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Commentary By Jason L. Riley

A Fire Chief Burned by Progressive Piety

Culture Culture & Society

Atlanta’s mayor gave Kelvin Cochran the sack for self-publishing a religion-themed book.

Kelvin Cochran was raised in Shreveport, La., in the 1960s and recalls always having the same answer when adults would quiz him about what he wanted to be when he grew up.

“I told them that I did not want to be poor, because we were very poor; that I wanted a family, because my dad had left my mother; and that I wanted to be a firefighter,” he explained in a 2017 interview. When Kelvin was 5, he returned from church with his family one Sunday and saw a neighbor’s home ablaze. “I saw the firefighters, and I was smitten on that day. I knew that I wanted to be a firefighter.”

Mr. Cochran went on to fulfill all those childhood ambitions and much more. He’s been married for more than three decades and has adult children. He became Shreveport’s first black fire chief in 1999, and in 2008 he was appointed the fire chief of Atlanta. A year later, President Obama tapped him for U.S. fire administrator, the highest office in the nation for a firefighter. Mr. Cochran was lured back to Atlanta in 2010 by then-Mayor Kasim Reed, who praised the fire chief for “dramatic improvements in response times and staffing” and “much-deserved national recognition.”

Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal

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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal