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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CPT: Race Relations and Race Results

 Cuyahoga Politics Today

New Show in Town; New councilmen for Lee-Harvard and Hough pending recounts 

We haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, but there is a new weekly radio show in town that bears checking out. It’s called “Race Relations in America with Laverne and Jack”. The hour-long program airs Tuesdays from 6-7PM on WERE TalkCLE Radio 1490/AM.

Laverne Jones Gore and Jack Boyle are the co-hosts. Gore, a Cleveland resident, founded and leads the Ohio Diversity Coalition, which appears aimed at fostering a healthier relationship between white and black Republicans. Businesswoman Gore and retired banker Boyle, a Solon resident, launched the show a few months ago.

We don’t know if all the shows are politically oriented but tonight’s should be of some interest as it features Ohio’s Lieutenant Governor Mary Taylor, who is seeking the 2018 GOP nomination for Governor.

Taylor is expected to discuss her gubernatorial campaign, the allegations against Roy Moore, the GOP candidate for US Senate in next month’s special election in Alabama, as well as the secret payments US Congressmen have authorized to settle allegations of improper conduct relating to some undetermined number of them preying on women, especially Congressional staffers and interns.

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The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections announced this morning that former Councilman Joe Jones and Basheer Jones have secured narrow election victories over incumbents Terrell Pruitt and T. J. Dow. Joe Jones won the Ward 1 seat by eight votes — 2,690 to 2,682 — while Basheer Jones edged Dow in Ward 7 by thirteen votes — 1,599 to 1,586. The victory margins are well within the range for which the law mandates an automatic recount. The recounts will take place next week.

These are two of the more important political wards in the city. Ward 1, centered in Lee-Harvard, historically generates the highest turnout in the black community, while Hough’s Ward 7 is generally thought to be a prime site for expansion by two of the city’s 800-pound institutional gorillas — the Cleveland Clinic and University Circle. How Basheer navigates the ward’s relationship with those entities will go a long way towards defining his council tenure and political future.

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Nonprofit Thursday Ruminations: A Sense of Place

University Circle Legacies and Opportunity Corridors

My deep affinity for University Circle predates my understanding its status as one of the world’s unique repositories of knowledge, beauty, and culture.

It began when I was a child and none of that world-class stuff mattered. The Circle was simply a mystical and fun place, a natural center of learning and adventure. My elementary school classes took trips to the art museum, touring the Armor Court and the Egyptian galleries. There was the occasional school excursion to Severance Hall for a weekday morning concert featuring Haydn and other more accessible classical composers.

There were also a couple of summers where I spent three hours a day for six weeks taking French classes with students from all over the county. By the time I was ten or twelve I had become used to wandering all around the Circle neighborhood, most often alone, wholly ignorant of my privileged position as a vested civic co-owner of such grand treasures.

Wade Oval Wednesday, August 2013

I didn’t know at the time how rare my status was. University Circle then and now was a cultural oasis. Today its movers and shapers have learned that the survival of their institutions depends upon attracting newer, younger, and more diverse audiences and patrons, not from the old time sense of noblesse oblige, but out of self-interest. They know conceptually that this no longer their parents’ Cleveland. So the more enlightened among them are looking to build bridges to the surrounding neighborhoods.

That’s a far cry from how their predecessor caretakers managed the oasis. Instead of establishing an open and welcoming environment, the Circle impresarios equipped their domains with invisible moats designed to maintain separation from the new immigrants that had slowly overtaken the surrounding neighborhoods of Glenville, Hough and Fairfax in the fifties and sixties. When East Cleveland all of a sudden became a black enclave around 1970, the Circle was itself virtually encircled, save for a narrow southern path uphill to the Heights through Little Italy.

How do you dismantle the invisible?

The catalyst for these remembrances was my attendance this past Monday at the premiere of a documentary designed to be a legacy film capturing the history, art and architecture of University Circle. The film was screened in the Iris S. and Bert L. Wolstein Research Building on the campus of Case Western Reserve University.

A good chunk of Cleveland’s civic and philanthropic elite was among the early arrivals to claim places in Wolstein’s 180-seat auditorium. The film did an exceptional job of capturing the history of University Circle, with its unique concentration of cultural, medical and educational institutions that form the city’s intellectual core. Many of these institutions are over a hundred years old, established with the wealth of the industrial titans who amassed incredible riches in late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, when Cleveland was to manufacturing what Silicon Valley is to information technology today.

http://universitycirclefilm.com/

The film traces the history of the Circle area from its early farmland status through its role as an Underground Railway station, its development of a millionaire’s row enclave, and its eventual metamorphosis to a unique mélange of public space, institutional might, and civic wealth.

The film gives a nod to the unfortunate decision of most Circle institutions to wall themselves off from their surroundings as area demographics shifted and their neighbors grew more déclassé. The film used the marvelously mellifluous Dee Perry, the elegant Adrienne Lash Jones, and an infectiously energetic class of John Hay High students as implicit reminders of efforts to create a more inclusive University Circle.

But as much as I tip my hat to Nina Freedlander Gibans and Jesse Epstein for their work in conceiving and producing the film [about which you can learn more here], I confess to having a vague discomfort at evening’s end.

Perhaps it was because there was only one black attendee there without a readily discernible role to play. I was there to observe and report, and I discovered that my friend Danny Williams was there as a panelist for the panel discussion that followed the screening. Danny heads The Free Clinic, a Circle outlier near the East Cleveland border [“on the wrong side of the tracks” he joked with serious implications]. I saw only one other black person in attendance, kind of an eerie reminder of the Circle’s formative days.

When Danny spoke during the panel discussion, he referenced the work his agency did with the medically marginalized, and noted the irony of the Free Clinic’s existence within the orbits of two of the country’s largest and best hospital systems and also in an area where medical outcomes show huge disparities when tracked by zip code.

While his remarks seemed to draw sympathetic nods from many in attendance, what added to my discomfort as I sat there was realizing that probably fewer than ten people in the room knew or cared that voters in the adjacent community of East Cleveland would the very next day be charting the course of their city, including its relationship to the Circle we all love.

Where do we go from here?

University Circle has come a long way in shedding its isolationist heritage and impulses. But it has a long way to travel, like so many of our area institutions, before the invisible barriers that keep so many people from feeling able to claim a part of their birthright as Greater Clevelanders are removed.

So I ask you, what will it take to make the Circle’s neighbors feel as comfortable and unselfconscious as that kid who wondered amongst all the imposing edifices and perfectly manicured spaces so long ago?

What would it take to create a Human Opportunity Corridor?

NONPROFIT THURSDAY: Resources for African American Youth; Wade Oval Wednesdays; Voter Suppression

The African American community is often castigated for its indifference to our young.  Critics, many of whom are not well meaning or constructive, fault us for ignoring our children’s education, manners, home training, health and the like.

To be sure, many of these self-assured pontificators and tut-tutters are African American themselves. And there is certainly room for improvement in pretty much every area of our community, regardless of how we interpret “our”.

The other side of the coin however is that there are many organizations and individuals who work and contribute to the general uplift of our young people. They often operate without fanfare.

We have come across a number of these outstanding efforts in just the last couple of months as we have begun to work more formally with what we have long referred to as “EAGs”, or ethnic affinity groups. We use that term to refer to those innumerable social, communal, neighborhood, professional, faith sororities, fraternities, beneficial societies and organizations that black people formed to provide essential community benefits when the larger American counterparts excluded us from participation.

While popular belief adheres to the fiction that that time was long ago and far away, the reality is that exclusion from opportunity has been and continues to be the norm in the lived experiences of most black Americans of all ages. This is true even in the nominal Age of Obama, Diversity, and Multiculturalism.

Rules and roles around racial and ethnic identity are changing, but the vestiges of centuries of legal and social practices and attitudes die hard.

The more racially retarded among us love to argue that we have become a colorblind society. Even worse, some whites see race/racism as a zero-sum game that they are now losing.

All of this is part of the background that informs our sense that compiling an inventory of the programs and services available to African American young people in Northeast Ohio would be a beneficial exercise.

The verbal and in some cases informational responses we are getting suggest that this listing can become a useful community resource. So once again, we invite you to join in this collective effort and respond to our request to send the pertinent info to nonprofits@cuyahoganews.net if your church, club, sorority, fraternity, social, auxiliary, civic or other nonprofit organization provides resources [programs scholarships, mentoring, field trips, college tours, etc.] to area African American boys and girls.

• • •

Wade Oval Wednesdays

It has been said with truth that 11am on Sunday is the most racially segregated hour in America. In Cleveland the antidote to that is Wade Oval Wednesdays.

The weekly summer picnic in Cleveland’s University Circle is beyond question the most eclectic, integrated, wholesome, heavenly recurring activity in our town. Old, young, robust, frail, wealthy, poor, urban, suburban, blond, dreaded, solitary, betrothed, pet lovers, the animal adverse, vegetarians, prime ribbers, tree huggers, chain smokers, hippies, Brooks Brethren, students, veterans, the blind and the bespectacled, Browns backers, LeBron haters, Frisbee throwers, music lovers, exhibitionists, the bi-polar and the ambivalent, the tall and lean, the short and stout, the bald and the hirsute, the tidy and the slovenly, the shy and the gregarious, PhDs and no degrees, the native and the transplant, the Asian, the South American, the European, the Middle Easterner and the African, and impossible to decipher amalgams of each all spread over a lush expanse of nature, encircled by the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History, the Botanical Gardens, and Case Western Reserve University to enjoy beautiful weather and the strains of reggae, blues, classical, hillbilly, rock, salsa, et al in a FREE EVENT.

The naturalness of it all is extraordinarily blissful. Yesterday was like nature without predators. Lions and lambs and all that.

Next week is the last gathering for Cleveland Summer 2012. The music will mine the Blues/Rock vein, performed by The Soul Men and a Blues Brothers Tribute with Shady Drive Band. Six to Nine. Come early or come later.

Be there or be square.

• • •

Tomorrow, the Cleveland State University Black Alumni Association will meet up with the After Five Friday posse led by inveterate networkers Alton Tinker, Donna Dabbs and Jesse LeGrande for the post-workweek happy hour confection of music, libation, food, and networking at Bodega’s Restaurant, 1854 Coventry, Cleveland Heights. The evening runs from 5:30 to 11p.

• • •

And I don't know how I posted but failed to mention tonight's program at 7PM on Voter Suppression at the Cleveland Heights Public Library, 2345 Lee Rd.

The speakers will include former Cleveland law director Subodh Chandra, Kathe Mayer, co-president of the Heights-Hillcrest branch of the American Association of University Women, and State Senator Shirley Smith, D-21 Cleveland. Your correspondent will serve as moderator.

Tea and cookies will be served at this event, sponsored by the ADA of Northeast Ohio, a chapter of Americans for Democratic Action based in Washington DC.