Hughes Blues

On a chilly day in January 2002, Stefan Hughes’ phone rang. It was the man Hughes considered his political mentor — Mark Bryant, the president of the black political group Freedom Inc. and a former city councilman.

Bryant told Hughes he wanted to meet for lunch to talk about the March 2003 City Council elections.

Hughes had thought about going into politics ever since his father, Leonard Hughes, a Kansas City municipal court judge, had tried to convince him to run for City Council in 1991. That year, the younger Hughes had just accepted a position as an assistant Jackson County prosecutor. He was excited about his new job and didn’t think he was ready to be a politician, so he shelved the idea of running for office.

Hughes tells the Pitch that soon after Bryant took over leadership of Freedom Inc., in the summer of 1999, Bryant confessed to Hughes that he was upset about Councilwoman Mary Williams-Neal’s representation of the 3rd District. Bryant said he wanted to lead a recall petition, and he offered to try to install Hughes in her place. Hughes declined.

“I didn’t want my entrée into politics to be ugly and messy,” Hughes says now. He then set his sights on the 2003 election. No recall petition materialized, and Hughes says Bryant later approached him again, saying, “I want you to be my man in 2003 in the 3rd District.”

Hughes says he agreed immediately, believing he had Bryant’s pledge of support.

Hughes seemed to be a promising newcomer. Personable and good-looking, he had been making a name for himself at the county level, prosecuting murder cases that made the news — such as when one man stabbed another after an argument about mayonnaise, and when a woman was killed with a screwdriver over a $10 drug debt.

Hughes was known around the prosecutor’s office as someone who would take the time to sit down with crime victims and tell them the truth about a case. In his office sits a victim’s advocacy award that was presented to him by then-Prosecutor Claire McCaskill in 1995. “I believe you have to be real with people,” Hughes says. “I don’t believe in sugarcoating anything.”

Hughes had grown up in the 3rd District. He’d watched as his father and his mother, Mamie Hughes-Rodgers, became energized by the burgeoning civil rights movement. Hughes’ mother once joined a campaign to picket a downtown department store that didn’t allow black shoppers and later fought to save historic buildings at 18th and Vine. Then she became head of the Black Economic Union, helped to start the Central Exchange networking group for women and was elected to the County Legislature. Hughes’ father was among the founders of Freedom Inc. and created the group’s motto, “Dignity, equality and freedom through unity.” The organization grew into a formidable political force in helping elect black candidates to office, though its influence appears to be waning.

Hughes thought an endorsement from the organization his father had founded could help him overcome his main political handicap, a lack of elected experience.

As Hughes drove to RT’s Deli on 39th Street to meet Bryant for lunch a year ago, he looked forward to a friendly chat over chicken-salad sandwiches. Instead, Bryant delivered a speech that stunned Hughes.

“You’re going to lose!” Hughes says Bryant told him from across the table.

Hughes says Bryant asked him not to run. Hughes figured Bryant must have found a better candidate. But then Bryant broke the news that really upset him. He was going to throw his political weight behind Jackson County Legislator Ron Finley.

“I remember very clearly what I said to him,” Hughes tells the Pitch. “I said, ‘I consider myself to be a reasonable man. If you ask me to step aside, I certainly would do that. But it would have to be for somebody I respect. It would have to be for somebody who’s done something for the community.”

Hughes stayed in the race — joining another candidate whose relationship with Finley has been frosty.

Saundra McFadden-Weaver is making her third try for the council. Other than never having held elected office before, McFadden-Weaver has at least one thing in common with Hughes: her distaste for Finley.

McFadden-Weaver’s rivalry with Finley dates back to 1995, when she ran against him in an at-large race for a 3rd District seat. A political unknown at the time, with little money and no endorsements, McFadden-Weaver earned 47 percent of the primary vote, doing especially well north of the river. That’s when the race got nasty.

In a postcard mailed to mostly white northland voters, Finley pointed out that McFadden-Weaver was not related to attorney Gene McFadin, who is white. The card showed a photograph of McFadden-Weaver — but not Finley. In a column titled “Stop the Sleaze, Now!” Kansas City Star columnist Yael Abouhalkah chastised Finley for the mailer, lumping it in with several ads he called “despicable.”

“It was very racist. And insulting,” says McFadden-Weaver, who is a minister in the African-Methodist Episcopal church.

McFadden-Weaver ran again in 1999, facing Troy Nash, a popular young former aide to then-Mayor Emanuel Cleaver, who publicly backed his protégé. At the time of that race, McFadden-Weaver was involved in a battle with the AME church over her sexual harassment by two church officials. The suit went to court in 1999, and McFadden-Weaver won (“Divine Debauchery,” June 7, 2001). McFadden-Weaver still found the time to run a grassroots campaign, going door-to-door and cleaning up trash in neighborhoods. Nash spent double what McFadden-Weaver did, and he won, but McFadden-Weaver pulled in 43 percent of the vote.

She says she’s running a third time simply because she has a passion for people and wants to use her talent for negotiating to benefit 3rd District voters. “We’re in a period where we need strong coalitions, team players, consensus builders,” McFadden-Weaver says. “My communication skills are very strong. I believe that if I had to negotiate the lion and the lamb lying down together right now, somehow or other I could accomplish that.”

McFadden-Weaver says that this past November, while candidates waited for the downtown Election Board office to open so they could file for 2003, a group of Finley acquaintances tried to intimidate her. She says she was standing with her teen-age son when several men got out of a pickup, surrounded her and pressed against her until she could barely move. “They looked like they were walking down South Central L.A. when they came up to us,” she says. “I think everybody in line thought that these were my bodyguards.”

Finley admits that he had his people with him at the Election Board that day. “But so did she,” he says.

This time around, McFadden-Weaver has endorsements. She says Cleaver now supports her, and in January she won the backing of another political group, the Citizen’s Association, which had previously backed Finley.

Finley got Freedom Inc.’s nod in early January. “Ron Finley has developed a reputation as a keen reviewer of governmental budgets, and that skill is especially important during these austere financial times,” Bryant says. “All of the candidates are good, but the 3rd District needs a councilperson adept at digesting the city budget.”

Finley served eight years on the City Council in the 1990s before term limits forced him out. He was elected to the County Legislature in 1998 and was re-elected to a second four-year term in November 2002. But even as his county constituents were voting for him this past fall, Finley was busy collecting signatures so he could run for City Council.

That rankles Hughes.

“It does a disservice to the people of Jackson County to have this lame duck occupying space on the legislature, then having to go through another election for that seat,” Hughes says. “He’s acting like the world revolves around Ron Finley rather than the folks he’s supposed to be serving.”

But Finley, who has his own law practice in Kansas City, says it’s not the $56,000 compensation package that comes with a council seat (county legislators make about $11,000 a year) that inspired him to seek both seats. He says he never wanted to leave the City Council in the first place.

“I feel that as a city councilman, I’d be able to accomplish a lot more for my community,” Finley says. “The city has the most day-to-day impact on people’s lives, more so than the state or federal governments.”

Finley denounces Hughes’ criticisms and says he is sticking to the issues. “I’m running a positive campaign based on my record,” he says, taking credit for new housing developments, the construction of a police station on Linwood Avenue and a hazardous materials facility on Truman Road, a new post office in his district, park improvements and more money for a senior citizens’ center.

Bryant tells the Pitch that Hughes must have misinterpreted their original conversation about Hughes’ entering the 2003 race. He says he was simply encouraging Hughes to announce his candidacy if he actually planned to run. “I told him, ‘I heard Finley’s getting ready to announce,'” Bryant says.

Regardless of the winner, the 3rd District primary has put a dent in Hughes’ idealistic hope that his first foray into politics wouldn’t be ugly and messy.