Marker.

Mark one.

OK. You had worked in Mississippi in the early '60s as a journalist covering the civil rights movement. The, the struggle going on there. How did your work, what you were doing with the Stokes campaign, how would you compare that, how was it connected with what...the movement in Jackson?

Thinking back to the, to the period of time of the '60s, I think it was the people believed they could really make a difference. Certainly, that was the strength and the spirit of both the people in the South and some, from the North that went into the South that just their caring enough and wanting to do something could make a difference. And that certainly was, would be a carry over of both the '65 and the '67 Stokes campaign. They didn't, they weren't well financed. They didn't have all the appropriate endorsements, and yet they believed they could make it happen.

Well, talk about your experience in the, in Mississippi and how that compared...how it was connected with what you were doing with the Stokes campaign.

Well, I'm not sure that they were connected except that it was that same timeframe. I was a student of the '60s, and, and was in...just enthralled with the fact that we could change history. Although now that I say that, I wonder if that isn't a retrospective [laughs] view. I mean, that was what we, that was where the excitement was. That was the frontier. And, and certainly in terms of politics, the cities in the North were where the political frontier was, and so I was attracted to that.

OK. I just really wanted you to say that you had worked as a journalist in Mississippi and what you saw, and how that might possibly be connected with what you were doing in, in Cleveland or what you saw happening, the movement happening in Cleveland. But just identify the fact that you had worked in, in Mississippi.

I published a, a weekly newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi. It really served the whole state of Mississippi. It didn't have a real large circulation, but it was the third largest circulating paper in the state, which says a lot more about how many people read in Mississippi than, than how big it was. But I did that for two years, from the summer of '62 until the summer of '64, then returned north and, and went to college. By then I was married, and my wife was gonna be expecting a child.

OK. What-why did, why did people join the Stokes campaign? And you might, you mentioned about volunteers and the idealism. What, what were, what were people trying to atrieve [sic] -achieve, trying to achieve? What were you trying to achieve? Why did you join the campaign?

The '60s, the movement that, and we made reference to what was happening in the South, was a belief that civil rights, the rights of people who had been-

Could you just begin that again, and don't make a past reference. Just the '60s, once again.

[inaudible]

So, so, why, why did people try to...why, why did people join the cam-campaign? What, what were you trying to achieve, trying to achieve?

Civil rights was a movement where people believed that they could change the way people were treated. And, and the Stokes campaign, while it was a political campaign, it had a candidate and became a, a campaign that stood for that kind of change. And the energy that made that campaign go was not money. It was the belief that people could make a difference. And so it was, it was a volunteer campaign. It was a campaign that, that brought in just thousands of people.

OK. Was there as particular belief in the Democratic Party, Party as a, as an organ of change at, at that time? How did you look at the, the Democratic Party in, in '67?

By '67, I was ready to believe that politics could really make a difference. That while everybody in it didn't ennoble it, it could be a very noble profession and, and a noble mechanism. But as a student of the '60s, when I was first in college and as I went into the South, I was, I was a cynical student and really didn't believe that big government and big business and all that kind of thing that had brought the world to what it was could really work. John Seigenthaler, who was at that time the editor of _The Nashville Tennessean_ [sic] was a contact that I had the privilege of making. Since he was close to the Kennedys, I was able to see bright people who believed that they could make a difference, and it was a, a lot of fun. It was exciting to be part of that. And so I began...while I wasn't, I saw him, I got to know him. He acquainted me with that. It made me believe that I could do that sort of thing even though I was not part of, of what he was.

OK. In, in 1967, we're talking about the Stokes primary election, what were the numbers? I mean, talk about, a little bit about what, what did you expect? What kind of strategy did you need to put together to get Carl Stokes elected?

Well, it, when we're talking about 1967, this is two years after he had run the first time as an independent. In 1965, there was little belief that, that he could be elected. As a matter of fact, the political pundits would evolve...were all predicting that he couldn't possibly win. He didn't win, but he came close enough for a recount. One of the things that I-this is before we had the polls for every election and at every point in an election. But I did what others did of asking Blacks that might be taxi drivers or, or people in the parking lot and all the, all the ones that one would run in downtown, just as the political pundits. And they said no, they didn't think Carl Stokes would win. But I asked them the second question. I said, Are you going to vote for him. They said, They're darn right. And their...and, and that's part of what began, well, it happened in 1965 that needed to be exploited and taken, taken to victory in 1967 was that there was a belief that it was the thing, the right thing to do. And by 1967, it was pretty well clear because he had come so close that he could win.

OK. And in terms of percentages, what kind of voter turnout did you need from the Black community, and what kind of dep-how dependent were you on the White liberal community? What was, what were, were your, your goals in, in '67 when you were running Stokes? What, what kind of numbers did you need?

Well, the strategy was, and, and this is particularly true in 1967 to have the candidate campaign really equally on both the east and west side of town and both the Black and White community. Of course the, they...the campaign relied on doing very well in the Black community, and that's where the biggest campaign volunteer effort was. Now, this was an off-year election and a primary was the first critical one to get through. And as a result of volunteers that were brought into that campaign, we were able to get an eighty percent turnout and ninety-five percent success of the people who were voting. The ninety-five percent was almost more predictable and not as big a chore as the eighty percent turnout in an off year primary election.

OK. If you could just, if you could just say those numbers again, and make sure you identify that that's the Black community you're talking about.

Yeah.

So, what, so what were the numbers that you, you wanted? What were the numbers that you got in that primary election?

In, in the Black community, which as I recall was about forty or forty-two percent of the total population, we ended up with eighty perecent turnout and about ninety-five percent voting for Stokes. But it was the eighty percent turnout that, that was a result of this phenomenal volunteer effort. And as I recall, about twenty-five percent voted for Stokes from the non-Black community, and that was because there was a number of people who stepped forward to endorse him and because the candidate went out and sought that support.

OK. What was your strategy for voter registration? I know voter registration was an important part of the effort. Could you talk a little bit about, you know, the, your, your strategy, how, how that worked, and any particular memories you might have.

Well, voter registration was very important in, in 1967 to capitalize on this feeling that it could be done in the Black community. A scheme that we came upon was to have what I called the non-registered voter petition. This served several functions. One, to involve people who wanted to get involved in the campaign early on. In a sense test them and give them something to do to...for us to be able to measure whether they would be successful workers. And what we asked them to do was to fill out, I think it was, the petition only called for five names of people who were not registered to vote. And this was well prior to the registration deadline. That of course gave us a targeted list that we could go and attempt to get registered, and we met with a lot of success.

OK. Could you talk about Carl Stokes? I mean Carl Stokes as a, as a candidate. Carl Stokes as an organizer. Let's first...Carl Stokes in the field. Talk about Carl Stokes. What, what was it like being with Carl on the streets of, of Hough or Glenville in the Black communities? What was that like?

In both the Black and White community, Carl Stokes was a, a candidate of just immense charisma. It would, it would be easy to see that in, in the Black community, but maybe its best measure would be in the White community. I, I remember when a group of liberal White ministers were having a meeting, and they'd invited everyone, it was in a basement of a west side church. It was very warm. Carl Stokes was still serving in the legislature, and in fact the legislature was in session that day. And he just couldn't escape a vote. We'd made arrangements for him to fly back, and, and yet even so he was late.

And I was with that audience, and they were-

OK. Let's just stop one second. We ran out of film. We're just gonna [unintelligible] -

-great.

Marker.

OK. Could you talk about Carl Stokes as a candidate and how, how audiences on both the east and west side, Black and White, responded to him?

Carl Stokes had immense charisma. I guess that's a word that's used a lot with politicians. But a story that I think reflects that it really was true of Carl Stokes was as a matter of fact on the west side of Cleveland when a group of liberal White Protestant ministers had a meeting for him. It was summer. The meeting was in a church basement where it was quite warm, pre-air conditioning. Carl was still serving in the Ohio legislature. And as a matter of fact, they were in session, an important vote he couldn't get out of. We had a plane arranged to be able to spirit him back in time for the meeting. Nevertheless, he was late. These liberal folks from the west side really got very angry. How could we have this meeting, and then he wouldn't be here on time. And it was about as surly a crowd as I ever remember, because they felt as though they were being wronged and shortchanged. Then he did arrive. He came in that back room and gave them a [laughs] Carl Stokes smile, and they just melted and were in his hand. Tremendous power of, of, of just the presence of his personality. But there was more. He, he did understand how to organize people. And, and this showed on both east and west side, and maybe most particularly in his base in the Black community. That...so many in the Black community, their experience was as an undertaker, as a, as a teacher, as a ward healer that they would have a very small organization under them. And so that people in the Black community weren't exposed to an organization that would be wider.

OK. Can you just start again and just make it clear that you're talking about politicians. That politicians came from the ranks of funeral directors, and teachers, and...

I didn't really mean that.

OK.

I mean, that, that's the experience...

OK. I'm sorry-

That, that, the...I was, I was struggling with that a little bit.

What, what-OK, so once again. Could you talk about Carl Stokes and his ability to organization coalitions and to organize a campaign?

I think particularly for the '60s, he was somewhat unique in the Black community among politicians. Certainly at least from what I saw in Cleveland in that he understood how to put together an organization with captains, and lieutenants, and sergeants, and, and soldiers. By and large, what one saw both in politics and in business in the Black community and in the church was one person who might be a very strong person, but that he would only, he or she would only have someone under them that they could control. And so the Black politicians in 1965 did not support Carl Stokes almost unanimously, while he ended up having widespread support amongst the people. They really couldn't comprehend a campaign that would go city wide. And, and that was his uniqueness, I think, to be able to visualize and then carry out an organization that we-went beyond the people that he immediately controlled.

OK. Could you talk a little bit about that coalition or, or people who might have been in that coalition, or, or weren't? Could you talk about labor, if they were involved, Black political leaders. You talked about that a little already. But let's talk about, you know, labor and White liberals. What, what were their motives, and why, why, why did they become involved in the campaign in, in '67?

Well, as opposed to the really great support that I associated with liberal causes when I was in the South coming from labor, the labor movement in Cleveland in 1967 in that primary and certainly in '65 when he first ran was not...did not represent support for Carl Stokes. The liberal community was a, another, another matter where he did have a number of people who were very excited by his campaign. They were caught up in the fact that the '60s was a time when some of the things that they had been talking about could happen and that, I think, Carl Stokes personified that for many. So, while they, they, they represented most of the money he was able to raise, it wasn't a great deal. But, but it did come from the ADA kind of liberal community.

And what about the business community? What were their motives in supporting Stokes?

He did get some support in '67. The more cynical view might have been that, that that was in order to protect-

Cou-could you just start again and make sure you identify the business community? In, in 1967. Why did the business community support Stokes?

It's, it's really not fair to I suppose, for me to, to try and determine the motivation of the business community's support of Carl Stokes. A, a cynical view might be that there were those who supported a Black mayor because then he could control the Black community at a time when the business community and everybody I suppose was afraid of the kind of riots that were occurring at that time. That would of shortchanged, I think, the spirit that was behind the people who were supporting Carl Stokes in the community. And, and I don't think it's fair to say it was true of all of the business community. But I think that would have been the kind of thing you might have read about in the paper both before and after the election.

OK. You, you, you described to me walking into headquarters with Carl Stokes and then showing him this telephone room upstairs.

Hmm.

Could you just talk us through that again? Walking inside the, into, into the campaign headquarters and the telephone room, and explaining what the telephone room was for.

I had been able to arrange to get a downtown headquarters that would be the headquarters in the 1967 Stokes campaign for free, which is the way you want to get it in a campaign. I had had some ground level office space that would have been ideal for our volunteers to do the traditional kind of activities, but it had a, a larger room that was just down a hall and up the stairs, as I recall. And as I was walking the candidate, Carl Stokes, through that first day and kind of laying out how I envisioned it, I said, Up in this room, we're going to have forty telephones, and we're going to, we're going to solicit volunteers cold out of the phone books. And, and he said, Well, that's gonna cost a lot of money. And I said, Well, that, that wasn't my part of the campaign. [laughs] But that we did in fact have that phone room. We did solicit cold volunteers and ended up with what we called volunteer coordinator, block, block supervisors. Block supervisors.

Once again, just explain the, the strategy of how you organized people with the...through the, through the telephones.

This of course is just, I'm, if I describe how we did it through the telephones, that's just one of the ways-

OK.

-that, that people were recruited into the campaign. But I think it was a, a unique way that, that helped us to have that eighty percent turnout that occurred, that there was something called a crisscross, which is a telephone book that organizes by house number as opposed to by alphabetical order. And we divided all of the streets in the Black community and sectioned them off by twenty households. And we hoped to find a volunteer who would be willing to solicit support for Stokes within each of those blocks of twenty. So, we called them block supervisors. And they had to go through the system of, of getting the non-registered voter petition filled if they were involved early enough in the campaign, and then other activities that could in effect test them. And those that, that didn't respond, mail something back, or bring something back into one of the field headquarters, well, then we'd go back to that list and try and find somebody so that for just about every twenty households in the community, there was someone identified who had been tested, who was working as a volunteer in that campaign.

OK. Was, was, was it a deliberate policy to not identify Stokes public-publicly as being a Black candidate as opposed to just being the candidate? That is what, was there a deliberate, deliberate effort to take race out in, in the public media in that, in the campaign for Stokes?

In the media?

Yeah, as far as your campaign media, your, your campaign message. Did you try to downplay race?

Carl Stokes, you know, obviously-you got a problem?

Let's just stop for one second.

[inaudible]

Marker.

What did you think of Stokes' policy of, of not, not being labeled as a Black candidate? Of making sure that he was, he would campaign equally in the Black and White community to try to put-downplay race in the campaign?

Well, I think there's two ways to answer how Carl Stokes did not want to operate just as a Black candidate. On the one hand, he did campaign throughout the entire community irrespective of the race of the neighborhoods. Probably in the end he spent more time in the Black community, but it was an effort to really try and evenly balance it. On the other hand, he certainly didn't shy away from talking about the issues that were important issues in the Black community. The thing of course what was true and I think is probably true now is that issues that are important to urban citizens that happen to be Black are very often issues that are important to ones that don't happen to be Black. But he talked about issues that were very important to, to urban residents. And, I mean he didn't shy away from them at all. And they played very well in the Black community, and they began to make some impact on the, on the west side as well.

What, what did the endorsement from Zoltan Gombos mean to the campaign? What was, what was, what was the symbolic importance of that?

Well, I'm goin' to have to admit that the endorsement of, of the ethnic editor-

-is not one that I can recall as well.

OK, let's stop tape. Stop camera.

You know, and the-

OK, all right.

[inaudible]

Mark.

Could you tell us the, the, the story of the, the second debate in the general election?

Can we cut for a second. I'm sorry.

Sure.

Mark.

OK. Could you set the stage? I, I want you to tell the story of the second debate at the high school on the west side, and talk a little bit about the first debate and, and what happened that night of the second debate.

Well, the, the context of the second debate in 1967 probably should be set with the first debate was on the east side with a largely Black audience. Carl, who thinks of himself as a very good debater and, and usually is had great success the first night. In the debate on the west side, the audience was more hostile. And a remark that Carl made about the fact that the media and others were trying to make the race racial was not well accepted by the audience. There was boos. There was heckles and cat calls. The net result was a very negative kind of feeling, and the perception was, certainly what was written in the newspaper was that he had not won the debate. And there was a setback for the campaign.

And what happened that next day in the, in the campaign office after Stokes had brought race into the campaign?

Or the, the-

Or had been, it had been mentioned.

All right, you're not saying that [unintelligible] . The, the following date, a number of the campaign activists, whether they were supposed to go to work that day or not, ended up in the morning down at campaign headquarters. There was some recriminations against some decisions that had been made by some publicists that were brought up and, and generally a feeling that the, the campaign had been let down by this error. Stokes did I thought was a pretty strategically wise thing. He asked me to get everybody up in that phone room, which was our largest room. And everybody trudged upstairs. And then he spoke to them, and he said that, Well, we had this incident last night. It may have been that your candidate made a mistake. But remember your candidate isn't God and is gonna make mistakes. It's, it's been our one set back, and we feel that opposition has had a lot. And one mistake won't lose an election unless you let it. So, just remember your candidate can make mistakes. And he repeated that he thought that the candidate wasn't God. And so it worked very well because they vented against him for a while and then kind of began to feel better, began talking about other strategies in the campaign. And the meeting ended. And I remember it as people were filing downstairs and they were stopping to talk with him, and then they had all left, and it was only he just getting ready to go down the stairs. And I said, Carl, it must have been rather difficult for you to say that the candidate wasn't like God. And he said, Yes, it was. But I didn't mean it. [laughs]

OK, great. And could you talk about the, the, the primary night? I mean we're going backwards. The primary in '67. What was-when, when Stokes finally, it was announced first by radio then by the TV that Stokes had, had lost, that Locher had won. And then Stokes came out. Do you just, do you remember those details? If not, let's just talk about the victory that, that day.

Well, on election night, primary election night in 1967, it looked like it was gonna be a close election. We certainly would have expected it to be. And we realized, Lou Stokes, his brother and I, that there was no one down at the board of elections that was really friendly to the Stokes organization. And we thought we should go down there and kinda watch over what was happening. So, we did go down there and stayed long enough to, to come to realize that it was going to be a, a Stokes victory. A pretty, pretty sizeable substantial Stokes victory. So, then we, we went back to the campaign headquarters, but it was a very difficult job even getting close to it. The campaign headquarters that I had opened months before as an empty barren place was now just surrounded by people far out into the street, and there was dancing in the street on Superior Avenue. And certainly that is a, a night to remember.

Now, what...after the primary, why was Taft such a formidable candidate? Why, why was he a particularly difficult candidate for, for the Stokes campaign?

Well, it seemed like he shouldn't have been. I mean it was a Democratic town, had a Democratic nominee who had after the primary a unity rally that really for the first time brought in substantial labor and, and, and really across the board Democratic political people who supported Carl Stokes, including U.S. senator Steven Young. So, you wouldn't think that a Republican candidate would make any more than a nominal run. Of course the reason that he was able to was because that was still a, a town that had much racial feeling in it. And so a White candidate, irrespective of party, was running against a Black candidate. And it ended up being a very close election.

OK. Stokes has won the election, November 7th, 1967. What was the expectation? What, what did people expect of this new mayor? What, what did people hope for when they voted for Carl Stokes?

One of the consequences of having a, an emotional volunteer kind of campaign is that people have to believe in some kind of dream. It probably always becomes an unrealistic expectation. It did seem though that by winning with not only substantial Black support but very meaningful White support that Carl Stokes had an opportunity to really do a lot to, to solve the wounds of, of a divided city. I think he did a number of things to move in that direction. And overall though by the time four years later he had left, it was at least as divided a city and in some ways perhaps more so.

OK, let, let's just go back to the beginning. You had worked in Mississippi as a journalist covering the civil rights movement. How was what you were seeing in Mississippi connected to the work you were later doing on the Stokes campaign?

Don't ask it that way. [laughs]

Don't ask-all right. Can, can you, can you connect what you were, what was happening in Mississippi with what was happening in Cleveland?

Well, when I was in Mississippi-

OK.

-I, I mean that's the problem.

[unintelligible]

There was no Cleveland. You see?

What were you doing in Mississippi, and how is it-what were you doing in Mississippi in '62 to '64?

Be-beginning in the summer of 1962 for two years, I published a weekly newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi. Medgar Evers was on my board and one of the people that had begun that newspaper in the first place. He served on my board until he was assassinated. And I unfortunately had the unfortunate experience of being the first newsman on the scene because I knew where he lived when word came out that he had been shot down. James Meredith went to Ole Miss at that time, and there was that crisis that resulted in the death of several people. I knew him both as a journalist covering that as a story as well as knowing him as an individual.

OK. Stop camera. Any...

Mark it.

After that second debate, Stokes began to slip in the polls, and Taft began to rise. Election night, what are your memories of it? I mean, do-were you losing hope? Was there a chance that Stokes might not win?

Oh, I think election night, general election night in 1967, it was expected that Stokes was gonna win. The fact that it turned out to be so close, I, I think was a surprise. And there was some anger because it was so close that throughout the evening, it could have gone either way. And the feeling that the only way a Democrat who had won the primary convincingly the way he had, the only way he could lose was because of racism. And as I recall, Gary Hatch-Dick Hatcher running in Gary, Indiana was having the same kind of teeter-totter night.

Could you talk about the informal polling that you did in '65 and sort of why that set it up for '67?

In, in 1965, the political pundits didn't believe that Carl Stokes was even gonna be really a factor. They didn't believe that most Blacks voted, and they didn't think that if they did they necessarily would follow a Black candidate. There wasn't a precedent. They had polled, and I did the same kind of polling of Blacks that they had encountered just in, in the course of the day. And they said, Did you think Carl Stokes was gonna win? And they said, No. And I think they thought that he probably wouldn't. They didn't ask the second question though that I, I did ask, and that is, But are you gonna vote for him? And they said, Well, you're darn right" And they did. And I...they may have surprised themselves because of their numbers and the intensity of their support resulted in an election that was close enough for a recount. Carl didn't win it that time, but he came that close. And it was certainly the momentum of '65 that made '67 possible, and everybody knew then that it was possible.

OK. Thank you very much. Very, very good.

Nice, smooth-