The Real Black Power
(See Cover)
"Hey! We got ourselves a mayor!" cried a white college student from New York. "We did it! We did it!" exulted a middle-aged Negro man. "Amen, amen," murmured an elderly Negro woman, tears starting from her eyes. It was 3:02 a.m. at a downtown hotel, and Cleveland, the nation's tenth biggest city, had just chosen as its mayor Carl Burton Stokes, great-grandson of a slave, over Seth Taft, grandson of a President.
With his swearing-in this week in the city council chamber, sinewy, stage-handsome Stokes becomes the first Negro elected to head any major U.S. city. He brings to the job not only political experience and ability but also grace, pugnacity and energy neatly packaged in a 6-ft., 175-lb. frame. In all, he is quite a change from the routine succession of organization men he succeeds. "This is not a Carl Stokes victory," he said when the results were in, "not a vote for a man but a vote for a program, for a visionary dream of what our city can become." He added softly: "I can say to you that never before have I ever known the full meaning of the words 'God Bless America.' "
Against Backlash & Bigotry. Cleveland was not alone in making last week's voting a historic off-year election. Gary, Ind., a northern bastion of the Ku Klux Klan 40 years ago, also elected a Negro, Richard Hatcher, 34, as its mayor. As in Cleveland, white votes supplied the crucial margin. In Boston, a coalition of white and Negro voters chose moderate Mayoral Candidate Kevin Hagan White over Louise Day Hicks, who had become a totem of opposition to school integration.
Martin Luther King called the three elections a "one-two-three punch against backlash and bigotry." Massachusetts' Senator Edward Brooke, who made his own racial breakthrough last year, said that "It showed the American Negro what he can achieve through lawful means." And A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany pronounced that "American voters have rejected racism as a political issue."
Judgments such as Meany's may be euphoric. In all three cities, thousands of white Democrats crossed party lines to vote against Stokes and Hatcher while Mrs. Hicks got nearly half of Boston's white ballots. "The great mass of white voters in Gary and Cleveland," observed Psephologist Richard Scammon, "voted white, not Republican or Democratic." And CORE'S Floyd McKissick, in discussing Cleveland and Gary, pointed out: "A black man is still black and the parties do not support black candidates with the same vim, vigor and vitality that they do white candidates."
Granted such caveats, the elections nonetheless mark a new point of departure in American politics. They answer at least in part the growing demands of moderate Negro leaders like the Urban League's Whitney Young to "give us some victories" to offset the revolutionary preachings of black extremists. Even more important, the success of Stokes and Hatcher underscores an important new stage in the Negro's political evolution. Neither of the new mayors fits the traditional mold of the ghetto politician, seeking and getting solely Negro support and campaigning principally on racial issues in the style of Adam Clayton Powell. Nor are they products of the Negro middle class such as HEW Secretary Robert Weaver and Edward Brooke, who as public personages seem so nearly white that the Negro workingman is hard put to identify with them.
Stokes and Hatcher were both born in the slums, both reared in grinding poverty. While they embody the Negro's quest for social recognition and economic advancement, they ran and were elected on their ability to represent the entire community. They have shown a sophistication and professionalism rarely seen in Negro campaigns. Further, as big-city mayors, they break the tradition whereby most Negro politicians have been forced to settle for legislative or judicial office. Running a city is one of the most demanding jobs in American politics, and one that more intimately affects the day-to-day lives of the voters than any other office.
"Cool for Carl." While a few extremists dismissed the elections as "tokenism," black militants purposefully helped Stokes and Hatcher by avoiding violence in their cities this past summer. In Cleveland the byword was "Cool it for Carl." The more moderate majority of Negroes, who all too often in the past have been too apathetic, fearful or despairing to use the ballot as an effective weapon, this time showed rare cohesion and voted their interests. If bloc voting wins no seal of approval in civics texts, it has been the device by which every ethnic group in American history has exerted and earned its political muscle.
Negroes, in some cases with white help, also showed new strength in lesser contests. In the racially mixed Richmond district, Dr. William Ferguson Reid became the first Negro elected to the Virginia legislature since 1891. Charles City County, Va., elected a Negro sheriff, James M. Bradby, and a county clerk, lona Adkins. Bradby defeated a white incumbent of 43 years' standing. In New Orleans, Attorney Ernest Morial won a seat in Louisiana's state legislature. In Mississippi, Holmes County's Robert Clarke was elected, thus integrating the state legislature, while six other Negroes won posts as county supervisors, justices of the peace and constables.
Boston Negroes, who constitute only 13% of the population, had the triple satisfaction of defeating Mrs. Hicks and her loyal anti-integration ally, School Committeeman William O'Connor, while helping to elect Thomas Atkins to the city council. Atkins, 28, who has a master's degree from Harvard in Near Eastern studies and is former executive secretary of Boston's N.A.A.C.P. chapter, will be the first Negro on the council in 16 years.
Louise's Blunder. The mayoral rivals, Louise Hicks, 48, and Massachusetts Secretary of State Kevin White, 37, are both Irish Democrats, and for most of the campaign the issue though muted, was racial. Mrs. Hicks had established herself as the protector of Boston's lower-middle-class whites against forced school integration and black assertiveness in general. While Williams-educated White is no racial radical, he was clearly sympathetic to the ghetto's troubles.
Louise Hicks posed a formidable challenge. Although an amateurish and unattractive campaigner, she had rolled up 69% and 64% of the vote in her last two elections to the school committee; in 1965 she got the biggest citywide vote of any candidate for any office. This year she led a field of ten in the mayoral primary.
White, hardly a dynamic campaigner himself, seemed to be running behind until Louise blundered four weeks ago by promising to increase the salaries of policemen and firemen without raising taxes. The money, she said, would come from Washington. White pointed out that the pay raise would add $26 per $1,000 of assessed value to the tax rate, and thereby captured votes in tax-conscious Irish neighborhoods that had previously gone overwhelmingly for Mrs. Hicks.
In her own South Boston, she had to settle for about 60%, down nearly ten points from her previous showings. In Irish precincts with higher income and education levels, her share of the vote dropped to near 50%. Yankee, Negro and Jewish neighborhoods went decisively for White. Negroes ignored the promptings of black militants to boycott the mayoral election and vote only for Atkins. Though the percentage of eligibles voting was the largest ever for a Boston municipal election, White's plurality of 12,552 out of 192,860 votes cast was one of the smallest in the city's history.
Harvard Social Psychologist Thomas Pettigrew summed it up by saying: "A lot of people voted their prejudices, but more people voted something else." White, more assertive as a victor than as a campaigner, declared: "No man or woman is going to tear this city apart with hate or bigotry or false promises." Mrs. Hicks, more gracious in defeat than in combat, appeared with White on election night to congratulate him and wish him well.
Franks & a Pint. Gary enjoyed no such amity. The city of 178,000 on Lake Michigan has two major industries, steel and Democratic politics, whose byproducts are wide-open vice and only slightly less tangible corruption. The population is mostly blue-collar. The majority of whites remain close in custom and outlook to their foreign origins and suspicious of the Negroes, who make up 55% of the population; many of them have arrived from the South since World War II. The city boasts 54 foreign-language groups, and in the 1964 presidential primary, the white vote went overwhelmingly to George Wallace.
Thus the Democratic bosses were understandably less than elated by the advent of a mayoral candidate who was both Negro and reform-minded, who deplored gambling, prostitution and crooked politics. Hatcher's presence jarred the Democrats so badly that in their primary last May, Mayor Martin Katz was challenged not only by the Negro but by a white segregationist as well. With the white vote split, City Council President Hatcher was able to win the nomination.
Many Gary Negroes had traditionally cooperated with the organization, which responded with the philosophy of "Give 'em some franks and a pint of whisky" in exchange for votes. Hatcher was all too clearly a different sort. But even after the primary, as he tells it, Lake County Democratic Chairman John Krupa came to Hatcher with the ritualistic demand that he pledge subservience to the machine and allow it to name his police chief, controller and fire chief after election. "Too many people have worked too hard in this," replied Hatcher. "I'm not going to abdicate my responsibilities or sell them out."
Professional Hazards. No one had worked harder or gone farther than Richard Gordon Hatcher himself. Born in a Michigan City waterfront jungle called "The Patch," he was the twelfth of 13 children. His father, a factory worker, was usually laid off half the year. "We had," understates Hatcher, "a very difficult time of it." Instead of surrendering to slum life, Hatcher went to Indiana University by dint of a church stipend, a small track scholarship and his willingness to wait on tables. After earning his bachelor's degree, he went to Indiana's Valparaiso University Law School, where he attended class from 8:30 to 3:30 and worked in a hospital from 4 to midnight. After graduation he moved to Gary and began the practice of law, was soon in politics--first as a deputy county prosecutor and then, starting in 1963, as a member of the city council. He was soon baptized in the hazards of his profession. His enemies attempted to hook him on a drunk-driving charge; the trap might have worked except that Baptist Hatcher is well known to be a lifelong teetotaler.
By the time Hatcher won the nomination for mayor, a crude frame-up would have been too obvious. Krupa tried the ideological tack. He labeled Hatcher a Black Power extremist and, as the smear spread, it widened to Communist. Krupa demanded that Hatcher repudiate Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, Joan Baez, Marlon Brando and sundry other so-called "pinkos" as proof of his patriotism. "I will never repudiate Marlon Brando," deadpanned Hatcher--though the subtlety was probably lost on most Garyites. For the rest. Hatcher would only say that he deplored "civil violence of any kind."
The organization was unappeased, and its calumny persuaded lifelong Democrats to vote for the white Republican candidate, John Radigan, a furniture dealer. The Democrats issued voters careful instructions on how to split their tickets.
Not-Too-Secret Ingredient. Taking no chances, the Krupa machine unblushingly set out to steal the election (see box). The skulduggery was so blatant that it rebounded in Hatcher's favor, bringing cash and services from citizens far from Lake County.
The final, not-too-secret ingredient of success was the white vote. Though Negroes represented a majority of the population, whites held a slight edge in voter registration, and at least a few Negroes were certain to vote under organization orders. Hatcher's campaign aides recruited 2,000 precinct workers--including 400 white residents and college students--and he himself stumped vigorously in white neighborhoods. He never attacked Radigan but he cast doubt on his ability to deal with the "entities"--the powers that have made Gary the unlovely place it is.
Gold Doorknobs. Hatcher promised to reorganize the police department, drive out the gamblers and prostitutes, improve housing conditions. He said he would knock heads with U.S. Steel, which founded Gary in 1906 as a company town. The corporation's facilities, Hatcher charged, are underassessed by nearly two-thirds--12% of value instead of the required 33 1/2%. "If we could just raise it to 20%," Hatcher said, "why, you could build schools with gold doorknobs. You could tear down all the slums." The strategy worked, but with little to spare. The biggest election-day turnout in Gary's history produced a slender victory of 39,330 v. 37,941, a plurality of less than 2%. Hatcher held 95% of the Negro vote and attracted an estimated 12% of the white electorate. Pledging a "multiracial government," Hatcher takes office in January, and if he makes good his threats to expel racketeers, cleanse the party machine and face down U.S. Steel, he should be in for a lively four-year term.
Sharing with Rats. In Cleveland, the excitement started for Carl Stokes even before his two-year term began. The tension of election night gave way to apprehension as the county elections board discovered sizable errors in the initial count, then whittled his lead practically to the vanishing point. It was in keeping with the roller-coaster life that Cleveland's new mayor has led for most of his 40 years.
Stokes was born in the Cleveland slum called Central. His handsome father, a laundry worker, died when Carl was a year old, leaving his son no legacy but looks. For the next eleven years, Carl, his older brother Louis and their mother shared one bed and one bed room with the rats. While Mrs. Stokes, now 65, worked as a maid by day, their grandmother reared the boys. But Mother Stokes managed to get across one important message: "Study, so you'll be somebody."
Carl and Louis studied, though Carl, at least, suffered some ambivalence. He would smuggle books home from the library under his clothes. "Reading was against the mores," he explains. "I couldn't let the other boys know." And in the Depression-era slums, he thought more about Joe Louis than Booker T. Washington. "All of us looked on boxing as a way of life," he says. "You had to fight." At 17 he dropped out of high school and soon found himself in the Army. His military career in Europe as the war was ending was more athletic than heroic. He continued to box, won the table-tennis championship of the European theater. He came home with corporal's stripes and a renewed determination to go back to his books.
Pistol Whipping. Carl completed high school, enrolled under the G.I. bill as a psychology major at West Virginia State, but after a year went back home to Western Reserve University. He was still undecided as to a career--psychology and the ministry were possibilities--when in 1948 he became chauffeur to a political organizer in Frank Lausche's gubernatorial campaign. After Lausche won, Stokes was offered a state job and chose to be a liquor inspector. He was a tough one. In his first case, a lone foray against an unlicensed saloon, the tough barkeep and customers laughed in his scrawny face (he then weighed only 150 Ibs.). Stokes pistol-whipped the bartender into submission. Later, in a shoot-out with some bootleggers, one of Stokes's colleagues was wounded while Stokes gunned down two men. Before long he had the second highest record of arrests among 85 inspectors.
By this time he had decided on law as a career. He went first to the University of Minnesota, where he earned a B.S. in law and the university's billiards championship, while working as a dining-car waiter; then to the Cleveland-Marshall Law School at night, where he obtained an L.L.B. while serving as a court probation officer during the day. He had married while he was a liquor inspector, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1956. In 1958 he married Shirley Edwards, an attractive Fisk University graduate in library science. They have a boy and a girl: Carl Jr., 9, and Cordi, 6.
On the day he passed the Ohio bar examination in 1957, Stokes resigned his court job and went into law practice with his brother. A year later Mayor Anthony Celebrezze appointed him an assistant prosecutor under City Law Director Ralph Locher. The next step, in 1962, was election to the state legislature, where he quickly established himself as a prolific, catholic lawmaker. He helped draft legislation establishing a state department of urban affairs, wrote a new mental-health services act, helped enact stiffer traffic regulations, promoted a gun-control bill, worked for tougher air-pollution controls, and was the only Democrat to sponsor a bill giving the Governor power to send the National Guard into a city before a riot situation gets out of hand.
Mistake-on-the-Lake. His record suggests a bizarre combination of New Dealish liberalism and honest-cop abrasiveness. While Richard Hatcher says his personal hero is John Kennedy, Carl Stokes mentions crusty old Harold Ickes, Interior Secretary under F.D.R. One of Stokes's favorite books is Who Governs? by Robert Dahl, which describes the political assimilation of European immigrants in New Haven. Although Dahl was not primarily concerned with Negroes, Stokes associates the Negroes' evolution with that of other minority groups. "If the ethnic pulled himself up a bit with the help of the rope," wrote Dahl, "he could often gain a toehold in the system; the higher he climbed, the higher he could reach for another pull upward. He was not greatly interested in leveling the mountain itself."
Certainly Stokes, with his expensively tailored, double-breasted pin-stripe suits, monogrammed (CBS) shirts and Antonio y Cleopatra cigars, is no leveler. His children go to private schools. And now that he is king of Cleveland's mountain, he can be expected to work from the top to excise the civic decay that has retarded Cleveland's progress.
After a proud and prosperous history going back to 1796, Cleveland in recent years has suffered from a malaise born of hubris and small minds. It has a sound, diversified economy and a renowned cultural establishment that theoretically should draw strength from its enclaves of ingrown, Old World-oriented ethnic communities--63 of them in all. Yet it remains a frustrated and fragmented society. Negroes, who were still being recruited from the South by the city's industry as recently as 1958, form the most recent wave of immigration. Three hundred thousand strong, they account for 38% of the population of some 800,000, which makes them the largest single distinguishable group of Clevelanders.
Industry, much of it nestling in the very heart of town along the river, has not been able to supply enough employment to bring prosperity to the ghetto. Neither city nor state government has been able to meet the slums' other needs. The poor often call their town Mistake-on-the-Lake.
Though it has designated nearly twice as much land (6,060 acres) for urban renewal as Philadelphia, the runner-up, Cleveland probably has the worst fulfillment record of any major city. Blocks have been bulldozed for grandiose, half-forgotten schemes, while their residents, mostly Negro, have been left to find new homes for themselves. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development earlier this year took the almost unheard of step of withdrawing $10 million in previously allocated renewal funds. Negro slums like Hough are as bad as any in the country, and seem ready to explode, as Hough in fact did in the summer of 1966, on any hot night.
Man with the Spark. And things have been getting worse, not better. In a statistical profile of the Negro published by the Federal Government last month, Hough mirrored the national picture: while some Negroes are absorbed into the middle class, the hard core poor grow ever poorer and more numerous. Between 1960 and 1965 in Hough, median family income decreased from $4,732 to $3,966. The percentage of families headed by women increased from 23% to 32%.
Recent mayors, though honest and reasonably competent, have lacked the spunk to meet the city's mounting problems even part way. During Locher's regime, says Thomas Vail, publisher of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, "Some of the most powerful people in Cleveland were going to city hall and saying 'Let's get going. What can we do to help?' But nobody could get anywhere with Locher." In Vail's phrase, "that little extra spark" was missing.
Carl Stokes saw himself as the man with the spark two years ago when he ran as an independent candidate against Locher, his former boss. He came within 2,143 votes of winning, and did not let up between elections. This year, Stokes, with the influential support of the Plain Dealer, challenged Locher in the primary. He waged a gentlemanly campaign and mentioned race only to say that his own should not be an issue.
His strategy, identical to Hatcher's in Gary, was to organize the Negro vote solidly and chip away at the white electorate. It worked: his plurality over Locher was a comfortable 18,736, even though the Cuyahoga County Democratic chairman, Albert Porter, had allowed letters to go out calling Stokes a "racist Republican."
Tea & Rap. Nonetheless, Stokes emerged from the primary as the clear favorite in the general election. He was an experienced, chipper, charismatic campaigner who could beguile white suburban clubwomen at tea and rap with soul brothers in Hough. He was a Democrat in a town that had not elected a Republican mayor in the past 26 years. And his opponent was Seth Taft, 44, who bore the multiple burdens of a stiff presence, the wrong party label plus nephewship to the "Mr. Republican" who co-authored the Taft-Hartley Act, longtime anathema to organized labor.
Taft turned out to be a liberal, and a dogged, gutsy campaigner to boot. He saw "human relations" as the city's number one problem and poured out a spate of specific ideas while Stokes tended to generalize. "We don't need more plans in this city," Stokes declared at one point. "What we need is action." Actually, he was already on record with his own specifics. To an all-white meeting of policemen, Stokes declared his intention of firing Police Chief Richard Wagner as his first order of business. To a Negro club he promised: "We're going to enforce the law so that it hurts. I don't want any riots in my town." He came up with a plan to economize by selling an obsolescent municipal power plant and a little-used park. At risk of alienating Negro friends, he came out against a civilian review board to investigate allegations of police brutality.
Though Taft had scrupulously avoided the race issue--despite Stokes's needling about his upper-crust background --some of the Republican's aides openly injected color into the campaign. Perhaps in response to this pressure, Stokes a month before election day blurted during a debate that if Taft won it would be purely because of bigotry on the part of Clevelanders.
Detail for Detail. That hint of arrogance hurt Stokes. His campaign manager, Dr. Kenneth Clement, was to rue later: "A lot of people who did not like the idea of a Negro mayor were waiting for an excuse to vote against him." It was not merely an error but a near calamity. In the early opinion polls Stokes had led Taft by 30 points and more. Now he was running scared. He dropped his supercilious needling and swung into substantive issues. To answer his opponent's charge that he had been a poor legislator, Stokes produced a testimonial that read: "The reports I hear of your performance in Columbus are excellent, and I congratulate you on your job." The letter was dated last June 8 and signed by Seth Taft.
Stokes began to match Taft detail for detail. He promised to combat the crime rate (up 14% last year) by increasing the police patrol-car force one-third, expand the airport with already available fill, eliminate a particular traffic bottleneck on Baltic Road ("the Baltic Blockade"), which, conjectured Stokes, costs a 20-year commuter 100 days off his life. He announced plans for an inaugural ball to raise money for clothing for children of relief families. Even with a skillful advertising campaign, a large and capable biracial campaign staff and a regiment of 2,000 door knockers, Stokes's lead was down to 0.28% a few days before election.
Election day dawned bleak and snowy, with the snow seemingly heavier on the eastern, or Negro side of town. The wind soon equalized that, and then it became apparent that the vote would be heavy--and there was every indication that a big turnout would mean a Taft victory. The pattern of Gary was duplicated as Stokes held fast to his Negro support--he got 96%--and attracted an estimated 19% of the white vote (he had received only 15% in the primary). Even so, it was close: Stokes's plurality was just 1,644 or 0.6%, out of a total vote of 256,992.
Air of Excitement. After a cordial election-night meeting with Taft, in which the loser proclaimed Cleveland "the least bigoted city in America" and Mrs. Taft gave Shirley Stokes a bouquet of long-stemmed roses, the mayor-elect named a new police chief, Inspector Michael ("Sledgehammer Mike") Blackwell; a safety director, Joseph McManamon; and a police prosecutor, James Carnes. All three are white. One of the first orders to the police department was to discard the riot helmets that had symbolized hostility to the ghetto dwellers.
Like the fund-raising inaugural ball scheduled for next week, the helmet directive was more gesture than substance, but it was the kind of gesture that had been sadly missing around city hall. A more pragmatic innovation is Stokes's plan to fully integrate police precinct squads regardless of the neighborhoods they serve. He tried to hire Edward Logue to head Cleveland's urban-renewal program, but Logue declined to leave Boston, instead will serve Stokes on a consulting basis. Meanwhile, Stokes is talent-hunting for a full-time urban-renewal director and other top officials; and he is drawing plans to produce more jobs. He is already talking about how long it will take to fulfill his share of the contract to "do Cleveland proud," as he asked the voters to do. In his expansive way, he figures ten years.
If Stokes lives up to his potential, he will be in demand for higher office long before 1977. Cleveland, in the interim, will be his testing ground. "It hasn't been an exciting town," says Tom Vail, "but it's about to become one. There's an air of something about to happen."
What has already happened, of course, is that two big American cities have elected Negro mayors while a third rejected racism as an overriding issue. Both Negro candidates received vigorous support and vital votes from white liberals even though both owe their victories primarily to a unified Negro vote. After three summers of violence in the cities, this in itself is a reassuring portent. It will be up to Mayors Stokes and Hatcher to demonstrate that the only constructive--and indeed, tolerable --force in American politics is ballot power.
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