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3

How To Get Elected by White People

The petty tacticians of local government are fond of talking about politics as though it were a game, subject to narrow rules and ritual, and arena for private competitions and personal ambitions. At the other end of the scale, the theorists and political dreamers conceive of politics as synonymous with all social life. Politics is both and neither of these. It has levels of play and levels of importance. The back-room maneuverings of city councilmen pad the pockets of a few and affect little. The protest politics of a legion of dreamers can turn the tide in a President's career and change the course of a nation. Even though it so often draws mean and ordinary men, politics is a grand human activity, and it is often cheapened by easy comparisons. The source of those comparisons is easy to spot: he is that constant figure, the professional politician. The professionals who make their living from political life find their levels of play and their levels of importance. There have been men of strategic genius whose time never came, and men of vast social understanding but no daring. And there are those who play only to survive. You see them all around you, the bailiffs, the commissioners, the judges, the councilmen. They play their game well enough. They keep their jobs and do small favors. They go as far as native wit and a knowledge of their people and their times will take them. But there

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are levels where men turn petty games into important events. The stakes are higher and you have to gamble more to win more. The game is tough and fast and sometimes meaningful.

In the summer of 1957, thirty years old, still poor, but with my law degree, I began to move into Cleveland's political arena. Ten years later I was elected the first black mayor of a major American city with a predominantly white population. I did things other men could or would not do. It came to me not because I had a new politics but because the old politicians had forgotten the most basic lesson: people, acting together, are power. They don't just have power. They are power.

With $120, my brother and I formed the law partnership of Stokes and Stokes, with offices at 10604 St. Clair Avenue, in a lower-middle-class neighborhood at the northern frontier of the ghetto called Glenville. Louis had already been in practice a few years and had some clients. What I lacked in clientele I made up in direct referrals of automobile accident cases and criminal cases by the investigating police officers.

In that first year, although I made much more money than other freshman lawyers, and as much as some veteran practitioners, my more serious efforts were political. I ran the campaign for Lowell Henry, a black man on my ward who was running for city councilman. It was an easy campaign, pure majority politics. Henry was running against a complacent Jewish councilman who, it was to turn out, owned more than eighty thousand dollars in slum properties. We used that and beat him.

Running Henry's campaign, I grew closer to some men who would be important to me as political confidants and counselors, Al Sweeney, Perry B. Jackson and Lawrence Payne. Sweeney was city editor of the Call & Post, the Negro weekly newspaper. I would bet that from sometime late in 1957 roughly through to 1971 after I left office as mayor, not a week went by that I didn't visit the Call & Post offices and counsel with Al Sweeney or, after Sweeney left the city in 1967, with the editor and publisher, William O. Walker.

Perry Jackson, a black Republican, was a former state legislator,

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then a municipal judge, then a judge in the Court of Common Pleas. The late Lawrence Payne was Cleveland's second black city councilman. Like Jackson, he was a Republican. Both men had a sure understanding of the groundwork for political success. That they didn't go farther in the politics themselves is the measure of white prejudice during their time. But they laid the foundation for me and other young black politicians. Both men served as mentors and guides in the early days of my political career.

Also, in 1957, I joined the Young Democrats, an organization open to any registered Democrat under thirty-five. It was not devoted to any particular progressive ideals, but served as a kind of gathering point for the young men who intended to be active in the party. I tended to be more liberal than the regular party, simply because younger men tend to be more liberal than older men. But, like the party itself, it was mostly white. Most of the white politicians I was close to in those early years were the men I met in that club.

But the most effective political work I did on my own behalf in those first years didn't look like political work at all. Jackson and Payne had advised me to get involved with civic groups the Boy Scouts, the charity drives, and NAACP and the Urban League. And the churches, always the churches. There is no more effective political force in the black community than the church. When you need good zeal, when you need people out there working for you, having a hundred black preachers out there rallying them up for you is invaluable, unbeatable. So, during the years after I started the practice of law, I did anything I was asked to do in the community.

Judge Jackson would call me and tell me that some small church group needed a speaker and I would accept always and without question. There were plenty of times that I would end up talking to only two or three people, but I would talk and give them my whole load. For the civic and civil-rights groups. I would agree to be a chairman or co-chairman of particular drives, always volunteer work, never elected office. Long before I ran

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for anything, politics was for me a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. The party regulars never saw me coming. I had never worked through the ward leaders or precinct committeemen, the heelers. I worked through the civic workers, the dedicated volunteer women and men who believe a community can be helped, but never think, or at least never thought in those days, of politics at all. They didn't think of me as a politician either. Later, when I called on them to help, they thought of my candidacy as different from that of a "regular" politician. I was the one who had worked alongside them on that charity drive back in 1959, or in the NAACP membership campaign of another year. Whatever our experience had been together, it was much more solidifying than the typical political relationship. Through this process, I developed a depth of relationship with neighborhood people whose existence was ignored by politicians other than Jackson and Holly.

We say that politics is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. Yet a man does have a personal life, a home, a family. These things have always been very important to me. Having them reminded me that I am in the real world, not outside it. My first attempt at marriage was unsuccessful at least partly because I didn't yet know what I was doing with the rest of my life. Shirley came to Cleveland shortly after I returned form Minnesota, but we didn't see each other, and in 1956 I filed for and was granted an uncontested divorce.

In 1957, when I was in the middle of running Lowell Henry's campaign, I started to hear about this girl from Mississippi, a graduate of Fisk University who was doing graduate work at Western Reserve University. She was staying with friends of mine, and they were trying to get us together. Finally, the day after the primary election in September, I went over to meet her. I was feeling proud of myself., Henry had won big, and I was ready for something celebratory. And she was. Long, soft brown hair, tall, proud-looking and solid, a beautiful girl named Shirley Edwards. I told her I was going to be busy with Henry's campaign until after the general election. For the next month then I would have lunch with her on campus a couple of times

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a week, and we would go out once on the weekends. After Henry won in November, though, we dated steadily until, in late December, we decided to get married. On January 28, 1958, we were married by Reverends Donald Jacobs and A. Fuller in St. James's Church in Cleveland. Carl, Junior, and our daughter, Cordi were born in the next three years. It wasn't until 1970 that our son, Cordell, joined us. In 1973, we agreed to seek a divorce.

This, or course, was my second marriage to a girl named Shirley. They were both born in January and both were Capricorns. I met both of them at about the same time of year and married at about the same the same time of the year. My first wife signed her name "E. Shirley Stokes," since her given name was Edith Shirley. My second wife signed hers "Shirley E. Stokes," since her maiden name was Edwards. Neither of them liked professional politics.

In 1958, I changed my mind about being in private practice. For one thing, Louis didn't like my political activities invading the law office. One of the few bitter arguments we had was that spring when I was running my nominal campaign for the state Senate. Louis didn't like my using the secretary to send out my political materials. I explained to him that I was paying half her salary and I could use her to do that as well as typing up briefs. But he just didn't want that kind of thing going on in the law office. If I used her only for legal matters, I wouldn't be getting my money's worth. The kind of law I practiced involved little clerical work. You go down to the police station in the morning, a bondsman tips you to a case, you get the name and number from a policeman, you talk to the accused, and if he can scrape up a couple hundred dollars you represent him. This is quick work, cash and carry, no checks, no record of money changing hands. Another one of those chinks in the edifice of justice.

I decided to try for a post that would give me a title, and some sort of entrée to the political apparatus. I went once again, and for the final time, to John Holly. He got Mayor Anthony J. Celebrezze to appoint me assistant police prosecutor. By the time I left that job in 1962, after being elected to the Ohio Legislature, I had had -- including my time as a probation officer and as a defense lawyer -- eight years of

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contact with the administration of justice at its lowest level, the municipal court. I witness that justice is not blind; neither is it just.

White bookies flourish while black numbers writers, pickup men and runners were arrested and given fines and workhouse terms. White racehorse bookies took their bets in the halls of Central Police Station. A white prostitute house operated right across the street from the station. But black girls were arrested and run through on an assembly line. They were brought in, told by their lawyers to allow a finding of guilty, fined, and released all in a few hours. The police arrest record looked good, and the judge looked good.

One of the few times I remember a white girl being charged with prostitution, her case was quickly thrown out. I was the prosecutor in the case. An Irishman whose last name was famous in Ohio politics and who hurried to get through his docket so he could get to the racetrack was the judge. The girl had been Miss Cleveland five years before this arrest. The detective testified he had called her for a date and they agreed to meet. He registered in a hotel room at East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue. He said he asked her how much and she replied twenty dollars. He said he put the twenty dollars on the dresser, she took off her clothes and he put her under arrest.

The judge said, "Well, you know that she was Miss Cleveland."

Yes, the detective said, he knew that.

"Well," the judge said, "so how do you know that she wasn't taking her clothes off for twenty dollars just to let you see her body?"

"That wasn't the arrangement," the policeman said.

"She has already denied that she agreed to have intercourse with you," the judge said.

While the policeman stood there, completely at a loss for words, the judge dismissed the case. Such judicial concern for the rights of the defendant was never exhibited in cases that involved black women, at least not in my presence.

The courts' willing blindness toward the manipulations of the jailhouse lawyers is a perversion regularly practiced on the body and ideal of justice. Those lawyers merely hang around courtrooms,

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handling flocks of clients, and using about as much knowledge of the law as the average man could pick up in a week. These men did little but convince accused men to plea guilty to lesser crimes than they were charged with. The lawyer could guarantee the accused man a lesser sentence or a smaller fine. And by convincing him to plead guilty to something, he removed the necessity for the policeman to testify and made the judge's handling of the case a merely clerical matter. The accused man, always poor, whether black or white, left the courtroom happy with his smaller fine, ignorant of the implications of the fact that he now had an incontestable police record.

Payoffs reflected whatever the traffic would bear. One elderly Hungarian judge, now dead, would commit the most outrageous legal decisions for a case of liquor. Few judges worked past noon, and many headed for the racetrack at midafternoon to be the guests of two or three lawyers willing to place their bets, willing even to stake them for their losses. Homicide detectives were usually willing to lower a charge from first-degree murder to second degree, or even manslaughter, if two conditions were met. The first was that the man charged with the crime had to come up with some money, at times as little as a hundred dollars. The second, but most important, was that he had to be a Negro accused of killing another Negro. Money, of course, also determined whether a man would be charged with reckless driving or the less serious offence of failing to keep an assured clear distance, or in another case charged with drunk driving or the less serious offence of being in physical control of a vehicle while under the influence of intoxicants.

The bar associations know at least casually about these things. The news reporters know, too. But nothing is done. The administration of justice is wrenched. But it is not entirely blocked, so it is left alone, and the people who have get more, and the people who have not get more trouble.

In 1958, I "ran" for public office for the first time. I circulated enough petitions to get my name placed on the ballot in the

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primary for the Democratic nomination from District 25 to the state Senate. It took only a hundred signatures, and fifty dollars for the filing fee. I had no serious thoughts that I would win the nomination, and didn't campaign beyond the routine appearances before the endorsing bodies -- the newspapers, the Citizens' League, the League of Women Voters, the Cleveland Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO. The seriousness of my effort lay in finding out how many people would vote for Carl Stokes just on the pull of the name alone. This was part of the political groundwork I had to do. I had to find a control factor, a base figure for any serious analysis of my political chances. I chose the state Senate race because I wanted a district larger than a City Council ward, yet not so large that I couldn't find out easily where my votes had come from. Without any visible campaign, I pulled 5,000 votes. The man who won the nomination received 53,000 votes. But now I had something to work with.

I was determined to run for public office, but I was just as determined to do it on my own and in my own way. I had my own purposes and ideals, which I knew didn't mesh with those of the local Democratic Party.* At the local level, the party exemplified neither the national party's ideals nor its power. It had not been able to elect a mayor since 1941. The prototypical politician of the time was Frank J. Lausche, mayor, then governor and finally United States senator, a nominal Democrat who was as conservative as any Dixiecrat and as independent as a cat. He was the first of what was to be a succession of "newspaper mayors" -- elected by the powerful Cleveland Press and its aggressive editor, Louis B. Seltzer.

There are great advantages to having a strong and unified party behind you, but those advantages were not going to be available to me, not only because the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party

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was divided and weak, but because I was black. I knew that I couldn't count on support from the party once I set out to tackle any office beyond the level of city councilman. The party's patronizing attitude towards Negroes was all too clear. And I had no intention of running for councilman. I had helped put Lowell Henry in, but membership in the City Council repelled me. The only interests I could see being served by councilmen were petty and pecuniary. They counted their success by whether the office brought them money -- so much for allowing a new gas station, so much for a zoning change, so much for allowing a cheat spot to operate. Being elected to the Council wasn't a mandate to legislative responsibility, it was a ticket to a bartering system.

Lawerence Payne said to say, "In figuring out how to win an election, if it works out on paper go ahead. If it doesn't, don't try it." I decided to project the potential countywide vote I could hope for if I ran in the 1960 primary for designation as Democratic nominee for member of the Ohio House of Representatives, the lower house of the state legislature. Party nominees for lower-house seats were selected countywide on a "bedsheet" primary ballot -- a list of candidates which in Cuyahoga County might run to 150, of whom seventeen were chosen. I spent my off hours at the County Board of Elections going over the voting records. I wanted to find out how the community turned out for black Democratic candidates -- and whether they had had the endorsements of the local party organization, labor, the newspapers, or the Citizens' League. The known factor was that no black Democrat had even before allied himself with white candidates in the suburbs. I knew that I was running a race that turned in the familiarity of the candidate's name as much as anything else; in a typical election, the Corrigans, Pokornys, Gormans, Celebrezzes and a handful of Sweeneys always won. I had determined

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in the 1958 state Senate primary race that my name was known enough to pull five thousand votes without a visible campaign. It took me several days of note-taking from the Election Board's records, but I ended up with fourteen single-spaced typewritten pages of statistics that proved, at least to my satisfaction, that if I ran for the Democratic nomination to the lower house I could come in fifteenth or sixteenth.

I called three of my closest friends and showed them my blueprint. I handed out a copy of my fourteen-page analysis and informed them I was going to run for the state legislature. They agreed that the figures were very nice, but wouldn't I be a lot better off running for the City Council? They though I was crazy, but they agreed to support me if I ran.

The next move was a larger meeting. I pulled together a group of them, this time mostly white men my own age I had met at the Young Democrats. Once more, I gave them each a copy of my study and went thought it with them patiently, projecting the vote in the 1930 primary. This was in December of 1959. I showed them where the votes were, where my endorsements should come from, where my base vote would be, and what the minimum vote was to get nominated at somewhere around the fifteenth or sixteenth position.

They didn't believe I could get the necessary white votes. No black Democrat has ever gotten those votes, but the reason was that his white political colleagues had always persuaded him to keep his black face hidden from the white community. The party had told him to keep his picture out of the newspapers and off any campaign literature in the white areas. No one had thought to challenge the logic. It seemed clear to me that other than those with politically popular names, people vote for you because they know you; if you don't let them know who you are, there is no way in hell you are ever going to get their vote. So even if you lose votes because you are black, you can still dip into the band of liberal whites if you can convince them you are progressive, socially committed, intelligent and, well, one extraordinary black man. I had everything to gain and nothing to lose by running

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visible in white suburbia. (Not quite visible: for campaign mailings we had two sets of campaign pictures; one for the black community, and another, overexposed and with my mustache retouched for the whites. I didn't explain all this to the people at that meeting.)

Now I needed an entrée to suburban political meetings. I couldn't just show up. There had to be somebody who would introduce me to the ward club leader and get me on the agenda.

I needed a slate. How could I persuade suburban white candidates for the legislature to get on a primary slate with a Negro? For certain kinds of candidates who were running for the first time, I had two things to offer. I told them that I was going to wage an intensive campaign to bring out the black vote, and that by being on the ticket with me they would pull some votes they would otherwise not get in the community. Second, I was certain I would get the endorsement of the County Democratic Executive Committee. They were fresh candidates running against a field of "regulars" and were unlikely to get the committee's endorsement. Being on a slate with me, their own candidacies might gain by osmosis. This bit of maneuvering was certainly against party discipline -- if you are the endorsed candidate, you don't first run off with some rump ticket. I didn't give a damn about that. I knew that the committee wasn't going to endorse until late and that its endorsement wouldn't mean but so much anyhow. Those other fellows didn't know that, though, and so we formed our slate. As soon as the campaigns got under way, I started moving.

And I mean moving. I would put a hundred miles a night on my car, crisscrossing the county, going to the Slovenian card parties, the Hungarian Democratic Club, the Irish-American Democratic Club, the Polish-American Club. I went into all the suburbs I could -- not just the old-guard upper-middle-class suburbs where I knew the liberal pockets, but the new bedroom suburbs filled with first- and second-generation ethnics, or (as we called them in Cleveland before "ethnicity" became an American watch-word) "cosmos," short for cosmopolitans.

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It was a marvelous experience. Those white people had never been confronted with a Negro campaigning in their clubs before. When I entered the room, there was a chill. The chairman would rarely know what to do, so I would walk over to the other candidates and ask whom I should see about being called to speak. Because of the natural camaraderie that had developed as we saw each other every night, I could depend on finding the right person. Once I opened my mouth, I had an advantage over the other candidates. I was the alien, the exotic, and I knew I could count on their complete attention. Then the amazing thing happened. I spoke English. Enough has happened since 1960 that it is hard to remember now what a shock I was to them. But in those days whites, especially suburbanites, had lived in pure isolation from blacks. I feel certain that the first word those whites expected to hear come out of my mouth was "mother fucker." But standing before them was a clean, well-dressed young man discussing the biennial state budget appropriations for the maintenance of roads and highways, child welfare, mental retardation, and education tax formulas. I could feel them melt. Those people disliked Negoes, but they didn't dislike Carl Stokes -- didn't, that is, after he had talked long enough to show them he was a real human being with intelligence and understanding equal to those of the candidates he was running among, if not against.

This was all brought home to me one night in Parma, an ethnic, blue-collar suburb of some 100,000. In Cleveland, Parma jokes are synonymous with Polish jokes. I was attending some political meeting. After I had spoken and answered some questions, a small man in a lumberjacket and shirt open to his stomach walked up to me.

"Carl," he said, "I want to meet you. I'm Mr. Kwiatkowski. I like you, you talk just like me."

I thanked him of course. A politician always does. Neither did I say anything about his calling me "Carl" while styling himself as "Mr." I knew that most of the things I had said had gone right over his head. What he meant was that he had never heard a black man discuss issues before, and he was impressed.

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Politics, especially local politics, tends to draw second-raters, and I knew that I was bound to look good in that company. Besides, I knew that I was intimidating those people just by being there among them. I was daring them to show their prejudice. I always went alone. There is a certain psychological benefit in walking into a room full of whites alone, letting them know that I am just as aware as they are that I am not supposed to be there. They were already on the defensive when I would go into my speech about democracy is supposed to mean in this country.

Some years later I read Robert Dahl's 'Who Governs?,' which presents a theory of ethnic politics in America, based on a study of the political history of one town, New Haven, Connecticut. When I read that book, I understood instantly that what I was doing was what ethnic groups on the way up had always done. Politics today may not be what it was before the old machine broke down and civil-service procedures ruined the old corrupt patronage systems. But the ladder is still there, even if all of the rungs aren't. I saw that coalition politics as the Germans and the Irish and the Italians had practiced it was still possible. Dahl took New Haven as his example, but you can plot the same movement in any large town in the country. When the predominant ethnic group moved up the social and economic ladder, it moved out or organized politics. The people moving out may, at the most, leave one of their own in politics as a kind of boss. But it is always true that the group, having moved up economically, moves out -- out geographically as well as politically. And as they move out they are no longer interested in being ward leaders, councilmen, and judges, clerks of court or members of the school board, and they leave a vacuum for the next group.

People take it as remarkable that I won the mayoralty in a predominantly white city, but it you look back on the history of Boston, New York, Chicago, the new ethnic group has rarely been in the majority and ordinarily would make up no more than about thirty percent of the population. A man in the advance guard of that sort of movement makes very certain he has his thirty percent locked up and then puts together what he

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can take from the rest. In my own case, I would spend about half the time with the base in the ghetto, and then spread the rest over places where I hoped to pick up marginal support.

And I played my appeals the way they have always been played in ethnic coalition politics. The Italian politician would go to his own people and talk about the need for Italian participation in government, he would rant and rave and cry and moan about his Italian pride, about injustice, about Italian culture, all of the things that stir the loyalty of the people. He would let his people know that he felt Italians should take care of Italians. Then he would go all over the rest of the city and talk about democracy, about how government is for all of the people, about the need for new coalitions for the common good. To outsiders he talked about the great melting pot; to Italians he talked about Italians. That's how we came to have Italian mayors, and Irish and German mayors. It's a game well defined and well understood by the people who play it, each in his own turn. It's the way things have been done for two hundred years. All the black community of Cleveland needed in 1960 was someone who could do that same old thing for them.

I put on major campaign, far more intense than any other candidate for the legislature was waging. I rented an office in the old Hollenden Hotel, the busiest hotel in the city, and from there, Blanche Bolden, my campaign manager, and I put it all together. Blanche ran the mechanics. She was a remarkable leader. She could mangle the English language, but she had the tough eloquence that can get people excited enough to work and work hard. When I was elected mayor either years later, I named her executive secretary to the service director, one of the toughest jobs at City Hall, since it put her in charge of managing the waste-collection and street-cleaning crews, and she handled it with aplomb. In 1969, Blanche was discovered to have a terminal illness, and she died a few months later, not yet fifty.

In 1960, blacks made up only about eleven percent of the county population. I intended for that eleven percent to be a much higher percentage of my vote. They must learn to "plunk"

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their vote -- that is, vote for my name only instead of voting for all seventeen candidates, as the law permitted. This "plunking" would have the effect of multiplying each black vote seventeen times. This is one of the oldest methods used by white ethnic minorities to increase their voting strength. Now I had to teach my people how to do it. In addition, I had to wage a campaign in the ghetto to change the habitual voting pattern of a drop-off as a voter makes his way down the ballot. I was running in a Presidential election year in which delegates to the Democratic National Convention were waging a hot primary battle, which would ensure a heavy turnout by the white Democrats. This increased the necessity of the black voter to vote the legislative ballot as strongly as he did the top of the ballot for the presidential delegates. I knew that the total vote for state legislators in the county would be a good deal less than half the vote in the Presidential race. I had to make sure that blacks would make the extra effort to look for my name, regardless of any lack of interest in the state legislature. And I used that great source of inspiration, the church. I went to as many services as I could on Sunday, and during the week I spoke to the study groups. Having a preacher mention your name favorably to his congregation is worth any number of union endorsements.

For the rest, I was running on a primary slate with five white candidates from the suburbs of Euclid, Garfield Heights, Maple Heights, Parma and Lyndhurst all predominantly ethnic and for that matter, racist communities. But those candidates wanted to get elected. They got me into meetings in their areas, and I reciprocated in the inner city. Every Sunday night Jewish liberal friends arranged for me to attend a coffee klatsch in someone's home in the Heights, a group of three predominantly Jewish suburbs east of Cleveland -- Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights, and University Heights. I knew that by continually presenting my self to as many whites as possible, I would gain a certain margin of votes. I knew some people would forget exactly who I was but would remember the same Carl B. Stokes when the saw it on the ballot and vote for me. More important, though,

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was my faith in that margin of idealistic, progressive white people who are not caught up in the tide of America's racial paranoia and fear. I suspect that that margin doesn't change much, never getting much smaller or larger. But it is always there. I knew it mainly from my experiences with community groups, the Urban League, the NAACP, the Boy Scouts, the United Appeal. In all those activities I had worked alongside white people and had found some white men and women I didn't have to mistrust. And they knew me. They were votes I could get.

I made the rounds of the two daily newspapers, because the mass appeal of their endorsements were an integral part of my campaign. The Call & Post was devoting most of its front page each week to my candidacy. The one endorsement that was necessary, because of the deal I had offered my running mates, was from the Democratic County committee. That meant getting the nod from the county boss, Ray T. Miller, the man who had put it all together back in the 1930's. I turned to Charles V. Carr to deliver that.

Some ten years later at a testimonial dinner for someone else, Charles Carr go the biggest hand of the evening and endeared himself to me forever when he introduced me by saying that he was "the only black politician in the country that doesn't take credit for Carl Stoke's victory as mayor of Cleveland." It was of course an exaggeration, but the truth was that a good two or three dozen people, both black and white, had been claiming personal credit for my success. And, to be sure, most of them had done something important for me at one of the many crucial times in my career. What they forgot , though, was how many crucial times there had been and how many activities had engaged me -- too many for any one person to take the credit. It was easy for them to miss that essential truth because I never built a formal organization that would bring all the disparate elements of my support together. I never wanted them together; the more that each of them thought I depended solely upon them, the better.

But in terms of the importance to my career, Charley Carr's

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speaking for me to Ray T. Miller in 1960 ranks very high. At that time Charley who was already in his seventh term as city councilman, was the Council's majority leader. He was one of three men who virtually ran the Council for a decade. The other two were the Council president, Jack P. Russell, a wily infighter who knew where all the skeletons were, and Russell's crony, Thad Fusco, the Council clerk. Those three men and Ray T. Miller had lunch together almost every day. Many fates were sealed as those men broke bread together. Charley spoke for all the Negroes, (whites always like to have one black man who can speak for all the Negroes.) I took my case to Charley, and he agreed to support me. He took me in to see Miller. Miller asked me a couple of questions and then said, "Well, Charley, I can't make any commitments at this point. Get his petitions filed and appear before the Scanning Committee."

As we walked out of Miller's office, Charley said, "All right, You've got it. You're all set." All that had to be done was for Charley to remind Miller later that we had met. There was certain to be one black on the endorsed primary ticket, and it would be me. The fact is, my meeting Miller was a mere formality. Charley Carr told Ray Miller which blacks to endorse.

Although, Carr got me the endorsement, he really didn't believe I was going to win. He was a man from a different generation, resigned to a mediating position, wheeling and dealing with whoever was in charge. Since Ohio's ratification as a state in 1803, no black Democrats ever had been elected to the legislature. None had ever won the nomination in the primary election in Cuyahoga County.

The primary election was May 3. In the early counting, I ran far behind. I expected that. The counts from the black wards were always the last to be tallied. This was a pattern that was to repeat itself in all my elections. Because there were so critically close, the results were never clear until the small hours of the morning. And because the last votes to come in were always pre-dominantly black, there were always rumors that I had somebody out there waiting to see how many votes I needed to win

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and then "finding" them. That night in 1960 I went home at about 1 A.M., running about thirtieth but still confident that I would win.

Early the next morning I received a phone call from the late Richard Maher, the veteran politics editor for the Press. "Congratulations, Carl" he said. "You've just become the first Negro Democrat ever to be nominated in the Ohio legislature."

That was the morning of May 4. It took until the middle of September to find out he was wrong. In the unofficial count I finished sixteenth, with 26,535 votes. Michael J. Crosser won the last berth with 26, 465. William M. Feighan, son of a congressman and nephew of a judge, pulled 26, 272, finishing eighteenth, just out of the money. But twenty three days later the board finished its official tally. In his case it didn't make any difference, he had finished too far down the line. But in my case, a few votes made all the difference. In the official tally, Crosser picked up 164 votes, Feighan gained 184, and I lost 102. Suddenly I was in the eighteenth position, and had lost the nomination by twenty-three votes.

I had ten days to decide whether to ask for a recount. I was entitled to one recount, for which I had to pay ten dollars a precinct. There were more than 2,200 precincts in the county then. I called a rally. My supporters showed up and I put it to them. I told them that I thought we could focus on 150 precincts, all in the black community; that would cost $1,500. They responded with a zeal that was overwhelming. What had happened was that although I ran an intense campaign, and black people were solidly behind me in my effort, most of them didn't really believe I could win; but once the vote came in and they saw that I was within breathing distance of winning the race, they realized for the first time that one of us could make it. And that really put the fire under them. In this case, two days after that rally we had the $1,500. Lawyers would send checks for twenty-five dollars, poor people would come up with one dollar,

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little kids would come in with dimes. And beyond that, when the recount was actually made, we had more volunteers than we could use as watchers. The recount of those 150 precincts took two days. When the new results were tallied, I was ahead of Feighan by nineteen votes. I had won, and Feighan had lost.

Now comes the tangled part the period of legal maneuverings when being the son of a congressman can make a difference. After my recount, Feighan was entitled to call for one himself. But he didn't quite do that. His father brought in a couple of lawyers and called in his own staff and some campaign workers, and they went down to the Board of Elections, asking that the board call its own recount of the votes in those precincts to justify the figures. The board did that, and after this recount Feighan gained, I lost, and he was declared the winner by eight votes.

What was I going to do? I had used up the one recount I was entitled to. I conferred with William H Stein, the president of the Young Democrats, who had agreed to act as my lawyer, and we presented the position to the board: when the board ordered its own recount and changed the final results, it admitted that the official count was erroneous. Since it was this erroneous count that we had relied upon in requesting our own partial recount, our recount should be thrown out and we should be granted a new one, based on the corrected official count.

Our Board of Elections consists of two Democrats and two Republicans. In case of a tie, the secretary of state votes to break it. The two Democrats on the board voted for my position, and the two Republicans voted against it. The secretary of state, a Republican, sided with the Republicans. We had lost again.

Then I had Bill Stein ask the board to consider the matter an issue of law and to call in the county prosecutor, to make a legal ruling on our position.

It was a classic scene. The board is sitting before us almost like a court. I'm sitting on one side in front of them with Bill Stein.

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On the other side are Bill Feighan, Congressman Michael A. Feighan and his executive assistant, plus their two lawyers. The prosecutor comes in and makes his ruling; I am entitled to a new recount. One of Feighan's lawyers leans over to the other one and says in a low voice, "File it." That lawyer walks to the back of the room and makes a short phone call. He nods back to Ned Mann, the lawyer still sitting with the Feighans, who stands up.

"I want to advise you," Mann tells the board, "that we have just filed an injunction and a mandamus action against you."

I'm sitting there with my friend Bill Stein, and there they are with an army out there, people standing in the courthouse ready to file suits against us when they get a phone call. The mandamus action asked the Court of Appelas to restrain the board from holding any further recounts and ordered it to immediately issue William Feighan the certificate of nomination.

The county prosecutor argued his position -- actually mine -- before the appellate court. Stein, as a friend of the court, filed a similar brief.. Feighan was represented by the same two lawyers. We lost, three to nothing. We appealed in the Ohio Supreme Court. By this time it was almost the middle of September, and we had reached the deadline for printing ballots for the general election. The Supreme Court ruled in less than a week, four to three against me. The Chief Justice, one of the minority unfortunately, wrote a separate opinion on the issue, asking, "When is a recount a recount?" He said that you cannot base a recount on an erroneous count. If you correct the official count, anyone who has relied upon the previous one ought, as a matter of law, not be considered as having had a recount. Nice logic, it seemed to me, but it didn't carry the day. There I was, eight votes down, and the legal war lost. That same afternoon, Richard Maher of the Press called me to ask what I was going to do. I told him I was going to support William Feighan in the general election, and then settle down and prepare for 1962.

       The battle over recounts had generated a great deal of publicity in all the papers and on television. I emerged from that primary much more widely known, and I believe admired, than

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I would have been had I simply won in the first place. I had been shown as a serious and competent candidate and a good loser. I was legitimized in the eyes of many whites who would normally only have known me as just another Negro. When I ran again in 1962, I won without too much trouble. I didn't have to wage anywhere near the battle I had waged in 1960. I had made my own people realize I could make it. Now that they knew we had it in our grasp, they came out with confidence. The same pattern applies to the mayoral race of 1965. I didn't quite win in 1965, but a similar recount I had then brought me more goodwill from whites, and more confidence from the black community. Interestingly, I've had more recounts then any public official in Ohio's history. My mayoral victories in 1967 and 1969 resulted in recounts. But I had won those.

Also, my system of analysis had been proven correct. I had come within two hundred votes of predicting not only the votes I would need to be nominated, but how many votes I would actually receive. And this was in a very heavily voted Presidential election year when John F. Kennedy was running. In Cuyahoga County, which is heavily Catholic, that made it difficult to analyze the vote from the experience of previous elections.

Finally, I saw how the black community had perceived the recount battle as their fight for equality and justice. Remember that William Feighan was not only the son of a congressman, he was the nephew of a judge. Edward Feighan, the congressman's brother, had sat on the municipal bench for more than a decade. With his good political name, he was running for an open seat on the Probate Court bench, one of the most powerful political posts in the county because of the amount of money that was handled in wills and estates. When the battle between me and his nephew was getting started, the judge quietly tried to get his brother to call it off. He was afraid of backlash from the black community if I lost. He had reason to be afraid. That November, the vote against him in the black community was overwhelming. It was one of the rare times that a Republican beat a Democrat for a judgeship in that county.

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