Birmingham’s mayoral election was drawing early handicapping from the city’s alternative press, and one name on the board belonged to a son of Mobile.
Patrick Cooper, 48, a lawyer with the Birmingham firm of Maynard, Cooper & Gale, was rated a long shot at 12 to 1 by a Birmingham newsweekly’s early field guide to the race. The write-up called him “a new underdog candidate” who had “expressed a desire to rid City Hall of its caretaker government and implement visionary progressive leadership,” and noted that he was actively raising money, much of it from people who lived outside the city limits. Some high-profile business interests, the piece said, considered him “the city’s best hope for something fresh and new.”
The liabilities column was blunter: never elected to political office, no political experience, little or no name recognition.
A Mobile pedigree
In Mobile, the surname needed no introduction. Cooper was the eldest child of Beverly and J. Gary Cooper, a former state senator, a retired U.S. Marine Corps major general, and the Clinton administration’s ambassador to Jamaica, who by then was heading Commonwealth National Bank in Mobile. The younger Cooper was a graduate of McGill, took his undergraduate degree at Notre Dame and earned his law degree at Yale.
Mobile attorney Larry Hallett offered an assessment that mixed admiration with genuine puzzlement.
“I like Patrick,” Hallett said. “He is handsome, bright, personable and charming. He will be able to raise a great deal of money for his campaign, and will obviously have the support of the big law firms and their clients, and their client’s money. He is Alabama’s answer to Barack Obama.”
Then came the question. “Why in the world would Patrick want to be mayor of Birmingham?” Hallett asked.
The uncle who broke a barrier in Prichard
The question had been asked in the family before. Patrick Cooper is the nephew of A.J. Cooper, the two-term mayor of Prichard who in 1972 became the first Black candidate elected mayor of a majority-white city in Mobile County, a landmark in a county still living with the machinery of segregation.
The former mayor said he had put the same question to his nephew that had once been put to him.
“I asked my nephew Patrick the same question which had been put to me when I ran for Mayor of Prichard, ‘Why would you want to be Mayor of Prichard?'” the elder Cooper recalled. “His response was to the effect that Birmingham had been good to his children and to him and that Birmingham needed fresh energetic leadership not hidebound to the past.”
A cautionary word on councils
If the nephew took the job, his uncle suggested, he might look elsewhere for guidance on getting along with a city council. Relations between A.J. Cooper and the Prichard council of that era were, as he put it, tempestuous.
“True enough, my relationship to my council (four white, one black) was tempestuous,” he said. “However between dragging Prichard into the 20th century of municipal management, having to fight Prichard’s history of segregation and the Klan to appoint the first black female judge, the first black female planning commission chair, the first black female housing authority chair etc. in Alabama made it worthwhile.”
He predicted his nephew’s leadership would “likewise position Birmingham to assume its rightful position as a leading city in the South and the nation.”
Why it mattered downstate
Mobile has always kept one eye on the Magic City, the larger, wealthier metropolis 250 miles up Interstate 65 whose politics set much of the state’s tone. A Mobile-raised candidate with an Ivy League law degree, a corporate law practice and a family name associated with both military service and civil rights history was a story that traveled south along that highway.
- The candidate: Patrick Cooper, 48, attorney, McGill and Notre Dame graduate, Yale law
- The family: Son of J. Gary Cooper; nephew of former Prichard Mayor A.J. Cooper
- The early odds: 12 to 1, per a Birmingham alternative weekly’s handicapping
Whether Birmingham voters would reward an outsider with a fresh face and a famous name, or stick with the political establishment they knew, was a question for the fall.