The Man, the Strategy and the Seismic Shift by Brent Larkin

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer on the 40th Anniversary of Carl Stokes election as mayor of Cleveland.

The man, the strategy and the seismic shift

11/04/07

Brent Larkin

Plain Dealer Reporter

By midnight, all seemed lost. And the mood inside Carl B. Stokes’ downtown headquarters had turned decidedly gloomy.

Destiny was about to deny Stokes what he wanted most to be the first black elected mayor of a major American city.

With 70 percent of the vote counted, Republican Seth Taft had built what seemed an insurmountable lead. As Election Day turned to Wednesday, Taft had pulled in front by 20,000 votes.

It seemed that Stokes, a 40-year-old state representative who had handily defeated incumbent Mayor Ralph Locher in the Democratic primary, would lose the general election to a Republican in a city with a minuscule Republican population.

Cleveland Press reporter Dick Feagler would write that women wept during this tense, trying period when defeat seemed certain.

A Dixieland band played ‘S’Wonderful,’ but it wasn’t, described Feagler, adding that for four hours it appeared Seth Taft had won.

There was really a sense of despair, recalled Anne Bloomberg, at the time a 26-year-old civil rights activist and campaign volunteer. Our hopes were so high going in, and it looked like it would all be for naught.

But then it all began to change. Votes from predominantly black, East Side neighborhoods were the last to be counted. Slowly, but inexorably, Taft’s lead began to shrink.

We had ward-watchers in the neighborhoods and we knew Carl would come back, recalled Ann Felber Kiggen, Stokes’ campaign scheduler. When it began to happen, I remember this incredible feeling that swept through the headquarters. People were dancing and holding hands. It was uncontained joy.

It was 3 a.m. when, with nearly 900 of the city’s 903 precincts reporting, Stokes took the lead for the first time. Out of 250,000 votes cast, he won by 2,500.

Then, as the mayor-elect appeared before about 400 jubilant supports, the room grew quiet when he declared, I can say to all of you that never before have I known the full meaning of the words, ‘God Bless America.’

In his autobiography, Promises of Power, Stokes would later marvel at the magnitude of what happened that night.

In a race for high office, the grandson of a slave had defeated the grandson of a president.

That had never happened before. And it hasn’t happened since.

The Cleveland that elected Carl B. Stokes mayor was a far cry from the one that chose Michael R. White as the city’s second black mayor 22 years later and light years removed from the one that elected Frank Jackson in 2005.

In 1967, Cleveland was still a top-10 city, with a population north of 750,000 nearly 300,000 more than today. Because race was as much a factor in city politics then as it is now, Stokes’ election was all the more remarkable; the city’s black population was only about 35 percent then. Today, that figure surpasses 53 percent.

To defeat Seth Taft, a decent man with a magic name who would later serve with distinction as a Cuyahoga County commissioner, Stokes needed white votes lots of them.

We knew we had to broaden our base on the west and south sides, recalled Charlie Butts, Stokes’ brainy, 25-year-old campaign manager fresh out of Oberlin College. But we had to be careful not to give the appearance of running different campaigns in different parts of town.

To give his campaign legitimacy, Stokes desperately needed support from whites in corporate boardrooms and city neighborhoods. He got it from this newspaper, which endorsed him on the front page.

He got it from people like Bob Bry, a vice president of Otis Elevator who organized a group of business leaders to take out newspaper ads on Stokes’ behalf.

I was a registered Republican, but my sympathies were with what Carl was trying to do, said Bry, now 84 and living in Florida. Some business leaders were bothered by it. But no one ever said anything to my face.

He got it from people like Ann and Joe McManamon and hundreds of others like them who paid a price for welcoming Stokes into their living rooms and churches.

There were recriminations, remembered Ann McManamon. We got some very hateful phone calls. It got quite nasty. But our friends stuck with us and were supportive.

Nearly one in five whites voted for Stokes which meant he needed nearly nine out of every 10 black votes.

To win those votes, Stokes built a political organization that, to this day, serves as a model for black candidates across the country. It was a base that relied heavily on churches, ward leaders and a grass-roots field operation that extensively schooled street captains on how to maximize turnout.

That same base later enabled Stokes’ brother, Lou, to become an institution in Congress. It helped make former City Council President George Forbes powerful and wealthy. And it twice brought Arnold Pinkney to the brink of becoming Cleveland’s second black mayor.

It was a base built to last and last it did.

All around the country in places like Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago black candidates copied what Carl was able to achieve in Cleveland, said his brother. What made it special was that it was done so well and had never been done before.

There was no blueprint for electing a black mayor of a major American city. So Stokes drew his own.

He had a plan on how to win, and he never strayed from it, said Forbes. In his prime, there was none better none.

From City Hall to New York, and, finally, back home

Stokes won re-election in 1969, but did not seek a third term in 1971, leaving soon after for New York, where he was a television anchor and later a reporter for NBC. Over the years, Stokes gave various reasons for his decision not to seek a third term, but he was clearly tired of the constant struggles involved in leading a big city with mounting problems.

Stokes’ record as mayor was decidedly mixed. He brought a sense of fairness to the city’s hiring practices, helped raise the level of social services and aggressively fought to improve housing conditions. But Stokes fought repeatedly with City Council, and revelations that some funds from a poverty-fighting program he founded went to nationalists involved in the killing of police in the Glenville riots significantly eroded his popularity.

Upon his return to Cleveland in 1980, Stokes found that the new political stars were his brother and Forbes. In 1983, he became a Municipal Court judge an important position that lacked the high profile of a powerful congressman and council president. There were also some troubling and embarrassing moments. Stokes engaged in some high-profile political fights with onetime allies and was twice accused of shoplifting he paid restitution on one charge and was acquited of another.

But none of what happened later detracts from the significance of what Stokes achieved in 1967.

Many black leaders in the ’60s aspired to be Cleveland’s mayor, but only one ever stood a chance.

Only one person could have built that base, said Pinkney. Only one person had the charisma, the experience and the drive to win. Back then, it took a special talent for a black to be elected mayor. And only Carl had that talent.

Stokes was not a civil rights leader. He was a politician. And four decades later, Pinkney and others still speak with a sense of awe of Stokes’ political gifts. Butts thinks Stokes was born with an intellect, understanding and chemistry that allowed him to connect to voters in ways almost unprecedented. Forbes volunteers that Stokes had the whole package looks, the charm and one of the sharpest political minds I’ve ever seen. Kiggen says he was the most charismatic man anyone could hope to ever meet.

In his book, Stokes wrote that he considered the 1965 campaign for mayor, in which he narrowly lost to Locher in the Democratic primary, the high point of my career.

He was mistaken. The 1965 campaign energized Stokes’ base. And it set the table for what would follow. But it paled, compared to what would happen two years later.

Always looking ahead, even at the end

For all his winning ways, Stokes was also the most complex politician I ever dealt with. He could be warm and witty one day, your enemy the next.

On Jan. 30, 1996, we visited over lunch at an East Side restaurant. He knew by then that his fight with cancer of the esophagus was one he couldn’t win.

As Stokes picked at food he could barely swallow, he spoke with no rancor as he reminisced about those days of glory that landed him on the cover of Time magazine. He wasn’t finished looking ahead, either: He eagerly agreed to meet with a group of young journalists at this newspaper to talk about how the political process affects minorities, and we chose a date in February.

But when the day came, he was too ill. By early April, he was gone.

He had long before kept the date that mattered most, though. That was the one back in 1967 that made him, in the sense of history, immortal.

The Glenville Riots 1968 aggregation

1 The Glenville Shootout from the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

2 Glenville Riots Documentary

3 The Glenville Shootout from Cleveland Memory

4 Shoot-Out in Cleveland by Louis A. Masotti and Jerome R. Corsi

5 Mayor Carl Stokes press conference on the Glenville Shootout, July 1968 (Video)

Hough Riots aggregation

1 Hough Riots from Wikipedia

2 The Hough Riots from the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

3 Hough: Building and Tension by Luke Ondish

4 Hough Riots: The Aftermath by Brigette Bencoe

5 Rough Hough: Frustration and Redemption

6 Race, Violence, and Urban Territoriality – Cleveland’s Little Italy and the 1966 Hough Uprising

7 Hough: Before and Beyond. A Series on Cleveland’s Hough Neighborhood 50 Years After the 1966 Riots (Ideastream)

8 Living History: Hough, Before & Beyond ’66 (Video) July, 2016 Ideastream

Perceptions of the Burning River: Deindustrialization and Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River Author(s): David Stradling and Richard Straddling 2008

Perceptions of the Burning River: Deindustrialization and Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River Author(s): David Stradling and Richard Stradling
Source: Environmental History, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Jul., 2008), pp. 515-535
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Forest History Society and American Society for Environmental History

The link is here

Cuyahoga River Documentaries

1. Don’t Fall in the River

Short Documentary about Cuyahoga River fires produced by CSU Digital Humanities

The link is here

2. Cuyahoga River Restoration

WFN Green examines the 40-plus years of clean up the has been done on the Cuyahoga River since the river caught on fire.

The link is here

3. Cuyahoga River Pollution 1967

Short documentary produced by WKYC TV in 1967 about the Cuylahoga River and the problems of pollution.

The link is here

Remembering Cleveland’s Muhammad Ali Summit, 45 Years Later-Plain Dealer 5/3/12

Remembering Cleveland’s Muhammad Ali Summit, 45 Years Later-Plain Dealer 5/3/12

Courtesy of the Plain Dealer

The link is here

Remembering Cleveland’s Muhammad Ali Summit, 45 years later

Published: Sunday, June 03, 2012

Branson Wright, The Plain Dealer

AP Images

On June 4, 1967 at 105-15 Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, a collection of some of the top black athletes in the country met with — and eventually held a news conference in support of — world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali (front row, second from left), about Ali’s refusal to be drafted into the U.S. Army in 1967. • Mouse over the picture to put names with the famous faces and read details.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — On a sunny Sunday afternoon in early June 1967, several hundred Clevelanders crowded outside the offices of the Negro Industrial Economic union in lower University Circle. None of those gathered, including a collection of the top black athletes of that time, realized the significance of what would happen in that building on this day.

Muhammad Ali, the most polarizing figure in the country, was inside being grilled by the likes of Bill Russell, Jim Brown and Lew Alcindor, who would later change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. They weren’t interested in whether Ali was going to take his talents to South Beach or any other sports labor issues.

They wanted to know just how strong Ali stood behind his convictions as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. The questions flew fast and furious. Ali’s answers would determine whether Brown and the other athletes would throw their support behind the heavyweight champion, who would have his title stripped from him later in the month for his refusal to enter the military.

“When I look at the situation in Florida (Trayvon Martin case) and when I look through all my adult life, there’s always been a period where something happens that causes this country to struggle, be it racial or whatever,” said former Green Bay standout Willie Davis. “I look back and see that Ali Summit as one of those events. I’m very proud that I participated.”On June 4, 1967 at 105-15 Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, a watershed moment occurred in the annals of both the Civil Rights Movement and the protest against the Vietnam War. Every cultural force convulsing the nation came together – race, religion, politics, young vs. old, peace vs. war. This is the story about how such an extraordinary meeting developed. How it transpired in Cleveland. And of what that meeting means now, looking back though the lens of 45 years.

The core of the summit was the NIEU, later named the Black Economic Union (BEU).

The organization was co-developed by Brown in 1966, a year after he retired from the NFL to become a full-time actor. The BEU served various communities across the country, mostly in economic development. The BEU also supported education and other social issues within the black community.

The BEU and this meeting with Ali stemmed from Brown’s social consciousness. For the meeting with Ali, Brown brought together other socially conscious black athletes of the time. Besides Russell, Alcindor and Davis, there was Bobby Mitchell (Washington Redskins), Sid Williams (Browns), Jim Shorter (Redskins), Walter Beach (Browns), John Wooten (Browns), Curtis McClinton (Kansas City Chiefs) and attorney Carl Stokes.

“The principal for this meeting of course was Ali,” McClinton said. “The principal of leadership for us was Jim Brown. Jim’s championship leadership filtered to all of us.”

The Sixties

The United States in the 1960s was ripe for political, social and cultural change. It was a time of upheaval, and re-awakening.

“The time dictated the passion in all of us,” Brown said.

Forty-five years ago, the United States was in the midst of a Civil Rights movement. There was also an increase in protests against the Vietnam War. Malcolm X was killed in New York in 1965. Later that year, black football players refused to play in the AFL All-Star Game in New Orleans because of racism and discrimination in that city. The game was moved to Houston. In July 1966, riots erupted in the Hough neighborhood of Cleveland. Two major race riots erupted in Newark and Detroit during the summer of 1967. Opposition to the Vietnam War grew with protests on college campuses and in several major cities. And 10 months after the Ali Summit, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis.

In many ways, Cleveland was also the epicenter of black political and social progress. In November of ’67, Stokes became the first black mayor of a major U.S. city when he was elected in Cleveland. The city became a destination for thousands of blacks who migrated from the south because of job opportunities. When it came to sports, the Browns were popular in the black community, mostly because of their history with black players, such as Marion Motley, Bill Willis and Brown.

“Black people were coming to Cleveland from all over the country to see what we were doing here politically and economically, because no other city was doing it like we were,” said former BEU treasurer Arnold Pinkney, a long-time entrepreneur and political activist.

“Cleveland was a hotbed for black power, energy and Black Nationalism at this time,” said Leonard N. Moore, University of Texas professor and author of the book, “Carl B. Stokes and the Rise of Black Political Power.”

“In so many ways, it was fitting that the meeting happened on the East Side of Cleveland,” he said.

A little over a month before the Cleveland gathering, Ali refused to step forward for induction into the U.S. Army in Houston. That set off a firestorm of criticism of the champ. Ali was also a member of the Nation of Islam, broadly seen as an anti-white cult, even in some circles within the black community.

Harry Edwards, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California-Berkeley, said there was so much consternation concerning the war and Ali that the fighter became symbolic of almost every rift in society.

“He was already regarded as a loud-mouth Negro while he was Cassius Clay,” said Edwards, referring to Ali’s birth name before his conversion to Islam. “When he joined the Nation of Islam, that exacerbated it even more.”

Ali’s stance helped ignite the rising level of anti-war sentiment.

“The anti-war movement really hit the headlines when Ali refused induction and made his statement about not having any quarrel with the Viet Cong,” Edwards said. “And then to refuse to comply with the draft, that lined up all of those people who were on one side or the other of the Vietnam War.”

Enter Jim Brown

Former Browns players John Wooten and Walter Beach on the Ali SummitJohn Wooten and Walter Beach discuss how they became involved with the Ali Summit.

In 1967, Brown was in his second year of retirement after leaving the sport as the NFL’s all-time leading rusher. His post-NFL career was spent as an actor, but Brown never lost his zeal as a social activist. When Brown helped form the BEU, the organization established offices in Los Angeles, Kansas City, Philadelphia, New York, Washington and Cleveland. His former teammate, John Wooten, became the executive director of the Cleveland office. Everyone in the meeting with Ali, with the exception of Russell, was a BEU member.

Ohio State graduate student Robert Bennett III, who will complete his dissertation thesis on the BEU later this year, said supporting Ali was not out of the ordinary for the BEU.

“Oftentimes when you look at the history of black athletes, it often looks at their achievements on the field,” Bennett said. “And it’s rare for someone to look at their social or political activism off the field. The athletes involved with the BEU were about defending and supporting issues that supported the black community.”

Shortly after Ali’s refusal to join the military on grounds of being a conscientious objector, Brown received a telephone call from Ali’s manager, Herbert Muhammad. Several boxing governing bodies had already suspended or threatened to suspend Ali’s boxing license. Brown said Herbert wanted him to help convince Ali to reconsider because of the potential loss of income, and because of the anticipated backlash.

Herbert Muhammad was torn because of his religious faith, but he was also in the business of helping Ali make money.

“Herbert wanting Ali to go into the service was a shocker,” Brown said. “I thought the Nation of Islam would never look at it that way. But Herbert figured the Army would give Ali special consideration so he would be able to continue his career. But he couldn’t talk to Ali about that, so he reached out to me and I had the dilemma of finding a way to give Ali the opportunity to express his views without any influence. I never told Ali about my conversation with Herbert. I never told anyone, really.”

There was another backdrop to the meeting. Bob Arum and Brown were partners in Main Bout, Arum’s company that promoted Ali’s fights. Convincing Ali to go into the military would provide economic opportunities for the athletes in the summit.

“The idea was that these guys would become the chief closed-circuit exhibitors for Ali’s fights all over the United States,” Arum said. “Each of them would get a particular region and they would make a nice chunk of change every time Ali fought.”

Subsequently, Brown reached out to Wooten and asked him to contact some of the top black athletes in the country to attend a meeting in Cleveland with Ali.

“Herbert wanted me to talk with Ali, but I felt with Ali taking the position he was taking, and with him losing the crown, and with the government coming at him with everything they had, that we as a body of prominent athletes could get the truth and stand behind Ali and give him the necessary support,” Brown said.

Where and when

Walter Beach and John Wooten talk about the Ali SummitFormer Browns Walter Beach and John Wooten talk about the historical significance of the Ali Summit.

The athletes’ response did not surprise Wooten.

“After I called all of the guys and explained what we were meeting about, they didn’t ask who’s going to pay for this or that, they just asked where and what time,” Wooten said.

Alcindor, who had just finished his sophomore year at UCLA, didn’t hesitate to make the trip.

“Muhammad Ali was one of my heroes,” said Abdul-Jabbar, who was active in the BEU office in Los Angeles. “He was in trouble and he was someone I wanted to help because he made me feel good about being an African-American. I had the opportunity to see him do his thing [as an athlete and someone with a social conscience], and when he needed help, it just felt right to lend some support.”

More importantly, the meeting wasn’t just for Ali.

“Our assembling there was about Ali defining himself, because that definition was a part of us,” McClinton said.

The athletes at the summit were not going to give Ali blind support. Many needed answers to exactly why Ali claimed to be a conscientious objector. There was some confusion regarding Ali’s motives. Three years earlier, Ali failed the Armed Forces qualifying test due to sub-par writing and spelling skills. In early 1966, the tests were revised and Ali was reclassified as 1A, making him eligible for the draft. Initially, Ali said he didn’t understand the change and there was no reference to religion or being a conscientious objector. Many wondered if he was only upset because of the interruption to his boxing career.

At the summit, Ali also had to convince a group that had several members with a military background. Brown, as a member of the Army ROTC, graduated from Syracuse as a second lieutenant. Wooten completed his military obligation in 1960. Shorter served in a reserve unit, and Mitchell served with a military hospital unit in 1962. Beach spent four years in the Air Force. Stokes served in World War II, and McClinton served in the Army Signal Corps.

Making his case

Brown didn’t set up a gauntlet for Ali. He also did not set up a meeting for Ali to waltz through.

“I wanted the meeting to be as intense and honest as it should’ve been, and it was because the people in that room had thoughts and opinions, and they came to Cleveland with that purpose in mind,” Brown said.

“We weren’t easy on him,” Mitchell said. “We weren’t slapping hands. In that room, especially early on, it got a little heated.”

How heated?

“F. Lee Bailey [a famous trial lawyer] would’ve been proud in the way we questioned the champ,” Wooten said. “Those guys shot questions at the champ, and he took them, and fought back. It was intense because we were all getting ready to face the United States public relations machine — the media, and put our lives and careers on the line. What if this fails? What if he goes to jail?”

Although it wasn’t discussed as a group before the meeting, many of the men planned to convince Ali to accept his call to the military.

“But after about 15 minutes of being there, I’m saying to myself, ‘No way is this guy going to change his mind,'” Davis said.

Ali made it clear that he would not participate in the Vietnam War. He spoke on Islam, Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, and black pride, but it all came down to his religious beliefs, and nothing was going to convince him otherwise.

“Jim told me that Ali talked for two straight hours,” Arum said. “And you have to understand that at that time, Ali was functionally illiterate. And here he was in a room with these great athletes who were all college educated, but he was able to convince all of them that the path he was taking was the correct one. And people at that point and time didn’t realize how smart Ali was.”

In fact, Ali was so convincing that many in the room nodded their heads in agreement whenever Ali made several points.

“The champ stood strong,” Wooten said.

“During those hours, he said he was sincere and his religion was important to him,” Mitchell said. “He convinced all of us, even someone like me, who was suspicious. We weren’t easy on him. We wanted Ali to understand what he was getting himself into. He convinced us that he was.”

McClinton also noted how the summit was not entirely about supporting Ali as a conscientious objector.

“Our presence there was more to the freedom for Ali to go left or right,” McClinton said.

“We didn’t have a right to tell Ali what to do,” Williams said. “All we could do is show our support for him in whatever he was going to do. That decision was up to him and he made it.”

Following the meeting, Brown led the group to a press conference. Russell, Ali, Brown and Alcindor (Abdul-Jabbar) sat in the front row at a long table. Stokes, Beach, Williams, McClinton, Davis, Shorter, and Wooten stood behind them.

Brown said the group supported Ali and his rights as a conscientious objector. And they felt his sincerity.

‘Absolute and sincere faith’

Russell declined to comment when approached for this story during the NBA All-Star Weekend in February, but shortly after the summit, Russell said this to Sports Illustrated in the June 19, 1967 issue:

“I envy Muhammad Ali. … He has something I have never been able to attain and something very few people possess. He has absolute and sincere faith. I’m not worried about Muhammad Ali. He is better equipped than anyone I know to withstand the trials in store for him. What I’m worried about is the rest of us.”

Supporting Ali certainly wasn’t a popular move, but Brown and the others were willing to take the risk. None of the participants could cite any direct fallout when it came to supporting Ali, but being there for a friend was worth any risk.

“We didn’t care about any perceived threats,” Wooten said. “We weren’t concerned because we weren’t going to waver. We were unified. We all had a real relationship with each other and we knew we were doing something for the betterment of all.”

In an even broader sense, the Ali Summit — not known by that name at the time — helped to validate Ali’s religious beliefs. But those beliefs and the summit could not prevent the actions of the U.S. Government two weeks later when Ali was convicted of draft evasion, sentenced to five years in prison, fined $10,000 and banned from boxing for three years. He stayed out of prison as his case was appealed. The Supreme Court would overturn the decision in 1971.

But the summit had other immeasurable benefits.

“We knew who we were,” said McClinton of the athletes who stood united 45 years ago. “We knew what we had woven into our country, and we stood at the highest level of citizenship as men. You name the value, we took the brush and painted it. You raised the bar, we reached it. You defined excellence, we supersede it. As a matter of fact, we defined it.”

King’s Speech – Cleveland Magazine

From Cleveland Magazine April 2012 and written by Erick Trickey

In April 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. launched a drive in Cleveland to prevent another riot in Hough and help elect the city’s first black mayor. His aides and local leaders recall the struggles and tensions 45 years ago.

The link is here

On Aug. 23, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. arrived at Lafayette School in Cleveland, and kids from the Mount Pleasant neighborhood rushed over to see him. It was still summer vacation, but the schoolhouse doors were open that day, and Dr. King was standing just outside them.

Adults were coming in and out of the building, registering to vote in Cleveland’s 1967 race for mayor. It was the one day of the year that Clevelanders could sign up to vote without going downtown to the board of elections.

From somewhere came Dr. King’s resonant, amplified voice. Someone was playing a recording of King’s four-year-old, already-famous I Have A Dream speech. But King asked for it to be turned off. He had something else to say, something less lofty but also less dreamy, something immediate and real.

“Today is just the beginning,” he told the crowd. “Now you must vote, or tell your parents to vote, on Oct. 3.”

All that spring and summer, America’s most prominent civil-rights leader had been flying to Cleveland, every two weeks or so, reaching out to the city’s restless, frustrated black minority. Responding to an invitation from several local black ministers, who feared a repeat of the devastating July 1966 riots in Hough, King’s civil-rights group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had come north.

After a difficult effort against housing discrimination in Chicago in 1966, King chose Cleveland as the second and last campaign he ever directed outside the South.

In speeches in schools, rallies in the streets and sermons in churches, some of them carried live on the radio, King exhorted Clevelanders to choose peace over violence, activism over riots. He organized boycotts to try to win more jobs for black workers. And, most of all, he asked them to register and vote, while dropping obvious hints about whom he thought they should vote for: state Rep. Carl Stokes, who hoped to become the first black mayor of a major American city.

King knew Cleveland well. He’d visited in 1965 to raise funds for the voting-rights march in Selma, Ala., speaking to thousands at a downtown banquet and in churches in Glenville and Shaker Heights. He had friends and in-laws in the city, ex-Alabamians who’d moved north for a better life.

But Cleveland posed complex new challenges for his movement. The racial divide here was as deep as the Cuyahoga River valley. Black Clevelanders rarely traveled to the West Side. Many white Clevelanders were fearful of blacks, resentful, hostile. King’s peaceful confrontations with white society, his growing activism against the Vietnam War and the frequent insinuations that he had Communist ties made him a deeply controversial figure. His Cleveland campaign put the single person it was most designed to help, Carl Stokes, in an awkward political spot, a tension the two men never fully resolved.

King’s Cleveland drive began 45 years ago this month. This year, a rediscovered recording of his April 1967 speech at Glenville High School has sparked new interest in King’s intimate relationship with Cleveland during the last year of his life. Cleveland Magazine spoke to several people who witnessed King’s campaign here, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and former U.N. ambassador Andrew Young, to reconstruct the story.

Spring 1967

The United Pastors Association, a group of black ministers formed after the 1966 Hough riots, invited King to Cleveland in April 1967 to join them in a campaign to improve conditions in Cleveland’s black neighborhoods. Teenagers on an arson spree had just burned down Giddings Elementary School in Hough. Many Clevelanders feared more summer rioting.

REV. E. T. CAVINESS was a member of the United Pastors Association. Then, as now, he was pastor of Greater Abyssinia Baptist Church in Glenville. The Hough riots were horrendous. They were devastating. They possibly did more damage to the fabric of the African-American community than anything else. It burned the stores. Instead of being able to shop in your neighborhood, you had to go out. All of our efforts were to obliterate that kind of activity from transpiring again. Martin almost was the symbol for us, a motivating factor, to let us know we could do it if we all stood together in unity.

King spoke at three Cleveland schools, asking students to embrace nonviolence. In Glenville High’s gymnasium, 3,500 teens from several schools sat on folding chairs to hear him. King stood at a wooden podium, facing a forest of microphones and wires. Speaking slowly, drawing out his words, pointing to the students to emphasize a point, King spoke to them in the same soaring oratory as his historic speeches and church sermons. When he switched from the word “Negro” to declare, “Black is as beautiful as any color,” the students erupted in a high-pitched cheer.

REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING, at Glenville High, April 26, 1967: Our power does not lie in Molotov cocktails. Our power does not lie in bricks and stones. Our power does not lie in bottles. Our power lies in our ability to unite around concrete programs. Our power lies in our ability to say nonviolently that we aren’t going to take it any longer. You see, the chief problem with a riot is that it can always be halted by superior force. But I know another weapon that the National Guard can’t stop. They tried to stop it in Mississippi, they tried to stop it in Alabama, but we had a power that Bull Connor’s fire hoses couldn’t put out. It was a fire within.

REV. JESSE JACKSON was a 25-year-old aide to Dr. King who often came to Cleveland with him in 1967. Jackson went on to found the civil-rights group Operation PUSH in 1971 and run for president of the United States in 1984 and 1988. The question was, would nonviolence work in the North? [With] urban frustration and job tensions, could you have the same kind of discipline you had in the South? We were picking and choosing which urban markets we could apply nonviolence in, so we could use the new Voting Rights Act to make an impact. Cleveland had the right combination of alliances and coalition potential. [It] was one of the northern areas where we had lots of relationships.

Discontent with Cleveland Mayor Ralph Locher was rising, from the black community and the business community, over his underwhelming reaction to the Hough riots and the state of Cleveland’s black neighborhoods. Support was building for state Rep. Carl Stokes, who had barely lost to Locher in the 1965 mayor’s race, to run again. The morning King came to town, Locher called King an “extremist” and declared he wouldn’t meet with him. That set off a war of words.

KING, at Glenville High: One of the things that we need in every city is political power. • Cleveland, Ohio, is a city that can be the first city of major size in the United States to have a black mayor and you should participate in making that a possibility.

King and the United Pastors wanted to help elect Stokes. But Stokes feared King would set off a white backlash. King’s 1966 fair-housing marches in the Chicago area had attracted violent attacks from angry whites.

CARL STOKES, from his autobiography, Promises of Power: In 1967, Dr. King’s great career was at a low point. He had just come out of Cicero, Illinois, with great disappointments, discovering just how profound are the white man’s hatred and prejudice. He desperately needed a victory.

Stokes met with King at the offices of the Call and Post, Cleveland’s black newspaper.

CARL STOKES: I explained to Dr. King that I had carefully put this whole campaign together. I had worked to get actual white votes. I couldn’t afford to do anything to aggravate the white voter. …

“You’re going to create problems that we do not have now and may not be able to handle. I would rather that you not stay.” •

“I will have to stay,” [King] said, “but I promise there will be nothing inflammatory.”

JACKSON: I remember that meeting. Carl was [concerned about] whites’ reaction to Dr. King. Carl felt he had to have a coalition to win. That meant relieving white fears. Between relieving white fears and black legitimate aspirations, there’s a tension. Dr. King was the anti-war guy. He was the challenging-the-white-power-structure guy. He was, for many, an object of fear rather than a source of hope. So I think Carl was walking that thin line.

Summer

King called a May 16 press conference at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church on Quincy Avenue. With four black ministers and local black nationalist Fred “Ahmed” Evans standing with him, King announced that on June 1, the SCLC would kick off efforts to register voters and boycott companies doing business in black neighborhoods until they hired more black workers. Afterward, he visited striking workers at St. Luke’s Hospital on Shaker Boulevard, stopping on the way to ask people on street corners about life in Cleveland.

KING, at the press conference: Like many of our nation’s cities, we find Cleveland a teeming cauldron of hostility. The citizens of the Negro community reflect the alienation of the total community, which has constantly ignored their cries for justice and opportunity and responded to their joblessness, poor housing and economic exploitation with crude methods of police repression rather than compassion and creative programming.

CAVINESS: Black people were not being hired. The only thing you could do around here was run the elevator. Basically, that was the norm.

JACKSON: It required a confrontation before negotiation. They’d been so locked in to one-way trade: We bought, they sold. We wanted to be reciprocal trading partners.

JOAN BROWN CAMPBELL was a local community activist. She later became a minister and executive director of the World Council of Churches’ U.S. office. There was a lot of pressure from more radical groups. I remember him being somewhat discouraged. His commitment to nonviolence was being challenged.

In a couple of conversations I was in with black ministers, he would take people to task. [He’d say,] “We can’t afford to be giving up on nonviolence. We can’t afford to move in a direction of violence. We’re making progress, fighting with the right tools.”

JACKSON: The Hough district was very violent, very threatening. I spent a lot of time down in Hough, developing relationships as a street organizer. [I remember] how desperate and poor people were in Hough. That stands in my mind.

ANDREW YOUNG was executive director of the SCLC and an aide to King. He later became a congressman, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and mayor of Atlanta. I remember we were going down Euclid Avenue, and a group of possible prostitutes were on the corner. They saw [King] in the car, and they said, “Ol’ Uncle Tom, we don’t need you up here! Go on back down to Georgia.”

The driver pulled off, and Dr. King said, “Stop this car.” He got out and went to speak to them.

He said, “Ladies, I’m sorry. I understand how you feel about me, but I’d like an opportunity to explain to you why we’re here. I’d be glad to have a cup of coffee with you back at my hotel, if you could come back there at about 3 o’clock.”

We got back a little later, about 3:30, and there must have been 15 to 20 prostitutes in the lobby saying they were there to see Martin Luther King. We got the boardroom and invited them all in. We ordered coffee, donuts, cookies and sandwiches, things like that.

He said, “Look, it’s obvious that all of you are very intelligent young women, and you probably have children, and you probably would rather do something other than what you’re doing.” He said, “You’d probably be good schoolteachers. You could probably do anything in this society if you had had the educational opportunity and a helping hand to do that. Those are decisions that are politically controlled.

“One of the reasons why we think we ought to be represented in the government, in the board of education, is so that young women like you would not have to do this as the only means of survival.”

They were grateful for being treated like people, with respect. When they finished their coffee and cookies, they started trying to clean off the table and he said, “No, no, no, you don’t have to do that.” They promised that they would register to vote and that they would spread the word around the neighborhood.

King and his aides befriended “Ahmed” Evans, the black nationalist and astrologer who had predicted more riots in Cleveland.

CAVINESS: Violence was on the table with Ahmed Evans. It was “by any means necessary,” [like] Malcolm X. There were people who looked upon him as being courageous, no-nonsense. “We’re prepared to die, do it or die.” Angry young people would look at that and say, maybe this is the way to do it.

YOUNG: [Evans] was quite loud and boisterous on the news. But when he sat with Martin Luther King, he was very quiet and gentle, and they had a really peaceful conversation.

CAMPBELL: It was very like Dr. King to reach out to someone like Ahmed Evans. And he would get criticized for it. That was the most magical thing about him. He didn’t play his cards safely.

Evans joined the voter registration drive, a signal to his fellow angry young men to work within the system. Other forces were also in play; Stokes and Call and Post publisher William O. Walker convinced white businessmen Ralph Besse and Lawrence Evert to pay black nationalists a total of $40,000 to keep the peace.

Violence did not break out in Cleveland that summer, but it did in Newark, N.J., and Detroit. On July 28, the last day of the Detroit riots, King toured Cleveland’s East Side, exhorting audiences not to burn down their neighborhoods, but to embrace black pride and vote.

LOUIS STOKES, Carl Stokes’ brother, was a lawyer for the Cleveland NAACP in 1967. He was elected as Ohio’s first black congressman in 1968. Dr. King rode on a flatbed truck. You would see him standing on that flatbed truck at places like 55th and Woodland, 79th and Cedar, 105th and St. Clair, and numerous other places. He had a bullhorn and he would be exhorting people in that community to register to vote.

What I noted most was that voice, which was like no other voice. When he spoke, something moved all through your body and your mind.

KING, in a discount store parking lot at East 105th Street and St. Clair Avenue, July 28, 1967: I want to say to everybody under the sound of my voice this afternoon that you are somebody. Don’t let anybody make you feel that you are nobody. You are somebody. You have dignity. You have worth. Don’t be ashamed of yourself and don’t be ashamed of your heritage. Don’t be ashamed of your color. Don’t be ashamed of your hair. I am black and beautiful and not ashamed to say it.

GEORGE FORBES, a young city councilman from Glenville, joined King on the truck for many of his rallies. Forbes became city council president in 1973. There was an Operation Breadbasket Band, headed by [a saxophonist] named Ben Branch. They would come in on the back of these big trucks. They would go to these places like Pick-N-Pay [a grocery store] and sites where black people would gather. The band would play jazz music. People would come from all over the neighborhood, saying, “Dr. King is here.”

KING, at East 105th and St. Clair: Every politician respects votes, and we have enough potential voting power here to change anything that needs to be changed. And so let us set out to do it and to do it in no uncertain terms. And finally, I want to say to you that if we will organize like this, we have a power that can change this city.

It wasn’t easy to register to vote in Ohio in 1967. There was no mail-in registration, and people were removed from the rolls if they didn’t vote in two straight elections. So the Stokes campaign and the SCLC both organized bus trips and car pools to the board of elections downtown. They spread the word about the one day when people could sign up to vote at neighborhood registration stations: Aug. 23.

King visited several registration sites that day. He took a break to eat a home-cooked lunch — fried chicken, ham, macaroni and cheese, greens — and play some football in the front yard at a home on Van Aken Boulevard in Shaker Heights.

YVONNE WILSON was a homemaker and mother of five. She and her husband, Moddie Wilson Jr., had moved to Shaker Heights in 1964. I had friends who worked with the SCLC. Someone called and said, “Do you mind having Dr. King over for lunch?”

He was with Jesse Jackson and Andy Young. They had a little meeting to plan for the afternoon, for voter registration.

He was just like a regular Joe. He was trying to recognize everyone who was there and be patient with people. Everyone seemed to be thrilled to be in the company of him.

MODDIE WILSON III, an accountant in Los Angeles, was 10 when King came to lunch. He brought [his sons] Dexter and Marty. They rode my bike. Dexter broke one of the mirrors. I said, “You gotta pay for that! I don’t know who you guys are!” So he went in and got $3.60 in nickels, dimes and quarters from his father.

[King] was like a dad figure. We threw the ball around for 15 or 20 minutes. We all went out for passes. He was a pretty good quarterback.

I have some pictures where he’s sitting in my dad’s library, talking to my dad. He said he was going to come back next summer, and bring his wife and daughters and family, and they were going to spend the night. My dad said he was under a lot of stress. He said, “You could tell this guy had a lot of pressure on him, the weight of the world on his shoulders.”

At least 20,000 black Clevelanders registered that summer, including 8,600 on Aug. 23 alone.

THE PLAIN DEALER, AUG. 24, 1967: Ray C. Miller, director of elections, • gave much of the credit for yesterday’s turnout to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Said Miller of Dr. King: “He must be magic.”

FORBES: Carl would have disagreed with this, but he would not have gotten elected if he had not had that strong registration drive. [King] was the motivating force behind the registration drive. Now, you [also] had a good candidate to go register to vote for!

Fall

Just before the primary election, the local Democratic Party published a series of inflammatory attacks on King and Stokes.

NEWSLETTER FROM CUYAHOGA COUNTY DEMOCRATIC EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE, late September 1967: Will Dr. Martin Luther King actually be the mayor of Cleveland if Carl Stokes is elected Tuesday? This would give the noted racist control of his first city in the United States.

The scare tactics didn’t work. In the Oct. 3 Democratic primary, Stokes beat Locher 110,769 to 92,033. He combined almost all of the black vote with 15 percent of the white vote.

KING, in a press release: Yesterday Cleveland made a significant step toward making America a color-blind society. … Stokes’ victory was a result of a coalition of Negro and White voters and reminds us that black and white together, we shall overcome.

In November, Stokes faced Republican Seth Taft, grandson of President William Howard Taft and a former mayor of Pepper Pike. Vote-counting went late into the night. Stokes supporters and the press gathered outside Stokes’ headquarters.

JACKSON: The night we won, it was such a great urban victory for Dr. King, one of our urban victories, working in the north. We expected that night for Dr. King to go down on the stage, with Carl, to be presented.

YOUNG: My recollection is that [Stokes] asked us to wait in a hotel and he would send for us.

When we saw him on television, claiming victory with us still up there in the hotel, we realized he didn’t want to be seen with us.

For almost 45 years, there have been two versions of where King was on Stokes’ election night. King aides remember him waiting in a hotel room for a call from Stokes’ campaign that never came. But Clevelanders remember King coming to the Rockefeller Building late that night.

MICHAEL D. ROBERTS, now a Cleveland Magazine columnist, covered the election night for The Plain Dealer. The media was looking for Martin Luther King. [The Stokes rally] took place in the Rockefeller Building. We were looking for him, we heard he was there, but nobody would lead us to him.

FORBES: I saw him on the sixth floor of the Rockefeller Building [Stokes’ campaign offices]. Lou [Stokes] and I stayed up and talked to Dr. King when he came over. And then Carl was downstairs in the headquarters for that night when the vote was being announced.

Stokes beat Taft by only 1,679 votes. Cleveland, a majority-white city, had elected a black mayor.

LOUIS STOKES: My last memory of Dr. King here was the night of my brother Carl’s election. Dr. King was in our headquarters. I guess it was about 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning when we finally got word that Carl had defeated Seth Taft.

Carl had not yet gone down to greet all of the people. There was a throng of people outside our headquarters. They all wanted to see Carl.

He went down and took everybody in the headquarters with him, but it was decided Dr. King would not go down. Carl came to me and said, “Lou, would you stay upstairs with Dr. King while we go down?” and I said, “Sure.”

As I recall, Dr. King was very, very happy that night. I guess he could see how his work here had helped bring this night about.

He spoke of what Carl’s victory, politically, meant to black Americans in this country. But he also said that with this achievement politically, we also had to concentrate on economic achievement.

He stressed the fact that no ethnic group seeking power in America had acquired meaningful equity and parity without achieving both political and economic empowerment.

JACKSON: To keep our movement growing, you needed credits. Would the nonviolent movement work in the North? Would the voting-rights movement apply to the North? All that happened. It was a great victory. He would have savored the victory, but he was not allowed to in that instance.

YOUNG: Dr. King was very understanding. He said, “Look, he’s got to run this town. He doesn’t want it to seem that civil rights is his only issue. He’s got to appeal to the broad base of the Cleveland population.” Some of us were kind of upset, and he spent his time explaining to us why Carl had to do it this way. He might have taken offense, but he didn’t admit it.

CAVINESS: I was disappointed. I thought King should have been on that stage. His magnetism and all of his resources were brought to this town to get it done. So we felt a little bit at odds about it. But Carl was the leader. He called the shots. Carl knew that in order for him to govern, now that he was elected, he was going to have to demonstrate that this was an indigenous movement here in Cleveland.

King visited Cleveland three more times. In mid-November, he announced an end to the boycott of the Pick-N-Pay chain after it agreed to hire more black workers. He also made a public appearance in December and a private visit in early 1968.

King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, six days before he was to return to Cleveland to rally support for the Poor People’s Campaign, the SCLC’s protest on the Washington, D.C., Mall that spring. Carl Stokes led Cleveland’s mourning for him. Some 35,000 Clevelanders gathered in Public Square outside a memorial service at Old Stone Church. A photo of Stokes in tears at church ran on The Plain Dealer‘s April 6 front page.

CAVINESS: [Stokes] loved him. It brought tears to his eyes, because he knew how much he’d meant to the struggle, how much the man had given, how much he’d sacrificed. And he also knew he was the beneficiary of so much of his love and concern.

Stokes served as co-chairman of a committee of mayors who supported the Poor People’s Campaign that June.

In July, Ahmed Evans and a few followers, who had stockpiled guns in a home in Glenville, got into a shootout with police. The incident sparked the Glenville riots, which wounded Cleveland again and punctured the atmosphere of hope that had grown around Carl Stokes. He was re-elected in 1969 but chose not to run again in 1971.

One of the first bills Louis Stokes co-sponsored in Congress in 1969 was a proposal to create a holiday honoring King. It became law in 1983.

Category: Carl Stokes – Civil Rights 1960’s