Kwame Kilpatrick marries fiancée at Little Rock Baptist Church

Detroit — Ex-Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his fiancée said "I do" Saturday at an afternoon ceremony at Detroit's Historic Little Rock Baptist Church.

Kilpatrick and Laticia Maria McGee married surrounded by family and friends at the church off Woodward Avenue where he gave a sermon last month. 

Earlier in the afternoon, a wedding dress was brought into the church. Police helped deal with traffic control along Woodward. By 3 p.m. guests were still arriving and the parking lots were almost completely full. Shortly before 4 p.m., the ceremony began and the doors to the church were closed. The ceremony ended about 5 p.m.

Kilpatrick announced the wedding date during a Deadline Detroit interview on Tuesday.

"We started a conversation and started praying together," he said during the interview. "Neither one of us was looking for a relationship at the time."

He said that allowed them to "be brutality honest" with one another.

Kilpatrick preached at the house of worship last month, addressing how he has changed. “How can you be born again and be the same person?” the former mayor asked those gathered at the church, where he took to the pulpit amid shouts of "Kwame!" and "We love you, Kwame!"

If planning a wedding wasn't work enough, Kilpatrick also filed articles of incorporation for a nonprofit in Georgia last month.

The documents list Kilpatrick and his new bride as the owners of Movement Ministries. The address listed is for a UPS in a strip mall near his father Bernard's home in Fayetteville. Someone with the same name as his sister, Ayanna Kilpatrick, incorporated another nonprofit ministry at the same address earlier this year called Project 61 Ministries. 

Kilpatrick met McGee when she started working as a receptionist in the mayor's office, Deadline Detroit reported Wednesday. Kilpatrick said he connected with her through a friend and they started praying on the phone together before eventual prison visits.

Kilpatrick served more than seven years in federal prison after being sentenced to 28 years before being released early by a commutation in January at the direction of President Donald Trump in one of his final acts as president.

Kilpatrick's sentence, the longest for a conviction for public corruption, ended a chapter in Detroit’s history. The city plunged into the largest municipal bankruptcy in America’s history in July 2013 partly because of financial decisions made by Kilpatrick.

The former mayor was convicted of racketeering conspiracy in March 2013 on 24 federal felony counts, including mail fraud, wire fraud and racketeering. Seven months later, Kilpatrick was sentenced to federal prison by U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds.

Staff Writers Mark Hicks and Robert Snell contributed.