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Kenneth Cockrel Jr.

American mayor

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 4, 2026
Entity authorityQ6389985
Source-derived summary

Kenneth Vern Cockrel Jr. (born October 29, 1965) is an American journalist, nonprofit executive, businessman, and former politician who served as the 73rd mayor of Detroit, from September 2008 to May 2009. A member of the Democratic Party, Cockrel served as a member of the Detroit City Council from 1997 to 2008, and again from 2009 to 2013, and as the council's president from 2005 to 2008 and May to December 2009.

On September 17, 2008, Cockrel was sworn in as the city's interim mayor following Kwame Kilpatrick's resignation, with his term in office beginning September 19.

On May 5, 2009, former Detroit Pistons player and businessman Dave Bing defeated Cockrel 52% to 48% in a special election for Mayor of Detroit, to complete the rest of the term. On May 11, 2009, Bing was sworn in as the new mayor of Detroit and Cockrel returned to his position as council president. He was replaced as president for the following term, and sat as a regular council member. On April 23, 2013, he announced that he would not run for re-election.

Background

Kenneth Cockrel Jr. is the son of Kenneth Cockrel Sr.

Editorial summary

“Kenneth Cockrel Jr.” enters the record as american mayor. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Kenneth, Cockrel and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1965, 2008, 2009, 1997—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1965-10-29. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Kenneth, Cockrel and American.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Kenneth Cockrel Jr.” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Kenneth, Cockrel and American provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6389985. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1965, 2008, 2009 and 1997.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Kenneth Cockrel Jr. primary sources, Kenneth Cockrel Jr. archive and Kenneth research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Kenneth Cockrel Jr.” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.