In the mid-1960s former Cleveland Mayor Ralph Locher ran into stormy political times that likely no mayor could survive.  He was as much victim as culpable in a historic Cleveland election in 1967.

The political battle between a white ethnic mayor and an African-American challenger was followed by an election between the victorious challenger, the great grandson of a slave, and a Republican with a historic name, the grandson of a President.

Shrouded in the backdrop of this momentous election were civic machinations by business leaders, desperate to revive Cleveland to its former glory, but caught up in mounting racial conflict.  A crisis for the Establishment often means civic and business elites have to take the stage publicly.  Events force the "invisible government" of private interests to show their faces, if you look critically enough.  That happened in the '60s, as we shall see.

Having run unopposed in 1963, and having survived re-election barely in 1965, Locher wasn't able to overcome the charismatic and charming Carl Stokes and hopeless poverty, urban renewal disaster, civil strife and the undermining of the business community.  But we get ahead of the story.

Locher faced a hostile business and legal community that wanted him out, but not necessarily Stokes in.  The times they were a trying.

Indeed, Locher, as the hated Dennis Kucinich later, became the victim of a business cabal.  Corporate Cleveland, as it does today, used wealth, civic power, the press, foundations and other front groups as weapons to dominate the public sector.

Cleveland, at the time, still had major corporate headquarters here and prominent law firms that served them.  However, Cleveland had serious and long-standing festering problems.

An article I wrote in The Nation in June of 1967, with Murray Gruber, a social scientist at Case Western Reserve University, told of the city's plight:

Between 1960-75 the number of poverty families in every Negro planning area increased, and the median income slumped.  In Hough, median income skidded from $4,732 to $3,966, and two other areas, with 60,000 Negroes, had median incomes lower than Hough's.

Unemployment in March reached 15.6 percent for Negroes in poverty areas, with 58 percent of the young males jobless, or earning below poverty level wages.

Negro unemployment in general hovers around 9 percent while the community rate is 2.3 percent.

The building trades remain impregnable, with only 13 Negroes among 11,500 workers in the five major construction trades.

Only 43 Negroes were among the 1,350 apprentice trainees in the five major construction trades.

We also wrote, "In April, 1966, the (U.S.) Civil Rights Commission ripped away  Cleveland's carefully nurtured façade of social progress.  Hearings gave the ghetto a chance to speak (in Cleveland), and even it was shocked by the cumulative findings.  In July, Hough erupted in five days of rioting that took four lives."

Cleveland seemed an ungovernable hellhole.

How bad was it?  "Symbolizing police contempt, Police Chief Richard Wagner rode into Hough during the riots armed with his personal hunting rifle, which he used against snipers.  When a woman, searching for her children, was killed by gunfire, Wagner remarked, 'There was a similar occurrence in the Chicago riots.  They sacrifice one person and blame it on police brutality," The Nation piece read.

Cleveland's "ostrich compulsion gave way to a billy-club mentality," we wrote.

Locher faced long-standing problems.  He was unfortunate to be mayor when the civil rights movement crested in anger.  He didn't handle it well as his police chief's views attest.  His strategy for re-election was obvious:  Get all the white votes you can, as whites outnumbered blacks at the time.

Other political currents were less obvious.  The business community in the late '50s pushed City Hall into massive urban renewal projects, that era's dream to revitalize a once vibrant Cleveland.  Plans went seriously awry.  The renewal triggered a mass movement of people, primarily black and poor, from the central areas of the city into Hough.  Whites then moved massively out of Hough.  Ghetto housing became overcrowded.

Adding to problems, purposeful school segregation led to serious protests.  The death of the Rev. Bruce Klunder (pictured), run over by a bulldozer at a protest site, added to community passions.

Cleveland's Establishment - operators of more Fortune 500 corporations than any cities but New York and Chicago in the '60s - was in a quandary about how to handle civil unrest.  First, business leaders didn't know with whom to deal since established black leaders were not attuned to new demands of street activists.

The question was how to deal with these new problems.

The WASP Cleveland business community, though it did not want a black mayor, was willing to aid Stokes to dump Locher.

To do this, the business community played a two-timing game against Locher and temporarily for Stokes.  Unlike the 1965 election when Stokes ran as an independent, in 1967 he ran as a Democrat with the promise of help from President Lyndon Johnson's administration.

To undermine Locher, the business community formed various entities to spew negative material against Locher.  The Little Hoover Commission was  established to "study" city government.  Of course, final reports were all essentially negative and embarrassing to Locher's administration.  I personally got one of my first tastes of how the business establishment worked here.  I was assisting the late Don Sabath covering urban renewal efforts (at the Plain Dealer).

Locher was vulnerable on a stalled urban renewal program.  We were called to the offices of Edward Howard & Co., still the town's elite public relations firm, to be given the "scoop" (over the Cleveland Press) on what Little Hoover said about Locher's handling of urban renewal.  It wasn't pretty.

In a sidebar to the main story, I wrote:  "All six of Cleveland's urban renewal programs are lagging behind schedule and riddled with problems, according to the Little Hoover Commission report disclosed yesterday."

Then President Johnson's Housing and Urban Development Secretary Robert Weaver (pictured) took unprecedented action by denying Locher federal renewal funds due the city.  Stokes later wrote:

Locher's loss of federal funds gave us a chance to attack him at a most vulnerable time.  When those attacks were coupled with my frequent and visible trips to Washington, it began to seem to people that President Johnson wanted Carl Stokes to be mayor of Cleveland.  A federal urban renewal official was blunt to me:  "Cleveland is our Vietnam. We'd like to get out but we don't know how."

Typically, however, the expert Little Hoover studies failed to examine what forces pushed these massive urban renewal programs upon a city with obvious inadequate resources.  Nor did they examine the cheerleaders for these efforts - the Plain Dealer - now critical of the failures and Locher.

The Cleveland Development Foundation (CDF), which propelled the disastrous urban renewal program, was given a media free-pass, indeed, commendations.  CDF promised cures for the city's problems.  It was funded, it said, to eliminate "slum and blight."  Some 80 corporations gave $1 million to CDF and another $5 million came from the Hanna Fund of the Cleveland Foundation.  Edward Sloan, a CDF member and chairman of Oglebay-Norton, inadvertently told the truth about the true corporate aims:

"It would be a mistake to think that the foundation (CDF) ever had as its main concern housing.  The main thing was to make land available for industrial and commercial use," Sloan said.

The CDF got such good press that Sloan worried it would be seen as an "ambivalent Santa Claus" for aiding the black community.

A valid assessment of business efforts came from Thomas Westropp, president of Women's Federal Savings and a city planning commission member.  Westropp said:  "For some the urban renewal program has worked very well indeed.  Hospitals and educational institutions have been constructed and enlarged.  So have commercial and industrial interests and many service organizations, all with the help of urban renewal dollars.  With respect to housing, however, the urban renewal program has been a disaster.  I wish I could believe that all of this was accidental and brought about by the inefficiency of well-meaning people - but I just cannot.  The truth, it seems to me, is that it was planned that way."

Locher paid the price for these self-interested decisions of corporate leaders.

At the same time the Little Hoover Commission was doing a job on Locher, another tool of the Establishment was getting prime recognition from the news media.  The so-called "liberal" press more likely is a corporate press slanted to amplify the views of wealthy interests.

Ralph Besse, chairman of Cleveland Electric Illuminating and a former partner in Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, formed the Inner City Action Committee.  Here came another corporate entity that purported assistance to Locher and the city's renewal efforts.  After a series of meetings with Besse's group, a Locher aide wrote, "All in all, I was not encouraged to believe that the position of the business community represented by Mr. Besse would be willing to offer any real assistance except on its own terms."  Besse wanted Locher to fire his urban renewal director and replace him with a retired U.S. General on Besse's staff.  (Besse, pictured, was quite a leader.  He encouraged his top executives at CEI to read German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel's biography and apply its war philosophy to the company's business tactics).

Locher rejected Besse's offer and Besse severed relations with the Locher administration.  The play of the story by the Plain Dealer represented a serious blow to the already beleaguered Locher.  It was all out of proportion to its importance.  The paper's front-page banner headline read:  "Besse's Inner-City Group Quits Locher."  Besse had a direct financial interest ignored by the Plain Dealer.  CEI wanted to take Muny Light from the city.  Stokes, who during the campaign said he would sell to CEI, changed his mind when he learned the city electric system's value.

Other corporate leaders got into the act.  One went after Locher's base.  Squire-Sanders managing partner James C. Davis in a speech before the Cleveland Bar Association blamed the white ethnic community - not Cleveland's leaders - for the city's racial problems.  Thousands of copies of the speech - "Cleveland's White Problem: A Challenge to the Bar" - were distributed free.

Stokes took advantage of the corporate hostility to Locher.  He wrote in Promises of Power that the power structure in early 1967 catered to him.  "In the Spring and Summer of 1967, when the power structure was grooming me as the man to back in the mayor's race, I was invited to the most exclusive clubs in Cleveland to talk to them about myself and what I hoped to do for Cleveland."

Cleveland's corporate leadership also used tactics that today would be considered underhanded and invite press condemnation (hopefully).

In one important effort unreported at the time except in Point of View, corporate interests paid black militants weekly to keep peace for Carl in the ghetto that summer.  The payments were made each Saturday at the Cleveland Call and Post newspaper.  The importance of this $40,000 summer program sponsored sub-rosa was its ability to help maintain peace in 1967.  Another outbreak that summer would have severely damaged Stokes' candidacy.

Most telling was the duration of the under-the-table program.  It ended on the weekend of the Democratic primary.  That indicated to me that business leaders were interested in helping Stokes only in the primary not in the upcoming general election when he would oppose a Republican.

In the general election, Republican corporate lawyer, Seth Taft, a partner in Jones, Day, Cockley & Reavis, ran against Democratic primary victor Stokes.  At the time because of the population make-up, the belief was any white candidate would win in a head-to-head election with a black candidate.
  

There was more unusual activity to split the Democratic white vote and assist Stokes.  Taft's Jones-Day law partner and top civic leader Jack Reavis helped financially support a third candidate in the Democratic primary.

The business community funded former Lakewood Mayor Frank Celeste, the father of Dick Celeste.  The aim was a second white candidate would draw from Locher's vote.  Both Frank Celeste and Taft moved into Cleveland from suburbs to run.  Reavis contributed $3,000 to Frank Celeste and three other foundation members $5,000 more, considerable sums in a mayoral primary at the time, particularly for Republicans to a Democrat.  Stokes won by more votes than Locher and Celeste combined.

Some church leaders at the time wanted to bring Saul Alinsky, the famed community organizer, here to help Cleveland's impoverished community.  I called Reavis for comment.  His response was, "I think it (Alinsky in Cleveland) would be a tragedy."  Besse told me, "We don't need an agitator in Cleveland."  Activist help for grassroots people was not in the business leaders plan.

In contrast, the Cleveland business and foundation community poured money into the Cleveland ghetto that summer in a major attempt to buy off the black community against its own interests.  The city was staged, I believe, for a national test to divert black street anger into conventional politics by Cleveland and national foundation leaders.

The Ford Foundation funded the Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation (GCAF), a subsidiary of the Cleveland Foundation.  GCAF was formed to insulate elite Cleveland Foundation members from personally having to deal with ghetto issues.  The Cleveland Foundation and GCAF staffs, however, were the same.  Ford also gave $175,000 to Cleveland's Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), $127,000 to a businessmen's group headed by Reavis and $200,000 to GCAF for programs involving racial issues.

Surprisingly, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., having trouble organizing in Chicago, came to Cleveland during this summer.  To headlines, he announced he would register 40,000 black voters.  It was not news that Stokes wanted, fearing King would generate white voter anger and registration.

My studies showed that Reavis' group gave King $5,000 that summer, while CORE, having received Ford Foundation money, also contributed $3,000.  That didn't cover King's expenses as he traveled to Cleveland a number of times and had staff here.  An October 1967 outline of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, however, revealed that $27,899 in expenses was used in Cleveland from its Atlanta offices.  SCLC had received a $230,000 grant in Atlanta from the Ford Foundation that year.

How important was this election to the aims of business leaders, not only in Cleveland but nationally?  I'd cite a statement by McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation, who told the Urban League in 1966 that if blacks burned American cities, "The white man's companies will have to take the losses."  Robert Allen in "Black Awakening in Capitalist America," quoted Bundy and added, "White America is not so stupid as not to comprehend that elemental fact."  Bundy told the Urban League audience, "Something would have to be done about the urban problem."  Allen added, "Thus, the Ford Foundation was on its way to becoming the most important though least publicized organization manipulating the militant black movement."  The Cleveland election provided Ford with a prime testing of a strategy to turn black anger into conventional politics.

 In Cleveland, the Ford Foundation had a perfect setting.  It also had close friends at the Cleveland Foundation and a city dominated by corporate controlled foundations and front groups to guide its aims to fruition.

Locher was defeated in the primary.  Stokes went on to defeat Taft.

The business community made best of the notoriety of being the first large American city to elect a black as mayor.  Business interests took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal soon after Stokes election.  It bragged of an old-line city with new, blue chip leadership.

Their love affair with Stokes turned sour eventually.  Ironically, a year after Stokes' election and 36 years ago, the same buyoff strategy used by Ralph Besse to keep peace in the ghetto that summer so Stokes could defeat Locher, proved very risky.  Ahmed Evans and others were paid to extended peace in Cleveland but the second time around events ended with the Glenville shootout.  That broke the alliance Cleveland business had built with Stokes who had walked the streets of Cleveland keeping peace on April 4, 1968, the day Rev. King was assassinated.

After the Glenville shootout, Reavis and his friends deserted Stokes.  "He felt the corporate leaders had deserted him and Cleveland, and that they simply didn't want conflict," an associate said.

Stokes' press secretary said of him, "He became more and more conscious of his blackness and this disturbed the business community."  He quoted Stokes' unstated feelings:  "I'm not going to be their house nigger."

Stokes did not run for a third term in 1971.  Locher went on to win a seat on the Ohio Supreme Court, where he served with distinction with a liberal interpretation of our laws.

Photos Courtesy of Oregon State University and
The Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland State University Library.
  

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