bid of Sen. Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee.
After two terms as Prichard’s mayor, Cooper joined Secretary Moon Landrieu at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, then returned to Capitol Hill as executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and later as a staffer on the House Ways and Means Committee, where he worked on the Tax Reform Act of 1986. In 1988 he became a partner in a Washington law firm, practicing litigation, legislative and administrative law and public finance.
Active in Eastern Shore civic life, Cooper served as vice-president of the Eastern Shore Democrat Club, general counsel of the Point Clear Cemetery Association and a trustee of Twin Beech AME Zion Church, which was marking its 140th anniversary. His “professional, social, political and familial associations,” he said, brought “a powerful national network of relationships to problem solving.”
With his entry, District 32 voters faced a general-election choice between a deep Republican bench and a Democrat with decades of experience, and, by his own telling, more sense of obligation than ambition.