A look back at Mark Ridley-Thomas' career
Mark Ridley-Thomas and Common help a Men's Central Jail inmate register to vote when Ridley-Thomas was a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.Ridley-Thomas is scheduled to be sentenced in federal court today for corruption. His supporters say his conviction shouldn't define his legacy.of conspiring to support a county contract for USC in exchange for one of the school’s deans providing his son a full scholarship and faculty job.Mark Ridley-Thomas represented South L.A.
Ridley-Thomas “defrauded the people of the county,“ U.S. Attorney Martín Estrada said after the jury handed down the verdicts. “Anytime a politician engages in corruption and breaches his duty of trust to the public, it is a great crime that must be brought to justice.” Mayor Karen Bass knew Ridley-Thomas back in the 1980’s, when he was executive director of the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference — the organization Martin Luther King, Jr. started in 1957.
“It began in the late ‘80s as a conversation about how we could more intelligently, humanely and effectively respond to this crisis,” he said. Portrait of Councilman Mark Ridley Thomas, taken at an NFL News Conference held at Macy's Plaza, downtown Los Angeles on August 9, 1999. “Mark was very committed to the issue of preventing violence against women and girls way before #MeToo,” she said. “He was one of the few men who stood up for survivors at the time.”Ridley-Thomas played a crucial role in the building of Staples Center, now called Crypto.com Arena, said John Semcken of Majestic Realty. At Majestic, Semcken was responsible for the development of the arena in the late 1990s.
On the board, Ridley-Thomas fought to reform the Department of Children and Family Services, authored the county’s minimum wage ordinance, and for years was the lone voice in favor of the creation of a civilian board to watchdog the Sheriff’s Department. But perhaps Ridley-Thomas’ crowning achievement as a supervisor was the 2015 reopening of a vastly improved Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in South L.A. It had been closed for nearly a decade after the federal government pulled funding over a series of problems, including controversial patient deaths that earned it the nickname “killer King.”
“He did not let ideological differences get in the way,” Harris said. “It illustrated his ability to reach across the lines.”
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