CPT • Change is Coming to Ohio's iconic 11th Congressional District — Part III

Cuyahoga Politics Today 

Fudge departure must be wake up call for 11^th District’s Black Civic Leaders — Part III

By R. T. Andrews

The gale force entry of former state senator Nina Turner into the developing race to succeed Cleveland area Congresswoman Marcia Fudge, pending her confirmation as the next Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, knocked our plans for this column momentarily askew. 

Having discussed here in Part I and here in Part II the District's proud origins and history, and its importance to Cleveland’s black community, we had planned to advocate for a new process whereby we might begin more effectively to cultivate the generation of new black political leadership. 

Turner’s reemergence on the local scene, taken together with the initiative Justin Bibb is showing in the race to replace Frank Jackson next year, might seem to suggest a reinvigorated local political scene. But Black Cleveland needs a long term strategy if it is ever to realize its potential as an agentic community or capitalize on its status as the city’s largest ethnic group. 

If we can do that, we would not only address our seemingly intractable problems of poverty and despair, we would galvanize a sorely needed larger civic vision that for once was truly inclusive, not just so in our typical top down pro forma way. 

A smart community has a system for developing and nurturing talent.

John O. Holly, founder and president of The Future Outlook League

So, while Rep. Fudge is still our Congresswoman, we should consider that a smart community has a system for developing and nurturing talent. Let us realize that the mid-twentieth century ecology that produced our community’s greatest political talent — the Stokes Brothers — is not the environment we inhabit today. Carl and Louis Stokes, separately and collectively, were a once in a lifetime occurrence, products of a compact hothouse black community where they could attach themselves to a John Holly, perhaps black Cleveland’s greatest civic leader, and imbibe his sense of community service and spirit. 

Black Cleveland needs a long term strategy if it is ever to realize its potential as an agentic community and capitalize on its status as the city’s largest ethnic group. 

Carl and Lou came of age at a time when avenues for black excellence were tightly constricted. Many avenues of career and professional development were unavailable. Black people were unwelcome in every professional association. Black real estate agents could not participate in multiple listing services and could not even call themselves realtors, forcing them to invent the term “realtists”. You couldn’t find a black professional anywhere from downtown east until you neared 55^th and Woodland Ave.

How did we overcome? We got organized, informally and formally. John Holly formed The Future Outlook League, which quickly became 10,000 strong, forcing employers large and small to open their hiring gates.

Informally, civic leaders convened Operation Alert, a regular conclave of community leaders who shared information, plotted how to capitalize on vulnerable points in the area’s apartheid regime, and discussed how to navigate both opportunities and crises, whether sudden or foreseeable. 

The eventual 1960s breakthrough was communal, collective, cultural, and simultaneously national, global, and local. 

Regrettably, once black people began to find status and success in positions of public service, i.e. as elected officials, the definition and pecking order of community leaders and spokespeople began to shift, often with unfavorable results. Sometimes we placed impossible demands upon some of these officials. More often we asked too little of them and failed to hold them accountable. And most fatally, we failed to recognize the extent to which they in fact often answer to interests outside the community that are inimical to our own.

How can we change a system where too many of our elected officials do not work for us, do not respect us, do not love us enough to care for our welfare?

In much of the black community, the quality of our elected officials is left to chance. We do not identify, train, nurture and develop our political leaders. They self-select, more often than not becoming beholden to those who finance their campaigns.

There has to be a better way.

To find it, we spoke over the past month with a number of folks from all walks of life about the black community might develop a more effective politics. The brightest among them were quick to decouple the issue from any particular office or imminent election.  The frustration and despair that sometimes peeked through our questioning gave way before long to hope as we realized the enormous talent that already resides within our community. 

In the midst of our discussions, cleveland.com published a column that purported to identify some leading candidates to succeed Fudge. With a couple of exceptions, the list was tired, perhaps reflecting a veteran reporter’s old paradigm and his obvious disconnect from the black community of the present and future. It seemed almost an attempt to select a leader for us.

This is what happens when by our inaction we leave the field to others. 

In the next and final installment of this series, appearing this Sunday, we will explore how we might become, as a friend of mine is wont to say, “active participants of our own deliverance”.

• • •• • •

CAROLYN M. COCKFIELD, 70

SEPTEMBER 28, 1949 – FEBRUARY 1, 2020

East Cleveland Citizen Activist

Carolyn McClain Cockfield’s community spirit was part of her DNA. She came from a line of heritage of civic activism that extended at least to her maternal grandfather, who was cousin to John O. Holly and involved in the renowned Future Outlook League. Her father, who later changed his name to Harambee El Medamfo, was affiliated with the Nation of Islam.

Carolyn M. Cockfield, 1949-2020

Her ancestors would surely have smiled when Carolyn published one of the first books on Kwanzaa, My Kwanzaa Book, in the mid-1980s.

Carolyn was born September 28, 1949 in Cleveland and attended Robert Fulton Elementary and Alexander Hamilton Jr Hi schools. She was a member of the first class to graduate from John F. Kennedy High School in June 1967. She then worked for a year before enrolling at Howard University.

Just before heading off to college, Carolyn met Ross Cockfield at a party. As fate would have it, he gave her and a friend a ride home. He secured her phone number that night, prelude to a relationship that culminated in her marriage to Ross in 1972. In later years they always debated whether he asked for the number or she volunteered it.

Carolyn’s love of children led her to major in early childhood education having a love of children. Financial strains kept her from finishing at Howard; she left in 1971 at the end of her junior year to return to Cleveland to help her mother.

A year later she and Ross married. They moved into East Cleveland into an apartment on Elberon Ave., excited about the prospects of the suburb’s being a model for African Americans exhibiting self-rule during the racially charged era.

A year after they were married, they were blessed with their first child, Kianna Yanee. Two years later their second child Zahra Akosua arrived, and finally, four years after that their third child Touré Henry was born.

Carolyn’s early employment years were spent as teacher and director of daycare centers. She also became Education Coordinator for the AIDS Coalition Network, traveling to Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa to assist with AIDS education. It was during this period in her life that she and some of her friends formed the “Sista Circle” as a support and outreach organization to assist young African American women.

Carolyn became politically active in the late seventies, running twice for a seat on East Cleveland’s city council but losing each time. During these runs for office she established herself as a no-nonsense champion of doing the right thing.

Carolyn was subsequently appointed the city’s Director of Parks and Recreation, where she created a legacy of achievement in tackling the East Cleveland’s long neglected parks system. She led the revival of Pattison Park, cleaned up infrequently used public spaces, secured grant funding via the State Wildlife Department, and worked to stock the Forest Hills Park pond for seasonal fishing. Additionally, she assisted the summer baseball league to make sure the baseball diamonds were properly maintained and worked to bring activities back to the parks for public enjoyment. Her work reflected her belief that residents of East Cleveland deserved recreational facilities and services comparable to its neighbors.

In 2004, during her tenure as director, Carolyn suffered a stroke, forcing her retirement from public service. She subsequently devoted her time to maintaining her house and becoming a staunch advocate of maintaining her street, Roxbury Rd, and the surrounding community. It was not uncommon to see her anywhere on the street picking up litter. She demanded respect from the children in the area and had no problem reprimanding them for improper language or dress.

Survivors include her husband of 47 years, Ross Cockfield; their three children, Kianna Baskerville [Rajahn], Zahra Cockfield, and Touré Cockfield; a grandson, Kaden Cockfield; her great aunt Betty, and a host of cousins, close friends and neighbors.

Preceding her in death were her parents, her sister Latisha Miller and a grandson, Miles Golden Cockfield.

The funeral service was held last Saturday, February 8 at Cummings and Davis Funeral Home in East Cleveland.

# # ## # #

CPT | Desperate Times: Dark Money, Gatekeepers and the Public Square, Part I

Cuyahoga Politics Today

Cleveland's Crumbling Political Order

The emergence of "dark money" in this year's mayoral campaign is a harsh but illuminating case study on how the intersection of race, power and privilege in Cleveland retards the region's redevelopment into a first class twenty-first century metropolis.

Ironically, this object lesson of primitive politics is on display front and center this week as Cleveland hosts not one but two national conferences focused on smart cities and intelligent planning for urban communities.

We will have more to say about our national visitors in a companion post, but suffice it to say here that they are some of the brightest minds currently operating on the cutting edge of technology, urban planning and intelligent design. Stepping outside their conference headquarters to experience our downtown vibrancy, the more attuned can hear disturbing echoes from the local corridors of power emanating from our airwaves, unlike the soothing welcomes they are receiving from official local representatives.

Like most big cities, a status Cleveland now holds more in memory, longing and pretense, our direction and pace are largely set by the interplay between our business and civic leaders. In healthy communities, these forces are complementary competitors. Like Howard and Hampton, two of the nation’s best historically black universities, they battle fiercely but enjoy both a mutual respect with the understanding that beyond the struggle on the playing field, they each share a common interest in the other's prosperity and well-being.

More than a century ago, Cleveland was at the national forefront of municipal leadership. We had nearly one million residents within our borders. We had a progressive mayor, Tom Johnson, who left a successful business career to run for public office in service to his community — not just to his class. While Johnson is justly celebrated today for his bold, visionary and courageous leadership — his statue adorns our Public Square — his former business associates at the time vilified him for daring to represent the public interest at the expense of their immediate profits.

Mostly since then, it seems that our business community has made it a cardinal principle to ensure that organic leadership in the public interest would never reemerge. The dominance of that first principle has coincided with Cleveland's steady decline ever since 1930.

Cleveland's population growth was fueled first by middle and Eastern European immigrants who came to toil in the filthy factories, foundries and refineries that forged the area's wealth. The unhealthiness of those sweatshops and the griminess of the teeming masses in their ethnic central city enclaves led people with means to seek greener pastures. Even Millionaires Row did not escape the exodus as wealthy Clevelanders moved outward to create some of the world's first and finest modern suburbs: Shaker Heights, Cleveland Heights, East Cleveland.

In so doing, they had to abandon direct control of city politics. By and large, good government forces refocused on emerging suburban city halls, replaced in Cleveland City Hall by waves of competing ethnic politicians sent downtown from their respective enclaves — Little Italy, Slavic Village, Collinwood, Clark-Fulton, and so forth — to gain public power to improve their neighborhood's and living conditions.

A tacit bargain was struck between the business community and the ethnics. The latter could run the city politically but would not interfere with the city's powerful money making apparatus, which was slowly becoming more corporate, with the attendant development of powerful legal and financial service muscle centers.

Cleveland ethnics developed a unique and powerful "Cosmopolitan" political machine, best exemplified by Frank Lausche, who blazed a trail to stunning success as judge, mayor, governor, and ultimately US Senator. (George Voinovich would follow Lausche's Cosmo path a generation later, but even though he took some of his rough and tumble homies along to ride shotgun, his saddlebags always carried a corporate agenda.)

Black people, eventually to become the area's largest and most indigestible ethnic group, were initially barely a blip on Cleveland's municipal radar. Restricted initially to the city's Central neighborhood, they were only a minor irritant in the civic arena until a modest immigrant from Alabama, John O. Holly, began agitating for equity in 1935. Seemingly overnight he organized 10,000 working class black to support his contention that black lives mattered. Under the banner of “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work”, his Future Outlook League forced dozens of businesses in the central area and then downtown, to begin desegregating their workforces by hiring Negroes.

Holly's intrusion into how the city did business had political overtones and fostered the business community's resort to gatekeepers, respectable black people whose primary chore was to keep their unwashed and rebellious kinfolk under control.

This quasi-colonial system has been in place ever since, with continuous refinements that extend until the present day. Its use was instrumental in the undermining of the opposition to the Q deal, and can now be seen in the ferocious effort to derail the populist challenge to City Hall that threatens to put neighborhood native son Zack Reed from sitting in the mayor's seat.

What Cleveland’s civic leaders continually fail to understand its that its adherence to a post-colonial reliance upon a gatekeeper mentality retards our entire community, keeps us in a defensive stance, limits our attractiveness to immigration from anywhere, makes us wholly ill-equipped to compete for Amazon HQ2, and ultimately undermines our most earnest efforts to enter world class competition even at the middleweight level, notwithstanding our enormous public assets.

We approach today the 50th anniversary of the election of Carl Stokes as mayor. We are right to celebrate that achievement: Cleveland was the FIRST big city in America to elect a black man as mayor.

(Richard Hatcher was elected mayor in Gary, Indiana the same night in November 1967; however, Gary barely registered on the roster of the city’s larger cities, Its 178,000 citizens ranked it #70 in 1960, while Cleveland came in as the nation’s 8th largest city, with a population of 876,000. 

Today, Cleveland has shrunk to a ranking outside the top fifty cities, with a population of about 385,000, placing it below such lustrous venues as Tulsa OK, Arlington TX, Colorado Springs CO, and Mesa AZ.)

The Stokes era at City Hall, 1967-1971, busted open the old order. Black people, confined almost exclusively to the overcrowded neighborhoods of Cedar-Central, Hough, Glenville, and Mt. Pleasant, used their concentrated mass to break down decades of exclusion, and to bring a measure of meritocracy to the public space. The establishment, which had long resisted such a development, embraced it in the wake of Stokes’ near-election in 1965, and in fear of the tumultuous conditions erupting nationwide in places like Newark, Watts, and Detroit.

Those were exhilarating years for black people in Cleveland. Doors were kicked open on every front as black people found new opportunities in employment, housing, and the civic space. There was opposition all along the way, but led by Carl and his brother Lou, who became Ohio’s first black Congressman in 1968, the black community stuck together and persevered.

While the Stokes years at City Hall led to unquestioned improvement in the quality of civic life for all Clevelanders, certain problems, most notably in the justice and public education systems, proved intractable even as significant progress was made in other arenas. Hardcore resistance to public school integration was tolerated and even supported by key elements of the business community, and the promise of the Stokes years quickly waned. And when an ambitious, audacious inner city ethnic westside kid named Dennis Kucinich rode the unrest into City Hall, all hell broke loose.

Kucinich was mayor for only two years, every day of which seemed as tumultuous as what we currently observe in the White House. The business community found George Voinovich, a Cosmo Republican, retook control of City Hall and community politics, and found complicit partners it could control with a multifaceted system of financial controls in the form of salaries, grants, contracts, and other more nefarious fiscal tools.

Today, Frank Jackson sits in City Hall as the embodiment of that system. A good man, conscientious, diligent, he is the virtual embodiment of a political metronome. Super dependable, predictable to a fault, he can be counted upon to support almost every business community initiative, irrespective of its merit or the disproportionate aspects of its benefits and burdens.

Jackson has done a lot of good during his unsurpassed twelve years as mayor, but almost everybody knows and believes the baton should be passed.

And therein lies the problem: the natural stream of selection has been corrupted, choked with pesticides, and clogged, perhaps inadvertently but nonetheless primarily as a direct consequence of the gatekeeper system that restricts access, development and advancement of talent, ambition, and potential in the civic, commercial and cultural spaces that matter in Greater Cleveland.

In tomorrow’s post, we will talk more about the gatekeepers. We’re likely even to name at least a couple of the most obvious ones.

###