CPT | South Euclid mayor booted off County Dems Executive Committee

Cuyahoga Politics Today

South Euclid mayor spanked in intraparty feud

South Euclid mayor Georgine Welo was disciplined by the County Democratic Party last week.

The action was taken by the Party Unity Review Committee [PURC] after Welo endorsed a Republican who is running against incumbent South Euclid councilwoman Ruth Gray, a fellow Democrat.

Party officials and elected Democrats are prohibited from “actively and publicly” supporting a non-Democratic candidate in a non-partisan race. South Euclid council races are non-partisan.

Gray filed a complaint on July 10 with then-party chairman Stuart Garson, after learning that Welo had endorsed Gray’s opponent, Kenneth Atchinson in this year’s November election. Atchinson has been a registered Republican for the past seven years, according to election records cited in her letter.

The PURC ruled unanimously in Gray's favor last week, kicking Welo off the party’s executive committee, and rendered her ineligible for party office or party endorsement for the next election cycle. Their action means Welo cannot receive the party’s endorsement if she runs for reelection in 2019.

Gray’s complaint cited other instances where members of the South Euclid Democratic Club have backed Republicans over qualified Democratic black women. Gray also referenced efforts to undermine South Euclid Municipal Court Judge Gayle Williams Byers, contending, “There is a pervasive pattern and practice of animus against African American female Democrats in South Euclid.”

The current political turf battles in South Euclid have given rise to reports that freshman councilman Jason Russell may toss his hat in the ring for the post of city leader, a nongovernmental position currently held by councilman Marty Gelfand.

Gray, who ran against Welo for mayor in 2015 and lost, is seeking reelection to her fourth term on city council. She is also president of the Cleveland chapter of the National Council of Black Women, a growing presence on the local political scene.

A call to Mayor Welo was not returned for press time.

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Transitional Communities Putting Youth in Peril, say former prosecutor, councilwoman

Stop me if you’ve lived this one: you are running to get away from some situation that you know is dangerous, unhealthy, or just unpleasant. You find an area that seems just the opposite: safe, healthy, and pleasant. You settle in, breathing sighs of relief and rejoicing, only to find that you are received as an outsider, as different, unwanted. Your manner, language, dress, customs, and culture — in short YOU — are not wanted in this perceived oasis of wholesomeness. And what follows is so psychologically uncomfortable and assaultive that you to think of the troubles you fled with fond reminiscence.

Sound familiar? I’m not talking about immigration. Actually, I am, just not from country to country. I am talking about a situation I suspect most of us have faced to some degree at one time or another in our lives. Colloquially, you might call it “out of the frying pan and into the fire”.

It’s the kind of situation I thought of when I spoke a few days ago with South Euclid Councilwoman Ruth Gray. As chair the council’s safety committee she has become increasingly concerned over the growing involvement of her city’s youth in the county juvenile justice system. Perhaps because she is the grandmother of nine, or maybe it’s because she is a social worker, but she is unable to sit by and watch young lives get pushed off track by their own community.

Councilwoman Ruth Gray

Gray has become increasingly concerned over the past few years as her city grapples with the adjustments necessitated by transitioning communities. We are speaking here specifically about reaction formations as formerly all or mostly white communities experience a critical mass influx of African American immigrants.

The impact on a community is often felt first in the school system, where the mix of ethnicities skews more quickly towards minorities than does the general city population. The 2010 census puts South Euclid’s population at roughly 42% African American. Yet an informed estimate of the South Euclid-Lyndhurst school district puts its African American enrollment at more than 75%, even though Lyndhurst is more than 90% white.

This replicates a pattern occurring throughout our community to greater or lesser degree, in places like Euclid, Maple Heights, Garfield Heights, Richmond Heights, Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights.

Our schools, and therefore our children, principally our black children are placed in a laboratory where the challenges of society are being dealt with. The political, economic, social, and cultural forces have national and global origins that can and do easily overwhelm many local school districts.

These same forces tax local police departments as well. The result too often is that ordinary juvenile behavioral issues that once were handled on a personal, informal, case-by-case basis, are increasingly thrown into our county juvenile justice system.

This is the informed view of Case Western Reserve University visiting law professor Carmen Naso, who says that “we’ve become really, really good at throwing kids in jail. … It’s a disaster that we are taking more people into the system when we should be taking fewer.”

CWRU Law Professor Carmen Naso

Naso is no bleeding heart liberal college professor. He spent 30 years in the practice of law, the last seven of which were as the Supervising Attorney in county prosecutor Bill Mason’s office, where he trained a staff of young lawyers before transfer to prosecute adult felony cases. But lawyers are trained to evaluate evidence, and professors are inclined to study systems, and the evidence of how our juvenile justice system is not working is impossible to ignore.

Naso sees no greater incidence of juvenile delinquency these days than in the past. The difference is these same behaviors now are foisted upon a juvenile justice system that is ill equipped to handle them. He cites as one culprit the No Child Left Behind Act promulgated by former president George W. Bush.

Bush “created a new sub-class of people who would not be in the system, who are placed on track to fail by [the] Act, which allows schools to use the criminal justice system to deal with normal behavior issues rather than find solutions,” says Naso.

Councilwoman Gray would find herself in agreement. Her thrust is to find ways South Euclid can begin to develop and allocate resources to community youth that can help keep them from a meat-grinding juvenile justice system that continues to provide fodder for an ever-more expensive criminal justice system.

That’s why the program her public safety committee has put together tonight — Youth in Peril: A Community Response Public Forum — should be of interest, not just to South Euclid residents, but to citizens of all stripes across the county, including educators, legislators, public safety officials, parents, and taxpayers.

Django, the Drug War, and Black History Month

My blood tends to run a little faster every year when the calendar flips to January. It’s not so much the Cleveland winter — global warming is taking care of that; rather it’s the one time of year when our community kinda sorta celebrates blackness, or at least says it’s ok to talk about it in a positive way. The period lasts about six weeks or so, from the observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day through the end of Black History Month, and then it’s “ok, recess is over, back to normal.”

I’m not referring to “our community” as either just black folks or white folks. It’s almost as if an unspoken pact exists between in-laws. Most everybody around here tiptoes around race. We know the subject is explosive; we know it’s problematic. We know it’s the Eight Ton Gorilla in the family room. Which is why we stay in the kitchen and visit the family room only on special occasions, and even then according to carefully scripted rules of engagement. So during MLK day we talk about the content of our character but not about our national propensity for warmongering and sustained violence at home. And during BHM African Americans can salute our ancestors and how they overcame the Middle Passage, Slavery, and Jim Crow, without any discussion or analysis of why we are not doing anything about 21^st Century New Jim Crow in education, criminal justice, or the economy.

This year feels a little different to me. Thank you Django! It seems everywhere I turn people are talking about the movie, and therefore talking about ticklish aspects of our history. If there were an Oscar category for most provocative film, Django would be a hands-down winner.

Of course a lot of our discourse on race is echoed in views long ago forged into cast-iron. Many times when we think we want to talk about race we can’t get past skin. So an ESPN commentator questions the racial bona fides of Washington ‘Skins quarterback Robert L Griffin III — is he a ‘down’ brother or a ‘cornball brother’? — because RGIII: a) has a white fiancée and b) disdains simplistic comparison to other mobile quarterbacks who happen to be black, aspiring to one day achieve the status of the best QBs ever. (The commentator, Rob Parker, was first suspended and then let go. This was an appropriate result, not because Parker crossed some forbidden line but because his analytical frame is too flat for him to be a social commentator in any medium.)

Jeffrey Blanck, Reno NAACP president

In a similar vein is the reaction of many across the country to the headline that the Reno NAACP elected the first white president in its 66-year history. Many blacks greeted this news with groans from a familiar grab bag of perpetual victimization and helplessness: ‘white folks gotta run everything’, ‘couldn’t they find a black man’, ‘black people always think white is right’, etc. They were oblivious to the story of the NAACP’s interracial founding, its guiding principles, or the decades of civil rights advocacy that justified the fellow being entrusted with the honor of serving as branch president.

These examples of call to mind the succinct and wise counsel my friend Julian Earls likes to share with young, aspiring black folk: “Every black person is not your friend, and every white person is not your enemy.”

Agentic African Americans

Still, this season seems different to me because I see local African Americans who are not making automatic skin responses but choosing instead to be agentic in the struggle to address core community issues. Microsoft Word doesn’t seem to like “agentic”, giving it the red underline; it is a fine word, and I use it here to describe people who do not accept victimhood but are “active agents in their own deliverance”.

That quote is from another friend Trevelle Harp. Trevelle is a community organizer who heads the Northeast Ohio Alliance for Hope [NOAH]. In two weeks his group will present the Cleveland-area premiere of “The House I Live In”, which last year won top documentary honors at the acclaimed Sundance Film Festival. The powerful film questions why the United States has spent over One Trillion Dollars on drug arrests since the beginning of the Nixon Administration, only to become the world’s leading jailer of its own people, while drugs remain cheaper, purer and more available than ever.

To quote Eugene Jarecki, the film’s director, a prime result of the “drug war” is that “We have more black men incarcerated today, in one form or another, than were enslaved at the end of slavery 10 years before the Civil War ended.”

The special screening will be Saturday, January 26, at the East Cleveland Library, 14101 Euclid Ave. Admission is free and doors open at 1 PM. The film will start at 1:30 PM. A moderated discussion will follow the screening.

NOAH under Harp has concentrated its efforts on the East Cleveland community. Its organizing approach involves training and developing local leadership, identifying common issues, finding collaborative and strategic ways to address those issues while systematically strengthening the institutions in our regions. They are on a perpetual search for agentic partners.

South Euclid councilwoman Ruth Gray is advancing a second example of agentic approach. Concerned about her community’s failure to offer sufficient resources to its youth, she has convened a forum next week to address this issue. I will talk about this effort more on Monday but I encourage you to put the event, “Youth in Peril”, on your calendar. It will be held Wednesday, January 16 from 7-9 PM at the South Euclid Community Center, 1370 Victory Drive, in South Euclid OH 44121.