Former Cleveland Mayor Mike White Gets Real About Politics, Power, Race, Trump

Mike White talks to local civic group about everything from parenting, politics and power to leadership, race and Trump

Former Cleveland mayor Michael R. White made one of his infrequent public appearances Tuesday night when he appeared as the final speaker in a 17-month series on leadership sponsored by the Black Professionals Association Charitable Foundation (BPACF).

Former Cleveland Mayor Michael White
makes a point at BPACF event
[All photos courtesy of
WAKE UP CALL MEDIA]

Generational conflict was clearly on his mind as White spoke informally and extemporaneously, first in conversation with BPACF president Ronald V. Johnson, and later in a Q&A before an audience of at least sixty business owners, civic leaders, educators, and attorneys.

Echoing both his elders and the spirit of his youth, White repeated the wisdom of Frederick Douglass’ famous lesson that “Power concedes nothing without demand”. White displayed an enduring respect for the elders of his youth — “W. O., Carl, Lou, George, Arnold”[1] — who inspired and taught him the fundamentals of politics, supported his development, and then resisted him on generational grounds when, as a state senator, he decided to run for mayor in 1989.

BPACF President Ronald V. Johnson, left,
with business owner Ishmael Martin

White talked about how he soaked up the wisdom of these and other leaders in Cleveland’s black community. Feeling privileged to be in the room with these titans, White said he kept his mouth shut, his eyes open, and focused on doing what he was asked to the best of his ability. The result was a continuing rise in his responsibilities.

About 60 people attended the final session of BPACF's
Leadership Speaker Series at JumpStart in Midtown
on January 30, 2018.

Although he set his life’s goal on becoming Cleveland’s mayor after he “met” Carl Stokes at 13 (he saw him on television), White said he didn’t think of himself as having leadership qualities until 1969 and he arrived at Ohio State University, where he began to study leaders in a search for their common characteristics.

White expounded on a variety of topics, including Cleveland Schools — “No one in Cleveland should be happy with the state of public education.” — the impact of Donald Trump on race relations, the importance of vision, parenting, and some of his current work with the Mandel Foundation. And, of course, the Browns-Modell saga.

Among White’s observations:

Power: “you gotta take it.” When you have prepared yourself and you are ready, go for it!

Politics: “Politics is hard work… What prepares you to be a councilman is ward work.” You have to put in the time, work campaigns, get to know the issues. Formal education is important but insufficient in and of itself. White said he ran 6 or 7 campaigns, including those of Lou Stokes and Jesse Jackson [locally]. You have to stay focused on the task and not be distracted by the personal.

Parenting: One of “the most painful moments” of his life, on a par with losing his mother when he was 33 and his father a quarter-century later, “was realizing my children were gonna have to fight the same battles” against discrimination that he had fought.

Schools: “Education is so important to the future of our people... the school system has historically not been welcoming to working class people.

"Do not accept a high school graduation rate of 71%."

From left: Cosmo Danielly, Chris Nance,
Stephanie Hamilton Brown and Sanford Watson

The black community: We cannot be afraid of our young people. We must become more engaged with our children. We must nurture them.

“When everybody around you tells you can fly, you believe you can fly. That is half the battle.”

The stool of survival for our community has three legs, which are economics, education and politics.

“We need to continue developing and evolving our own businesses even as we penetrate institutions” at the professional level.

We need to be about business and not make things personal.

“We gravitate around personalities when we should gravitate around vision.”

Front: Marcella Brown, BPACF executive director

Vision: "Vision is always more important than the individual. There is no leader who is more important than the vision. The vision must remain intact and undefiled.”

The Cleveland Browns campaign: “The whole Save Our Browns strategy came out of the Civil Rights manual." Number one, do we have legal standing? [Yes.] Number two, talk to a broader audience. [Build a base of support.] Number three. Be disruptive. White said had Cleveland relied on the courts, “we would have lost” because of the time factor. By taking the fight to select cities and teams, the opposition got nervous and anxious. Cleveland won, he said, essentially because the National Football League paid us to go away.

Cleveland’s future: The city’s neighborhoods are moving in the right direction, albeit more slowly on the east side. There needs to be physical development, business development, and human development.

Question about Trump

White responds to question from BPACF President Johnson

Perhaps the most sobering moment of the evening came in White’s response to a question about the impact of Donald Trump upon race relations. The former mayor’s answer was ominous.

“We all know what it is, but that’s only a part of it. Much of it is under the radar. We don’t see ICE [deporting and harassing people].” 
We don’t see the move towards the development of a national database that will track license plates nationwide. We don’t see the rollbacks that are degrading our air and our water. We don’t see the “real insidious nature” of this administration.

Lisa Bottoms of Bottom Line Consulting, Christopher Howse
of Howse Solutions, and Gloria Ware of JumpStart 

There is a 21^st century kind of lynching going on of blacks, Hispanics, Arabs, people who don’t look like them. We have to fight back 24 hours a day.

White said, “Trump’s rise was enabled by millions and millions of people who think just like him, and worse.”

White warned the audience that we can’t be so holed up that we don’t understand what’s happening to others. We can’t take the attitude that because we live in Solon we can be dismissive about what goes on in Hough. White referenced the time when he became a state senator, and his constituency included Jewish citizens for the first time, causing him to broaden his perspective. He quoted a snippet from the famous poem that begins, “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Socialist.”[2]

White said we should all be repulsed by what is happening to the Dreamers.

“We are all Dreamers,” he said.

White today

White was relaxed and outgoing, betraying little of the trademark intensity that characterized his governing style during his three mayoral terms from 1990-2001. Now 66, White was the first in his family to attend college. He earned two degrees at OSU and after graduation went to work for the Republican mayor of Columbus before returning home to pursue his goal of becoming Cleveland’s mayor. He left direct political combat close to two decades ago, moved several counties away, and now sees himself as a farmer. He has become a winemaker and a rescuer and hospice steward for horses. In what he said was a rare admission, White said he was an introvert, one who needed regular time away from the madding crowds. He attributed his attendance in large measure to his respect for BPA, which recognized him as its Black Professional of the Year in 1993.

White has been a consultant to the Mandel Foundation almost since his retirement from active politics. His work for Mandel brings him to Cleveland about once a week. While his Foundation work is most visible in his direction of the Neighborhood Leadership Development Program (NLDP), White has quietly become an influential political adviser to a reigning power structure that prefers to sit offstage until its interests are threatened and preservation of the status requires direct, albeit discreet, intervention. Politically speaking, he knows both how and when to wield a hammer and thread a needle.

Those interests were seriously challenged twice last year, most notably in the bitter fight to force public subsidization of the Quicken Loans Arena expansion to serve private interests. Strings were pulled from national to ward to parish level to thwart an engaged Cleveland citizenry. The second direct intervention was required following the September primary, when Mayor Frank Jackson’s surprisingly poor showing led to an “emergency cash transfusion” to beat down the quasi-populist challenge of Zack Reed.

White described his NLDP work as helping to identify engaged community leaders and building their capacity to be more effective. He likened it to “fishing for zealots”.

The event drew a Bell-shaped crowd age wise, from Millennials to seniors. Reed was among those in attendance, listening closely as his one-time hero turned adversary, showed that while removed from the ring, he still retained the sharp instincts honed during decades of political combat: White donated several bottles of wine from his Yellow Butterfly Winery as part of the evening’s refreshment.

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[1] W. O. Walker was the longtime editor and publisher of the once influential Call and Post weekly newspaper widely read throughout Cleveland’s black community. Carl Stokes was Cleveland’s first black mayor [1967-1971] and the inspiration behind both the 21^st Congressional District Caucus, in its heyday the strongest black political organization in the nation. Lou Stokes was Carl’s brother, an outstanding lawyer who became Ohio’s first black Congressman, serving from 1969-1998. George Forbes amassed unprecedented power during his tenure as City Council president from 1974 to 1989. Arnold R. Pinkney gained renown as a master campaign strategist power broker and was highly sought out for advice and campaign assistance by politicians near and far, including Jesse Jackson, Hubert R. Humphrey and Jimmy Carter in their presidential campaigns.

[2] First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

– Martin Niemoller

Niemöller  (1892–1984) was a prominent Protestant pastor who emerged as an outspoken public foe of Adolf Hitler and spent the last seven years of Nazi rule in concentration camps.

Black Politics in Cleveland: From Apex to Nadir

Black politics in Cleveland has a long and rich history, dating to the 19^th century and the activism of men like Harry C. Smith and George A. Myers. And of course there is a long line of firsts that perhaps reached its apotheosis between 1967 and 1972. Those pivotal years saw Carl Stokes elected mayor [1967], elder brother Louis Stokes elected to Congress [1968], and the formation of the Twenty-first District Caucus [1970], perhaps as potent and sophisticated a political organization as black people have ever created in this country.

Comprised mostly but not exclusively of Democrats, the Caucus — its very name became a household word — at its zenith had the power to elect its friends and defeat its political foes, irrespective of party affiliation. It forced open doors and claimed seats at the table.

That short but sweet epoch of black political power began to recede when Carl Stokes left Cleveland in 1971 for New York and a new line of work. And while there are likely close to 100 black elected officials in Cuyahoga County today, including Congresswoman Marcia Fudge and Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson, no one with a memory of those days would tolerate the notion that the entire lot of them wields more than a fraction of the power the black community exercised through the Caucus.

Those halcyon days are long gone, thanks to a number of factors, including population sprawl, demographic changes, the complex and unforeseen effects of a civil rights revolution that knocked down the walls that kept black people segregated in this northern mecca, and the unwillingness or inability of black leadership to groom and grow the next generation of leaders.

Moreover, the outsized role that money now plays in political and public affairs means that even when blacks are elected to public office, they are not necessarily responsive to their constituencies. Politicians of all hues respond first, fastest, and most often to those interests that speak green.

My intent when starting this post was to report on an event of great promise that occurred in town the night before last. But the foregoing attempt to provide context for that report has resulted in painting such a dismal outline of the current state of black political affairs that I don’t want to join the two in one piece. Instead, if you will permit me to extend this preamble a bit, I promise some breaking news in the context of further comment on the failure of black leadership and the prospect of better days ahead.

Our community’s failure to develop long range plans has retarded our progress immeasurably. The lack of leadership development is but the most visible evidence. Our key institutions — political, civil rights, commercial, and cultural — have all suffered from this failure. Fortunately, as we have reported over time, several have begun to emerge from the depths. The Urban League of Greater Cleveland, for example, after being driven to near-insolvency by an ossified board of trustees, has rebounded under the focused leadership of Marsha Mockabee and a reconstituted board to become more relevant and engaged. The United Black Fund, after recycling the same old same old leadership for what seems like a quarter century, is likewise beginning to make major strides under new professional and lay leadership. And the Cleveland NAACP, static for near a half-century, is at least stirring again.

Black Cleveland once had many strong black voices, perhaps none more resolute and louder than W. O. Walker, former publisher of the Call and Post. Of course, he owned a printing press. But he was also a national spokesperson on issues of civil rights, an elected official, and the first African American to serve in an Ohio Governor’s cabinet. My reading of several books in the past few years about aspects of national black politics and culture has enlightened me to many of Mr. Walker’s accomplishments, and my respect for him has only grown over the years. Thus it is all the sadder and more depressing to see what has become of his pride and joy under the ownership of Don King. The last issue I picked up had a severe portion of its news hole devoted to drivel about the virtues of our current president, much of it disguised as paid advertising.

Politically, we have hit rock bottom, best epitomized by the fact that 83-year old Una H. R. Keenon pulled petitions this week to run for mayor of East Cleveland. It seems she is no longer content to pull the strings on the city’s governance from her various perches [retired judge, current school board president, imperial wizard of the Black Women’s Political Action Committee].

There are countless other examples, a few of which can be found on Cleveland’s city council, where Ken Johnson Sr. still presides over the Ward 4 seat from which he retired.

Age of course is not an indicator of competence or lack thereof. We have inadequate leadership across all chronological dimensions. Yesterday morning I called a Cleveland city councilperson about 8am to discuss a few issues. I of course inquired about the prospects of the multi-million dollar Quicken Loans expansion project legislation that is simply the biggest local issue of this decade. The member literally declared total unfamiliarity with the issue, notwithstanding having participated in the 17-0 vote to refer it to committee just last week.

The good news? All Cleveland city council members are up for re-election this fall and most face brisk opposition and an increasingly attentive and engaged electorate.

Better news? Come back tonight and read the report we intended to publish in this space. We promise it will be 100% positive!