Ann Arbor City Council Virtue-Signalling: Why the Kathy Kozachenko Statue Doesn’t Make Sense

by Thomas F. Wieder

The Ann Arbor City Council’s recent passage of Its Resolution to Initiate a Statue to Honor Kathy Kozachenko is one of the odder and most ill-conceived Council actions that I have observed in more than a half-century of following the Council, which is saying a lot.

It is strange that the Council would want to get into the “statue business,” for the first time, in Ann Arbor’s 200th year as a city. As far as I can tell, this would be the first statue of any individual erected in a public place in Ann Arbor by the City or any other body or organization. (There may be statutes inside university or other buildings of which I am unaware.)

Statues, and plaques, are usually reserved for individuals who have made a significant and positive impact on their nation, state, community or organization. Kathy Kozachenko simply does not fit that description. She is part of a small historical footnote, but not much more. Other than winning a single Council election and serving on the body for two years, what did Kozachenko do which warrants such an honor? The only other activity or action attributed to Kozachenko in the Resolution is that she was an “activist student at the University of Michigan.” That description would apply to many tens of thousands of U-M students over the years.

There are a few, very few, individuals who have been honored in other ways for their contributions to the life of Ann Arbor, but no statues. Ann Arbor city government is now headquartered in Larcom City Hall. Guy Larcom was Ann Arbor’s first City Administrator and served for 17 years. He is widely praised for the way he guided the City through a period of massive population growth, major new demands for City services and the initiation and completion of major city projects.

Eli Gallup, for whom Gallup Park is named, served as head of the Parks Department for 38 years. He added a total of more than a square mile of land to the parks system. He was instrumental in creating the string of City parks along the Huron River.

Wheeler Park is named for Prof. Albert H. Wheeler, the first black Mayor of Ann Arbor. But Wheeler was much more that than. He was, in 1952, the first African-American academic to be put in a tenure-track position at the U-M. He was one of the most significant fighters for civil rights in the history of the city. (For a fuller description of his life and accomplishments, see: https://findingaids.lib.umich.edu/catalog/umich-bhl-9428)

There is a direct and significant connection between Mayor Wheeler and the park named for him. The park is located in what was, for decades, the predominately African-American near north side of Ann Arbor. African-Americans were concentrated there, because segregation prevented them from living almost anywhere else in the City. Where Wheeler Park is today was the former Lansky’s Junkyard. It was an eyesore and something of an insult to the African-American community. Wheeler was one of the leaders in the fight to get it moved.

There are so many, many more Ann Arborites who have had significant positive impacts on the city.

Where does Kozachenko fit in this pantheon of great Ann Arborites? She doesn’t.

Evaluating Kozachenko’s place in the history of Ann Arbor requires some knowledge of the political history of the city. For a very large portion of its history, Ann Arbor was been dominated by Republicans. (For a brief interlude during the Prohibition era, Democrats did well. Ann Arbor was a heavily German town. The Germans liked their beer. The Republicans supported prohibition; the Democrats opposed it.)

From 1929 to 1969, Democrats never controlled City Council. There was one Democratic Mayor for two years – Samuel Eldersveld from 1957-59 – but Council always had a Republican majority. For one year, 1960-61, just 13 years before Kozachenko ran, there were no Democrats on Council at all, just eleven white Republicans. By later in the 1960’s, Ann Arbor Democrats were liberal and worked very hard to build an organization. They won some tough races, but could never put together a six-vote majority.

In 1969, law professor Democrat Robert J. Harris led a ticket that won five of six races and achieved an 8-3 Council majority. It was a local political earthquake. The new majority had a broad agenda – improved public housing, controls on development, establishment of a public transit authority, promoting tenants’ rights, non-discrimination, etc., and they went right to work on it.

Just three months after taking office, the new majority was rocked by another tremor. A large summer street party on South University Avenue erupted into a major confrontation between the local police and the young partiers. The confrontations continued over the next three nights. While the Ann Arbor Police were ultimately responsible to Council and somewhat restrained, then-Washtenaw County Sherriff Douglas Harvey liked nothing better than cracking heads of “long-haired hippies.” Council had no control over him. There were numerous arrests and significant damage. The events came to be called the “South U Riot.’

The new Democratic majority was blamed by many voters for the “riot.” Partly because of that, and partly because of some of their liberal initiatives, Democrats won only one Council seat in 1970, reducing their majority to 6-5. Unfortunately, the only African-American on the Council, H. C. Curry, was conservative on a number of issues, and his vote could not always be counted upon by Harris. Harris sometimes was successful in getting the vote of moderate Republican Robert Weaver.

In 1971, Harris drew a strongly right-wing opponent and won re-election, but the Democrats lost the majority. Harris then had to rely upon Weaver or another Republican for a vote.

In the April 1971 election, a new group, the student-based Radical Independent Party (RIP) ran write-in campaigns for two offices, Mayor and 2d Ward City Council. The party had not qualified for the ballot. The effort had little effect, as the Democrats won both of those races easily.

Two new shocks hit Ann Arbor politics in the summer of 1971. The first, in July, was the ratification of the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting the right to vote to all persons 18 or older. The second occurred in August when the Michigan Supreme Court handed down a decision that was momentous for Ann Arbor. There was a Michigan statute that prohibited students at colleges from registering to vote where they went to school. Ann Arbor Democrats spearheaded a lawsuit challenging the statute, and the Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional

Suddenly, the potential Ann Arbor electorate swelled; virtually every U-M student who was a citizen could register and vote in the city. That would mean possibly tens of thousands of new voters.

Given the left leanings of U-M students while the Vietnam War was still raging, and the women’s movement and gay liberation movement were surging, Democrats were gleeful. Their long-time efforts to help students to vote in Ann Arbor had paid off in the court decision, and the 26th Amendment was a bonanza.

Democrats had hopes of winning all five wards in the 1972 election. They were in for a rude shock. RIP, refashioned as the Human Rights Party (HRP), had qualified for a ballot spot. It had the good fortune of arriving just in time to benefit from the massive change in Ann Arbor’s electorate. It ran candidates in all five wards on a far-left platform. It included calls for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. military forces from foreign soil, the end of the ROTC and Selective Service, repeal of laws against homosexuality and prostitution, the closure of all state prisons, and provision of daycare and health care based on ability to pay.

The results were a shock. In the traditionally Democratic and significantly student 1st Ward, the HRP’s Jerry DeGrieck, a U-M student won. In the heavily student 2nd Ward, HRP candidate Nancy Wechsler, also a student, won. Both were plurality wins. In the 3rd, 4th and 5th Wards, the GOP won plurality victories. The bottom line – the GOP received 40% of the total vote, Democrats 36% and HRP 24%. Democrats got zero seats.

The new Council lineup was 5 Republicans, 4 Democrats and 2 HRP. No party could pass anything without support from another. Democrats were in the middle. They could vote with the GOP and face backlash from the two HRP wards or vote with the HRP and face backlash from the three GOP wards. The Democrats’ political positions were much closer to the HRP’s, so they took the risk and voted with the HRP to pass such things as $5 city marijuana, a new human rights ordinance that prohibited discrimination based on sexual preference and a resolution – believed to be the first in the nation – officially recognizing Gay Pride Week. It took considerable courage for the Democrats to do this.

The HRP had fond hopes of duplicating their success in the November 1972 election (Nixon v. McGovern). There were two new County Commissioner districts which were overwhelming student and a State Representative district which looked winnable based on the Council results.

Instead, they got clobbered. They didn’t come close in any race. Students and nonstudent liberals and radicals were pretty comfortable with the McGovern “peace party.” They had to recalibrate.

There was a chore to do before the 1973 city election – redrawing the ward boundaries to reflect the 1970 Census. No party could do it on its own, so the bargaining began. Chastened by its November drubbing, HRP jettisoned its visions for greater citywide competitiveness and angled for two wards that they thought would be reasonably safe for them.

The resulting new 1st Ward had a large student population, but not commanding. The 2nd was above 75% student. The common wisdom was that HRP was almost a sure bet in the 2nd, but more of a longshot in the 1st, especially since the Democratic candidate, Norris Thomas, was an African-American attorney working as public defender.

The 2nd Ward Democratic candidate was 19-year-old Carol Jones, an Ann Arbor native and student in U-M’s Residential College, something of a stronghold for campus political activism. I was her campaign manager. The HRP candidate was Frank Shoichet, a law student, one of the HRP’s founders and one of its principal strategists.

Thomas won easily, and Jones eked out a close victory.

The race for Mayor was the really bad news. James Stephenson, a far-right Republican received 47% of the vote, the Democratic candidate 37% and the HRP candidate 16%. The HRP again appeared to be a spoiler in this and the 4th Ward Council race. The GOP assumed a seven-seat majority, the other two parties were down to two each, and the GOP Council proceeded to repeal a number of the measures passed by the ad hoc Democratic/HRP coalition.

In the fall of 1973, Jerry Degrieck came out as gay, and Nancy Wechsler came out as a lesbian. It is believed that these were the first two elected officials in the country to do so. The announcements did not create much of a stir in Ann Arbor.

The 1974 Council race was on the horizon, and HRP leaders needed to plan their next steps.

Steve Friess is a long-time journalist and Editor of The Ann Arbor Observer’s A2 View online feature. He is also a gay man. In 2015, Friess wrote a long profile story about Kathy Kozachenko for Bloomberg Politics. Here are the opening passages:

The decision was made, amazingly, with a shrug – and that may be one of the first reasons it has been all but buried by history. Frank Shoichet, the campaign manager, had this novel thought.

“Hey Kathy, I’ve got an idea,” the University of Michigan law student said to the 21-year-old English major who was about to announce her candidacy for a seat on the Ann Arbor City Council. ”Why don’t we run you as openly gay?” Kathy Kozachenko, an apple-cheeked radical with long blonde hair and a little gap-toothed overbite, hardly blinked. “Yeah, OK, Frank,” the 21-year-old creative writing major replied. “Let’s do that.”

Later, in the same story:

Ironically, Kozachenko’s decision to run as openly gay was a matter of political expediency, a tactic rather than a mission. In 1972, the Human Rights Party enjoyed what would later be seen as the pinnacle of its success, with DeGrieck and Wechsler winning their seats on the Ann Arbor City Council. But in early 1974, the party was falling apart as its founders left town to pursue studies or careers elsewhere. Most of the issues HRP had pushed had also been co-opted by Democrats. Kozachenko, then 21 and nearing graduation, felt as if she had arrived at a party right as it was ending – and she was desperate to keep it going.

Kozachenko preferred to remain behind the scenes, but Wechsler, DeGrieck, [1972 HRP State Representative candidate Steven] Burghardt, and Shoichet lobbied her hard to run. If she didn’t, they said and she knew, the party would field no candidates and probably collapse immediately. Then, when she agreed, Shoichet added the extra wrinkle – the idea that she acknowledge her sexual orientation publicly.

“To me, by that point, it just seems, like, well, why the hell not?” says Shoichet, now an attorney in Seattle. “People were getting used to it in Ann Arbor.”

Besides, in progressive circles, being on the vanguard can be a selling point. By 1974, the policy differences between the HRP and local Democrats had diminished; there was no pressing reason for progressive voters to choose an HRP candidate. Kozachenko’s run as an out lesbian, however, provided her with a distinction to set her apart. “The Democratic Party started to look like us and sound like us, so the students found no need to vote for us if they were saying the same thing,” she [Kozachenko] says. “So we found something different to say.”

***

Today’s Council Claims: “Kathy Kozachenko stood as a beacon of courage.” She did not.

Beyond the fact that Kozachenko was, as she put it on a campaign flyer, “an out-of-the closet lesbian,” her 1974 campaign was only vaguely about gay rights. The Human Rights Party, scrambling for relevance, put a pair of referendums on the ballot to appeal to student voters, one to reduce the marijuana fine to $5 and the other to impose rent control. Only the pot one passed, but both drove turnout in the student-dominated ward where Kozachenko was running.

This doesn’t sound much like a profile in courage or the language of the Council Resolution saying “Kathy Kozachenko stood as a beacon of courage…” Kozachenko herself says: “I don’t think I was brave, because I was in a college town where it was cool to be who I was.” (Friess article)

Nancy Wechsler said this: “But in Ann Arbor in 1974…, we had pretty much gotten everything we wanted for gay people by then. There wasn’t really a debate over gay rights in her ward.”

Kozachenko and some others complain that she hasn’t gotten the attention that she deserves as the first openly gay or lesbian candidate to win election. It is probably true that she was the first person to fit this description, but it sounds like more than it is. She may have been the first candidate to win an election while out, but not the first one to run while being out, which is probably the more important thing.

Harvey Milk, the almost legendary gay activist who ran for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, first ran for that Board in 1973, before Kozachenko, when he was known as a prominent gay activist in the community. He lost. He ran again in 1976, and lost again. He finally succeeded in 1977. He had a much higher hurdle to leap in his earlier runs for office. At that time, Supervisors ran at-large, having to win citywide. Later, they ran in just sections of the city. Kozachenko had the advantage of only needing to win in a nearly all-student ward of Ann Arbor. Milk is also remembered because he was assassinated by a conservative member of the Board in his first year in office.

It’s a bit contradictory to complain that Kozachenko’s story is unknown while also claiming that she was “a beacon of courage.” It’s hard to be both unknown and a beacon.

If one thinks that the significance of the Kozachenko story is that it shows that an openly gay or lesbian person can run for office, can surmount the obstacles that entails and get elected, that’s missing the real significance of her campaign and election. The real significance of it is that, in 1974 Ann Arbor, the fact that Kozachenko was a lesbian was a non-issue in the campaign. it just didn’t matter, or perhaps it was an asset. Isn’t that exactly the desired situation, that who a person loves and is sexually attracted to should make no difference in whether they succeed in politics?

I don’t know how one would create a statue celebrating the tolerance, the open-mindedness and the progressive values of the people of Ann Arbor that Kozachenko benefited from, or that you’d want to, but that’s the one that would make sense.

The City Council’s Resolution is an Example of Pandering and Virtue-Signalling

The Council Resolution was not a thoughtful exercise of legislative authority; it was an example of pandering and value-signaling. The Resolution was almost ridiculous in its excess. It noted that Kozachenko was “a woman of Ukrainian descent,” something of no significance in her 1974 story, but was probably included in a clumsy attempt to capitalize on current support for Ukraine.

Not a single question about this unprecedented action was posed by an any member of the Council. It was treated as if it were so routine, so unworthy of discussion, that it could have been included in Council’s Consent Agenda. The entire consideration of this matter consumed less than five minutes of Council’s time.

Is this a one-off event, the only statue to be erected of a person in Ann Arbor? If so, it’s a very wrong choice. If more might be considered in the future, shouldn’t there be some guidance and standards for doing so, such as thorough research into the history of the person’s actions and claimed contributions to the city? What about citizen input? None of these things were present here.

Who will approve the size, design, style and materials of the statue and where it will be placed? Administrators? Discussion around the Council table? A citizen commission? What role will Statues for Equality have? Has that organization been appropriately vetted?

The Resolution says that the City hopes to raise $100,000 dollars. What is the source of this number? Will the start of work on the statue be delayed until all of the necessary funds are raised? If not, would the City be responsible for costs of creating the statue if insufficient funds are raised?

Is there any established process in the City to do fundraising of this sort? What City staff and other resources would be required? What would be those costs? Will they be recovered by the contributions? If not, won’t that require that City funds to be budgeted? The Resolution calls for all of these issues to be resolved and the statue completed “to ensure an unveiling ceremony be part of the 2024 Bicentennial activities” of the City. Is this realistic?

I don’t know what the City is planning for its Bicentennial, but this notion is appalling. Of all the individuals who have contributed significantly to the life and history of the City over 200 years, Kozachenko, who contributed very little to that would receive the most prominent recognition.

The excesses of this decision don’t stop there. The Resolution also calls for the Administrator to pursue a State of Michigan historical marker. The statue isn’t enough?

As the Resolution was being considered by Council, Mayor Taylor said that he was delighted to be able to honor this “great Ann Arborite.” One can only hope that Council will gain better perspective on this matter and reverse its decision.

Tom Wieder came to Ann Arbor in 1968 as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, eventually earning degrees in history, public policy and law. He first became active in Ann Arbor Democratic politics in 1971, campaigning for Mayor Robert Harris’s re-election. Subsequently, he was active in scores of local, state and national campaigns. He managed four campaigns, including three City Council races.

During the early 1970s, he got to know many people active in the Human Rights Party (HRP), including Kathy Kozachenko. He had several roles in the Ann Arbor City Democratic Party structure – Precinct Captain, Ward Chair and as a Vice Chair. He served on three City bodies – the City Charter Review Committee, the Zoning Board of Appeals and the 1991 Ward Boundary Commission. In the latter position, he drew new City ward boundaries which are little changed to this day. During graduate school, he worked for a while in the City Administrator’s Office. He wrote the City Charter amendment moving City elections from April to November, co-managed the campaign to pass it and defended it from legal challenge in court. He has been a member of the ACLU of Michigan since 1971 and served as a member of its State Board and as a Vice President. Tom has represented ACLU clients in several cases, including one supporting the rights of minor parties in Michigan.