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13 Disillusion
Much of the hurry I was in, the reason I did things so quickly, was because I knew I wasn't going to be in City Hall long. I knew the things I had to do were not going to permit me to be around long and so I had to move fast, before the day when that white person out there who was part of the majority suddenly understood what was going on and turned to use his majority against me. I knew that it had to mean something to be Carl Stokes, not just black, but black in a predominantly white city, and black with style, with charisma, and with a hard sense of my own priorities, an unwillingness to depart from the path toward what I thought ought to be done in the town, knowing that I could use the process to get things done but that as I exercised the power there would be a reaction that did not occur to whites who had broken through. As you try to go ahead, you keep asking yourself, How long am I going to have to do these things, how much can I do before the combination of all these events come together and make it impossible for me to govern as I want to, as I perceive it has to be done? By the time I took office I had been in Cleveland long enough, had been in politics long enough, and had certainly been black
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long enough to know that they would be coming after us, but I did not really understand the sophisticated ways it could be done. I had expected the critical surveillance and weighing of actions. I had not anticipated the lengths people would go to. Read the history of Tom Loftin Johnson, the man now revered as the greatest mayor in the history of Cleveland, and learn what happens when you fight the power structure. A wealthy man when he went into office in 1901, he is praised today for what he achieved, but few remember he was defeated for reelection, broken financially and physically. He died less than a year after he left office, disowned by the establishment from which he had come. He fought both of the political parties and was at sword's point with the newspapers of his day for almost the entire eight years he was in office. Looking at his career, you have to realize that whenever you go up against the established structure it is going to be self-destructive. It happened to Carl Stokes between 1967 and 1971, but it also happened to a wealthy white man over fifty years ago. The attacks, the antagonism and the hostilities may vary in approach, but they come to anyone who works at government as we did. I am sure they would not have acted as they did if I had not governed as I did. When I talked about commitment to housing, they thought it was something a politician said to get elected. The same of the poor. Politicians have always used poor people, black people, to get in, and then gone ahead to do it as it was always done. Even the poor people didn't really expect me to do anything. They had always been made promises that were not kept. When I got in, I tried to do what I had said I would do. But my actions brought down the attacks of those who felt threatened, or who were deprived of something they had always had. And those who had always been on the outside didn't believe it, either. They forgot the campaign, the tough days they walked the streets, telephoned, gave up their nickels and dimes, because they had always done that and never got anything for it. When the jobs and opportunities began to flow it was like a child who
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suddenly is given an opportunity to buy all the clothes he wants, to be able to stay up as late as he wants, or not to go to school if he chooses not to. Many people were ready for the responsibility; some were not. They had never been in positions not just of responsibility but subject to such close scrutiny; consequently there were holes, and they were unable to provide the kind of protection to their own jobs and ultimately to me that veteran political appointees understand. Here is an example. In our earliest days at City Hall there was no one with more political savvy than Geraldine Williams. Her devotion to the administration and the things we wanted to do was unsurpassed. We were in office less than a month when she blundered. I compounded her errors with a mishandling of the situation, and those who were ready to attack the infant administration had a field day. I had named Gerry as one of my administrative aides. Nine days after we took office we learned that the Press had been checking into complaints of Sunday liquor sales at the 32 Cedar Club, a private club owned by Gerry's ex-husband. Gerry had been the secretary of the club. It had been a meeting place for us for a long time, and much of the 1965 campaign was planned and run from there. I had told Gerry before I appointed her that she must be free and clear from the club. She assured me that she was. When we heard that the state Liquor Department had the club under surveillance, I called Gerry in. She swore to me she was completely divorced from the club. We heard no more about this until after I had left for a vacation in January. While I was in the Virgin Islands the Press broke a story saying they had linked my aide to a "cheat spot." Dr. Clement and Paul White phoned me and told me what the Press had. I told them to have Joe McManamon get the facts. Two days later they phoned to tell me that McManamon, with the help of a handwriting expert, had determined that signatures on permit applications from 1967 back to 1952 indicated that Gerry was still with the club. More, the club minutes submitted after the story broke appeared to be new minutes, trying to establish
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a prior resignation by Gerry. All of this was known to the press. Meanwhile, I was weighing the need to keep my administration above reproach and feeling that by acting decisively when something like this would come up we could prevent attacks. So I said, "Okay, she has to go. Inform her." I really regret the way I handled the situation. Apparently she did lie to me; she was with the club, and she made it worse by dummying up the minutes. But what had she done wrong or in dereliction of her duty with the administration? The stories did not say she was at the club selling liquor on Sunday. The only thing she did wrong was lie to me. She had done nothing in her role as an employee that warranted firing, and certainly not firing by long-distance telephone. But in an atmosphere of panic over this, the first attack on the integrity of the administration, I overreacted. If the same thing had happened later in my administration, I would have gone on the counterattack, asking why this spurious, yellow-journalist attack, trying to discredit my administration. I would have asked what illegal act she had done. When I think back to the nights in 1965 when she and I worked alone making signs by hand in that very club or in my law office, I wish I could undo what I did. I lost probably one of the four or five most trusted and loyal people I have ever had around me in public life. We all live under power trees. That's where the goodies grow. We all have to decide whether we want to accept what falls from the trees and is left there by someone else or whether we shake the tree and get our own. There is one problem: those trees belong to certain people, and if you shake the wrong tree, they come after you. And that is what happened to Carl Stokes in Cleveland. Efforts to physically assassinate me were successfully warded off, but there was no way to ward off the systematic and determined campaign to assassinate me with rumor, conjecture, speculation, insinuation and indirect charges that I had no defense against. For decades the city had been raped through the system that made it possible for Jim Stanton to casually tell me one morning,
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"If I don't make fifty thousand dollars a year, then something must be wrong." Why? How could a full-time Council President make fifty thousand dollars a year? If what he said is true, then despite the technical legality of however it is done, such a system is reprehensible. That is why so many of the attacks on Carl Stokes by some commercial, business and political interests should not be looked on as simple racism. Rather, it was the economic reaction of those who had been displaced from the goodies they had enjoyed for so long from those previously running the city. They had to believe I was now dispensing the goodies and getting the return. Accordingly, I was investigated by everyone from Cleveland's lowliest Polish housewife to the highest agencies of the United States government: my own Police Department, all the Cleveland-area papers, the strike force set up to fight organized crime, the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service, were all in Cleveland and anywhere I'd ever been, investigating me because of rumors, allegations and accusations. On April 29, 1971, three and a half years after I took office, the Press headlined a story "U.S. Finds No Misdeed by Stokes." The story read as follows:
The investigations were made by the Justice Department's task force on organized crime, whose chief is William J. Tomlinson. The task force has authority to investigate complaints about alleged corruption by public officeholders as well as organized crime involving racket figures. Its investigation of Stokes, based on complaints funnelled to the task force, was fruitless, The Press learned. Investigators could find no evidence to substantiate the complaints. Task Force investigators, it was learned, were conscious of the possibility that some of the complaints were inspired by persons who dislike Stokes for personal or political reasons.
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I took power and gave it to unsophisticated people is they don't know how to protect themselves if they have done something wrong. They don't know how to take care of themselves like the white guy who has been taking money for years but also maintains a cash reserve to pay councilmen, police, prosecutors, legislators, and sees to it that money gets into a mayor's campaign. But few persons stop to think that a black man who understands all of this so well also understands not to do it. That's what they can't get through their heads. They know I've been down the road. I've watched money change hands in this society from level of the blackjack dealer who greets the vice squad at 3 A.M., cuts out some money and says, "Fellows, go get yourselves a drink," all the way to the legislature where some of the most respected big businesses in this country pay for representatives' hotel bills, guarantee five thousand dollars for a reelection campaign, provide prostitutes and interest-free loans for automobiles and homes. I've seen it all. But you don't have to be a chicken to know what an egg is. Beyond the question of doing wrong and knowing or not knowing how to cover it up was the question of just what is wrongdoing. Practices that had been going on for years were suddenly being investigated during my administration. When so-called scandals did occur, blacks or people identified as being close to me could expect the full attention of the county prosecutor. Things that were not crimes were made to seem like crimes to discredit my administration. You have to keep in mind the great power of a county prosecutor. He can do almost anything, from wiretapping to surveillance to the getting of records. And he can intimidate. He can get people indicted almost at will. A county grand jury relies almost exclusively on the county prosecutor or his assistant for direction. Since the grand jury sits in secret and its procedures are never subsequently available to public scrutiny, the information given to the grand jury is whatever the prosecutor wants to present. He may not be able to convict you, but he can sure as
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hell get you indicated. And even if he can't prove the case, the public stigma of the indictment is enough. I had to go against him because I was fighting for what we had labored so hard to put together and whenever there was a blemish I knew the only way to clear it up was to force the issue to an ultimate conclusion. I hoped that the people understood that you can't fight a man like the county prosecutor unless you are clean yourself. John T. Corrigan became Cuyahoga County prosecutor in 1956. He owned his election to a newspaper strike. Corrigan was running against Robert Krupanski, a Republican who had the support of both newspapers and looked like a sure winner. He had come out of Cleveland's West Side Irish ghetto, where racial hostilities and prejudices are part of the West Side Irish-Catholic heritage. Corrigan is personally honest, and it is hard to criticize honesty. But I happen to think there are things you do and things you don't do that can reflect on your consistency. To my knowledge, Corrigan has never investigated the activities of the Democrats who have dominated the county commissioner's office for decades and handle budgets twice the size of Cleveland's. As far as I know, he never investigated the activities at City Hall until the Stokes administration, yet nothing happened during my two terms that did not happen long before I got there. In 1970 when we told the top men in the County Democratic Party that we wanted black Councilman George Forbes to be a vice-chairman, most of them agreed except Corrigan. He alluded to some corruptness on the part of Forbes and declared Forbes was not going to be an officer in the party, and the others fell into line behind him. They could not buck him, because he could turn loose his office on any one of them and make life very uncomfortable. Two years later in 1972, Forbes aligned himself with the white Democrats, and John Corrigan supported him to be one of the three county co-chairmen of the Democratic Party. In April 1973 the white Democratic councilmen voted for Forbes to become the first black President of Cleveland's City Council. Had Corrigan's opinion of Forbes changed so profoundly in three years?
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The three men I appointed to the Civil Service Commission -- Jay B. White, Charles L. Butts and Marvin Chernoff -- understood the need to get more black policemen on the force. The commission gave its first recruitment test October 16, 1968, to almost twelve hundred applicants. The criticism had started even before the test was administered. The NAACP had sponsored a three day course giving tests similar to those that the applicants would actually be taking. This was attacked by those who just didn't want any more blacks on the force. Then immediately after the test there was criticism by some that it had been too easy, that the Stokes administration was out to lower the standards for getting onto the police force. But when the results of the tests were examined, a startling 41.7 percent pass rate was revealed, the lowest pass rate anyone could recall. Meanwhile, the commission was preparing a promotion exam to be given November 16. My three members, in designing the test, made an effort to take it beyond the traditional simplistic test of the policeman's memorizing the Ohio Code and the city ordinances. After complaints from the Fraternal Order of Police, the commission postponed the test, first until December 14, then until December 21. That test was to be nullified after Chief Gerity charged that "proper security was not maintained." His original charge was that there was cheating, but that reflected poorly on the policemen taking the test, so he changed it to a security failure, to make it reflect poorly on the commission. The commission gave another promotion exam January 23, 1969, after which the FOP filed suit in Common Pleas Court asking that the commission be enjoined from using the results for departmental promotions. The case was heard in March by Judge Thomas W. Mitchell, a visiting judge from Jackson County. Judge Mitchell nullified the results of the exam, stating that the test was unreasonable, not practical and not related to the positions sought. He also called on Corrigan to have the grand jury investigate possible violations of the law in connection with the January 23 test. At that time I praised Judge Mitchell's action and urged Corrigan to go forth with the investigation.
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There were reports that twenty-one policemen had purchased the exam and the answers. The prices quoted ranged up to $1,500. A white police lieutenant, John Apanites, produced a copy of the exam paper and claimed that a policeman's wife had given it to him. Obviously there was some wrong-doing and it involved more than the failures of Stokes's Civil Service Commission. White policemen had been cheating. In May the grand jury began its investigation into the two promotion tests and the appointment test for new policemen. Corrigan and his assistant George Moscarino carefully orchestrated the proceedings, stretching them out over months, leaking information that would indicate wrongdoing on the part of certain blacks, Stokes appointees, and, by implication, me. Meanwhile, we were unable to put needed policemen on the streets, so I was getting the crime-in-the-streets bit on the other end. After months of investigation, the grand jury returned with three indictments. Jay B. White, the president of the commission, who is black, and Charles L. Butts, the secretary, were indicted on several felony counts, and Lieutenant Apanites was charged with lying under oath about where he had obtained a copy of the January 23 exam. He had maintained he got the exam from the wife of a policeman but vowed he would go to jail rather than reveal who the woman was. Despite the indictment, the newspapers pictured his criminal act more as an act of chivalry than anything else. It was Jay White and Charles Butts they kept in a criminal posture. The whole involvement of Jay in this made me sick. When he or other blacks I had brought into City Hall let themselves get mixed up in things like this I would sit and think, The sons of bitches, here I am trying as hard as I can to put something together for all of us, and they go and get involved in something like this. I would feel so helpless. I had known Jay a long time; we grew up together. I had talked specifically with him, as I talked with others I appointed to significant positions, saying, "You are going to have great latitude, and persons are going to try to influence you and literally want to purchase favors from
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you. You will have a chance to make money, but I want you to understand, I can't stop you from taking a dollar but if I find out about it I will be harder on you than anyone else." I wanted people to understand that when I told them don't do something they shouldn't do it, or at least, if they did, it was their baby. However, I did not want my people singled out for persecution for something of which they were merely a part. The whites always managed to extricate themselves. On two occasions I managed to persuade all three television stations to allow me to go on at a prime time to pressure Corrigan to go after everybody. For all practical purposes, he had already maligned and prosecuted the black community. Along with the actual indictments of Butts and White, Carl Stokes was indicted in the public mind. I was fighting desperately the tradition of blaming black people while white people benefit. It is like the numbers game, where whites benefit from the numbers and policy exploitation in the black community, yet when one talks about numbers and policy the onus is on blacks. The same thing was happening here. I challenged Corrigan. I watched the newspapers play up the way he ridiculed me, saying I ought to go back to law school after I told him to push the investigation. I talked to Tom Vail, William Ware, and Tom Guthrie at the Plain Dealer, explaining to them that it was my belief that white policemen had benefited from these examinations and we must press Corrigan to continue his investigation. They agreed and did nothing. I told Tom Boardman and Herb Kamm at the Press that this was an effort on the part of John T. Corrigan to malign the Stokes administration and black people, that he must be urged to go forward in the investigation to reach the men who initiated the whole thing, who had been getting the tests over the years and getting the promotions through the use of stolen and purchased tests -- the white policemen. Everyone would sit there and agree with me and say that something must be done, and then do nothing. Meanwhile I was being urged by the black community to stop pressing for further investigation. They were fearful that more black people would be involved. Yet I had to stand above this,
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because I understood better than they did that you are not going to get equal justice in the United States until you make those black people who are doing wrong pay for it and at the same time get the white people who are in there with them. All this time the reaction from the white community was that I was trying to cover up for the black people and attempting to shift blame to white policemen. Corrigan was selectively releasing the names of the other blacks suspected of some involvement, and the media was playing it up. I had Sergeant Mack conducted an investigation, and it indicated that about twenty-seven policemen had been in possession of those tests. They were almost exclusively white policemen -- some of the worst white policemen and best-known racists in the department. Many also happened to be members of the vice squad in East Side areas where they were selling protection to policy and numbers people and to operators of after-hours places. These were the kind of men who apparently knew how to get the tests. When you look at the manifest evidence that there was something wrong, and finally at the recommendation of the prosecutor, that White and Butts plead guilty to the misdemeanor of destroying public papers (felony charges were dropped), then you know a deliberate decision was made on the part of someone not to continue. While Jay was eager to plead to a misdemeanor, the pressure was on Butts, who saw no reason to plead guilty to any charge. He admitted destroying the papers -- answer and identification sheets used in the exam -- but he did it at Jay's instruction, and the papers were not connected with the commission of any crime. Early in 1971, the prosecutor's office and the media combined again to give the appearance that I was personally involved in something illegal. Following a series of Press articles, five city employees and eight employees of private trucking firms were indicted by the county grand jury on the largest number of counts I've ever known anyone indicted on in the United States. There were 476 counts of defrauding the city through contracts the Utilities Department independently let to a trucking company for
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hauling sludge from a waste-treatment plant. The charges included conspiracy to defraud the city, larceny by trick, forgery, falsification of records and a couple of counts relating to a black employee who used city lumber in repairing the side of his house. The charges carried a potential of hundreds of years in jail. This time, Corrigan's operative was Assistant Prosecutor Charles Laurie, a man with a burning desire to be elected judge and a reputation in the black community of being one of Corrigan's most biased prosecutors. (Fortunately, the voters thought the two things didn't go well together and defeated him in his election efforts.) One of the black city employees Laurie was prosecuting came to my office and told me he'd been advised he could avoid prosecution if he'd "just give up Carl Stokes." "But to do that, you'd have to lie," I told him. He agreed and went on to defend his case. (I can't vouch for the truth of this story but Laurie's hostility toward me is well known.) A year after I left office, the highly publicized case of 476 serious criminal indictments of Carl Stokes's administration strangely melted away. All charges against two of the city employees and three of the trucking-firm workers were dismissed; and the remaining defendants were given money fines. No one was jailed. The man drawing the heaviest fine, $3,500, for what the judge must have thought was the most serious violation, was the black city employee convicted of using city lumber.
While I was fighting these battles with the county prosecutor's office, trying to protect the administration and the things we wanted to do, I was facing other fights too. The suburbs around Cleveland have grown in population and resources and in leadership people who reside there, leaving the central city with its dwindling resources, its ever-diminishing tax base, its high concentration of the poor, the elderly and the politically impotent. As mayor you are in control of territorial boundaries, but you have nothing with which to sustain yourself. You
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cannot look to the people in the central city, for they have more needs than they have resources. You cannot look to the people in the suburbs, because that is why they are out there. You cannot look to the state, because the legislature is controlled by a suburban-rural coalition. The central-city representatives in the legislature are a minority group, whether they are black or white. Then you have a governor who responds as most public officials do, in line with our whole theory of government, and that is that you please or appease the majority. The majority is not in the central city. The only recourse is to look to the federal government, not just for resources to pay the operating costs of government , but in order to enforce the things that mean life or death to your city. That government is the only one that can reach the suburbs, make them part of a health or transportation or air-and-water-pollution control system, make them help support the city. The federal government is the only source that can provide the money while providing protection against a complete takeover of those systems by suburban people, with their built-in hostility toward the central city. It is not just the drain of financial resources by businesses and industries that are locating outside the city, it is the drain of human resources. When the interests of the city come into conflict with the interests of the suburbs, you find this great wealth of people of substance able to articulate and fight for their position, whereas in that central city you almost literally have only the mayor and his handful of City Hall people. The suburbanites mouth slogans about the need to save the city and they are always there to tell you how to run it, but their first and final loyalty is to the place where they have chosen to move their families, invest in homes, have their children educated, and be safe. The basic understanding of the needs of a city like Cleveland, and the reality that the central city has some thirty percent of its tax duplicate exempt from taxation, makes it obvious that you are going to have to expand your tax base to fiscally survive. The federal government is more and more understanding of that
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need, but it also understands you cannot have cities as total welfare clients; that you also have to get people out to where the jobs are; that health factors know no boundary lines and must be treated on a regional basis or area-wide basis, and so must water pollution and rat control; and therefore it must help the cities, but to do it realistically by combining them in some formal way with the ever-expanding, greater population outside the central area. The government's present effort to do this is in creating area or regional councils composed of the central city and the areas immediately surrounding them. But the antagonism between these groups is intense. The lineup of forces in this battle between a city and the surrounding area can be seen in our fight NOACA (Northeast Ohio Area Coordinating Agency). In that body Cleveland, which has twenty-five percent of the population of the seven-county area that is part of NOACA, was being given some fourteen percent of the representation on its board. There you had county commissioners, mayors and city managers from seven counties, all of them basically one of mind, against one man from one city who understood that once such a council of governments is formed, the federal government will not spend any money in that area that does not go through the council. If you are not represented adequately in there, at the beginning, obviously your interests are not going to be protected. NOACA was determined that the central city would not be equitably represented. The issue was joined. I had a City Council so dedicated to diminishing the political presence of the mayor that paradoxically they were part of those calling for acceptance of lack of representation of their city on a board that has to be against the interests of their constituents and themselves. Extraordinary. Eventually I had to go to the federal government and explain to both the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission how federal dollars were being used by an organization that was fostering blatant discrimination in housing. The federal government decertified NOACA as the agency for spending money in northeast Ohio. That is the kind of protection that only the federal government can give.
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It is worse for a black mayor, but it is tough for any mayor who has a real commitment to his city. At one point, my successor, Ralph Perk, was tempted to talk about the suburban noose that strangles the city. Word got out that he was preparing to deliver a speech along that line, and the newspaper reaction to it sent Perk scurrying for cover, denying he planned to make the speech and blaming his aides. Perk knows they are out there and what they mean to the city. But when the powerful people who live in those suburbs prepared to come down on him, he ducked and ran. Mayors must fight for cities today in a way that has never been necessary before. It is a fight for the survival of the city and its people. The alternative is to give away the sewers and the water, give away control of your sewage treatment system, give away control -- and control sounds bad, but we are talking about protection of the interests of those who have the ownership, the use, and the need of these things -- to those who will use them for their own benefit, not the benefit of those from whom they are coming. My prediction is that Perk will be unable to sustain these fights. It takes too much personal commitment and acceptance of the costs you have to pay, politically and personally. Many of my dreams had died when one stupid, phony so-called revolutionary had decided to shoot it out with the police one night in Glenville. Some six thousand dollars of Cleveland: NOW! money had been allocated to Ahmed Evans and some of his followers as part of the summer employment program. We had spent over five million dollars in other badly needed community programs without a single bad incident. The positive aspects of the program were forgotten after Glenville, and soon it became increasingly burdensome for the trustees to get the business community to honor the pledges that had been made. I knew enough about the people of Cleveland to know that what we had lost would never be put together again. I knew that from then on it was going to be tough going to get any kind of positive response out of the business community, the City Council, the media and most of the people. Fear, hatred, all the
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emotions that had been pushed to the backs of people's minds for almost a year, were now going to come forth.
I approached the 1969 mayoral election with mixed emotions about running. When John Little and Sidney Spector came to me about organizing a $100-a-plate dinner for me, I told them it was all right but I wanted them to understand that there was no obligation on me about running again. I went to the dinner still uncommitted, still undecided. I sat there until about 11 p.m. and then got up from the table and went into a back hallway. I had the security men keep everybody out and I just walked around back there, trying to figure out what I could do other than run. People thought later on that it was the fact that two thousand people paid $100 a plate that caused me to decide to run. That was one of the least considerations. Most of the people who brought those tables were people who could afford it and were there for calculated political reasons. Most of them assumed their presence would redound to their benefit when it came time to award contracts. The only reason we had an extraordinary mixture of people -- welfare mothers, black militants, others who could not afford to pay a hundred dollars -- was that we made people who could afford it buy tables for those who could not. The real reason I decided to run was that I could not conceive of anyone who could take over the city. I kept asking myself was there anyone who could continue what had been the crucial battle with Jim Stanton and those he represented in the city and in the Council, or with the newspapers and their continued contribution to the resistance to change, or with the business community. I asked myself, Is there anyone to fight for the guy in the street who needs a decent home and is the victim of this class and race struggle? Is there anybody who can demand a response and make it difficult not to respond? The answer always came back no. There was no one who could win and who was more concerned about producing than about being liked. At midnight I walked up to the microphone and declared I would run again.
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It was that night that I really began to think seriously about an organization. I realized that after close to two years in office I had not prepared anybody or anything to carry on. I went on to defeat Ralph Perk and win reelection in November by twice the margin that I had won in 1967, and early in February 1970 I organized the Twenty-first Congressional District Caucus. The Caucus's name and its membership boundaries cam from my brother Louis' congressional district. The concept came from Charley Carr and William O. Walker. The motivation came from my wanting to leave my people a vehicle to continue the political thrust I had taught them and to leave my brother a solid political base not dependent upon my presence and muscle. All black elected officials who had been loyal to me were named to the executive board. A number of ward leaders were also elected to the board. Later, we expanded the board to include ministers of different faiths and civic leaders. Louis was chairman. I was honorary chairman. We were organized. We found a home at the Club Center on East Eighty-ninth Street at Quincy Avenue, a large neighborhood meeting center owned by Walter Burks, one of my later appointees to the Civil Service Commission. Reception from the community was wonderful. From four to six hundred people turned out at meetings. There was great pride in being a member of the Caucus. It added another dimension to the political growth of Cleveland's black people and came to serve as a model for the nation of organized black political power. The Cuyahoga County Democratic Party gave us our first confrontation. In May 1970 the party held its first county convention to elect new officers. Charley Carr attended Bert Porter's policy committee meeting a few days prior to the convention, at which they were determining what slate of officers to run. Carr proposed George Forbes for vice-chairman. John T. Corrigan led the opposition to Forbes. They decided that a black should not be named vice-chairman, because he could succeed to chairman. They created a special vice-chairmanship for a Negro and agreed to elect Dr. Kenneth Clement to it. Dr. Clement accepted it. I rejected this proposal out of hand when Carr reported back to
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me. It was preposterous in 1970 that a Democratic Party group would be creating a "Negro" position. In addition, we had just defeated Dr. Clement soundly in his primary race for U.S. Senate; we had backed Howard Metzenbaum, a liberal Jewish lawyer, and thrashed Clement five to three in his own ward. Clement did not carry a single black ward in Cleveland. We destroyed him and the myth the white media kept alive of his being a black leader. This was the first of several instances to follow in which the black community learned to discipline its errant members. We called a meeting of all black councilmen, ward leaders and precinct committeemen for the same Saturday morning and the same time the Democratic county convention was being held. We boycotted the convention and declared that the Caucus and its members were no longer part of the regular Democratic Party. We would be free agents, and nonpartisan, supporting candidates of either party, depending on what their election meant to the black community. The two white daily papers assailed us unmercifully. White Democrats who had been enjoying free black votes for years wrote letters of outrage to the papers. White West Siders who wouldn't let a black person live on their street bemoaned this political self-segregation by the blacks. White liberals who had their separate Americans for Democratic Action chapters and New Democratic Coalition clubs mourned over our action and demanded our return to the party. But the black people understood it and gloried in this new political independence. The result of every election from that time on depended on what the Caucus with its great solidarity in voting did. Any candidate, black or white, campaigning in the black community had to answer the question "Is the twenty-first District Caucus supporting you?" If not, he lost his audience. We had great victories. We controlled virtually every City Council and state legislative seat in the district. Our people followed us as we swung our votes to Republicans over Democrats, occasionally a white man over an underserving black candidate
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and in September 1971 we soundly thrashed mayoral candidate City Council President Anthony J. Garofoli, who had the endorsement of the county Democratic Party, organized labor and the Plain Dealer. With his ethnic background and those endorsements, Garofoli would have been a tougher apponent for the black candidate in the general election than James Carney. That and our other victories and what the Caucus was all about are well summed up in a Plain Dealer editorial of September 30, 1971:
It is they who capsized the Democratic organization and nominated James M. Carney for mayor. They got out a near unanimous bloc vote for him in the biggest surprise in Cleveland's political history. But also they were invincible in every Council contest they got into. They plowed Democratic regulars under. Examples: Warren Gilliam, in midtown, Mrs. Mary E. Yates in Glenville, Clarence R. Thompson out near Lee-Seville. They either won or put into the November runoffs their entire slate, including a former foe, Ceasar Moss, and others brought into line and then approved. Thus the Stokes-21st district Caucus party humbled the Democratic party. Mayor Stokes and his group showed up the part's weakness. They taught Democrats, political prophets, newspapermen and poll takers some lessons in political strategy. In City Council the Stokes group seems sure to control a much firmer block of votes, at least 11, possibly 14. All will owe more now to the Stokes-21st District Caucus, which hand-picked and then backed them. This makes the Stokes-Caucus group into the real opposition party, the only real second party in Council. It could control 40% of Council in Challenges to the bare 17-vote majority which the Democrats will manage to muster. Anyone who calls the upsets of Tuesday's primaries fluke or a mere trick is refuted by the ward-by-ward vote on the East Side. It took long, deep, thorough work to
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The party led by Mayor Stokes and the 21st District Caucus has proved what an important force it is in city's most politically conscious residents.
My second term was almost total war between the mayor and the Council, between the mayor and the newspapers, between the mayor and everyone. I took my cabinet out of the Monday night City Council meetings because I refused to follow a tradition that merely allowed councilmen to attack and impugn the integrity of the chief executive of the city. I was determined that the bigots and the haters in the Council were not going to get away with what they had been getting away with it in the past. I attempted to make them recognize the administrative branch of the city government as the equal of the legislative, not the whipping boy. I took the city's black population out of the Democratic Party because the party refused to recognize and reward blacks for years of service and votes. I went after the newspapers, challenging them as no one had done before on their racism and their reluctance or inability to understand the needs of a city and actually work to solve problems, not mutter about the evils of confrontation. I took the city out of NOACA because that organization was working against the interest of Cleveland. I fought for an income tax increase against people who were thinking they deserved more services for less money. All this time everyone was digging in, determined that there would be no change that would benefit black people. I became the focus of affection and anger, depending on which side of the river you lived on. The presence of Carl Stokes began to override all other considerations. Activists just attract a certain amount of hostility. Add to that the reaction to a man who carries himself a certain way, who ostensibly lives a certain way, and you can see that Cleveland was not about to love me for very long. The way I dress and the fact that obviously
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I am hip, that I obviously understand things -- this disturbs some people. People wonder, How did he learn those things? How did he get hip? How does he understand these things without having done them? I know of no one who can attest to any swinging life style of Carl Stokes. If I had publicly lived like Adam Clayton Powell the speculation would make more sense. I hate to protest so damn much, but I hate paying so much for something I am not enjoying. Now, if you say to me, "Stokes, have you ever gotten away?" -- well, sure I have. But now I only wish I had to the extent I've been blamed. I have a style for politics. Unfortunately, I pay an additional price because people really think that the guy who swings so well out there on the platform, kisses the girls, jokes around, has to be doing a lot of other things. Those trappings help you get to the mayor's office, but they don't help you once you are there. There are people who understand the level of mentality in Cleveland and who know how to use those things against you. Politics requires that a man compromise with the existing conditions. But the problems in Cleveland and the other large cities of this country can no longer afford the luxury of compromise. I choose not to compromise with those who went to keep the system running as it is. For four years in Cleveland those who had to fight me and beat me. Civic leaders, especially newspaper editors, were constantly writing their hands and prattling about the evils of confrontation politics and the need to avoid conflict. Problems come from conflict between the haves and the have-nots. They were exacerbated by the city government that was resistant to change and people who refused to respond to overall city problems. I have my way of fighting, and I understand it. I understand that if you have a sore that is festering under the scab, the only way to treat it is to pull away the scab, give the sore some medical attention, some light and fresh air, and let it heal. To believe
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that because you do not disturb the scab or because you wrap the sore in a very fresh, sanitary, pure white bandage you are healing the wound is wrong. You can't treat that sore unless you expose it. There is no way around it. You must grab the scab, pull it off, and expose the sore in all if its ugliness, its rot, it stench, its own kind of sickness. That is the way I approached Cleveland politics and national politics. But in the process you can survive only so long. You disturb too many things. You take a councilman who is close to you and who for years has enjoyed the production of the police for his numbers and policy operation, and you tell him this battle you are in does not permit him to go to the police chief and seek the protection he had enjoyed for the operation he had made money off of and the police have had made money off of. You can't fight for reform in the Police Department and at the same time be involved with them in the protection of numbers and policy. There is only so long that you can hold that man. He is following you because he has to, not because he has committed to your philosophy of government or to you or to things you want to do for people. Or take the councilman who used to make money on zoning changes. This man has learned to sustain his family's style on additional sources of income. He can't live on $12,500 a year. But when he joins you in a fight against the president of City council, he can't get his zoning legislation passed; he has to forgo that income. There is only so long you can hold him. It is sheer economics. You realized after a while that it will be only so long that you can pursue the fight with the confrontation of issues and uncompromising position. You know at the same time you were making the fight that someday you will have to give it up and get out or stay there and be defeated in what you are trying to do, and you must never let those whom you are fighting have that victory. I was fighting on many fronts, and that alone took its toll. I knew the end was coming. It never diminished my struggle, but I had to carry two diametrically opposed position -- I had to fight them and I had to get out. Sometimes one position would
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start to temper the other. I felt the city was entering a period when there could be no more change or movement; the need was for someone to hold what we had won until the mood changed and someone else came along to build on it. I wanted it to be a black man. I had sought out Arnold Pinkney, my black former administrative assistant who was then president of the School Board, and asked him to run. But I couldn't put it all together for him. He had no base of his own. The black ministers didn't like him and wouldn't support him. Community leaders active in the fight for better schools had been disappointed in his service on the School Board. He had no white votes of his own to go with the November 1971 general election. Second to Ralph Perk, the man I had twice run ahead of. I had decided as early as October of 1970 that I would not run again. At that time, no one else knew it, not even Shirley. It was February before I talked with her about it. I have never let the media in on my personal life. I have never talked about the threats and the fear I used to have about my family and their welfare. The cost my children had to pay at school each morning was great. Each day Carl Junior had to answer for my actions as reported on the nightly news broadcast or in the morning paper. It took a terrible toll on him. The same was true of Cordi each morning when she got on the school bus. And my wife. On several occasions men with guns appeared at City Hall and at my home. The most frightening incident occurred one day after a black youth had stabbed a white youth to death at 110th and Woodland. The black youth had escaped, and the neighborhood was up in arms. As always when violence threatened, I personally went into the area. The white boy's father confronted Tony Garofoli, the councilman from the area, and me on the street in front of a grocery store. He wagged his finger in my face and said "You're responsible, Stokes. These black people are running around here killing people." It was summer and the street was packed. This was formerly a heavily Italian neighborhood
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and was now heavily Appalachian. There were some poor Italians who had not been able to move out. The blacks lived nearby in the projects. This fellow was doing all he could to get a rise from me. The ingredients for a real riot were there. I took the hand he was waving in my face and said, "You don't have to put your hand on my face. I came out here to talk with you. Just talk with me. I am the mayor of this city and I am here to find out what happened." I spoke in a clam voice. I understand fellows like that. I understood the response he wanted to evoke and I wasn't going to give it to him. At the same time, I wasn't going to let him humiliate me there. I could go only far in handling this, and I was not going to do it at my total personal expense. We just let him talk it out. I then told everyone that the Police Department was doing all that it could and we had confidence that the young fellow would be found, at which point it would be a question for the courts. We told them we were leaving and in order for us to leave the crowd would have to stop aside. We did not want to get the police involved in getting us through the crowd. The crowds parted and we got back into the car. Tony was absolutely white. He was trembling. He said, "Mayor, I am not going to run again. I cannot handle these people." I ordered the area cordoned off and put it under a curfew. When I got home there must have been seven police cars in the street. The house was dark. A policeman came up to me and said, "Mayor, we got word that some if the 110th and Woodland people are coming up here." I said, "Well, if they're going to do that, let me go inside and get prepared for them." He did not understand that, "No," he said, "we don't want you to face those people." I wasn't talking about facing them at all. I was talking about going into the house to get something they would understand when they got there. "That's all right. I don't intend to talk with them," I said. "Mayor, would you do this for us? We have already asked your wife to turn the lights off. Could you ask your family to lay down on the floor?"
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I said, "You have to be kidding." "No. We don't know what's going to happen here. We have three more cars on the back street." I went into the house. Then occurred about three hours of the damnedest period of my life. All around my house are policemen with rifles and shotguns. I could hear the walkie-talkies. The house is dark. Shirley, six months pregnant with our third child, is lying on the floor with our two children and my sister-in-law, Doris Sitgraves, from El Paso. I'm sitting downstairs. We could hear the crowd as it came from 110th Street. There were more than two hundred of them, a committee of my neighbors. The police laid down a smoke barrage on them abut three hundred feet from the house. It drove them back. The family is upstairs now, scared. The children are frightened and don't understand what is going on. The yard is filled with police to protect me, not from foreign enemy but from the mob of people who live twenty blocks away from me. I am the mayor, and my family is hiding on the floor in a dark house. I have been out riding the area to see that there will be no disturbances and I get home to find the disturbance at my own house. My house is under siege by a gang if white hoodlums. That is the kind of experience in which your family pays a cost they never asked for. They didn't run for mayor. Yet they must endure all of this. Families always get sacrificed, but if the other factors are different, then perhaps you can hold out. But when you reach certain conclusions about the other part, the personal and family considerations only propel you toward what you know you have to do. Leave. In March of 1971, after talking it over with John Little, I called W. O. Walker and Charles Lucas, veteran civil rights leader, over to my house. I had relied heavily on Lucas's counsel when I was in legislature. I explained to them I would not run again. Both said, "Carl, you cannot do that. We don't have anyone who can hold what we have and can pull the black community together behind him and keep up this fight." I knew I had the support of the black community and a sufficient number if the white community. The problem went deeper. The decision had to be made not to whether or not I could get reelected, and
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this is hard to explain to people, but on what being reelected would mean. Being reelected has to mean an opportunity to affect change. If that opportunity isn't there, then being elected mayor of Cleveland would have no significance. For months before I announced that I would not run again I had been trying to tell my people that should prepare for the day I would no longer be around. I told them of that importance of the organization of the 21st District Caucus and the movement we had started must not depend on one man. None of them wanted to think about it. None of them wanted to think of a time when I wouldn't be here. I happen to understand why Adam Clayton Powell didn't campaign for Congress the last time his name was on the ballot. What is it that you would ask of Adam? The one thing he did most wrong in his career was to exercise raw, naked power in a white society. He didn't sublimate it. He didn't disguise it. When Adam died, a nationally respected daily newspaper carried an editorial comparing Adam to Martin Luther King. The editorial concluded that Martin had left a great contribution to mankind whereas Adam had responded to the grossest of the things in the white man's world. Well, if doing like white folks in the highest positions of our country do isn't right, what standard of human behavior do you have? He did it like Huey Long did it. Like James Eastland does it. Like Ronald Reagan does it. But Powell had declared himself a balck man who understood power of black people's needs and exercised it. You cannot compare the contributions of an Adam Clayton Powell and a Martin Luther King. Their contributions are in different areas. King stirred the conscience of this nation and gave all of us -- black and white -- moral courage. Adam left a legacy of laws that will benefit old people, working people, black people, for generations to come. The man passed sixty pieces of the most vital social-welfare legislation, affecting minimum wage, health standards, education, civil rights, but he was destroyed by white racism and black difference. Carl Stokes could have been mayor of Cleveland from now on, with flamboyance and fun and being a good nigger; and if riots happen then give them hell for having riots, and cooperate with
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Jim Stanton. There is no telling how wealthy Stanton and I could be. Or I could have been like former Mayor Anthony J. Celebrezze. One night at dinner he said something to me that I will never forget. "Carl," he said, "are you enjoying the job?" "Sure, Tony. It's got its tough moments, but I enjoy it." He said, "I notice all the big businessmen coming up her to shake your hand to make sure that you see them and that they see you. Well, go out of office at twelve o'clock and try to call one of them at twelve-five and see what happens to you. Your call won't get through." "Tony, I understand that." We talked some more and then got on the subject of the increase in the income tax that was coming up for a vote. He sad, "You know, in nine and a half years I wasn't able to get a tax passed in this city. Don't let it bother you. If they don't want it, don't give it to them. If they want to cut back on services, go ahead and cut back." "But, Tony," I said, "the town can't survive like that." "Right," he said, "but that's what they want. Always give them what they want." But I am not built in the way that I can "give them what they want." On Friday, April 16, 1971, I invited to dinner at my home those who had been my closest advisers and supporters. After dinner, I told them I would not run again. Leaving them briefly, I went to the WEWS television station, where I announced my decision to the city. Interestingly, as close as I had guarded my intentions about running or not, we found out the next week that my ten-year old daughter, Cordi, had predicted over a month previously that I would not run again. Mrs. Feder, Cordi's English teacher, produced a theme paper Cordi had written on March 10 which, after predicting I would not run for reelection and would return to the practice of law, stated:
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I have always understood the depth of this country's hostility and resistance when it comes to dealing with the basic functions of the nation. When you start dealing with the real change you are talking about interfering with those who are in possession of something. Power never gives up anything without a struggle. You can get laws passed. You can get expressed and resolutions and even condolences in the proper cases on matters of human concern. But when you start dealing with the basic fundamentals of housing and schools and jobs, then you are talking about fundamental change and you are dealing with a resistance that is not going to yield peacefully. How do you deal with it? There is only one way: power against power. That's what I did. I took the power of mayor's office and a solid constituency and went head on against those who didn't want the poor in their neighborhood, were determined to exclude blacks from jobs and new economic opportunities. But I knew I couldn't survive. And when I talk about going against those in power, I don't mean just the newspapers and the business and industrial concern; I also mean those who are in possession, the middle-class people who have the jobs, who live in the neighborhoods with the nice decent housing and the recreational areas that are well maintained. I am talking about the people who have and who are not willing to give up what they have. You have to make them give it up. You are asking for a struggle. Out of that struggle the cutting edge has to be blunted, dulled and even sacrificed. That's what happened to Carl Stokes in Cleveland. I accept it. I'll go on the next thing and let someone who is constitutes differently from me come back one day and begin the process again. Someone will come, I don't know who it will be. But someone will come.
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