“I was hired by Senator Robert Kennedy to work in his New York senate office; and shortly thereafter, he decided to run for president and I moved over to his campaign staff and I wound up running his campaign headquarters in Watts, Los Angeles.”

Meet A.J. Cooper: the only Democrat in Baldwin County willing to roll the dice on winning Republican Bradley Byrne’s vacant state Senate seat, which represents the lion’s share of the county’s populace in Montgomery. 

Not long ago in May, Byrne resigned to serve as chancellor of the state's two-year colleges, appointed by Gov. Bob Riley. 

Within weeks of Byrne’s announcement, a bevy of Republicans immediately rose to their feet in hopes of succeeding Byrne as Baldwin’s District 32 state Senator. 

But in the Republican primary, Lee “Trip” Pittman, a dark-horse candidate who has never held an elected office, fought off long-time county politicians - including County Commissioner David Ed Bishop and former state Sen. Albert Lipscomb - to get a shot at a runoff with Randy McKinney, a member of the state school board. 

In the runoff, Pittman overcame McKinney by a surprising result, taking 56 percent of the vote to McKinney’s 44 percent. 

And then there were two: Republican Pittman versus Democrat Cooper for the general election, less than two weeks from now – October 16. 

Cooper has a challenge ahead of him in the coming weeks since finding an elected Democrat in Baldwin County today whether it be a state representative or even a town councilman is similar to finding a diamond under a rock, and if they have Democratic tendencies or beliefs, it’s staying in the dirt.

“It seemed unusual to me to have a county this large and not have one Democratic elected official.  It seemed unusual that folks who were Democrats were scared to really talk about being a Democrat,” Cooper said, “and it (is) important to have a two-party system, both in terms of keeping the other party honest and also giving people an opportunity to have a choice.”

Although Democrats control both houses of the legislature, Republicans have been gaining a firm footing in Alabama over the years, including a near take-over of the state Supreme Court, until Sue Bell Cobb, a Democrat, halted the Elephant triumph with her recent election as chief justice. 

Yet, Baldwin remains red and has remained as such for many years: the five state representatives of the county delegation are Republicans; the four county commissioners are Republicans; but the other state Senator, who represents the county, W.H. “Pat” Lindsey, is a Democrat.  

Ask any mayor and a few random citizens, and more than likely they’re Republicans too.

But, Democrats are active in the county, and Cooper, who serves as vice-president of the Eastern Shore Democrat Club, finds quite a few who surreptitiously keep their political-side on a lower key than their Republican counterparts.    

“I had dozens of people saying, ‘I would say I was a Democrat but it would hurt my business.’ But, do you have the best price; do you have the best product? That’s what using your business ought to be about, not whether you’re a Republican or Democrat.”

Cooper’s campaign slogans are not typical of the national image of his party either: one reads “God, Guns, Grits and Gumption!” and the other is less bravado and more middle-of-the-road with a dash of middle-class family recognition: “A Real Person, A Real Voice, For Real People.”

“I have a variety of or combination of experiences which gives me, I think, an ability to see different sides of issues and needs,” Cooper said.

Cooper’s background from his birth in Mobile in 1944, childhood along the Eastern Shore, and opening a litigation firm in Fairhope, CooperLaw, a couple of years ago, is filled with a plethora of occurrences, traveling, education, and federal and municipal government experience, including a stint with Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign and being present at the Ambassador Hotel when the former attorney general was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan. 

After working with Kennedy’s senate office in New York, Cooper organized his presidential-bid from Watts, California, a residential district in South Los Angeles. 

“I ran a headquarters (and) the responsibilities were many.  It was organizing voters, it was putting together speaking engagements for the senator” and distributing “literature to organize our get out the vote campaign,” Cooper recalled.  “We beat Senator McCarthy, and we were heading back to New York.

“I was there when he was assassinated at the hotel,” Cooper said.  “Frankly, we didn’t know what had happened (at the time of the incident) because it was back in the kitchen.  

“After the senator was assassinated…we all went back to New York to put together the funeral…I escorted Coretta Scott King (Dr. Martin Luther King’s wife) from the funeral at St. Patrick’s and stayed with her on the funeral train to Washington and escorted her to the cemetery.”

Cooper would also work with the reelection campaign for Sen. Albert Gore Sr., Tennessee, and also serve as chief of staff for Congressman Harold Ford Sr., of Memphis. 

When Kennedy’s campaign hastily ceased, Cooper then finished his law degree at New York University where he founded the National Black American Law Students Association which is 40 years old this year with chapters on every law school campus in the country. 

The association, Cooper noted, was initiated “in order to give black law students some leadership and direction and providing services to the communities from whence they came and also to give college students and young African-Americans an avenue to believe in the rule of law.

“After law school, I came home (to Alabama) and I was a civil rights lawyer, criminal defense lawyer, whatever the dog dragged in lawyer in Mobile,” Cooper said. 

A few years later in 1972, Cooper ran for Mayor of Prichard, a city of nearly 50,000, and won, beating a three-term incumbent.

At the time of taking office, Cooper said, “Prichard was…the third poorest city in the country after Laredo and Brownsville, Texas” and he noted that “it never had a budget.”

“They would do something like increase what they spent the year before by one percent or two percent and that was their budget.”

Cooper served two-terms as he imposed a term-limit on himself, but during those eight years he said “we built a new city hall, a new jail, a new sanitation facility (and) the first senior’s facility.”

“My friend Trip talks about the experience he had in a plane crash,” Cooper said, alluding to his state Senate opponent, Trip Pittman, whose plane crashed north of Panama City, Fla. in May, inspired Pittman to run for public office for the first time in his life. 

“Well, I (as mayor), suspended a police officer for two weeks and shortly thereafter someone started shooting at me, shot at me three different times, and it turns out that it was the father of this officer, who had abandoned the officer and his mother 30 years before,” Cooper said. 

“There are life changing experiences, but between these experiences or even before those experiences, you make decisions about doing community service and you don’t have to have just one experience to decide that you’re going to skip from the first grade to college in terms of running for the senate as opposed to running for the city council…and then deciding maybe to run for state-wide or county-wide office.”

When his second term ended as mayor, Cooper headed to Washington D.C. upon the invitation of Secretary Moon Landrieu of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and then served on the professional staff of the House Ways and Means committee, one of the most powerful federal committees, which considers Medicare, taxation, tariffs, social security and unemployment benefits. 

Today, Cooper and his wife reside on the Eastern Shore, Battles Wharf, in a home built by his family in 1946. 

“I came back home.  I started a (law) practice here on Section Street in Fairhope,” Cooper said, but he “started noticing some things that didn’t seem quite right” regarding government practices in the state and the county. 

Policy Positions

Cooper said that his first task as the county’s elected state senator would be to enhance openness or transparency with government decisions so that the public will have an awareness of the actions being decided in their representative governments.   

“So the county commission has a working session at 8:30 a.m. on Monday morning.  Well, heck, who can come at 8:30 a.m. to see what the discussion really is about? Very, very few, if any citizens,” Cooper noted.  “One of the unfortunate things that’s happened is this notion of a working session where all the business gets decided then they come to the actual meeting, and have a meeting, but everything has already been decided.

“And so you say, what does all of this have to do with being a (state) senator.  Well the senator is the highest ranking elected official in the county…and he has an obligation to reflect the interests of the county as a whole and so when you talk about openness in government, you’re talking about how all the constituent parts of the county are open to all the citizens of the county.”

Cooper said that he would boost transparency in his administration by posting letters written to him, his responses and his daily schedule on the internet, and also “if I have meetings with lobbyists, there’s a synopsis of that meeting, what they asked for and what if anything was agreed upon so people can know: government in function.”

As a part of his platform of government working for the people, Cooper said that term-limits should be considered for all elected and appointed positions, and he has committed to a two-term limit for the state Senate seat. 

Term limits “should apply to the county commission, to the mayors, to the city council and to the boards of the different county and municipal governments” including planning and zoning boards and state representatives and senators, Cooper said.

When asked why during the interview, Cooper responded: “The first reason is because people who stay in office too long start believing that they own the office and not the people…the second reason is that other citizens ought to have the opportunity to serve and the third reason is that when one stays in office too long there are a set of relationships that get built between the office holder and special interest groups and by changing folks you minimize that.”

He added: “And the other reason is that it’s a guareentee that Republicans made in their Contract with America, and I think they ought to keep it.”

As for the hot-topic property tax debate where citizens are up-in-arms regarding substantial hikes in their ad valorem taxes, Cooper believes that property should be assessed every four years rather than annually – the current method. 

“The four year process gives peaks and valleys (in the property market place) an opportunity to be evened out,” Cooper said.  “I believe that we should demand that the governor take his pen out of his suit-coat pocket and sign an order ending the annual appraisals.

“(Gov. Riley) took his pen out, and signed an administrative order to institute it.  He can do the same thing to end it.”

Regarding homeowners’ insurance, Cooper said: “I think there is a mix of incentives and regulations that have to be used to bring common sense back to the pricing of insurance.”

He immediately wants to find a solution to protect non-profit and charitable organizations, including churches, from substantial insurance increases, which they have witnessed over the past few years.

He also wants to know where Walter Bell, commissioner of the state Department of Insurance, has been lately. 

“The head of the department of insurance for the state of Alabama has not been to Baldwin County, to my knowledge, since Katrina,” Cooper said.

“I want to know where he is for one thing.  And how do you have a state that’s got an insurance crisis where the insurance commissioner has not been to the place where the crisis is the greatest.”

When it comes to managing the county’s resources, especially in the face of drastic population growth in the past decade and predicted continuing growth in the near future, Cooper said that communities need to become involved in planning growth and to have a direct say in the matter rather than a local government and planning commission dictating all of it.

“I think the folks at Fish River have to be able to say that when you do things upstream that affects us. (They) have the right to have an effective and real say-so about it (and) I think the folks in Fort Morgan have the right to have an effective say-so about what happens there.”

Cooper said he would “explore how a local community can have some sort of local veto power” over government planning decisions.

“Government entities need to recognize and developers need to recognize that our environment is that which has made the sustenance of Baldwin County possible.  That our environment is the golden goose that has laid all of these eggs, and to that end, we have to have especial care for our environment that recognizes the importance of economic growth.”