Sounds of silence overwhelm talk of Cleveland's future

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In what may have been the last question* from the audience after a panel presentation on how catalyst projects throughout metro Cleveland impact the small business community, city councilman Kevin Conwell, whose Glenville area ward encompasses deep poverty cheek by jowl with the region's wealthiest concentration of institutional assets, rose to ask how the kinds of projects being discussed might be designed to benefit the whole community, especially those parts that suffer from "abject poverty".

Cleveland City Councilman Kevin Conwell's 8th Ward
encompasses the wealth and power of University Circle

as well as the poverty and promise of Glenville.

Conwell’s “tale of two cities” question was asked against the backdrop of a recent incident that clearly had him distressed; he had referenced the same issue earlier that week at the annual meeting of Famicos Foundation. Conwell spoke in both instances about having to call the city's health department over the filthy and unsafe conditions at Park Place, a 122-unit concrete estate that sits near the southwestern foot of University Circle. While geographically the estate sits just off the west end of Opportunity Corridor,

Park Place Apartments, where Councilman Kevin Conwell,
who lives about two blocks east of the complex, says that
residents are complaining of rodent infestation and other
unsanitary conditions. He has called for action by the city's
health department.

culturally there is a mile deep chasm between its tenants and the accumulated wealth perched just above it.

Conwell's question came after a discussion featuring Kyle Dreyfuss-Wells, chief executive of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District; Carl Naso, CFO of the Port of Cleveland; David Ebersole, Cleveland's economic development director; and Deb Janik, senior vice president for real estate and business development at the Greater Cleveland Partnership, the nation's largest chamber of commerce.

Before Conwell's question brought the discussion down to earth, Janik had extolled the Opportunity Corridor, saying the project was a "foundation upon which to rebuild every single neighborhood". She praised her organization for its role in Cleveland's over-hyped "public-private partnership" development model, saying that "no one does [PPP] better than Greater Cleveland, and no one ever has." Unable to check her enthusiasm, Janik professed her belief in Cleveland's being the "greatest city in the country".

These comments fairly cried out for the counterpoint that Conwell's question provided. As we discussed with a friend afterwards, clearly just asking the question is not enough. But too often at such civic engagements — this annual meeting of the Uptown Business Association, held in the elegant quarters of Case Western Reserve University's Alumni Center — the concerns Conwell raised are invisible and unvoiced.

Several weeks ago, the managing partner of a midsize downtown law firm ratcheted up a civic debate on Cleveland's sorry ranking across a variety of metrics in contrast to our perceived municipal competitors. There was an immediate cry to round up and interrogate the usual suspects, worthy of Captain Renault at the end of Casablanca. Amid cries to form this or that committee or commission, there was scarcely a peep from Cleveland's black community, whose issues must be addressed if this region is ever to stop circling the drain.

There should not be a public meeting in Greater Cleveland on the status, accomplishments or prospects of our city or region, attended by any would be leader or representative of the black community, where the disparities and inequities of our community are not discussed. Nowhere is the timidity and fecklessness of our current leadership more in evidence than in our inability or unwillingness to even put our issues on the table.

Outside of our local sports icons, the three most celebrated public figures in most black homes are likely Martin Luther King, Carl Stokes and Muhammad Ali. All are now nearly universally lauded for their courageous stands born of principled conviction. But every one of them was vilified when they were standing strong. And many of those who sing their praises the loudest today battled them viciously every step of the way.

Where are today's representatives capable and willing to speak truth to power?

* We were unable to stay and hear any response to Conwell's question.

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The bus stopped here and the driver is still napping

I left home for the office this morning about 6:50. Energized by a restful Fourth, I’d already exercised, perused articles from the New York Times and the Cincinnati Enquirer, read and sent a few emails, uploaded a picture of Kevin Conwell for a post that will be published later today, fixed breakfast and left the kitchen semi spotless, showered, shaved and dressed, and used the RTA app on my phone to discover that I could shave about 8 minutes from my two bus commute by leaving 49 minutes earlier.

I had barely gotten 200 yards from my porch and was already perspiring. The air was so humid I was transported back to my childhood visits to Richmond VA. My earliest years were spent in Washington DC., one hundred miles north of Richmond, where my mother was born and her parents still lived.

DC was humid enough, so much so that in that era Congress used to adjourn for the entire summer. Even as a first grader I sensed that DC was much faster paced than Richmond. And it wasn't just that DC was the nation's capital, either. The Virginia atmosphere was just thicker; people moved slower. And that was true for my six-year old motor as well. I just wasn't as efficient a nuisance when I was in Richmond. I couldn't run as far, as fast, or as long.

All of which came back to me on my walk to the bus this morning, along with my father's mid-century observation about how the invention of air conditioning had changed the South and enabled it to be more competitive. He was from Houston, Texas, where I imagine the heat and humidity took an even greater toll on productivity and efficiency in the first half of the twentieth century.

I'm slowly making my way through a book about Atlanta politics this summer, and I have just finished one set in Birmingham. As I read or visit other places, I always compare notes with my hometown. To my father's observation I would suggest that another competitive advantage that the old industrial North has lost -- and Cleveland may be Exhibit A -- is our refusal to give more than a lip service welcome to the demographic and cultural changes that are transforming our country and the world.

I'll have more to say on this directly in the next couple of days as I review Ballots and Bullets, a provocative new book by local author and attorney James Robenalt that underscores how little this community has changed in the last half century.

Our civic leadership is metaphorically still sitting on the veranda sipping mint juleps, dreaming of the Amazon while the world passes us by.

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MURDER ON SHADES MOUNTAIN • Book Review

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Book Review

Murder on Shades Mountain

The Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham

By Melanie Morrison  • Duke University Press, 202 pp. [2018]

Author Melanie Morrison talks about 1930s Birmingham at Loganberry Books, June 24, 2018

One early August afternoon in Depression-era Birmingham, Alabama, Willie Peterson, an unemployed miner of modest stature suffering from tuberculosis, was walking down the street in the midst of finishing some household errands, when the sole survivor of a sensational double murder fingered him as the rapist-murderer of her sister and their friend.

Very shortly this random black man would be arrested, nearly lynched, shot and almost killed while in police custody by a vicious relative of the survivor, tried twice for murder, and sentenced to death by electrocution.

I wasn’t too many pages into Melanie Morrison’s riveting account of Peterson’s legal lynching before realizing that I was reading history disguised as suspense. The author’s extensively researched narrative puts the reader smack in the middle of an all-too familiar American saga of a salt-of-the earth guy who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Peterson was a church-going deacon of modest mien, far from the kind of fellow you would expect to be accused of such a heinous crime. But he was in a region where Jim Crow was so rigidly enforced that, even though the chief of police, the county sheriff, a prosecutor who said “that Negro ain’t no more guilty than I am,” the editors of the white Birmingham papers, and the president of the Birmingham Bar Association, all professed a belief in Peterson’s innocence, a jury took only 30 minutes to convict him.

Author Melanie Morrison, r, with sister,
Cleveland resident Stephanie Hrbek,
former director of Near West Theater,
at Loganberry Books, June 24, 2018

Peterson’s story resonates on several levels, thanks to Morrison’s deft story telling. It is a personal account, though she was born eighteen years after the crime: her father dated the younger sister of two of the victims. It also offers keen insights into some of the more easily overlooked aspects of white privilege, as when she points out that the revered novel To Kill a Mockingbird is essentially a “white savior narrative that portrayed black people as guileless victims without agency or a supportive black community.” And it provides a public service, evocative of William Faulkner’s observation that the past is not even past — most useful at this time — when she writes in an Afterword to her deceased father:

 “[W]e who are white must always critically interrogate the stories we have inherited from our forbears … Because white Americans remain largely ignorant about the manifold organizations, movements, and uprisings — led by people of color — that resisted racism in every region and every era of this country’s history. … Because the white savior myth not only masks the rich history of resistance and reform, it diverts attention from the real work white people need to do in collaboration with people of color.”

Peterson’s long overlooked story should have a special resonance for many black Clevelanders. So many thousands and thousands of black men and women emigrated here after 1915 from Alabama’s industrial and rural areas that, as Kimberley Phillips pointed out, Cleveland came to be known in some circles as AlabamaNorth.

In addition to being a compelling read, Murder on Shades Mountain provides a ground level portrait of the workings of structural racism, an insightful critique of white savior stories, and offers us valuable vignettes of the brilliant and legendary attorney Charles Hamilton Houston, and such other key historical figures as the Scottsboro Boys and Walter White.

Murder on Shades Mountain is a reminder that “the civil rights movement was not born in the 1960s” and that its work is far from complete.

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