Carl Stokes, November 7, 1967
Near Cleveland, Ohio
Carl Burton Stokes grew up in a two-room apartment in a Cleveland housing project. His father died when Carl was two. He and his brother Louis were raised by their mother, who cleaned houses. He dropped out of high school, worked in a foundry, got his equivalency diploma, worked his way through college and law school, and by the mid-nineteen sixties was a state legislator who had already made history as one of the first Black members of the Ohio General Assembly.
On November seventh, nineteen sixty-seven, he won the Cleveland mayoral election with fifty point five percent of the vote. His opponent was Seth Taft, grandson of former President William Howard Taft. Cleveland in nineteen sixty-seven was a majority-white city. Black residents made up thirty-seven percent of the electorate. Stokes won ninety-five percent of the Black vote and enough white voters to put him over the top by roughly sixteen hundred votes.
He was the first Black mayor elected in a major American city. The national press descended. Time and Newsweek ran him on their covers. International newspapers treated the election as evidence that something had shifted in American politics. Whether it had was a question the next four years would answer more ambiguously.
Stokes launched a sweeping community development initiative called Cleveland: NOW!, aimed at raising one and a half billion dollars over ten years for housing, jobs, and neighborhood infrastructure. He opened city hall positions to Black and women applicants who had previously been excluded. He was, by any measure, governing actively under conditions of intense national scrutiny with a city apparatus that had never been designed with him in mind.
His brother Louis was elected to Congress from Cleveland in nineteen sixty-eight. Two Stokes brothers, from the housing project, simultaneously running two of the most visible public institutions in Cleveland. The city that had produced that outcome was also the city that would make their work extraordinarily difficult.
