Carl Stokes After Cleveland

Carl Stokes chose not to run for a third term as mayor in nineteen seventy-one. The Glenville shootout had damaged his national standing. The Cleveland: NOW! program had been discredited by the weapons connection. The city's finances were deteriorating. He was forty-three years old and had accomplished more in four years than most American politicians accomplish in a career, and the work had cost him nearly everything it had cost.

He became the first Black television anchorman in New York City in nineteen seventy-two, at WNBC. He practiced law in Cleveland through the nineteen seventies and eighties. He served as Cleveland's municipal court judge. President Bill Clinton appointed him United States Ambassador to the Seychelles in nineteen ninety-four, where he served until his death from esophageal cancer in nineteen ninety-six at age sixty-eight.

His brother Louis served in Congress for thirty years, from nineteen sixty-nine to nineteen ninety-nine, representing the district that included Cleveland's east side. He was among the founders of the Congressional Black Caucus.

The city of Cleveland named its new justice center complex after Carl Stokes. There is a plaza bearing his name near City Hall. The significance of what he accomplished in November of nineteen sixty-seven, in a city that was majority white, a year before the country assassinated two of its most prominent civil rights leaders, has not diminished with the passing decades.

He never ran for office in Cleveland again after nineteen seventy-one. He did not need to. He had already done what no one before him had done.