“Ward 6” By Jim Rokakis

The pdf is here
Essay from “Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology”, edited by Richey Piiparinen and Anne Trubek. Courtesy of the editors

“Ward 6” By Jim Rokakis

June 1977. My first official campaign stop was at Merryman’s Hall: a tired, two- story red brick building located at the corner of West 14th and Denison Ave. The club was nothing more than a small bar and ten tables. No food. Just cheap booze. Once a club for the Polish immigrants, it had now become a hangout for the sons and grandsons of the founders, but also for Appalachians who had worked their way north for the jobs at the mills and plants. The most recent wave of immigrants to the neighborhood, the Puerto Ricans, were not welcome here— not yet, anyway. When the membership rolls dropped to levels so low that the club could not pay the light bills, the membership criteria were loosened so anybody could join, as long as you had cash.

I had my one and only campaign staffer with me that night: Dave Krischer of Skokie, Illinois. Dave was a junior at Oberlin College. I can’t think of anyone who had less in common with the average Ward Six resident. He was Jewish. In fact next to blacks, Jews were probably the least favorite ethnic group in that neighborhood. Dave knew this. In fact he had some fun with it when the topic came up. “You a Greek like Rokakis?” I once heard him being asked. “Oh no,” he’d reply. “I’m Russian. My ancestors were from Pogrom, Russia.” I don’t think anybody ever caught on.

The steps leading up to the hall on the second floor were long and narrow. Like every other public space in the neighborhood the most overwhelming feature of the room was smoke. There were about fifty people in the room. At twenty-two years of age I was the youngest by about twenty years. When I entered, it got quiet, heads turned. I got anxious. My throat dried.

I stopped at the sign-in table and let them know that I wanted to speak that night.The club secretary asked if I wanted to join their organization.

“Yes,” I said, and gave her three bucks. She asked if I had a door prize.

“Of course,” I replied and handed her a bottle of wine I brought, complete with a tag that read “Compliments of Jim Rokakis.” I forgot who told me to do that. I would like to thank them anyway. The sentiment was a lesson that would guide me through Cleveland politics for the next thirty years.

1

The meeting began like all meetings did in the neighborhood: with the Pledge of Allegiance. After the reading of minutes, the club president suddenly turned to me, saying: “We have a special guest here tonight, a young man named Jim Rokakis. It says here on the sign-in sheet that he is running for City Council here in Ward Six. He wants to say a few words to us.”

Oh shit, I thought to myself. I felt I was going to get sick. I got up. “Thank you for the chance to speak with you this evening,” I stumbled. “My name is Jim Rokakis. I’m one of your neighbors—I live on Garden Ave. I am here to announce to you that I am running for Cleveland City Council here in Ward Six. I have lived in this neighborhood all of my life, but I am unhappy with the direction that it is taking.”

I continued, my tone as about as deliberate as the sound of tiptoeing: “I am really unhappy with the crime problem in this neighborhood—“

Just then I was cut off. There was a voice in the hallway, shouting: “I’m coming up. I’m coming up. Coming up babies, don’t nobody come down the stairs— Sophie’s coming up!”

Peals of laughter rippled throughout the room. Heads turned toward the doorway to see an enormous woman named Sophie enter. She wore a billowing white dress that was sleeveless and exposed big white arms. Her legs were trunks right down to the feet.

“Hi’ya Sophie!” somebody shouted. “Come over here, we saved a seat for you!”

She slowly worked her way over to a wooden folding chair. She sat. I stared at the chair, worried about its integrity. Sophie glared in my direction. My concentration was shot. I tried to pick up where I left off.

“People just don’t feel safe anymore in this neighborhood. As I go door to door I hear stories of break-ins, cars being stolen—”

I was cut off again by a man in the front row. “I caught a nigger in my driveway last week,” he began. I was floored. The man went on, “I asked him what he was doing, said he was looking for somebody named Maurice, you know that was bullshit. He was looking for a house to break in to.”

I turned to the club president, hoping that he would rule the man out of order for his racist remarks. Wrong. Instead he picked up the conversation where the bigot in the front row left off.

“What day did you see him? Was it Monday or Tuesday?” “I’m sure it was Monday because I was off that day.”

2

“Was he with anybody? Because I saw two of ‘em in a station wagon, cruising and looking up and down driveways.”

The conversation went on for another couple of minutes with people in the room joining in. Then someone raised their hand, pointed to me, and the club president apologized and asked me to continue. I didn’t get far.

Rita LaQuatra raised her hand and asked: “Mr. Rokakis, what’s better—governor or senator?”

I didn’t get the question, so I asked to her to repeat it.

“I said, what’s better, governor or senator?”

I stammered. “Well, they are very different jobs—both important but very different.” I then ventured into the differences between the legislative and executive branches of government. After about three minutes, folks weren’t paying attention. I then struggled to get back to my prepared speech.

At this point Howard Lorman of Library Avenue got up and turned to face the audience. Mr. Lorman was in his early eighties, rail thin, neatly dressed. He didn’t live in that neighborhood but somewhere along the way he found this group, or they found him—or they found each other more likely.

“I would like to say something about voting,” he said. “It was 1932. We use to vote in those metal sheds. Do you remember those metal sheds?”

People nodded in the smoke.

“Well, it was the primary. I asked for my ballot and looked for the name of Herbert Hoover, but couldn’t find it. They told me I had asked for the wrong ballot and wouldn’t give me another one. You know what I did? I wrote in the name of Adolf Hitler.”

The room burst into laughter. Not long after the crowd quieted, I thanked them for the opportunity and sat down. I was drenched in sweat. I had been speaking for forty-five minutes, and it seemed I had gotten nothing across. I was disappointed. I lost control of the group early and never regained their attention.

But the evening was not a total loss. I learned a valuable lesson about neighborhood politics: Expect the unexpected. This lesson was reinforced by the fact that Ted Sliwa, the incumbent Ward 6 Councilman and a legend in Cleveland politics, would be a no-show that night, as he was all summer. I thought it was because he was confident and secure in his position. Only later did we learn that he had had it with local politics.

3

I consider that evening at Merryman’s–my first public appearance–the night in which I was thrown to the wolves. But as difficult as the evening seemed, it paled in comparison to the experiences awaiting me less than a year away as a member of Cleveland City Council. They were the beginning of the most tumultuous two years in the city’s history—Dennis Kucinich’s short-lived tenure as mayor. The time would also present me with one of the toughest days I ever had in public life.

***

When Sliwa dropped out of the race I became the front runner. That much was clear. Our youth and enthusiasm had created “buzz” in the neighborhood. One problem: money wasn’t coming in. Campaigns cost money, and I was broke, as were my folks. A fundraiser was needed.

My first fundraiser was a “Greek” affair at the UAW Hall on Chevrolet Boulevard in Parma. We had a Greek band, the Pyros Brothers, and Greek food. The event raised a few grand, but it only lasted us until July, and we thought maybe we’d go bigger with a neighborhood event. So we hosted a beer and sausage event at the VFW hall at West 49th and Memphis. I was worried it would be a bust, but also hopeful that my relentless door-to-door campaigning would somehow pay off.

Rick Morgan, my right hand man at the time, printed up some cheap fliers and delivered them door-to-door. We had hoped for 100-125 people. A day before the event a man named Chuck Sayre, whom I had met on the campaign trail, asked if he could provide the evening’s entertainment. Chuck was a blue-collar guy: a former boxer, then a fight promoter, then an organizer of third-rate musical acts. Talk about Rust Belt Chic, well, Chuck was it.

The night of the fundraiser came. I was petrified I would arrive to an almost empty hall. I had spent the entire day campaigning and had gone home to shower. Around 7:30 the phone rang. It was Rick, and I could barely hear him. “You better get up here,” he shouted. “The crowd is huge and they are asking about you.” I was stunned. I headed over to the hall immediately.

When I got the parking lot I was shocked to see cars overflowing. Adrenaline rushed. I parked a block over and ran into the hall. As I worked my way to the door people began to shout out my name, “Jim,” “Jim, how ya doing,” and “Jim, good luck!” I was shaking hands. Hugging and kissing old ladies. Smoke filled the room. Drinks flowed. In the back Chuck had a microphone and was introducing one of his acts—an Elvis impersonator in a sequined suit—to the crowd. “Hound Dog” played and ended. Chuck then took the mic from Elvis’ hand and said: “Ladies and gentlemen, the man we all been waitin’ for. The guest of honor: JIMMY ROKAKIS!”

4

The crowd erupted. It felt like a dream. I worked my way to the head of the room and took the mic. I don’t remember what I said. But I do remember closing with a question: “Are you with me?” The crowd roared yes.

***

To say that I expected to be a politician growing up wouldn’t be the truth. The streets of my neighborhood weren’t particularly nice. They weren’t as tough on the Near West Side or East Side of the city, but as the years passed it was safe to say most of my neighbors were not there by choice. In fact growing up I didn’t so much focus on how to lead as much as I did on where I didn’t want to follow. So much youth around me was doing time, and dying young. Like Jerry Wallace: the best athlete in the neighborhood died of cirrhosis of the liver at 30. Luckily, my family and my drive kept me away from being on the terribly wrong side of life. And so the neighborhood that grew me eventually became the neighborhood that voted me to the forefront when it was their time to be represented.

But politics is not just about public recognition, it is also about public pain, and I learned this early with the murder of an eleven-year-old girl named Maxine Penner not a half year into my first term. I was sick when I got the news. I remember meeting her and her mother, Ruth Penner. They lived in a small frame house directly across from Riverside Cemetery. The media was all over this tragedy. The headlines blared: “Young girl murdered on the west side.”

I remember going to a meeting with a group of neighbors the night after the murder. They were angry. They were scared. The meeting was about ten doors away from the murder scene. I could barely look at the house where it happened when I drove by. The lights were on. The shades were drawn.

Nobody greeted me when I entered the home where the meeting was taking place. No handshakes. No smiles. The anger was thick. I remember a large heavyset man standing in the corner who charged at me, coming within inches of my face and screaming, “You ain’t done shit in this neighborhood. This neighborhood has gone to hell since you became councilman!” There were shouts of approval from others in the crowd. I remember thinking this was a verbal assault I would have to take. I had no choice. I represented authority and order. And what occurred was the opposite of that: horror, disorder. When I finally responded I was brief. I told them that I would work day and night to make sure the killer(s) were caught. I reminded them that I lived in the neighborhood and shared their risk. I promised a greater police presence. I asked them to share any information—to work with me even if they didn’t care for me. I asked them to say a prayer for Maxine. I stayed until almost midnight. It was and still is my hardest day in public life.

5

The next morning I compiled a list of potential suspects based on what I knew of neighborhood problems and what the neighbors shared with me. The neighborhood didn’t have a gang problem in the classic sense. Just a bunch of mean, hard-scrabble kids from the lower west side: Hispanic, Appalachian, and first-generation ethnics. Most abused drugs and had done time in some JV facility for relatively minor offenses. This murder was something else. And if they were the perpetrators, they had grown up: they were killers now.

I submitted the list to homicide detectives that morning and they politely accepted it. But they didn’t have much to say. It was too early in their investigation. They became annoyed over the course of the next few weeks as I pressed them for answers. These weren’t the days of crime labs and DNA analysis. The investigations were methodical, slow. I was afraid that they would never make an arrest.

The evening of the visitation I became sick and vomited just before I left. I knew the job of councilman wouldn’t be easy but dealing with the murder of a young girl was something else. When I went to the funeral home I was scared I’d become emotional when I’d meet Mrs. Penner: not exactly the image of a strong leader I was meant to project. I knew I had to keep my emotions in check.

The funeral home was crowded. The people parted for me as I walked to the mother of the victim. I remember holding her and the two of us walking to the casket, where Maxine lay. The casket was open and I remember her saying something about how they had done a good covering the cuts on her neck. That’s all I remember. I didn’t cry. I went directly to my car and headed south on Pearl Road into Parma, Parma Heights, and then all the way into Medina County. I turned around and it was dark when I got back. I stopped at my parent’s house on Garden Avenue before I returned to my empty apartment. I took an aluminum folding chair from the porch out to the backyard where I had grown up. I sat alone listening to the sounds of the neighborhood: the barking dogs, the television sets, the country music, and I cried.

A couple of months later one of the boys on our list admitted to a juvenile detention counselor that he had some information on the murder. They arrested Curtis Richmond and charged him with rape and aggravated murder, though he served less than eight years after being allowed to plead down to manslaughter. Other juveniles admitted to being accomplices but didn’t serve much time. They all said it was a botched break-in and panicked and killed her. Shortly after the funeral, Mrs. Penner left Cleveland and I never saw her again.

Maxine would be forty-six years old if she were alive today. I have not forgotten her. I never will.

6

JIM ROKAKIS was born and raised on Cleveland’s Near West Side. He ran for Cleveland City Council in 1977 at the age of 22. He expected to lose and begin law school that Fall. He won and spent 33 years in public office – nineteen years in Cleveland City Council and fourteen as the Cuyahoga County Treasurer. He spends his time now as the director of the Thriving Communities Institute, organizing land banks and raising money to knock down 100,000 houses in distressed urban Ohio.

7

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.


“How Reform is Changing Healthcare in Northeast Ohio: a Panel Discussion” (Video)

The video is here

“WHAT’S HONEST AND WHAT’S HYPE?”: HOW THE AFFORDABLE HEALTHCARE ACT
AND OTHER REFORMS WILL CHANGE HEALTHCARE IN NORTHEAST OHIO

March 19, 2014

Panel members include:
Dr. Eric Bieber, President, University Hospitals Accountable Care Organization
Dr. Akram Boutros, President and Chief Executive Officer, The MetroHealth System
Martin Hauser, Chief Executive Officer, SummaCare
Dr. David Longworth, Chairman of Medicine Institute, Cleveland Clinic
Moderated by Eileen Korey, former medical journalist

Presented by: 
CWRU Siegal Lifelong Learning, Teaching Cleveland Digital, and Cleveland Jewish News Foundation

Henry Flagler from the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

The link is here

FLAGLER, HENRY M. – The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

 

FLAGLER, HENRY M. (2 Jan. 1830-20 May 1913), a developer of STANDARD OIL CO. (OHIO), was born in Hopewell, N.Y., to Elizabeth Harkness and itinerant Presbyterian minister Isaac Flagler. He attended school through the 8th grade, and at 14 went to live with his Harkness relatives in Republic, Ohio. In 1852 he joined Dan and Lamon Harkness in buying out F. C. Chapman’s interest in Chapman & Harkness, forming Harkness & Co., a distillery which made $50,000 for Flagler by 1863. During the CIVIL WAR he worked as an agent dealing in provisions. After losing $100,000 in the salt industry in Michigan, Flagler moved to Cleveland in 1866, briefly selling barrels to oil refiners, then becoming a commission merchant. By 1867 he had enough money to establish H. M. Flagler & Co.

In 1867 STEPHEN HARKNESS invested $100,000 in JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER‘s oil business, placing Flagler in charge of his investment; the firm became Rockefeller, Andrews, & Flagler. Flagler developed the idea of absorbing smaller refineries, and of replacing the partnership with a joint stock company in 1870 and with the Standard Oil trust in 1879. Flagler was secretary and treasurer of the corporation, and vice-president of Standard Oil until 1908 and a director until 1911, but ceased playing an active role after ca. 1881, when he moved to New York and began investing heavily in Florida, developing Palm Beach and Miami. Flagler married 3 times: Mary Harkness in 1853; Ida Alice Shourds in 1883 after Mary’s death; and Mary Lily Kenan in 1901 after divorcing Ida. He had 3 children: Jennie Louise, Carrie, and Harry. Flagler died in West Palm Beach and was buried in the Flagler Mausoleum in St. Augustine, Florida.

Chandler, David Leon. Henry Flagler (1986).

Akin, Edward N. Flagler (1988).

Martin, Sidney W. Florida’s Flagler (1949).

Last Modified: 16 Jul 1997 01:39:52 PM

 

Henry Flagler from Wikipedia

The link is here

Henry Flagler

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  (Redirected from Henry M. Flagler)
 
Henry Morrison Flagler
HenryFlagler.jpg
Born January 2, 1830
Hopewell, New York, U.S.
Died May 20, 1913 (aged 83)
Palm Beach, Florida, U.S.
Net worth USD $60 million at the time of his death (approximately 1/651st of USGNP)[1]
Children Jennie L. (Mar 18, 1855-Mar 25, 1889)
Carrie (1858-1861)
Harry H. (1870-1952)

Henry Morrison Flagler (January 2, 1830 – May 20, 1913) was an American industrialist and a founder of Standard Oil. He was also a key figure in the development of the eastern coast of Floridaalong the Atlantic Ocean and was founder of what became the Florida East Coast Railway. He is known as the father of Miami, Florida and also founded Palm Beach, Florida.[2]

Contents

  [hide] 

[edit]Upbringing and education

Henry Flagler was born in Hopewell, New York and was the son of Elizabeth Caldwell Morrison Harkness and the Rev. Isaac Flagler, a Presbyterian minister. His mother was the widow of Dr. David Harkness of Milan, Ohio who had been a widower when they married. Dr. David Harkness and his first wife were the parents of Stephen V. Harkness whose business success enabled him to invest substantially with Henry Flagler in the Standard Oil company.[3] Elizabeth and Dr. David Harkness had one son, Daniel M. Harkness, Henry’s half-brother.

Henry Flagler received an eighth-grade education before leaving home at 14 to join his half-brother Daniel M. Harkness to work in Daniel’s uncle’s store, Lamon G. Harkness and Company, inRepublic, Ohio at a salary of US$5 per month plus room and board. By 1849, Flagler was promoted to the sales staff of the company at a salary of $400 per month. He eventually left Republic and joined Daniel M. Harkness in Bellevue, Ohio in a new grain business started with Lamon G. Harkness in Bellevue. In 1862, Flagler left Bellevue and founded the Flagler and York Salt Company, a salt mining and production business inSaginaw, Michigan in 1862 with his brother-in-law Barney York. By 1865, the end of the American Civil War led to a drop in the demand for salt and the Flagler and York Salt Company collapsed. Heavily in debt, Flagler returned to Bellevue. He had lost his initial $50,000 investment and an additional $50,000 he borrowed from his father-in-law and Dan Harkness. Flagler felt he had learned a valuable lesson: invest in a business only after thorough investigation.[4]

[edit]Business and Standard Oil

Henry Flagler, c. 1882

Flaglers Gingerbread house in Bellevue, OH

After the failure of his salt business in Saginaw, Flagler returned to Bellevue and reentered the grainbusiness as a commission merchant with The Harkness Grain Company. Through this business, Flagler became acquainted with John D. Rockefeller, who worked as a commission agent with Hewitt and Tuttle for the Harkness Grain Company. By the mid-1860s, Cleveland had become the center of the oil refining industry in America and Rockefeller left the grain business to start his own oil refinery. Rockefeller worked in association with chemist and inventor Samuel Andrews.

In 1867, Rockefeller, needing capital for his new venture, approached Flagler. Flagler obtained $100,000 from family member Stephen V. Harkness on the condition that Flagler be made a partner. The Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler partnership was formed with Flagler in control of Harkness’ interest.[5] The partnership eventually grew into the Standard Oil Corporation. It was Flagler’s idea to use the rebate system to strengthen the firm’s position against competitors and the transporting enterprises alike. Though the refunds issued amounted to no more than fifteen cents on the dollar, they put Standard Oil in position to outcompete other oil refineries.[6] By 1872, it led the American oil refining industry, producing 10,000 barrels per day (1,600 m3/d). In 1885, Standard Oil moved its corporate headquarters to New York City.

Standard Oil had the same principal owners that Rockefeller, Andrews and Flagler had, give or take a few business associates: one of whom was John D. Rockefeller‘s brother, William.[7] Standard Oil monopolized quickly and took America by storm.[8] Although Standard Oil was a partnership, Flagler was credited as the brain behind the booming oil refining business. According to Edwin Lefevre, in “Flagler and Florida” fromEverybody’s Magazine, XXII (February, 1910) p. 183, “When John D. Rockefeller was asked if the Standard Oil company was the result of his thinking, he answered, “No, sir. I wish I had the brains to think of it. It was Henry M. Flagler.”[9]

Henry Flagler dabbled in various businesses aside from building up infrastructure in Florida. When he envisioned successes in the oil industry, he and Rockefeller started building their fortune in refining oil in Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland became very well known for oil refining, as, “More and more crude oil was shipped from the oil regions to Cleveland for the refining process because of transportation facilities and the aggressiveness of the refiners there. It was due largely to the efforts of Henry M. Flagler and John D. Rockefeller.”[10] Flagler and Rockefeller worked hard for their company to achieve such prominence. Henry explained: “We worked night and day, making good oil as cheaply as possible and selling it for all we could get.”[11] Not only did Flagler and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company become well known in Ohio, they expanded to other states, as well as gained additional capital in purchasing smaller oil refining companies across the nation.[11] According to Allan Nevins, in John D. Rockefeller (p 292), “Standard Oil was born as a big enterprise, it had cut its teeth as a partnership and was now ready to plunge forward into a period of greater expansion and development. It soon was doing one tenth of all the petroleum business in the United States. Besides its two refineries and a barrel plant in Cleveland, it possessed a fleet of tank cars and warehouses in the oil regions as well as warehouses and tanks in New York.”[12]

By 1892, Standard Oil had a monopoly over all oil refineries in the United States. In an overall calculation of America’s oil refineries’ assets and capital, Standard Oil surpassed all.[13] Standard Oil’s combined assets equalled approximately $42,882,650.00 (U.S) from: Indiana, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York and Ohio. As well as the highest capitalization, totaling $26,000,000 (U.S).[13] The history of American oil refining begins with Henry Morrison Flagler, and his business associate and friend, John D. Rockefeller, as they built the biggest, most prosperous and monopolizing oil empire of their time: Standard Oil.

[edit]Florida: resort hotels and railroads

In 1876 on the advice of his physician, Flagler traveled to Jacksonville for the winter with his first wife, Mary (née Harkness) Flagler, who was quite ill. Two years after she died in 1881, he married again. Ida Alice (née Shourds) Flagler had been a caregiver for Mary Flagler. After their wedding, the couple traveled to Saint Augustine. Flagler found the city charming, but the hotel facilities and transportation systems inadequate.Franklin W. Smith had just finished building Villa Zorayda and Flagler offered to buy it for his honeymoon. Smith would not sell, but he planted the seed of St. Augustine’s and Florida’s future in Flagler’s mind.[14]

Although Flagler remained on the board of directors of Standard Oil, he gave up his day-to-day involvement in the corporation to pursue his interests in Florida. He returned to St. Augustine in 1885 and made Smith an offer. If Smith could raise $50,000, Flagler would invest $150,000 and they would build a hotel together. Perhaps fortunately for Smith, he couldn’t come up with the funds,[15] so Flagler began construction of the 540-room Ponce de León Hotel by himself, but spent several times his original estimate. Smith helped train the masons on the mixing and pouring techniques he used on Zorayda.[16]

Florida East Coast Railway, Key West Extension, express train at sea, crossing Long Key Viaduct, Florida. photo from Florida Photographic Collection

Realizing the need for a sound transportation system to support his hotel ventures, Flagler purchased short line railroads in what would later become known as the Florida East Coast Railway.

The Ponce de León Hotel, now part of Flagler College, opened on January 10, 1888 and was an instant success.

Ponce de Leon Hotel – Now Flagler College

This project sparked Flagler’s interest in creating a new “American Riviera.” Two years later, Flagler expanded his Florida holdings. He built a railroad bridge across theSt. Johns River to gain access to the southern half of the state and purchased the Hotel Ormond, just north of Daytona. He also built the Alcazar hotel as an overflow hotel for the Ponce de León Hotel. The Alcazar stands today as the Lightner Museum next to the Casa Monica Hotel in St. Augustine that Flager bought from Franklin W. Smith. His personal dedication to the state of Florida was demonstrated when he began construction on his private residence, Kirkside, in St. Augustine.

Flagler completed the 1,100-room Royal Poinciana Hotel on the shores of Lake Worth in Palm Beach and extended his railroad to its service town, West Palm Beach, by 1894, founding Palm Beach and West Palm Beach.[2] The Royal Poinciana Hotel was at the time the largest wooden structure in the world. Two years later, Flagler built the Palm Beach Inn (renamed Breakers Hotel Complex in 1901) overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Palm Beach.

Flagler originally intended West Palm Beach to be the terminus of his railroad system, but in 1894 and 1895, severe freezes hit the area, causing Flagler to rethink his original decision. Sixty miles south, the town today known as Miami was reportedly unharmed by the freeze. To further convince Flagler to continue the railroad to Miami, he was offered land in exchange for laying rail tracks from private landowners, including Julia Tuttle, whom he had met in Cleveland, Ohio and who ran a trading post on the Miami River, the Florida East Coast Canal and Transportation Company, and the Boston and Florida Atlantic Coast Land Company.

Such incentive led to the development of Miami, which was an unincorporated area at the time. Flagler encouraged fruit farming and settlement along his railway line and made many gifts to build hospitals, churches, and schools in Florida.

Flagler’s railroad, the Florida East Coast Railway, reached Biscayne Bay by 1896. Flagler dredged a channel, built streets, instituted the first water and power systems, and financed the city’s first newspaper, The Metropolis. When the city was incorporated in 1896, its citizens wanted to honor the man responsible for its growth by naming it “Flagler”. He declined the honor, persuading them to use an old Indian name, “Mayaimi“. However, an artificial island was constructed in Biscayne Bay called Flagler Monument Island to honor Flagler. In 1897, Flagler opened the exclusive Royal Palm Hotel there. He became known as the Father of Miami, Florida.

Flagler’s second wife, the former Ida Alice Shourds, had been institutionalized for mental illness since 1895. In 1901, Flagler successfully persuaded the Florida Legislature to pass a law that made incurable insanity grounds for divorce, opening the way for Flagler to remarry. Judge Minor S. Jones of Florida’s 7th Judicial Circuit presided over the divorce. Flagler was the only person to be divorced under the law he pushed through before it was repealed in 1905.[17] On August 24, 1901, Flagler married his third wife, Mary Lily Kenan, and the couple soon moved into their new Palm Beach estate, Whitehall, a 55-room beaux arts home designed by the New York-based firm of Carrère and Hastings, which also had designed the New York Public Library and the Pan American Exposition.[18] Built in 1902 as a wedding present to Mary Lily, Whitehall (now the Flagler Museum) was a 60,000-square-foot (5,600 m²) winter retreat that established the Palm Beach “season” of approximately 8–12 weeks, for the wealthy of America’s Gilded Age.

By 1905, Flagler decided that his Florida East Coast Railway should be extended from Biscayne Bay to Key West, a point 128 miles (206 km) past the end of the Florida peninsula. At the time, Key West was Florida’s most populous city, and it was also the United States’ deep water portclosest to the canal that the U.S. government proposed to build in Panama. Flagler wanted to take advantage of additional trade with Cuba and Latin America as well as the increased trade with the west that the Panama Canal would bring. In 1912, the Florida Overseas Railroad was completed to Key West. Over thirty years, Flagler had invested about $50 million in railroad, home, and hotel construction and gave to suffering farmers after the freeze in 1894. When asked by the president of Rollins College in Winter Park about his philanthropic efforts, Flagler reportedly replied, “I believe this state is the easiest place for many men to gain a living. I do not believe any one else would develop it if I do not … but I do hope to live long enough to prove I am a good business man by getting a dividend on my investment.”[19]

[edit]Death and heritage

Statue of Henry Flagler that stands in front of Flagler College (Flaglers formerPonce de León Hotel) in Saint Augustine, Florida.

In 1913, Flagler fell down a flight of marble stairs at Whitehall. He never recovered from the fall and died in Palm Beach of his injuries on May 20 at 83 years of age.[20][21] He was entombed in the Flagler family mausoleum at Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Augustine alongside his first wife, Mary Harkness; daughter, Jenny Louise; and granddaughter, Marjorie. Only his son Harry survived of the three children by his first marriage in 1853 to Mary Harkness. A large portion of his estate was designated for a “niece” who was said actually to be a child born out of wedlock.

When looking back at Flagler’s life after his death on May 20, 1913, George W. Perkins, of J.P. Morgan & Co., reflected, “But that any man could have the genius to see of what this wilderness of waterless sand and underbrush was capable and then have the nerve to build a railroad here, is more marvelous than similar development anywhere else in the world.” [22]

Miami’s main east-west street, is named Flagler Street, and is the main shopping street in Downtown Miami. There is also a monument to him on Flagler Monument Island in Biscayne Bay in Miami; Flagler College and Flagler Hospital are named after him in St. Augustine. Flagler County, Florida, Flagler Beach, Florida and Flagler, Colorado are also named for him. Whitehall, Palm Beach, is open to the public as theHenry Morrison Flagler Museum; his private railcar No. 91 is preserved inside a Beaux Arts pavilion built to look like a 19th Century railway palace.

On February 24, 2006, a statue of Henry Flagler was unveiled in Key West near where the Over-Sea Railroad once terminated. Also, on July 28, 2006, a statue of Henry Flagler was unveiled on the southeast steps of Miami’s Dade County Courthouse, located on Miami’s Flagler Street.

The Overseas Railroad, also known as the Key West Extension of the Florida East Coast Railway, was heavily damaged and partially destroyed in the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. The Florida East Coast Railway was financially unable to rebuild the destroyed sections, so the roadbed and remaining bridges were sold to the State of Florida, which built the Overseas Highway to Key West, using much of the remaining railwayinfrastructure.

Flagler’s third wife, Mary Lily Kenan Flagler, was born in North Carolina; the top-ranked Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is named for Flagler and his wife, who was an early benefactor of UNC along with her family and descendants.[23] After Flagler’s death she married an old friend, Robert Worth Bingham, who used an inheritance from her to buy the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper. The Bingham-Flagler marriage (and questions about her death or possible murder) figured prominently in several books that appeared in the 1980s when the Bingham family sold the newspaper in the midst of great acrimony. Control of the Flagler fortune largely passed into the hands of Mary Lily Kenan’s family of sisters and brother, who survived into the 1960s.

[edit]See also

Portal icon Miami portal
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[edit]References

Notes
  1. ^ Klepper, Michael; Gunther, Michael (1996), The Wealthy 100: From Benjamin Franklin to Bill Gates—A Ranking of the Richest Americans, Past and Present, Secaucus, New Jersey: Carol Publishing Group, p. xiii, ISBN 978-0-8065-1800-8, OCLC 33818143
  2. ^ a b “Madoff scandal stuns Palm Beach Jewish community”. Reuters. December 19, 2008. Retrieved 2008-12-20.
  3. ^ Martin 1949. 05.
  4. ^ Martin. 29.
  5. ^ Martin. p. 45.
  6. ^ Martin. p. 64.
  7. ^ Derbyshire, Wyn. “Six Tycoons: The lives of John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Joseph P. Kennedy.” London: Spiramus Press Ltd, 2008, p. 132.
  8. ^ Derbyshire, Wyn. “Six Tycoons: The lives of John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Joseph P. Kennedy.” London: Spiramus Press Ltd, 2008, p. 129-132.
  9. ^ Martin, Sidney Walter. “Florida’s Flagler.” Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2010, p. 56.
  10. ^ Martin, Sidney Walter.”Florida’s Flagler.” Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2010, p. 55.
  11. ^ a b Sammons, Sandra Wallus. “Henry Flagler, Builder of Florida.” Sarasota, Florida: Pineapple Press Inc, 2010, p. 4.
  12. ^ Martin, Sidney Walter. “Florida’s Flagler.” Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2010, p. 58.
  13. ^ a b Tarbell, Ida M. The History of the Standard Oil Company. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co, 1904, p. 376.
  14. ^ Nolan, David: Fifty Feet in Paradise, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich Publishers, 1984, page 95
  15. ^ Nolan, David: Fifty Feet in Paradise, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich Publishers, 1984, page 101
  16. ^ Nolan, David: Fifty Feet in Paradise, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich Publishers, 1984, page 105
  17. ^ http://www.theledger.com/article/20100328/columnists/3285012?p=1&tc=pg
  18. ^ Chandler p. 193.
  19. ^ Chandler
  20. ^ “Whitehall Flagler Museum”. Destination 360. Retrieved 2010-04-04.
  21. ^ “Henry Morrison Flagler”. Everglades Digital Library. Retrieved 2010-04-04.
  22. ^ Moffet, Samuel. Henry Morrison Flagler The Cosmopolitan; a Monthly Illustrated Magazine (1902) APS Online
  23. ^ “History”. Kenan-Flagler Business School. Retrieved 2010-09-04.
Bibliography
  • Chandler, David. Henry Flagler: The Astonishing Life and Times of the Visionary Robber Baron who Founded Florida(New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1986)
  • Standiford, Les (2002). Last Train to Paradise. Crown Publishers, New York. ISBN 0-609-60748-0.
  • Martin, Sidney Walter (1998). Henry Flagler Visionary of the Gilded Age. Tailored Tours Publications, Buena Vista, Florida. ISBN 0-9631241-1-0.
  • Martin, Sydney Walter (1949). Florida’s Flagler. University of Georgia Press, USA.

[edit]Further reading

  • Akin, Edward N. (1991). Flagler: Rockefeller Partner and Florida Baron. University Press of Florida. ISBN 0-8130-1108-6.
  • Bramson, Seth H. (2002). Speedway to Sunshine: The Story of the Florida East Coast Railway. Boston Mills Press, Erin, ONT, Canada. ISBN 1-55046-358-6. Noted by the author as the official history of the Florida East Coast Railway.
  • Mendez, Jesus. “1892-A Year of Crucial Decisions in Florida”, Florida Historical Quarterly, Summer 2009, Vol. 88 Issue 1, pp 83–106, focus on Flager’s aggressive urban development of the city of St. Augustine, his improvement of the local railroad networks between several Florida communities, and negotiations regarding international government trade policies and regulations.
  • Nolan, David. Fifty Feet in Paradise: The Booming of Florida. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
  • Ossman, Laurie; Ewing, Heather (2011). Carrère and Hastings, The Masterworks. Rizzoli USA. ISBN 9780847835645.

[edit]External links

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