Alvin Brooks (activist)

Alvin Brooks (born Alvin Lee Gilder on May 3, 1932) is an American civil rights activist, community leader, and retired KCPD officer and public official. His universally lauded career of more than seven decades has made him a key figure in Kansas City, Missouri, including as one of the city's first Black police officers in 1954, founder of the influential Ad Hoc Group Against Crime in 1977, and city councilman and mayor pro tem from 1999 to 2007. In the aftermath of the 1968 Kansas City riots sparked by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Brooks was appointed to create and lead Kansas City's first Human Relations Department. As a public administrator, he became Assistant City Manager, and later ran for mayor of Kansas City and for Jackson County Executive. In 2010, he was appointed to the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners, becoming its president.

Brooks has dedicated his life to violence prevention, criminal justice reform, and racial equity, working both within and outside of government. He has earned national recognition, including being named one of America's "Thousand Points of Light" by President George H. W. Bush, receiving the Harry S. Truman Public Service Award, and receiving the Kansas Citian of the Year award from the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce in 2019. In his nineties, Brooks remains actively prominent in Kansas City, evidenced by his election to a public school board in 2024.

The highest positions of Kansas City leadership have called him "a legend", a "freedom fighter", and "one of the most respected and revered figures in Kansas City history". Academy Award-winning director of the 2024 PBS documentary, The Heroic True-Life Adventures of Alvin Brooks, said, "People in trouble with the law ask him for help, the police ask him for help, and politicians ... also come asking for help. All of those groups trust and respect him, which is amazingly rare."