Cleveland in the 1960s – Mike Roberts

Michael D. Roberts was a reporter for The Plain Dealer in the 1960s and covered many of the events in that decade including the Vietnam War. He later edited Cleveland Magazine for 17 years.

Cleveland in the 1960s

The .pdf of this article is here

The 1959 holiday season, the last of the decade, was full of good cheer and spirit, the downtown department stores merry with color, music and the smells of Christmas. Shoppers swarmed the streets, their heads bowed to the cold as they made their way up Euclid Avenue past the array of brightly lit stores.

Children wondered how Santa could be both at May Company and Higbee’s. The giant Christmas tree at the Sterling-Linder-Davis department store was as traditional as the season itself. The restaurants and bars along the avenue were aglow with fellowship that only the holidays can bring.

It was the final hours of a peaceful and generally rewarding decade for Greater Cleveland.  No one predicted that the upcoming decade, the 1960s, would be as tumultuous and trying as any the city, or the country, for that matter, would endure.

The decade was only weeks old when a harbinger of bad news appeared.  On January 23, the Cleveland News, an institution that traced its heritage to post Civil War days, announced it would cease publication following years of competing for afternoon readers with the dominant Cleveland Press.

The Cleveland Press was no ordinary newspaper and because of the weakness in the two-party political system, Cleveland was no ordinary newspaper town.  Under Louis B. Seltzer, the newspaper emerged as the most powerful institution in the region.  Picked by Time Magazine as one of the most influential newspapers in America, The Press elected mayors, jailed corrupt public officials, hunted murders and drove the agenda of the city and its citizens.

Seltzer was as much a politician as a journalist.  Diminutive in stature, blunt and street smart, he was self-made with minimal  formal education.  He reigned as the most powerful force in the city for a quarter of a century.  He was a man whose vision did not eclipse the next election.

While no one realized it, the demise of the News marked the initial toll of the bell for The Press itself, as its death would take place 21 years later.  By 1960, television news was coming of age, and a circuitous highway system was opening a burgeoning  suburban sprawl. Afternoon newspapers could no longer reach the spreading population before the six o’clock news.

By the fall of 1960, it seemed as if the whole of America was changing. The election of John F. Kennedy brought a vitality to politics that heralded a new era not only in Washington but across the nation.  Cleveland was destined to be a major player in that change, even though it would be a painful change.

More than 25 years had passed without any major development or repair to Cleveland’s infrastructure.  The city suffered through the Great Depression and during World War II focused its energy on the war effort.  Its housing stock was decaying and many of its neighborhoods were overcrowded.

In a massive effort to rejuvenate Cleveland, the government embarked on six urban renewal projects.  The city’s business community hailed the effort and focused on the downtown piece of the project, Erieview.

In concert with urban renewal, a highway system planned as early as 1927 and spurred by the Eisenhower Administration’s federal interstate program was progressing.  Transportation was a constant theme in and around Cleveland with a rapid transit system being the key to the development of Shaker Heights in the 1920s.

Together these two efforts—urban renewal and the transportation system—would be largely responsible for the consistent drain of population from the central city.

At the time, the urban renewal projects constituted the largest such effort in America.  Critics accused Seltzer of promoting Erieview to benefit a new location for his newspaper.  The scope and shape of urban renewal would severely affect the city’s East Side and cause one official in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to later say Cleveland was the agency’s Vietnam because it was so deeply mired in a losing effort.

Meanwhile, on the city’s West Side adjacent to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, a group of scientists and engineers worked secretly and industriously to ensure that an American would be the first to set foot on the moon.

A federal aeronautical research laboratory was built in 1941 at the airport to develop aircraft engines and test fuels during World War II.  Later, it experimented with jet engines, rockets and exotic fuels. In the 1950s, a handful of engineers quietly began to experiment with liquid hydrogen.

The laboratory, known as the Lewis Research Center, part of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, was an obscure facility, until October of 1957 when the Russians orbited Sputnik, the first man-made satellite.  The launching of the satellite at the height of the Cold War shot panic through the U.S. government.

There was an obvious need for a new government organization to take on the challenge of the looming space race.  Because of their work with fuels and rockets, a Lewis team headed by its director, Abe Silverstein, authored a memorandum used by the Eisenhower administration as the foundation for the creation of the new space agency.

The first director of NASA was T. Keith Glennan, the president of Case Tech University in Cleveland.  Silverstein was the architect of what would be the Mercury and the Apollo programs that resulted in the moon landing in July of 1969. Sadly, Washington politics involving NASA and its budget ultimately dealt Lewis a short hand and made Houston the center of the space program.

In Cleveland politics, a transition was taking place as President Kennedy selected Mayor Anthony J. Celebrezze to his cabinet, as head of the Department of Health, Welfare, and Education.  Celebrezze served as mayor from 1953 to 1962, a generally prosperous and tranquil time for the city, high-lighted by highway construction, all of which would lead away from the city.

Celebrezze was promoted and prodded by The Press and he did much of the newspaper’s bidding, particularly when it came to the ambitious, but flawed downtown redevelopment plans.  Celebrezze was a mayor in a tradition of ethnic politics that governed from city hall  since the early 1940s and answered to The Cleveland Press.

These politics represented a philosophy of indifference to which there was no statute of limitations.   With its strong Middle European roots, the electorate was mistrustful of progressive government.

Appointed to replace Celebrezze was Ralph J. Locher, the city’s law director, a taciturn man described by those who served with him as decent and pleasant, known for his integrity and honesty.  He was no administrator, however, and no match for what would befall the city in his time. One councilman that served with him said Locher had the demeanor of a college president rather than that of a big city mayor.

Locher’s inadequate administrative skills and his links to a dying political past became obvious over time compounding an already relentless series of issues that had been ignored for decades and was now playing out in a destructive confluence.

The mayor inherited a troubled city, the depths of which were evident to those who examined the realities confronting urban life.  As the decade advanced, skepticism began to build around the massive renewal project that began with such grandeur and was slowly proving to be a profound gaffe.

An intrusive interlude to life in Greater Cleveland was a lengthy newspaper strike that began late in 1962 and ended the next spring that was costly to both newspapers. Art Modell, the owner of the Cleveland Browns, timed the firing of the team’s legendary coach, Paul Brown, with the strike hoping the news blackout would blunt one of the biggest sports stories here ever.

The Browns won the 1964 National Football League Championship, but Modell would never replicate Paul Brown’s achievements.

While sports had its moments in the 1960s, urban renewal continued in the headlines.  Erieview was an area boarded by E. 6th Street and extended to East 17th Street and south to Chester Avenue and north to the lake.  It was filled with small businesses and modest homes. These buildings were cleared, leaving vast stretches of acreage available for redevelopment.

The result was the displacement of people and businesses in such a fashion that it affected the commerce on Euclid Avenue, a stretch of upscale shops, stores and restaurants that had been a traditional haunt of downtown shoppers.  Over time, the combination of bad downtown planning and the creation of suburban malls aided by one of the best highway systems in the country, diminished downtown.

There were problems with other areas of the city designated for urban renewal. The process was driving people, mostly black people, into neighborhoods that were over crowded and filled with inadequate housing.

In the area around St. Vincent’s Charity Hospital, some 1,200 families were up- rooted and moved to the Hough area, itself designated for renewal.  Hough was notable for its overcrowded conditions for black families.

In fact, the city did its best to ignore these conditions almost from the very beginning of black migration during the Civil War era.

While historically Cleveland had a reputation of racial tolerance, its liberalism flagged as European immigrants arrived and settled making the town a mosaic of ethnicity that became ingrained in its politics and culture.

Cleveland also attracted southern blacks hoping for a better life.  Two world wars within the span of two decades hastened that journey as the industrial might of the city was geared to war production and needed as much manpower as it could absorb.  The Korean War soon followed, maintaining the manufacturing need.

There were about 10,000 blacks living in Cleveland just before World War I.  By the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 that figure had grown to 72,000 and by 1940 it had reached 85,000.  By 1960, there were 250,000 blacks living mostly on the city’s East Side.

The city was not prepared to deal with this increasing influx of newcomers in terms of housing and schools.  As time passed, both necessities degenerated further. By the early 1960s, the city was at a tipping point, but most were oblivious to the growing storm.

By 1960, jobs were still easily found for blacks, especially those in the steel mills where the money was good, but the work dirty, dangerous and damnable. Federal government jobs as postal workers, clerks and other official tasks were steady employment.  There were positions available for teachers, social workers and lawyers.

Blacks were increasingly part of the community’s fabric.  By 1963, ten of the 33 city council seats were black.  However, beneath the surface existed an unspoken demarcation that separated the minorities from the rest of the community. As late as 1959, The Cleveland Press carried a page one story   concerning downtown office space in which a respected realtor was quoted as saying, he would not rent to Negros because they were too messy.

There were few black newspaper reporters.  Editors routinely asked whether an incident or event took place, “at a good address”. Black crime was often ignored as not being newsworthy.  Reporters covering the police beat told editors of the conditions they witnessed in black neighborhoods, but could draw little interest in reporting on them.

Simply stated, the community had no sensitivity as to what was happening in the over crowded slums and the inadequate and aging East Side schools. Even though these conditions festered for years, it seemed to the community at large that the ensuing discontent   occurred overnight.

This was because of the nature of ethnic politics that drove city hall for years, and the failure of the news media to play its roll in communicating reality to the community.  Politicians knew its ethnic constituency possessed a heritage distrustful of government and the best way to appeal to that instinct was to embrace the status quo.

The racial story broke in a series of confrontations between black students and their ethnic counterparts in those neighborhoods that abutted each other.  Protests over the conditions in the schools became regular events.  Some black students were going to school half a day in makeshift classrooms in the basement of churches.

Nationally, Martin Luther King was beginning a cavalcade of civil rights protests that ignited the imagination of blacks across the nation.  He was no stranger to Cleveland, visiting often with his message.  Times were changing, and no place exhibited that dynamic greater than Cleveland.

This was the situation that Ralph S. Locher inherited as mayor. In a belated effort, the Cleveland City School District began a building program with an emphasis on East Side schools, which some civil rights activists saw as an effort to further segregate the city.

One of the dreadful moments of the decade took place on April 7, 1964.  It involved the growing conflict over education and the ensuing tragedy rocked the community.  Protesting the construction of an elementary school on Lakeview Road, Reverend Bruce Klunder lay in the path of a bulldozer and was accidentally crushed to death. The incident divided the community even further and photographs of the scene became a symbol of the agony of the times.

In the wake of this tragedy, the Interracial Business Men’s Committee was formed, bringing together black and white business leaders with a stake in the community together in an effort to alleviate the growing conflict and solve the contributing irritants. The effort provided temporary relief as more blacks were hired by business and a community relations department was established at city hall.

As days passed, the news focused more and more on racial issues.  The media showed a willingness, albeit naively, to explore the problem that had been evident for decades.  One newspaper ran a series of articles on the life of a black family.

Newspaper readers in the summer of 1965 drew some respite from the city’s  woes when a Plain Dealer copy editor, Robert Manry, sailed the Atlantic Ocean alone in a 13-foot boat, the smallest vessel ever to cross the sea at the time.   As he progressed his  78-day adventure was played out daily resulting in The Press scooping the morning paper on its own story by publishing a television interview of Manry in the midst of the ocean.

The man-against-the-odds story was in strange contrast to the odds-against-man story with which the city was struggling to confront or at least to contain in what was becoming an increasingly tension- ridden existence.

The mayoral election of 1965 was a contest of black and white and the past and future as Mayor Locher chose to run for his own two-year term, but this time his chief opponent would not come from the ranks of traditional ethnic politics.  He would be a black man, Carl B. Stokes, who successfully ran as the first minority state legislator from Cuyahoga County.

In many ways, Stokes was the perfect candidate for the times.  Handsome, articulate, a confident man, edgy in temperament, the representative of a cause whose time had come, he stepped into the campaign believing that he could make a difference both for his people and for Cleveland.

One of the characteristics of his confidence was a sense of arrogance that could be repelling. In 1965 Stokes failed to ask for support of the ten black city council members for his mayoralty bid.  It was not that they opposed him, it was a matter of protocol.  Stokes for his part thought he could win without asking for help.

He did not win. The newspapers backed the old politics and won the day as Locher triumphed by 2, 143 votes, the slimmest victory in the city’s history.  The Press predicted a 20,000 win for Locher.  Stokes impressed the reporters covering the race and he later would say that this campaign was the highlight of his political life.

The victory was Pyrrhic for Locher as events in the city continued to spiral out of control. After years of neglect the city and its services deteriorated, despite the late efforts to fix a failing school system. Education remained a primary issue, and the now apparent folly of urban renewal had come together like a Greek tragedy to generate a violent encore

Meanwhile, another important story broke in 1966 when the U.S. Supreme Court held that Dr. Sam Sheppard, who  had been convicted of the murder of his wife in a famous case in 1954, was subjected to unfair pretrial publicity by The Press. Sheppard was ordered released from prison and given a new trial.  He was later acquitted.

The news damaged the reputation of The Press at a time when The Plain Dealer was attempting to surpass it in both circulation and civic leadership.  The court decision cast a shadow on The Press and gave the morning newspaper the appearance of greater credibility, and in an odd way, this would come to bear on the campaign.

It was oppressively hot July 18 that summer of 1966.  At 5 p.m. outside of the Seventy-Niner’s Café on the corner of East 79th and Hough Avenue a crowd gathered. The heat made it a bad time to drink.  The bar, owned by two white brothers, had problems with its clientele.  Someone had tried to burn their car a few days before and a cherry bomb was exploded in the men’s room.

Tensions were high.

A young woman identified by some as a prostitute, was in the crowded bar soliciting money for flowers for the funeral of another streetwalker.  One of the owners ordered her out of the bar and she joined the crowd outside, angry at her dismissal.

A man who purchased a bottle of wine was refused a glass of water by one of the brothers.  His anger provoked, he joined the crowd claiming he had been called a nigger. The crowd began to swell in size and emotion.

Police were summoned, but it was too late.  All the frustration and conflict of the past welled up in one wild rampage that swept through the Hough area in a violent torrent. Shops were looted, fires set, the sound of gunfire resounded through the neighborhood. The scene resembled street fighting on the television news in some far-off land.

Looters roamed the streets with a strange sense of glee, pushing racks of stolen clothes and carrying bundles of goods.  The best the police could do was to take photographs of the looters and hope to identify them later.

Locher waited and finally, reluctantly asked the Ohio National Guard to intercede in what became a six-day siege of the Hough neighborhood.  Four residents were killed and some 240 fires were set. The blame for the violence rested on overcrowding and the failure of the urban renewal program to provide relief from conditions in Hough.

The sight of military vehicles mounting heavy weapons moving through the city streets was eerie and disturbing.   Guardsmen were crouched in doorways, their rifles at ready, scanning the rooftops for snipers in the night.

Despite its obvious cause, a county grand jury comprised of some of the town’s most respected citizens, and led by Seltzer, found that the riot was instigated by a conspiracy organized by outsiders, maybe even Communists.  There still existed a sense of denial among the city’s leadership as to the true conditions of the city.

Tragic as it was, Hough was the event that would propel Carl B. Stokes into City Hall and the annals of history.

The Hough riot shook the city’s business leaders, cast a cloak of fear over the town and brought more negative national media to a city already suffering from cynical reviews.  White people feared driving through the East Side and blacks dared not venture near the Murray Hill area.  There were random shootings and some killing, including an ambush of a policeman on the East Side.

The mood at city hall was sullen.  Community leaders lost faith in the ability of Ralph Locher to run the city and deal with the overwhelming problems that were mounting daily.  But it was not just Cleveland. The nation’s major cities were facing racial unrest with rioters taking to the streets elsewhere.

It did not help when the Cleveland officer testifying before a state legislative committee, urged that the death penalty be applied to rioting black nationals. The tension between the city’s police force and the black community lingered for years.

All the sins committed by city hall over the past decades suddenly came to rest on Locher.  The Plain Dealer that stood so gray and idle while The Press dictated to city hall for years, lashed out critically and rendered frustration and wrath on its competitor through the Locher administration.

To make matters worse, the federal government cut  $10-million of the city’s urban renewal funds leaving the already embattled program adrift.  It was evident to everyone that Locher’s term as mayor was fading into failure.

The national media became so negative in its portrayal of Cleveland that Locher refused to meet with another out of town reporter.

It was also evident that the performance Carl Stokes made in the 1965 campaign elevated him to a level where victory, while not probable, was certainly more than possible.  This time Stokes actively sought support, not only from the black councilman, but from the business community as well.

The 1967 mayor’s race was perhaps the most memorable and remarkable in the city’s history.  Not only was the first black mayor of a major American city elected, the drama and excitement of that campaign generated world-wide attention.  Reporters from every major news outlet in the world descended on Cleveland creating a genuine global event.

A signal and surprising moment in the campaign came with the endorsement of Stokes by The Plain Dealer, an act he considered legitimatized him among the white establishment.  It was an important moment for the newspaper as well, for it symbolized its ascension over the rival Press.

The business community stung by the ineptness of the Locher administration and fearful of more racial unrest, pumped money and influence into the Stokes campaign.  Some observers feared that the business leaders were so anxious to rid the city of Locher, that it would support Stokes in the primary and then back a white candidate in the general election.

Reporters followed Stokes in his forays into the white West Side where he met in small gatherings over coffee asking for support, urging that the issue of race be cast aside in favor of enlightened leadership in city hall.  He handily defeated a subdued Locher in the Democratic primary.

Poised to oppose Stokes was Seth Taft, a Republican with one of the most prominent political names in Ohio history, and a descendent of a U.S. president.  Seth Taft was regarded in the community as honest, dedicated and active, but most importantly he was white.

While both candidates tried to remain above the race issue, it smoldered in the background threatening to burst into full flame at any moment. Race would be the deciding factor, but it did not mar the campaign.

The campaign itself was exciting and interesting, unlike any since.  Both camps exhibited well-run political organizations.  A series of debates between the candidates held in various parts of the city were set-piece battles while reporters pontificated on the victor.

Stokes was the superior orator, but Taft improved as the campaign progressed and showed surprising and increasing aggressiveness.  As the election day approached, the polls showed the two candidates neck and neck.  The town was alive with speculation and anticipation.

Election day was cold, with flecks of wet snow.  There was a question of the turnout.  A huge voter registration drive, largely funded by a $175,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, worked the neighborhoods in the months preceding the election.  The question was whether the voters would respond?

Representatives of the global media roamed the city that day, studying the turnout which was not only large, but electric in mood.  Despite the issue of race, there was a wholesome quality to the campaign, two excellent candidates locked in a struggle that personified democracy.  People sensed history in the making and wanted to be part of it.

The early returns that night had Taft ahead, but by 9 p.m. the race was neck and neck.  And then at midnight, Taft began to pull away.  At 2:15 a.m. Stokes took his first lead and held on to win by some 2,000 votes in the closest race in city history.

The succeeding weeks and months were filled with an optimism that Cleveland had not experienced in years.  A feeling of achievement abounded, and while only 15% of white voters had supported Stokes, there existed an atmosphere of elation, a sense of genuine community.

Stokes had little time to celebrate.  The conditions that contributed to his election were now his problems to solve.  The first issue was the quality of personnel serving the city.  After so many years of patronage the various departments were larded with political hacks that contributed to city hall’s ineptness.  He attacked the problem with vigor.

Despite its aimlessness, the urban renewal program had to be regenerated and Stokes persuaded Washington to restore the funding. He then hired a director with national experience as part of assembling an energetic and capable cabinet.  Urban experts from other cities were eager to come to Cleveland and participate in the city’s rebirth.

Meanwhile, the business community, swept by euphoria, raised $5.5 million and created an organization to support many of the Stokes initiatives called Cleveland: NOW.   The idea born out of a swelling sense of community pride and necessity, ironically would become fickle and turn on Stokes in the meanest way.

Cleveland: NOW! was created by several white businessmen following the assassination of Martin Luther King in April of 1968.  The nation was in turmoil over King’s death and that of Robert F. Kennedy in June.  Adding to the domestic anxiety was the stalemate in Vietnam and the increasing protest of that war.

These angry forces were mounting across the nation as demonstrators and militants exercised their wrath in the streets.  In Cleveland, civic leaders hoped that a black mayor possessed the ability to calm their community.  Stokes maintained that a black mayor was no insurance against racial violence.

Fred Ahmed Evans, a Korean War veteran, became an astrologer of sorts after claiming to witness a UFO over Glenville one day. While known in the neighborhood as somewhat of a militant, he was an obscure figure until catapulted to notoriety by The Wall Street Journal that wrote Evans had predicted the outbreak of a race riot in Cleveland.

Evans portrayed himself as a black revolutionary, a man who called for a national black revolt and used his incendiary rhetoric to inflame ghetto youth.  Stokes later characterized Evans as a street hustler who used the idea of revolution to extort money.  Cleveland: NOW! gave Evans $6,000 to fund a youth group.

In the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination, Evans, among other black militants, walked Cleveland’s streets with Stokes to calm the anguish which was spreading across the nation and creating violence in other cities.

On July 23, 1968, Evans and some of his self-proclaimed revolutionaries engaged in a gun battle with Cleveland police that left seven dead including three police officers, three suspected militants and a citizen. Fifteen more were wounded, and the Glenville community suffered more than $2.5 million in damage.

It was never clear what triggered the shooting. Evans was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison where he died.

The shoot-out made headlines even in war-torn Vietnam.  It also destroyed the myth that a black mayor could prevent the spread of racial violence. It also effectively damaged the mayoralty of Stokes when it was learned that Cleveland: NOW! money was used by Evans to buy guns.

The irony was that one calamitous event aided Stokes’ political rise and yet another would accompany his decline.  He was proof that there were no easy answers to the city’s racial problems.

In 1969, Stokes was elected to a second two-year term as mayor, but the heady days, bright with promise and alive with community spirit were gone.  He struggled with the reform of the police department, a culture of its own, only to have his attempted reforms and innovations go awry or fail.

That summer, men landed on the moon and the triumphant national celebration that followed underplayed the achievements of  a handful of space pioneers at the Lewis Research Laboratory that came at a time when it appeared America had lost its technological edge.  It was no small thing that these men on the West Side of the city achieved.

Back at city hall, the newspapers became increasingly critical of Stokes, who bridled at the criticism, making the tenor of his final term one of rancor and bitterness over failed expectations. He left city hall in 1971 to become a television anchorman in New York City.

Among Stokes’ lasting achievements as mayor was the passage of an equal opportunity law that assured minority companies of participation in city business. While there had been no public housing units built in the five years before he became mayor, he could point to nearly 5,500 built during his term in office.

The Stokes years were significant in the city’s history in that they opened the way for the black community to participate in the mainstream of business and political life. The decade brought change in how a city worked and what roles black citizens played in that function. In retrospect, it is clear that the community and Stokes himself set expectations that were far from achievable given the times and the state of the city.

It was an exhausting decade for Cleveland and its citizens, but when it was over there were triumphs among the travail. Life went on, but it was changed forever.

The holiday season of 1969, the last of the decade, was not as festive as that of ten years before. The city had endured pain brought on by decades of neglect wrought by a political culture that worshipped the status quo.   The next decade would bring more change and a different dynamic, but this would involve the appearance of the city, and the dimming of downtown lights. The altering of its soul had taken place.

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Bibliography

Campell, Thomas F. and  Miggins, Edward M., The Birth of Modern Cleveland 1865-1930,  Cleveland, Ohio Western Reserve Society, London and Toronto: Associated University Presses.

Glennan, T. Keith The Birth of NASA: The Diary of T. Keith Glennan Washington, D.C., National Aeronautics  and Space Administration,  NASA History Office. 1993.

Dawson, Virginia P.,  Engines and Innovation: Lewis  Laboratory and American Propulsion Technology, Washington, D.C. National Aeronautics and Space Administration Office of Management Scientific and  Technical Information Division,  1991.

Stokes, Carl B. Promises of Power: Then and Now Cleveland, Ohio Published by The Friends of Carl B. Stokes, 1989.

Moore, Leonard M., Carl B. Stokes and the Rise of Black Political Power, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Porter, Philip W, Cleveland:  Confused City on a Seesaw, Columbus, The Ohio State Press, 1975.

Van Tassel, David   D. and Grabowski, John J., The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History,

Bloomington, Indiana University Press   in association with Case Western Reserve University.  1987.

Bartimole, Roldo, Point of View

Rose, William Ganson Cleveland: The Making of a City Kent, Ohio  The Kent State University Press in cooperation with  Western Reserve Historical Society  1990

Read the next chapter: “Cleveland in the 1970s – by Mike Roberts”

Adella Prentiss Hughes

From the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

The link is here

HUGHES, ADELLA PRENTISS (29 Nov. 1869-23 Aug. 1950), best known as the founder of the CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA, was born in Cleveland to Loren and Ellen Rouse Prentiss, graduated from Miss Fisher’s School for Girls in 1886, and from Vassar College in 1890 with a degree in music. After a grand tour of Europe, returning to Cleveland in 1891, she became a professional accompanist. Though successful in this role, Prentiss became interested in the broader aspects of musical promotion in Cleveland, and in 1898 began bringing various performers and orchestras to the city. By 1901, she was one of Cleveland’s major impresarios, regularly engaging orchestras to perform at GRAYS ARMORY. During the next 17 years she supplied the city with a series of musical attractions, including orchestras, opera, ballet, and chamber music. Seeing the need for a permanent orchestra, Hughes created the MUSICAL ARTS ASSN.. in 1915 from a nucleus of business and professional men to furnish support for her projects. It was through her influence that NIKOLAI SOKOLOFF† came to Cleveland. In 1918, she, Sokoloff, and the Musical Arts Assoc. joined forces to create the Cleveland Orchestra. She served as its first manager, holding that position for 15 years. She also held administrative positions in the Musical Arts Assoc. for 30 years, retiring in 1945 only to continue her philanthropic work. Adella Prentiss married Felix Hughes in 1904. The couple divorced in 1923.

Maurice Maschke from Philip W. Porter

 

from Cleveland: Confused City on a Seesaw

by Philip W. Porter
retired executive editor of the Plain Dealer
1976

courtesy of Cleveland State University, Special Collections

Maschke was much maligned, and unfairly so, by the Plain Dealer and Press editorial writers, but he bore the criticism philosophically. Reporters, on the other hand, learned that he always told them the truth, or nothing at all. He was respected by two generations of political writers. (An interesting paradox was that Maschke, a brilliant bridge player, one of the best in the country, was for years the favorite partner of the late Carl T. Robertson, the number two man among the PD editorial writers. Robertson, a determinedly independent man, refused to take part in writing denunciations of Maschke). Maschke was astute, well respected by other lawyers, by businessmen and even by his Democratic opponents. Tom L. Johnson praised him as a worthy opponent. Witt, though he professed a strong dislike of all bosses after Johnson died, praised Maschke publicly as a man of integrity (in contrast to his frequent aspersions against Hopkins). Gongwer respected and liked him. He was a ripe target for cartoonists and editorial writers. The name Maschke had a harsh, grating sound. He was bald, except for a wisp of hair on the back of his skull. He was not handsome. His large nose increased the prejudice of bigoted anti-Semites. He had a thin, reedy voice and seldom spoke in public until his later years, which was probably wise, for he was a poor public speaker.

Maschke went to Harvard (though he grew up in a poor neighborhood) both to the basic college and law school, and soon afterward gravitated into politics. He realized that the Republicans would have a tough time as long as Tom Johnson was running for mayor, so he concentrated on helping friends get elected to state and county offices. Two he helped were Ed Barry, who was elected sheriff, and Theodore E. Burton, elected to Congress, both despite a Democratic trend. Maschke sensed that Johnson’s popularity was beginning to erode and he rightly surmised that a respectable, colorless candidate might beat Johnson next time around. So he got his friend and protege, County Recorder Herman Baehr, to run for mayor in 1909. Maschke’s intuition was right. Baehr was the man nobody knew. He wouldn’t debate the brilliant campaigner Johnson. The people didn’t vote for Baehr; they voted against Johnson. (It was the old story of the Greeks deposing Aristides the Just, a man who was too good to be believed.) Maschke was now in the saddle as boss, after only twelve years as a practicing politician. He was appointed county recorder, to succeed his friend Baehr.

In 1911, Maschke was appointed customs collector by President William Howard Taft. In 1915, he was replaced by Burr Gongwer and began to practice law with John H. Orgill.

When Harry L. Davis was elected mayor in 1915, Maschke got back quickly into the city hall picture. The hall remained Republican all through World War 1. It was obvious that 1920 would be a Republican year nationally, too. Maschke sensed it early, and saw a chance to get into the national picture by coming out for Senator Harding. (The always Republican News endorsed General Leonard Wood, but Maschke’s delegates stuck with Harding, and won.)

The 1920 election, however, produced a temporary estrangement between Maschke and Governor Davis. Davis got the idea that Maschke had let him down in Cuyahoga County, which he almost lost. Maschke retorted that Davis had lost strength because his pro-labor attitude during the war had alienated businessmen in the suburbs as well as his home area, Newburgh, where the steel mills are located.

Maschke’s law practice was now making big money and he was on his way to becoming a wealthy man. His fees came largely from corporations, particularly from utilities, which were always deeply interested in getting legislation passed or killed. This type of law practice was, and is, the standard way for political bosses, and lobbyists, to make politics pay. Political law practice and political insurance business are the most familiar means, and they depend almost entirely on friendship and influence. If everything else is equal, few legislators, state, city, or national, will refuse a request from a party chairman to vote his way on a routine bill. And often on important bills, too. The boss makes promises, and holds the public officials to theirs. It has been a way of political life for centuries and still is.

The personal bitterness between Maschke and Hopkins continued even after Hopkins was ousted as manager. In the fall of 1931, when Hopkins was running for city council (to which he was later elected), they traded insults before the City Club Forum. Hopkins charged that Maschke had profited from city contracts, that contractors had hired him, that city employees were paying him for promotions, and that he, Hopkins, knew nothing about the 67/33-percent deal for jobs. Maschke retorted that Hopkins was a liar and an ingrate, “false, mendacious, spurious, a phrase-maker with an inherent capacity for deception,” and “I put him back on the sidewalk where Gongwer and I had picked him up in 1923.” It was a sensation.

Maschke in 1934 wrote his memoirs for the Plain Dealer, a remarkable thing for a political boss. In the final chapter, he described what qualities brought success in politics:

“Truthfulness, candor, foresight, courage, patience and a deep understanding of human nature. There is as much scheming in business as in politics, but in business it is mostly kept quiet. Politics is everyone’s business and it comes out. Truthfulness is supposed to be a normal quality of man, but somehow, truthfulness in politics distinguishes you.”

He was totally realistic about fame and fortune in politics. “When you win you are a great leader,” he said. “Lose a couple and people are ready to consign you to the ashheap.”

Maschke was way ahead of his time in understanding the value of racial integration in politics. He was the pioneer in backing such outstanding Negro public servants as Harry E. Davis for the legislature, school board, and civil service commission; Perry B. Jackson for the legislature, council, and municipal court; Clayborne George for council and the civil service commission. As long as Maschke was in charge, the black population of Cleveland remained Republican and stable. Today it is 95 percent Democratic and restless.

Maurice was also wise in his selection of first-rate candidates for the legislature. Not since the Maschke era has Cleveland been represented by legislators of the caliber of Dan Morgan, Harold Burton, John A. Hadden, John B. Dempsey, Herman L. Vail, David S. Ingalls, Ernest J. Bohn, Dudley S. Blossom, Chester C. Bolton, Laurence H. Norton, Mrs. Maude Waitt, and Mrs. Nettie M. Clapp. Choosing rich men like Blossom, Bolton, Norton, and Ingalls did Maschke no harm at campaign times, and it did the Establishment of that day no harm in having them on hand to make laws, but they were all first-rate, intelligent, concerned men, who took the lead in public affairs. Today it is hard to get men of real stature to run for the legislature and even harder to get them elected. In the Democratic era of the thirties, the Cleveland legislators were largely a bunch of zeros, hardly known beyond their neighborhoods, with little influence in Columbus. Later, the law was changed to elect legislators by districts, and the caliber of the candidates has improved some. It still is nowhere as high as it was in the twenties.

Maschke died of pneumonia in October 1936. His widow, Mrs. Minnie Rice Maschke, died at age ninety-five in March 1972. A son, businessman Maurice (Buddy) Jr., and a daughter, Mrs. Helen Maschke Hanna, still live in Cleveland.

 

Fred Kohler by Philip W. Porter

 

from Cleveland: Confused City on a Seesaw

by Philip W. Porter
retired executive editor of the Plain Dealer
1976

courtesy of Cleveland State University, Special Collections

But there was still to be a mayor in 1923-24, and the mayor was Fred Kohler. Nothing like his mayoralty had been seen before, or since.

Kohler was one of the most colorful men ever to hold high office here. He began as a beat policeman and rose swiftly to chief under Mayor Tom Johnson. Blond, handsome, tall, he was physically attractive to women, and his affair with one of them, who happened to be married to someone else, stymied his career; he was fired as chief. He brazened it out, and every day afterward for months showed up in the Hollenden Hotel lobby to visit with friends. Men stuck by him, as well as women, and it was obvious that he would return to the public eye at some more favorable time. This he did, in 1918, when he ran for county commissioner without Republican party backing and defeated a Democratic incumbent. Then, as a minority member of a board of three, he continuously landed on page one by heckling the majority.

He ran for mayor in 1921 without making a speech, simply by punching doorbells, asking for support. Meanwhile, Mayor FitzGerald’s campaign was a disaster. Republican Boss Maschke had to support him, though he feared the worst, for Fitz would often end an evening of speech-making practically in the bag. A private poll showed that Kohler would beat FitzGerald, and the shrewd Maschke bet a bundle on Kohler and cleaned up handsomely.

Kohler had the perfect formula for getting favorable attention from the newspapers. He ignored editorials and did exactly as he pleased. He seldom answered reporters’ questions, and was often absent from city hall, but he knew his image as the rugged independent and the “cop-who-had-been-unfairly-dealt-with” was intact. He exuded an air of mystery, which increased his news value. He had an uncanny sense of good timing, and he knew the voters wanted a change, so he gave it to them, spectacularly. At once, he fired 850 of the political loafers and announced the city was going to live within its income, after two years of $1,000,000 deficits. He appointed a law director, Paul Lamb, and a finance director, Gerhard A. Gesell, who were respected by the newspapers.

Then he ordered every fireplug in the city painted orange, had park benches painted orange and black, and repainted all city property that needed touching up (except the city hall itself) in the same garish colors, orange and black, which were visible night and day. Kohler said he wanted everyone to know which buildings belonged to the taxpayers.

That wasn’t all. Kohler erected gaudy signboards (also in orange and black) proclaiming that he was keeping the city within its income, and others reading, “I Alone Am Your Mayor.”

He was mayor, all right, from the first day, when he road a horse at the head of a police parade down Euclid Avenue — something he had promised to do some day, after he had been fired. The man he appointed as police chief, inspector Jacob Graul, was an ascetic who neither smoked, drank nor swore, and could have been mistaken for a Sunday School superintendent. Graul stayed on after Kohler left office; his reputation for uprightness was incomparable.

Kohler made good his promise to live within the city’s income, by a simple method. He refused to spend any money having streets paved or park repair done, leaving all this the incoming administration. He claimed a surplus $1,000,000 existed when his term expired and the city manager plan came in.

Kohler did not remain in private life long. Next year, was elected sheriff and soon got rich legally, at public expense, by spending less than half what the law allowed him daily to feed prisoners. A great uproar in the newspapers caused the common pleas judges to devise a menu that would require him to spend all the forty-five cents a day he was allowed. In 1926, he was defeated by a Democrat, Ed Hanratty, now that his public image had been altered to that of a profiteer. He dropped out of public life, traveled extensively, and died in 1934. Then $250,000 in cash was found in his safety deposit box.

 

 

Newton D. Baker by Philip W. Porter

Newton D. Baker, who was the official head of the Cleveland Democrats during the twenties and well into the thirties, was one of the few Cleveland political figures to become a nationally known statesman. He was called by President Wilson to become secretary of war before the United States got into World War I, and bore the entire responsibility for mobilizing an army from scratch, setting up the draft, and sending an expeditionary force of one million men to fight in France. After the war, drained emotionally and physically, he returned to Cleveland, but he remained active after Wilson’s death.

He was the unquestioned leader of Ohio Democrats at national conventions and kept such close contact with the national scene that in 1932, he had strong backing in both north and south for the presidential nomination. Had Roosevelt not been nominated on an early ballot, Baker stood a good chance of being chosen as a compromise candidate.

By any standard, Baker was one of the great men of his time. After he returned to Cleveland, he was always in demand to hold unpaid, nonpolitical civic jobs, and he continued to take a strong hand in Democratic party affairs, for he believed that good citizens ought to involve themselves in organized politics and government. He was revered by all newspaper men who came in contact with him, because he was simple, unpretentious, sincere and always approachable, a perfect example of the fact that the biggest men in government, industry, and the professions are the easiest to deal with. It isn’t always easy to get through their cordon of secretaries and assistants, but when you meet the big man face to face, he goes direct to the point and gives a straight answer. He will expect you to treat all confidential matters confidentially, but he puts on no airs, doesn’t give out the old double-talk. This was Newton D. Baker.

Baker’s unblemished principles made him the ideal teammate for the pragmatic Gongwer. Baker was always available to pronounce the principles, and take the high road, while Gongwer took the low road and attended to the patronage, the endorsements, the nuts and bolts of party management, without having to make speeches. Gongwer idolized Baker, but he also appreciated how useful Baker was to him as a party boss. Baker held the official position of chairman of the central committee, but Gongwer was chairman of the executive committee. Baker made statements and speeches. Gongwer made decisions and backed candidates. Baker approved completely of Gongwer’s decisions; he had no illusions about the necessity for a party boss. The Democrats were lucky to have them both; the Republicans had no such elder statesman as Baker. They left all the problems to Maschke, who made no pretense to being a statesman.

Baker came to Cleveland from Martinsburg, West Virginia, where he grew up as a Democrat; his ancestors had been Confederates. He joined Tom L. Johnson early, and was city solicitor, then law director. When Johnson died, Baker was the natural heir to run for mayor. When Wilson chose him for secretary of war, Baker was known as a pacifist. Wilson was not concerned about that; he needed a man of integrity.

When he returned to Cleveland, Baker was tired, middle-aged, disillusioned, and nearly broke. He had spent so many years in government that he had had no opportunity to accumulate money. So he organized a new law firm with two old Democratic friends — Joseph C. Hostetler, who had originally come from a farm in Tuscarawas County, and Thomas L. Sidlo, a bright young man who had been in Baker’s cabinet as service director. The firm soon attracted affluent corporate clients, and today is still one of the most influential and largest in Cleveland (although no one named Baker, Hostetler or Sidlo is still with the firm). PD editor Erie Hopwood was a close friend and client of Newton Baker; so was Elbert H. Baker (no relation), chairman of the Plain Dealer board.

Baker had a small, slight body, but a big mind. He was only a few inches more than five feet tall, was slender and lightweight. In addition to an amazing intellectual capacity, he had a deep, melodious voice and an uncanny ability to speak in complete, convincing sentences without a note in front of him. He simply knew exactly what he wanted to say, and how to say it; and he said it in the most mellow tones, which came out without the least bit of phoniness, unlike most orators.

Baker was a most approachable man, completely without deviousness or stuffiness. It was always easy to get to see him; all that was needed was to get his secretary to make a date. The secretary was usually a young law student or a newly graduated lawyer. (One of his most competent and popular secretaries was Henry S. Brainard, who later became city law director and after that, counsel for the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company.)

Baker was so short that he literally could, and would, curl up in a big office chair, and tuck one foot under him. He regularly smoked a big-bowled pipe. He was calm and even-tempered and went out of his way to be kind to young people. He was never without a book near at hand, usually some tome on history or philosophy. He was continually learning, and never wanted to waste a moment. He was often seen in a hotel corridor, waiting his turn to speak, quietly reading a book. He had plenty of books — not just law books, but reading-type books — in his office.

Everyone who heard Baker speak marveled at how he could extemporaneously come forth with the most cogent, well-reasoned, well-phrased arguments, without notes. He had such mental discipline that he arrayed his thoughts beforehand and knew how to express them for the most telling effect. He never prepared a text.

He was a tremendously effective courtroom lawyer. A1though he did not appear often in court, when he did it was worth paying admission to hear. One such time was when he defended Editor Louis B. Seltzer and Chief Editorial Writer Carlton K. Matson of the Press against a charge of contempt of court laid on them by Common Pleas Judge Fred P. Walther. The Press had severely rebuked Judge Walther for giving a light slap on the wrist to a defendant in a gambling case that involved Sheriff John M. Sulzmann (sheriffs were always in the grease with Cleveland newspapers). Walther took offense and cited the two editors for contempt. Baker, who was the Press’s lawyer as well as the Plain Dealer’s, appeared personally to defend them.

Baker’s cross-examination was superb, and his demolition of the judge’s reasons for citing the editors was icy, logical, and devastating. He went about as far as a lawyer could without saying in so many words that the judge was incompetent, ill-advised, or both. He made Walther seem like a pretentious fool. Finally, the irritated judge said, “Mr. Baker, are you expressing contempt for this court?” Baker, poker-faced, said firmly, “No, your honor, I am trying to conceal it.” (Walther found the editors guilty, but the court of appeals, after hearing Baker, freed the two.)

Baker used to enjoy telling of the sage advice he got from an old-timer, a brilliant courtroom lawyer, Matt Excell, when he was just a kid breaking in. Excell told him what emphasis to use in addressing a jury. “If the facts are on your side, argue the law,” advised Excell. “If the law is on your side, argue the facts. If neither the law nor the facts are on your side, confuse them, Newtie, confuse them.” Such smart tactics are still being used.

Baker was a man of broad culture. He was a music lover and supporter of the Cleveland Orchestra. (Mrs. Baker was an accomplished concert pianist.) He was deeply interested in education, and was offered the presidency of both Ohio State University and Western Reserve, but he preferred to stay with his law practice. He did serve as chairman of the board of trustees at Reserve, and was also on the board at Ohio State. The Newton D. Baker Hall now contains the dean’s and other administrative offices at Reserve, and there is a Baker Hall, a men’s dormitory, at Ohio State.

Cleveland lost its number one citizen when his heart gave out in 1937.

(His son, Newton D. (Jack) Baker II, has been administrator of the Lakeview Cemetery Association for several years, and his wife Phyllis, is active in Cleveland Orchestra and charitable efforts.)

Cleveland: Confused City on a Seesaw
by Philip W. Porter
retired executive editor of the Plain Dealer
1976

 

Courtesy of CSU Special Collections

Medicine in Cleveland by Diane Solov

Diane Solov is Program Manager of Better Health Greater Cleveland, a multi-stakeholder alliance dedicated to improving the quality of health care for people in Northeast Ohio with chronic illness. Based at Case Western Reserve University’s Center for Health Care Research and Policy at MetroHealth Medical Center, Solov manages the day-to-day operations of all aspects of the program.

Solov came to MetroHealth in March 2007 following a career in journalism, winning numerous awards and recognition for her work. She spent her last 15 years as a journalist at The Plain Dealer, Cleveland’s daily newspaper, as a medical editor, and previously, as a medical reporter. For nearly a decade, Solov often broke and edited stories about Northeast Ohio’s expansive health care market and national health care issues that affected them and their patients.

Solov earned a B.A. in anthropology from the University of Missouri and completed coursework in the M.A. program at its renowned School of Journalism. She was a 2010 Fellow of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Ladder to Leadership program.

The link is here

 

 

Bertha Josephine Blue By Debbi Snook

The pdf is here

Bertha Josephine Blue

By Debbi Snook

 

On a spring day in the early 1900s, a confident-looking woman ushers a group of schoolchildren along the hilly sidewalk in Cleveland’s Little Italy neighborhood. She wears a crisp, blue dress and the scent of lavender soap.

 

The children, many of them sons and daughters of Sicilian immigrants, are walking to First Communion practice at Holy Rosary Church. The woman, their first-grade teacher, is African-American.

 

This snapshot in the rich and remarkable life of Bertha Josephine Blue, a member of Cleveland’s early black middle class, also reaches across many generations of race relations in Cleveland.

 

By today’s perceptions, Blue had quite the nerve. From 1903 to 1947 – a total of 44 years – this granddaughter of a slave taught at Murray Hill Elementary School. 

 

Yes, in Little Italy, the tightly knit East Side Italian neighborhood of checkered tablecloth restaurants – and a checkered history dealing with outsiders.

 

But Blue used her determination, talent and heart to pierce this insulated community in such a way that it flooded her with love. It wasn’t a strategy, but a calling.

 

You won’t find Blue in most of Cleveland’s history books, but more than a half- century after her retirement and death, the mention of her name still brought tender, childlike responses from older residents of Little Italy. Some of them, plus a new group of admirers, are dusting off the memory of this respectful interracial relationship and passing it to future generations. Maybe, just maybe, they hope, it will help erase a multitude of old wounds.

 

Blue’s photograph graced the wall of the one-room Little Italy Historical Museum, the neighborhood’s former showcase. The same shrine housed a hand-cranked pasta machine from the old country and samples of lace tatted by many ancestors. An ornately painted donkey cart from Italy rolled out the door for many annual Feast of the Assumption parades.

 

Also on the walls were images of people from Campobasso and Abruzzi in the central part of Italy, and Sicily in the south – people who escaped the economic limitations of their homeland. Many worked as stonemasons in a quarry nearby, or as gifted carvers for the ornate Lake View Cemetery bordering the neighborhood.

 

Blue taught their children. Then she stayed after school to teach English to their parents. In turn, they taught her Italian.

 

Jane Darr, Blue’s daughter, said in a 2001 interview that her mother could relate to the immigrants as outsiders.

 

“She’d say, ‘Janie, they’re so young and so far from home. I have to do this.’ ”

 

“She was beautiful. We all loved her,” recalled Eva Maesta, a volunteer at the former museum and one of Blue’s former students. “Every birthday, she got a little cupcake for you with a candle in it. And this is when you couldn’t afford a cupcake.”

 

“She believed everybody should get a passing grade,” added Lauretta Nardolillo, another volunteer. “If you were a slow learner, she’d help you more. She never scolded you for getting things wrong.”

 

“When my mother baked bread, she’d give her a loaf of it,” remembered Frances LaRiche. Blue was allowed to park for free in the LaRiche family garage on Random Road. It was no small donation. The LaRiches couldn’t afford a car of their own.

 

On the cold, sunny afternoon of her interview, Darr circled the old school by foot and recalled the annual inspection tour she and her mom did each year. Most summers, the neighborhood kids would break classroom windows. Darr and Blue would drive around the building before school started to see which windows got hit.

 

“Never hers,” Darr said proudly.

 

Given the area’s racially tense past, people might expect the opposite. Darr said the late Carl Stokes, Cleveland’s first black mayor and the first black mayor of a major U.S. city, was astonished to hear about Blue for the first time at a Western Reserve Historical Society event in the early 1990s.

 

“He asked me if we tried to find out who ‘sent her up the hill’ and why – that it might not have been a joyful thing.”

 

But it was.

 

Kenneth L. Kusmer’s 1978 book, “A Ghetto Takes Shape, Black Cleveland, 1870- 1930” shows there were four black Cleveland teachers in 1908 – a healthy representation compared to other cities of the time. By 1915, there were 30.

 

Cleveland had been part of the Western Reserve, claimed by Connecticut and settled by New Englanders. Many of them were evangelic and reform-minded Christians who made most of what is now Northeast Ohio a center of the abolitionist or anti- slavery movement.

 

Remarkably, their 18th-century traditions of equality, Kusmer wrote, “remained intact to a remarkable degree” through the turn of the 20th century. Some of Cleveland’s first blacks found a more level playing field here than in many other cities.

 

The Great Migration changed things. The massive movement of Southern blacks heading north, escaping crop failures and old racism, magnified racial tension up north. Many were rural and uneducated, or seen as competition for jobs.

 

By the time Blue came of age, that tradition of equality did not include all professions. Because of her color, she probably would have been turned away from a medical school. But she was welcomed at a teacher’s college. With a teaching certificate in hand, the city school system would be open to her, including schools in white neighborhoods.

 

All she had to do was get that certificate. Those who knew her never doubted she would.

 

Blue lived for many years in the Central neighborhood, one of several sections of the city where blacks settled. During World War I, as southern blacks moved in by the tens of thousands, it became Cleveland’s version of New York’s Harlem. Blacks went there because other areas, especially growing suburbs, were closed to them.

 

When Darr visited the old homestead on E. 90th Street, the sweet memories flowed. There were the blue hydrangeas that her grandmother, Cornelia Cunningham Blue, planted in the yard. There were neighbors who showed up just to see Blue’s Asian décor, or her wall-sized bookcase.

 

It was a household of achievement.

 

“I grew up in a home where people always had a pencil and a legal pad,” said Darr. “They wanted to open doors that had never been opened. They would say, ‘This is the problem. How are we going to convince the community of such and such?’

 

“We were never allowed to use the terms ‘white people’ and ‘colored people.’ Grandma said it reinforced the battle. And you didn’t sit around the table at night and talk about the race problem. Dinner was a time to be happy and relaxed. If you wanted to do something, you went out and joined an organization that worked toward a goal.”

 

Darr recalled her mother and grandmother as serene personalities, and credits some of their talent for diplomacy from Quaker influence. She said Blue’s grandparents traveled the Underground Railroad to a Quaker settlement of ex-slaves near Cadiz, three hours south of Cleveland near the Ohio River.

 

Darr remembered using the words “thee” and “thou” at home, another possible Quaker connection.

 

Blue was born in Cleveland into a supportive atmosphere. Her cousin, Welcome T. Blue, was one of the city’s top black real estate salesmen with a big house one block away on E. 89th St. Welcome taught Blue to drive – when other male cousins wouldn’t, Darr said – and may have been a financial help.

 

As a young woman, Blue couldn’t afford four years of college in a row. She did one year at Hiram College, 1899-1900, and took other classes at Miami University in Oxford. It was not until 1932 that she received a bachelor’s degree from Western Reserve University. Darr said the graduation procession in front of the Cleveland Museum of Art was joyful.

 

“It was important to other people, too,” she said, “this one brown face walking around the lagoon.”

Blue’s life was full. There were high teas every afternoon at home, football games at Central High (starring her famous place-kicking brother, Joe Blue), the Minerva Book Club, classes in calligraphy and folk-dancing.

 

Blue once took her daughter to a party where bandleader Noble Sissle (best man at Joe Blue’s wedding) and pianist Eubie Blake played. There were annual trips to Oberlin to celebrate the end of slavery, and summer vacations at a tony black resort in Idlewild, Mich.

 

It was no spinster life. Blue once went to a show by fan dancer Sally Rand, “just to see how she got away with it.” And although Blue was a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, she brewed up ginger beer that her relatives called potent.

 

The frivolity did not obscure the humble bones of her life. In addition to teaching, she organized a Sunday school at St. John AME Church on E. 40th Street. Churches were essential to black lives, with one historian calling them “the only institutions the negro could call his own.”

 

Blue also helped her friend, activist Jane Edna Hunter, manage the Phillis Wheatley Association, a groundbreaking community house for black women. It’s possible that Blue joined Hunter in battling the raging controversy surrounding the formation of the house.

 

Some upper class blacks felt integration was achievable if they worked hard and worked smart within the white community. On the other side, Hunter, a trained nurse, and others, couldn’t just watch as young black women were turned away from the whites-only YWCA. They knew help had to come from somewhere, even if it meant in a segregated institution. The settlement house emerged to change minds and lives.

 

Blue helped deliver babies in her family, and many friends and relatives came by the house just to unburden their hearts.

 

But Blue’s mother did not think her daughter’s life was full in all ways. Two romances ended when one man died of pneumonia, another from tuberculosis. Cornelia felt Blue needed a child, and set out to find her one.

 

She did with Jane Lee Darr, a 2-year-old with pecan skin and blue eyes. Darr’s mother, a friend of a friend, had just gotten divorced. She had no money and no future, and she looked white, which she was, mostly. She knew Blue could give the child a better life.

 

When the adoption was finalized, the parental rights went to Blue’s mother. Then, when she died, the rights went to Blue, a rarity for a single working parent at the time.

 

Darr remembers feeling immediately comfortable with Blue, how Blue touched her small head to calm her, how the house felt immediately like a home. When Darr’s birth mother came back to take her to Cumberland, Md., to see her dying birth grandmother, Blue gave the girl a small, blue bowl to take with her. “She said, ‘You can rub it and you won’t be far away from us.’ “

 

Blue was never angry or out of control with her daughter.

 

“I was mischievous,” said Darr. “I had to leave the table a couple times because you don’t say ‘ain’t’ or ‘honeychile.’ And I loved [saying] that.

 

“But my worst punishment was to go to my room and not eat family dinner. So then it would get late and maybe I’d get some soup and we’d have a talk. Nobody ever went to bed [hurt or angry].”

 

Hints of Blue’s tenderness and her understanding of young people can be found among the items in her manuscript file at the Western Reserve Historical Society. There are references to her favorite books on teaching, which stress the individualism of children. And there are dozens of thank-you notes from former students, filling the file with greeting cards of violets and lilies of the valley.

 

Schools were changing when Blue retired in 1947. At that time, Kusmer noted in his book, “A Ghetto Takes Shape,” there was a trend toward segregating black teachers with black students.

 

The Civil Rights movement confronted that issue and many others in the 1960s. Blacks not only had the vote, they used it to right longstanding wrongs. In 1963, the year Blue died, city schools were overcrowded. Black students were sent to Murray Hill, but kept in classrooms apart from white Little Italy students.

 

A sidewalk protest against the in-school segregation was readied one day in 1964, but never launched. Still, a white mob of 1,500 gathered and, according to news accounts, attacked photographers and black citizens who happened to be driving through the neighborhood.

 

Tension lingered for decades. Blacks complained of discrimination and other mistreatment in restaurants and on the street. Neighborhood residents chafed at visitors or student residents who were too loud, disrespectful or parked in the wrong places.

 

In the 1990s, officials of Case Western Reserve University and Little Italy started meeting to deal with the problems. Reported racial incidents became scarce.

 

While some blacks were still not comfortable in the neighborhood, many more began using it.

 

Then the Little Italy Historical Museum published a history book. It was dedicated to three people: two of the neighborhood’s founding fathers and Bertha Josephine Blue.

 

“She was the first one we thought of,” said museum volunteer Nardolillo. “She was one of us. Everybody liked her so much and she was such a lovely, dedicated teacher, we felt she should get some recognition.”

 

Nardolillo said she also hoped it served as a gesture of reconciliation.

 

Sandra Malek Vodanoff, a historical society volunteer and Lake View Cemetery docent, got a plaque installed at Blue’s gravesite there, telling how much she was loved by the Italian-American community. Teachers of English as a second language helped in the effort.

 

Thelma Pierce, who processed Blue’s file at the historical society, and whose father- in-law, David H., was the first white president of the Cleveland NAACP, said Blue was an exception in Little Italy, but exceptions can light the way to better times.

 

“It’s good if people can say, ‘I love Bertha Blue. That must mean there are other African-Americans I can love, too,’ ” said Pierce.

 

And when that feeling is returned by blacks, Darr said, her family had a name ready for it: “The Feast of Forgiveness.”

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