Chapter 6, Promises of Power: How To Take The Hall

How To Take The Hall

By 1965 it was becoming clear to me that the ethnic machine that had run Cleveland for more than a generation was running out of steam

Three years earlier, President Kennedy had been casting about for an Italian to put into the Cabinet had settled on Cleveland's Mayor Anthony J. Celebrezze for the Health, Education and Welfare slot. According to Cleveland's charter, when the mayor leaves, the post goes to the law director. Ralph S. Locher, my former boss when I had been assistant prosecutor, had been hand picked as the perfect law director. He was Romanian, a dedicated worker, and he posed absolutely no political threat since he had never run for political office. But suddenly, with the Presidential appointment, Locher was in by default. Conservative and patriotic, Locher was the ideal public servant to see to the ethnic community.

But the years of neglect were beginning to show. School integration was the issue that exposed the wounds. In the spring, a group of blacks and white liberals attempted to disrupt construction of a new school being built in the ghetto; their argument was that the school was placed just far enough within the lines of the black arena to perpetuate an all-black student body.

In the confusion of the sit-in, a white minister was accidentally run over and killed by a bulldozer. And in the Murray Hill area-Cleveland's Little Italy-there were a series of running battles between blacks and whites over the few black children attending the elementary school. All this served to boost the popularity of the racist president of the School Board, Ralph McAllister, a man whose only political sense lay in the ability to create an endless series of frightening sentences that always referred to the black community as "them." Screams of lackluster government were being directed at Locher from all directions, mostly from lackluster men.

I had been paying attention to al this when I began to get word that two shrewd veterans of the political scene were launching an effort to draft me for mayor.

Geraldine Williams is a dedicated campaign worker. She stayed with me from 1965 through the 1967 campaign, and I named her one of my administrative assistants. Jean Murell Capers is one of the brightest politicians ever to come out of Cleveland. She understood what it takes to mix economics, politics and social forces into that curious admixture we call power. And she knew where the country ought to be going in relation to the needs of black people. But there was also a flaw there.

Jean was riding high in the late 1940's and through the decade of the 1950s. She was a member of the City Council from 1949 until 1959, when the black community turned away from her. In that year the white establishment, the local Democratic Party and the newspapers all turned on her and she lost her seat to James Bell. She had somehow forgotten things she knew better than anyone else about maintaining a political organization and staying close to the people. Her association with a major rackets figure became the subject of a newspaper expose, and other rumors of misconduct combined to discredit her permanently. Despite her political savvy, Jean never got over her political loss and in 1965 was still trying to find a way back in.

Jean and Geraldine announced in February that they were going to draft me for mayor. I read about it in Columbus. They hadn't talked to me about it in Columbus.

It was clear to me that Jean had a hustle in mind. I am confident, though, that she never intended things to turn out as they did. I understood that Jean wanted me to be her candidate, and I assumed that she really wanted to use me to force certain concessions from the 'regulars' in the race. That is not a new gimmick. You put a man you know is not going to win into a race to scare the incumbent. They you go to the party bosses and agree to pull your man out if they will give you something else you want. This is especially effective for a black politician in a white city -- you can negotiate the entire black vote because the white party bosses believe you can control it, whether you can or not.

I give Jean credit for not coming to see me and talking to me about her draft-Stokes movement, because she knew perfectly well I would never agree to it. Not only that, if I did agree to go along with her hustle, then she would owe me something. This way, everything was in her hands.

The newspapers carried a running account of their efforts in my behalf collecting petition signatures. I kept quiet. When the reporters would ask me about it, I was able honestly to deny any knowledge. Meanwhile, though, Al Sweeney, the Call & Post city editor, and I began going over the figures from my legislative races. We figured out that although blacks made up only thirty- five percent of the actual population, they comprised thirty-nine percent of the vote. Ralph McAllister declared himself an independent candidate. Ralph J. Perk, later my successor as mayor, announced he would run as a Republican. If I filed as an independent candidate, that meant a four-way race. Our thirty-nine percent loomed large. We decided to let the draft-Stokes movement build its own head of steam.

One night Geraldine called me at my home to say that a delegation from the draft-Stokes group wanted to visit me and talk about the petitions. I told her I would be in Columbus and they could visit me there. I could just as easily have met them in Cleveland, but I wanted to establish my remoteness from them. Sweeney and I decided that we would give the group a goal

that, if they attained it, would touch enough people to set up a viable jumping-off place for a campaign. At that point, we would set up our own group and publicly disassociate ourselves from Jean.

Geraldine and a small group came to Columbus. I told them, "Get twenty thousand signatures and I will run." You needed fifteen thousand to file as an independent. Geraldine swallowed hard and said, "Okay." She returned to Cleveland, and the next day I saw newspaper stories quoting her as saying that I had not committed myself but that I had not stopped them.

As the filing date drew near, I saw articles saying that the group had over fourteen thousand signatures. I decided to go see William O. Walker, the publisher of the Call & Post. I told him I wanted to run for mayor, thought I could win and explained how Sweeney and I figured it would work. He said that if I wanted to run, the Call & Post would support me.

"We have some problems, though," I said, "You know Jean Capers is involved with this draft effort."

"Yes," he said, "and I don't think it's good for you."

"Well, we aren't too worried about that. We plan to get her out of the whole movement. But what we have to do is put together the framework to displace her."

I told Walker that what I really needed from him, beyond his support, was his contact with the leading members of the black bourgeoisie. I wanted to put together a group of impeccable, influential men who would support me, a group that Jean would immediately see was off limits for her. I wanted the group to be headed by Dr. Kenneth W. Clement, and I asked W. O. Walker to intercede for me, asking Clement to head the group.

Walker agreed and that same day he sat down with Dr. Clement, who at that time was probably the most prominent civic-minded professional men in the black community. The white media, then and now, sought him out for quotes on all matters affecting the black community. Clement agreed to be my man, and I immediately set up shop to take the ball game out of Jean's hands.

The draft-Stokes group was really very small, and they hadn't got as much done as the newspapers reported. I called Geraldine and asked her to bring me the petitions. They had just over 6,700 names, far short of the twenty thousand I had set as a goal. But I immediately called a press conference and announced that over twenty thousand voters had signed petitions asking me to run for mayor, and that a group of distinguished black leaders, headed by Dr. Kenneth W. Clement and William O. Walker had prevailed upon me to accept the draft.

Jean, Geraldine, Sweeney and I knew we really had only 6,700 signatures. But nobody else did, and we presented the draft petitions at the press conference in a "Michigan bankroll," with real petitions at the top and bottom of the pile and blank ones in the middle. While the television cameras zoomed in and Richard Maher, the veteran politics editor for the Press, took notes, I riffled through the impressive stacks of petitions. Not one of the fifteen or more reporters looked through the petitions for himself. Then I dropped a bomb that nearly choked Sweeney. I announced that on my birthday, June 21, four weeks away, we would file 35,000 signatures with the board of Elections and I would run as an independent.

After the conference, Sweeney came up to me and said, "Man, what in the world made you say that? Where are we going to get thirty-five thousand signatures?"

I told Al that we would get them. I knew that even for an established politician the collecting of signatures is an arduous task, taking considerable work on the part of his ward leaders and committeemen; the idea of a Negro running for mayor and without organized political support getting that many signatures was unbelievable -- to them. But past experience had confirmed for me that I had a reservoir of supporters the politicians and political writers consistently ignored -- preachers, civic and community volunteers, and the little people whose interests I'd fought for in the legislature. You won't get response to a political appeal from these people if you haven't laid the groundwork. But groundwork or no, my relying on them this time, for those 35,000 signatures, was a bold and dramatic move.

I went to my files and pulled out the names and addresses of all the people I had worked with in the community and in my various jobs as probation officer, prosecutor and legislator. I sent them a short letter, asking for their help and explaining how the petitions should be filled out.

Those letters had just been sent off when I received a call from a young white student at Oberlin College named Charles Butts. He said he had read about my announcement in the newspaper and wanted to help. He told me he had some experience in organizational politics and editing a newspaper in Mississippi. It was almost summer, the college had just closed, and Butts came to Cleveland. We worked hard putting the petitions and the letters together. But he didn't believe I could get the signatures, either.

The next thirty days were marvelous. We worked out of the law offices on East Fifty-fifth Street that Louis and I shared with the famous defense lawyer, Norman Minor. People were almost constantly coming into the office, dropping off petitions and picking up new ones. But the impression was deceptive. June 21, my birthday and the deadline I had set for the 35,000 signatures, fell on a Tuesday. The Friday before, we counted up what we had; it was only eighteen thousand names.

"What in the world are we going to do now?" asked Al Sweeney, who carried dramatic front-page pictures and stories each week in the Call & Post.

"All we can do is let the people know we need those names," I said.

I went to the two radio stations that beamed to blacks, and broadcast an appeal. I reminded the black community of the challenge I'd established for us. The word spread that Carl Stokes needed help. All that weekend and through Monday afternoon, people were streaming into our office, dropping off petitions, asking if the had time to do another. They came by taxi, by car, on foot, on bicycles. Children were bringing them in. We couldn't keep up.

We had some keeping up to do. When relatively uninformed campaign workers are out there getting signatures, the often let somebody forget to write something-the date or the proper

ward number or the city. One of the fellows went to a dime store and bought a couple of dozen pencils and pens of various colors and we cleaned up the petitions so they wouldn't be subject to technical challenges. We would complete dates, finish out the spelling of "Cleve," sometimes change a date that was obviously out of sequence.

Monday evening we had petitions all over the floor of the offices and up and down the hall. We finished the correcting while Charles Butts did the counting. At 9 P.M., Butts came up to me. "Something has got to be wrong," he said. "I've counted them three times, and I keep coming up with thirty-seven thousand signatures."

We had done it. The next morning, Butts and I had all the petitions copied by photostat, to guard against any wrong-doing after the petitions left our hands, and took them to the Board of Elections. It made a dramatic news conference. We had actually picked up a couple of thousand signatures from the white West Side. Not many, but some. At the news conference, I was asked if the signatures were all from black areas.

"Oh, no," I said. "Well over ten percent of these signatures are from white areas."

That figure was at least twice as many as we had. But some times you have to help white people believe they can forgo their prejudices. Stretching the truth in this case made a lot of liberals feel proud of themselves, and more able and willing to help later. The fact of that signature drive was that the added theatricality of my arbitrary deadline and the unnecessarily high goal gave my people a challenge and kept the adrenalin flowing. When we made it, they were able to congratulate themselves much more feelingly than would have been possible in a routine petition drive. They didn't think about what would have happened if we hadn't made it.

I had the added fillip of nine days between filing the 37,000 signatures and the actual filing deadline of June 30. We picked up 14,000 more signatures, for a total of 51,000. Very impressive.

We had been having campaign meetings every Thursday night

at the Call & Post building. Each time, more people would show up. The campaign was organized by blacks and their support was my base, the thirty-nine percent. But I knew I needed white votes and white workers in the campaign-whites I could trust. I began with Lois Hays, an old friend who served with me on the board of Fairhill Psychiatric hospital; she became treasurer and co-chairman. Her being treasurer was important. Lois' integrity and that of her husband, Robert, an investment banker, were vital because at every step I had to build a confidence in the white community about the legitimacy of my effort. The other co-chairman was Walter Wills, a black funeral home director widely respected in both the black and the white communities.

Next I went to the Plain Dealer and the Press to ask for their endorsements. I had little hope of getting them, but it was important to me to let them know that I knew I could win. I wanted them to think back on how I had explained to them that I would win for the legislature and how they hadn't believe me. Both eventually came out for Locher, praising his honestly, his hard work and his clean record. His lack of accomplishment and his adamant stance against leaders of the black community were not mentioned.

The newspaper endorsements didn't strike me as being the products of ill will. But it was different with the local Democratic Party. I had gone against Bert Porter, the county boss, before, and this time I wasn't even running as a Democrat, but as an independent. Everybody knew I was a Democrat and intended to stay one. But I ran as an independent to force a four-way race. Bert Porter took my campaign as a civil-rights action and did what he could to discredit me. He had me barred from speaking at any Democratic ward meetings. And organized labor, while not as open in its techniques, was more virulent in its opposition. The AFL-CIO was notifying it members that Ralph Locher was the only "safe" candidate.

The other group that opposed me, sadly enough, was the black politicians in the Democratic Party. I had to run over them.

They always ran scared, staying safely within the fold of party dominance. They had a persistent and debilitating lack of faith in or understanding of the black community. They were as certain as Bert Porter that I would lose, and they were not about to jeopardize their standing with the mayor and the party by supporting me. In the primary, Locher was running against County Recorder Mark McElroy, another weak candidate. Locher received 53.6 percent of the Democratic vote, but only 23 percent of the black vote. The councilman should have seen that we could get the man.

The popular belief, sometimes encourage by me, is that I became a legitimate or serious mayoral candidate in 1967 when the Plain Dealer endorsed me. The implications are that until I was recognized as a fully functioning, competent man by the white establishment, I was not for real. There is a certain truth to that implication Until I could impress the white community with my competence, they were not about to believe that I was really as god as any white man, even a ninth-grade dropout like Ralph J. Perk. Until I did that, I knew I could count on precious few white votes. But the truth of the matter is, I did my own legitimization, and I did it in 1965, and I did it by debating Ralph J. Perk.

About a week into the campaign for the general election, Perk made the sort of statement that has characterized his career, both in its disregard of the facts and in its appeal to the anti-tax voting blocs. Perk's campaign cry has always been "Economy and efficiency, no new taxes." In this case he said that the city could meet its needs and being about needed improvements on the income it had if it were only run efficiently. When I read this remark in the Plain Dealer the next morning, I said to Charlie Butts, "I think we've got him. This is our chance to legitimize this campaign."

I knew I had great credibility problems. This especially bothered me when I could see it expressed among my own people, my base. Of course, the white areas just weren't prepared to concede that any black man had the intelligence to run for

mayor. That is probably the nicest thing they thought. Now I saw an opportunity to bridge the gap.

I arranged with a friend to get an open date at the City Club, Cleveland's most popular public forum. The club has for over fifty years been the traditional forum for debates and speeches by Presidents, governors and outstanding public and private personages. I wired Perk telling him he was wrong in his finance remarks, told him the City Club was available and challenged him to a debate. Perk had to bit on that one. As county auditor, he just had to believe he knew more about finances than a Carl Stokes. Few Clevelanders were aware of how hard I worked on the state budget in learning its intricate details of state financing. It was a great chance for me, the opportunity to demonstrate to the entire town that I knew more about city finances than Ralph Perk. Or any other candidate for that matter.

The Monday before the Friday debate, I checked into the Hollenden Hotel, and for the next five days I lived in what was virtually an intellectual gymnasium. Butts and I had put together every document, pamphlet and report on city finances that could be found. Much of the time I spent studying them. The rest of the time I spent talking to various experts on finances. One of them was Locher's own budget director. Butts would be out making appointments with everyone he thought could help, and those people would in turn recommend others. I developed a depth of understanding from the parade of opinions. I questioned and probed, and when they left I read and studies. Thursday I started writing my speech. That night I called Butts and told him, "Charlie, we're going to bust him wide open."

I had put together a short speech with a stagging set of statics and interactable facts about the city. The speech was written so that a reporter couldn't take a solid quote from it without including my fingers. It was all meat.

Perk came in with a public-relations gimmick. It was a neat example of the point he wanted to make. He had a series of stacks of poker chips set up on the table in front of him. He told his audience the chips represented the people Laushe had hired,

and former Mayor Thomas A Burke had hired and Celebrezze had hired, and Locher himself had hired. Declaiming, "This is what needs to be done at City Hall," he swept his arm across the table and knocked off all the poker chips, clattering across the floor, "Clean out that place," he said for emphasis.

It was the strongest part of his presentation, and it obviously had an effect on the audience.

In my rebuttal I devastated him in one line: "I don't know if Mr Perk is right or not that those poker chips represent employees the city doesn't need. The one thing I do know is that those chips represent people, and you don't smash people."

The effect on that audience, and on the reporters, let alone Perk, was electrifying. I had their rapt attention. I then went into my speech, hammering home the documented and unrefutable facts supporting the city's need for more money. The speech flowed so well, hit so hard, and I was thoroughly familiar with all its facts, that there was no contest between Perk and myself on the issues. In the question-and-answer period, I inundated him and the audience with additional facts, figures and statistics. No histrionics. I intended this to be intellectual slaughter, and it was. My hard work had paid off

After that debate one black man came up to me and made this remark: "Stokes, I was so proud of you. I never knew that a brother could know that much about finances." Now, he didn't know whether I really knew that stuff, but it sounded so impressive he had to believe I did. It was the reaction I had planned for. Most voters can't really judge competence. That is not meant to be a denigrating remark -- it is just that a subject like city finances is so specialized and complicated that most voters have neither the opportunity nor the inclination to master it. I knew that my main need was to put together remarks with fluidity and the feel of expertise. My speech was assembled not so much to inform as to overwhelm. When you campaign for office, you don't care so much about educating voters to the issues, you care about educating them to you, to give them confidence in your abilities. People will vote for a candidate when they won't vote for the issues he stands on.

The word began to spread in the black community, and a new recognition of what I was doing and a new excitement were developing. The realization that an actual black man was out there threatening to do something important that had never been done before began to be brought home in many ways. I was never made more mindful of this than during a parade the black ministers staged. They had gotten several convertibles from the auto dealers, streamers and banners and whatnot, and advertised the parade on the black radio stations.

Shirley and I were riding up on the back seat of a car, with big signs on the side that had my name and mayoral slogan. When we passed Central High School, a group of black kids, yelled and waved at us. We waved back, and as we did, one of the smaller boys jumped up in the air and shouted, "He's colored, he's colored!" Then he ran down the street, skipping and clapping his hands, yelling "He's colored, he's colored, he's colored!" That little boy felt, perhaps for the first time in his life, black pride.

For election night, we had two headquarters -- the ballroom in the Sheraton Cleveland Hotel downtown and the Call & Post auditorium out in the ghetto. Both rooms were filled with a most unlikely mix of people. Welfare mothers and wealthy residents of Shaker Heights. Ministers, truck drivers, laborers, doctors and lawyers, both white and black. Teen-agers and little kids. Out of a variety of motives that ran from idealism and personal commitment to guilt, people came. People who had previously ignored politics. People who had been deliberately excluded from politics. They gathered at those headquarters and waited to see the results of their work.

It was a bitter night, the early editions of the Press had broadcast, almost as a warning, that black voters were turning out in unprecedented numbers. That scared out the whites in the afternoon. By the end of the day, it had become the highest turnout for any municipal election up to that time. Of some 338,000 registered voters, 237,000 had voted. Locher received 87,967 votes.

I received 85,675. Perk received less than half of my vote, and McAllister got less than half of his. I had lost by less than one percent of the vote.

I had to move quickly, both to cool the high and bitter feelings I knew were building and to let my people know that we had proven we could win. It was a difficult speech, but I tried to get across not merely that we had a moral victory but that in short order real victory could be ours. Their mind had to be taken off the immediate defeat. I reminded them of the recounts I'd had for the legislature and set a goal of $10,000 for them to raise for another recount. They raised it within three days. The recount we had a week later did not change the results. But we had taken on an incumbent who had the support of the two newspapers, the local Democratic Party, organized labor and his twelve thousand city employees and we had come within one percent of beating him. A far as I was concerned, we had beaten not only Locher but the whole traditional establishment of political power, and in two years we would take it for good.

There is one more thing to be said about the 1965 campaign. In terms of the politics of coalition, of zeal and commitment, the 1965 campaign was the high point of my career. Just as, in 1960 my campaign had produced the hard work and the excitement and people involved that carried over into an efficient machine for electing me to the legislature two years later, so in 1965 the workers together my effort did so with a dedication that come only from working toward a goal that no one else believes can be achieved. In 1967, I had the support of much of the power structure I had men working with me who understood administrative procedures and how to most efficiently use manpower. It was an effective, expensive machine. But the human excitement of that campaign was at a much lower level. And in 1969, for my reelection, it was almost all machine. We hardly needed the volunteer help that was an absolute necessity in 1965. Such developments are probably inevitable, but to me they are disheartening. It is a truism among some socialist philosophers to say that the revolution always runs out of fervor. I have seen the truth of that, and it is a sad truth.

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