The sanctuary at Greater Emmanuel Church of God in Christ was already full before the first note of the organ swelled through the air. Every pew told a story of a city, of a people, and of a woman who spent her life fighting for both.
On Wednesday, October 22, Detroit gathered for two reasons: to say goodbye to Congresswoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick and, most importantly, to honor a legacy stitched into the city’s fabric like the red and black colors her family wore in her memory; bold, purposeful, unflinching.
As her son, former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, made his way to the front row, he paused.
Looking out across the packed house of city leaders, neighbors, pastors, and those she’d quietly helped — he placed his fist to his heart and whispered twice, “Wow.”
That small gesture held the weight of decades of service, triumph, and struggle that defined both mother and son, and by extension, Detroit itself.
From Congresswoman Yvette Clarke and Congressman Shri Thanedar to Mayor Mike Duggan and Wayne County Executive Warren Evans, dignitaries filled the room. But the power in the space didn’t rest in titles. It was in the people, thousands of them, who came because Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick had once made Detroit believe that government could be a tool of care, not punishment.
Bishop J. Drew Sheard called the loss “great.” His words rose above the hum of the choir’s praise — “My Soul of Jesus” filling every corner of the church as the congregation lifted hands and hearts. Even in mourning, Detroit knows how to celebrate a life that matters.
To her family and close friends, she was “Nataki,” the Kiswahili name meaning “one born to be royal.” To the city, she was something just as rare, a daughter of Detroit who never forgot the people who sent her to Lansing and later to Washington.
Her younger sister, Marsha Cheeks, remembered a woman who believed abundance was meant to be shared.
“She wanted everyone to have an abundant life as God had blessed her,” she said. “So, she helped absolutely everyone, especially the children.”
That was the foundation upon which she built her career: service rooted in love and accountability. Cheeks Kilpatrick became the first Black woman to serve on Michigan’s House Appropriations Committee in 1978, a place where few women, let alone Black women, were ever invited. In Washington, she chaired the Congressional Black Caucus and fought for billions in federal funding that transformed Detroit’s riverfront, public transit, and housing landscape. Long before it became fashionable to speak of “equity,” she practiced it.
Mayor Duggan called her a trailblazer who “went where no Black woman in state elected office had been.” He reminded mourners that her legacy is visible, speaking to her work on the transportation and appropriations committee in Washington, D.C., where she helped bring tens of millions of dollars in federal funding to build a central bus station that connected downtown to the neighborhoods.
Even as Detroit’s political seasons shifted, her imprint endured. From her early days volunteering for Mayor Coleman Young’s campaign to her later years leading in Washington, she held fast to a vision of Detroit that refused to shrink from its Blackness or its complexity. Her politics came out of the same place as her faith, the Shrine of the Black Madonna and Oak Grove AME Church, institutions that taught her to blend Christianity with liberation.
Frankie Darcell introduced Kwame Kilpatrick with words that carried both affection and history: “He’ll forever be my mayor.” The congregation answered with applause and amens.
Because whatever one’s politics, everyone in that room understood something deeper — that Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick was the kind of woman who made room for contradiction. She was the mother who showed up, the public servant who stood her ground, the churchwoman who could quote scripture and legislation in the same breath.
Her son’s eulogy, titled “What a Woman,” brought both laughter and tears. Dressed in a black suit, red tie, and business-casual sneakers, Kwame Kilpatrick stood before the city his mother once helped him lead, a city where their names still carry equal measures of pride and pain.
He sang softly yet with the most powerful conviction, “My Hallelujah Belongs to You,” before speaking of the lessons his mother gave him. “It takes a remarkable woman to raise somebody like that,” he said, likening himself to Peter — the disciple known for his fire and flaws. “She was ‘raising Peter,’” he said with a laugh, “and that’s what she did.”
He told stories of her visiting him twice a month while he was incarcerated — their visits beginning with Bible study, their faith holding what the world had broken. “She received the Lord Jesus Christ not just because she knew about Him,” he said, “but because she had an encounter with Him in a prison visiting room.”
Around him, the sanctuary glowed — bouquets of red, white, and purple flowers spilling from every corner. A full-bodied bouquet of white roses rested atop her cherry-wood casket. Beside it stood two tall lamps, their soft light reflecting against the shine of one of her signature power suits. It was a scene that could only belong to a Detroit matriarch — a mix of grace, strength, and style.
When the choir closed with praise and the crowd began to rise, Detroit did what it has always done — bore witness. The story of Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick is the story of this city’s resilience: brilliant, complicated, unbent. Her life stretched from the streets of Detroit to the halls of Congress, and even in death, she reminded her people that representation isn’t a position, rather it’s a calling.
In the end, the city sent her home the way she lived: full, radiant, unapologetically Detroit.
Because when a Black woman like Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick leaves this earth, she doesn’t go quietly. She leaves instructions. For the Mary Sheffields, the Portia Robersons, the young Black women studying policy at Wayne State or organizing tenants on the East Side — her life is a living syllabus on how to fight systems that weren’t built for us and still win.
Her service made clear that power can be both principled and Black, both feminine and fierce.
“She fought to the very last breath,” said Amir Kilpatrick, Cheeks Kilpatrick grandson. “Because of her spirit, I know she’ll never die. It will never be another person like her.”
Detroit will remember her not just for the laws she passed or the billions she brought home, but for how she carried us as if we were all her children, deserving of abundance.
In this city, where the names of our foremothers echo through the corridors of power and pews alike, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick’s name will remain among them spoken with gratitude, said with pride, and remembered as proof that Detroit has always raised women built for the impossible.
