America's Youngest Lt. Governor - Colorado Lt. Governor Joe Rogers

Ebony, March, 2000 by Charles Whitaker

Colorado's Joe Rogers is shaking up politics in his state and carving a high profile on the national scene

THE seeds of Colorado Lt. Governor Joe Rogers' ascendant political career were sown in a life-altering moment during his senior year at Adams City High School, just outside of Denver. Rogers, a member of the school's modestly successful tennis team, had long been fuming about his schoolmates' indifference to the triumphs of any athlete who was not a football or basketball player.

"I was very upset because everybody was supporting football, but no one would show up to watch us play tennis," he recalls.

His frustrations erupted at the school's annual end-of-the-year athletic assembly, where the football team, as usual, got the lion's share of the attention and applause. Rather than sit passively as the tennis team was introduced and ushered off, Rogers grabbed the microphone and gave the whole school a piece of his mind.

"I told the students in the school that it was wrong not to support all of our sports programs," he says, "and that our school was broader than just basketball and football, so we needed to support all the athletes in the school who were working hard."

It was both a scathing indictment of student apathy and a rousing battle cry. By the end of his fusillade, the entire student body was on its feet, and Rogers--who confesses that he, too, was rather indifferent when it came to studying in high school--was tapped as one of the senior class graduation speakers.

From that moment on, Rogers' life had new meaning and direction. The poor boy who grew up on public assistance--wanting to be everything from a cowboy to a trumpet player--suddenly saw for himself a new career path, one that included the sort of public service that was the legacy of his maternal grandfather, a minister and political trailblazer in Omaha, Neb.

Today Joe Rogers is something of a political trailblazer himself. At 35, he holds the second-highest office in the state of Colorado, and is one of the youngest and highest-ranking Black elected officials in the nation. The oratorical skills that catapulted him to high school prominence, as well as his expressions of support for overlooked and underserved communities, have made him a rising star in the Republican Party (he counts Colin Powell and presidential candidate George W. Bush as his political soul mates and patrons), and helped him win Republican converts in Colorado's staunchly Democratic Black communities.

In Rogers' relatively young, two-election political career, he has proven to be a top vote-getter, while challenging the notion of the Republican Party as an exclusive club of White suburbanites. His presence on the Republican ticket in the 1999 statewide election helped draw 50 percent of the Black vote--the largest percentage of Black voters the GOP has ever attracted in Colorado--and swept him into his first elected office alongside running mate, Bill Owens, now Colorado governor. Rogers won 61 of the state's 63 counties, partly on the strength of a campaign theme that stressed, "The new reality of race and politics."

"I believe that we as a people need to be everywhere," he says, explaining why a young Black man with a passion for improving the nation's urban centers is aligned with the Republican Party. "I feel we ought never to allow a table in America to be seated in which we don't have a presence, because otherwise our interests aren't protected."

Though he defines his political philosophy as a new kind of conservatism, Rogers, like Colin Powell, is something of a centrist. He waxes on in the traditional Republican vein when it comes to issues like cutting taxes, school vouchers and "family values," but beneath the veneer of Republican buzz words is an unabashed devotion to the political empowerment and economic development of Black communities, expressed with a conviction rarely heard from his Black GOP contemporaries.

"He is a tremendous and very impressive young man," says Dr. Acen Phillips, senior pastor of Mt. Gilead Baptist Church in Denver and head of the coalition of more than 180 Black ministers who endorsed Rogers in his unsuccessful 1996 bid to capture the Congressional seat of retiring U.S. Rep. Pat Schroeder. "His understanding of what the Black community needs in terms of economic development and his courageous campaigns for things like grocery stores in our communities have touched a chord and bridged a historic gap between Black people and the Republican Party in this state."

"For me," Rogers says, "the key issues are: How do we find ways to restore and renew Black families; how do we find ways to expand and improve the quality of education in our schools; and how do we bring new investment and jobs to our communities? That is my focus. And I believe it is consistent with the Republican Party."

Rogers' allegiance to the Black community and his surprising independent streak have been sources of consternation and friction between Rogers and Gov. Bill Owens. If the governor thought the young man he tapped for the state's No. 2 spot would sit quietly in his office and only emerge for ceremonial purposes, he was quickly disabused of that notion. Rogers has proven to be an outspoken and media-savvy critic of the governor at times. "Some people believe that a lieutenant governor is supposed to be seen and not heard. Or, in some cases, not seen at all," he says. "I've just taken a different perspective."