By James Wright
AFRO Staff Writer
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U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and Vice President Joe Biden are seen in the
Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus in Washington,
Friday, March 20, 2009, during Kirk's official swearing in ceremony.
(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
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(March 21, 2009) -Ronald Kirk hopes to bring a little bit of Dallas to the world.
The first Black mayor of that city plans to use lessons he learned in office as he steps into the role of United States Trade Representative. He was sworn into the Cabinet-level position on Friday at the Old Executive Office Building by Vice President Joseph Biden.
Kirk is the first African American to assume the position. His title is that of ambassador.
Kirk’s office is responsible for the development and oversight of U.S. trade policy, including strategy, negotiation, implementation and enforcement of the country’s trade agreements.
He will also oversee the country’s trade policy involving agriculture, industry, services and investment, intellectual property, environment, labor, development and preference programs.
Kirk said he wants to get small businesses more involved in international trade, a strategy he used to boost Dallas businesses.
“I support free and fair trade and want small businesses to participate in that,” Kirk said. “In Dallas, we saw how free trade benefits everyone and we can do that on the national level.”
Kirk said that the United States “will not retreat from leadership of the global marketplace.”
During a short confirmation hearing on March 9 before the Senate Finance Committee, Kirk said that he will look at the trade agreements of the Bush administration and decide whether to continue those policies or make changes.
Kirk said he and President Obama believe trade agreements should have high environmental standards and protect labor union rights for workers in trading partner nations. While Kirk has supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, he said agrees with Obama that it deserves another look in the face of the global recession.
Biden said that Kirk’s position has a lot of responsibility, but that he is up to the task.
“Ron is going to have the responsibility of working toward opening markets throughout the world to create new opportunities and higher living standards for our families, our farmers, our manufacturers, our workers, our consumers, our businesses,” Biden said. “In Ron Kirk, we have found a leader who has shown time and again that he is the man for this job.”
Kirk grew up in Austin, Texas during segregation, when blacks had to sit in the balcony at the Paramount Theater in the city's downtown section and could not try on clothes at the department stores. Kirk attended black schools until he went to the John H. Reagan High School when the school was integrated in the late 1960s.
During his four years at Reagan, Kirk endured threats and tried to stay out of racially-charged fights that turned into riots in 1969 and 1970. In 1971, Kirk was elected the president of the Reagan Student Council, the first black to win the position even though the school was only 20 percent African American.
Kirk graduated from then all-white but not segregated Austin College in Sherman, Texas, in 1975 and the tough University of Texas School of Law in 1979.
He practiced law until 1981 when he joined the staff of Sen. Lloyd Bentsen. He left Bentsen in 1983 to work as a city attorney in Dallas and worked for the next ten years as a Texas Legislature lobbyist for Dallas, and a Gov. Ann Richards appointee to the General Services Commission as well as a lawyer in a large law firm in Dallas.
In early 1994, Richards appointed Kirk as the Secretary of State, the second black and the first Black male to hold the position. After Richards' defeat by George W. Bush that year, Kirk went to Dallas to run successfully for mayor in 1995.
As mayor of Dallas, Kirk bridged the African-American and Mexican-American communities with the conservative business sector to bring down crime and to improve the city's image as a friendly place to live. In 2002, he won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, the first black to do so, but he lost to John Cornyn in the general election with 43 percent of the vote in the largely Republican state.
Since the election, he has moved up in the law firm of Vinson & Elkins to become one of its top partners. Biden said that Kirk's life is an example of a man who works hard to get what he wants despite the obstacles.
"He’s a man who has defied the odds, and continues to defy the odds, a man who can take very complex problems and find necessary, practical solutions everybody understands,” Biden said. [He is] a man who can make a real difference in the lives of American families, and create opportunities for those who need it most.”
Kirk now faces one of the worst economic downturns since the end of World War II and has to deal with the possibility that trade levels among nations will decline in activity, a first since 1982.
In a lighter moment, Biden said that he and Kirk had something in common: strong mothers.
“In the tradition I come from, you go to the power center immediately—that’s mom,” the vice president said. Kirk’s mother, Willie Mae Kirk of Austin, is a longtime educator and political activist.