6 From Earth Day to EcoCity

“Stokes Fears Poor Lose Priority to Pollution War,” read the Plain Dealer headline—not exactly the type of press that organizers of the first Earth Day were hoping for. Appearing on Thursday, April 16, 1970, the story covered the ceremony announcing Cleveland’s “Crisis in the Environment Week,” scheduled to begin that Saturday. Mayor Stokes had invited a number of environmental activists to City Hall for the occasion, where he indicated that his administration was supporting the event and then, surprisingly, announced concerns. In a statement that appeared in the Plain Dealer the next day, in the African American weekly Call and Post the next week, and in the New York Times the next month, Stokes said, “I am fearful that the priorities on air and water pollution may be at the expense of what the priorities of the country ought to be: proper housing, adequate food and clothing.”1 Suddenly the administration’s support for the growing environmental movement seemed in doubt.

Plain Dealer reporter Robert McGruder captured some of the discussion that took place in City Hall after Stokes expressed his reservations. Rev. Earl Cunningham pushed back, quoting statistics about how many people would die that week because of the effects of pollution. Cunningham was the white pastor of the all-black Mt. Pleasant Methodist Church on Cleveland’s East Side—the church the Stokes family attended. He was no stranger to the problems of urban poverty, but he must have been taken aback by Stokes’s sudden skepticism about the “glamour” of the ecology movement. “If you cannot breathe and there is no water it doesn’t matter what kind of house you live in,” Cunningham said. Stokes would have none of it, retorting with his own statistics about how many babies would die because of poor prenatal care and adding that hungry children in Biafra, Mississippi, and Hough needed food today. Then, after conceding that air and water pollution were important issues, Stokes revealed his growing frustration with suburban leaders, with whom he had reached an impasse regarding sewage treatment. “It is a lot easier to get the people in Parma and Shaker Heights and Lakewood, and even the President of the United States concerned about pollution than about hunger,” he said, according to the Plain Dealer. Perhaps this back-and-forth was inadvertent—a momentary lapse for a mayor who usually stayed on script—or perhaps Stokes was making a calculated political stand, one that might serve him in the future.

No doubt Stokes’s position played well on Cleveland’s East Side, especially after a longer piece on the issue appeared in the Call and Post under the headline “Poverty Gets Top Priority over Pollution from Stokes.” In the article, German-born poet, photographer, activist, and reporter Ulf Goebel included many of the same quotes as McGruder, and he added his own pointed analysis about the suburban/urban divide. “Even environmental problems that lack the glamour of air and water pollution control tend to be forgotten about,” he wrote. “For example, there is in the ghetto a substantial rat problem. Suburban idealists have no experience or knowledge of this. So they don’t worry about it.” Goebel, like Stokes, understood that the crisis in the urban environment involved more than just polluted air and water.2

Stokes’s position didn’t play as well in the New York Times, which usually treated the mayor with admiration. A month after Earth Day, a Times editorial, titled “Ecological Backlash,” noted that the people of Cleveland had seen “with their own eyes their river go up in flames” and then chided Stokes for his position. “It is sad to see so fine a Mayor as Carl B. Stokes of Cleveland succumbing to the notion that the fight against pollution can only be waged at the expense of the poor.” The Times argued, “Far from being competitive, these two vital sets of demands are interwoven aspects of the same environmental problem.” Stokes understood this, of course, and had made that argument himself, but now, with the federal budget under pressure from the seemingly endless Vietnam War, and an obvious pullback in the War on Poverty, Stokes also understood that the political winds had shifted, along with the nation’s priorities. Cleveland was struggling through an increasingly bad budgetary situation and could no longer hope for greater support from the federal government. Since the state legislature was an unlikely savior, Stokes knew something would have to give.

After the initial encounter at City Hall, Environmental Crisis Week proved a great success. A long roster of events, many of them organized by city employee Laurence Aurbach and Cleveland State University student Larry Tomscak, garnered good attendance and positive press. The Sierra Club led a cleanup of Edgewater Beach, where chapter vice president Grant Thompson explained that the club wanted to “dramatize the tragic condition of Cleveland’s water recreation areas.”3 At the same time, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts planted seedlings in the park. Stokes missed these events and others, as he traveled to Tulsa with his family to visit his sister-in-law, but his absence didn’t seem to matter. Ralph Nader roused a crowd of eight hundred at Cleveland State, arguing that it would cost corporations only a fraction of their profits to control pollution. “The way to do it is known and it would not cost any jobs,” he said, singling out Republic Steel for his criticism. According to the Cleveland Press, after the talk some of those in attendance picketed the Republic headquarters, a mile from campus. The previous day, April 22, more than a thousand students and faculty participated in a “March of Death” from the Cleveland State campus down to the river where Moses Cleaveland had disembarked and founded the city. Press reporter Betty Klaric kept busy during the week, reporting on events from the “March of Death” to the activities of Lakewood sixth-graders, who gave presentations to younger students and picked up litter around the Roosevelt School. The Call and Post also offered positive coverage of the events, noting that congregations made plans for “Save Our Environment” services at the beginning of the week and that many East Side schools had plans for cleanup activities, educational posters, skits, and, at Glenville High School, even chemistry experiments to demonstrate the consequences of water pollution.4

The enthusiastic participation of East Side schools and the positive coverage in the Call and Post didn’t reflect the ambivalence of the African American community about the growing influence of the environmental movement. Some prominent African Americans, including Stokes, were concerned that the environmental reform would be too narrow. As prominent civil rights leader Whitney Young Jr. wrote in his widely read syndicated column, “I get the uneasy feeling that some people who have suddenly discovered the pollution issue embrace it because its basic concern is improving middle-class life.” Like Stokes, Young knew that African Americans suffered from severe environmental degradation, but pollution wasn’t their only concern. As he put it in his Earth Day column, which appeared in the Call and Post on April 25: “Air pollution isn’t such a hot topic in the ghetto today. The pollution of racism and poverty is a bit more relevant.” He concluded his column with a powerful message for the environmental movement: “The choice isn’t between the physical environment and the human. Both go hand in hand, and the widespread concern with pollution must be joined by a similar concern for wiping out the pollutants of racism and poverty.”5

Figure 13. Cleveland State University students organized a march on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, which passed through Public Square and down to the Cuyahoga. Large numbers of Clevelanders participated in Environmental Crisis Week events, but not Mayor Stokes, who was out of town that week. Photo by Bill Nehez. Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland State University.

Young wasn’t the only African American leader who used Earth Day as an opportunity to offer a broad definition of, and broad goals for, the environmental movement. Nathan Hare, founder of The Black Scholar, similarly argued that African Americans had environmental concerns distinct from those of suburban whites. His essay, titled “Black Ecology,” which appeared in the April issue of his journal, argued that “black and white environments not only differ in degree but in nature as well,” and that “the causes and solutions to ecological problems are fundamentally different in the suburbs and ghetto.” Writing in San Francisco, Hare described the nature of the ghetto’s environmental crisis. “Three of every ten dwellings inhabited by black families are dilapidated or without hot water, toilet or bath,” he wrote. “Many more are clearly fire hazards.”6 In other words, the environmental movement could not forget the fundamental human environment: housing. Stokes might have said all this, or something like it, but he stayed quiet during Environmental Crisis Week, missing his chance to help define a movement that continued to gain influence in American politics over the next decade.

Instead, a week later, Stokes decided to decry the hypocrisy of politicians who spoke about the urgency of environmental problems but failed to take meaningful steps in their offices. Stokes even called out Nixon for making “a mockery of Earth Day” by authorizing the construction of the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline on April 23. Several city officials, quoted in the Call and Post as they reflected on the week’s events, held to what had become the administration’s position. Port control director Kiely Cronin said, “My concern is that the basic problems of society are not ignored. The problems of hunger, housing and discrimination have not been met and have not been solved.” Law director Clarence James: “We are still sending astronauts to the moon. What about the problems that affect all of us, like air pollution, water pollution, nutrition deficiencies, and so on? We are still fighting in Vietnam when we should be fighting on the urban frontier.” Public properties director Edward Baugh voiced a more common concern: “I hope general clean-up efforts continue without the benefit of a special day.”7

Clean-up efforts indeed continued, from periodic neighborhood trash sweeps to the passage of major federal legislation, the Clean Air Act later that year and the Clean Water Act two years later. Earth Day helped educate and energize a generation of environmental activists, and over the next decade their gains were significant. At Cleveland’s City Hall, however, the wave of environmental letters sent on Earth Day was followed by a mere trickle of such correspondences over the next two years. Among them was a November 1970 letter from St. Peter High School, signed by student Pat Ryba. The letter opened with a quote from the Press: “Ecologists are agreed that callous indifference to the delicate balance of nature has brought mankind to the brink of disaster.” Thereafter the letter sounded very much like the Earth Day letters, even echoing the essentially defunct Cleveland: Now! program with “We must act NOW!” The letter, like so many others, was inspired by personal experience with the polluted city. St. Peter was in downtown Cleveland, just beyond the boundaries of the Erieview urban renewal plan, and many of its students commuted from other neighborhoods. “Coming to school each morning is one of many encounters with visible air pollution,” Ryba wrote. “What about the air pollution we cannot see?” But Lake Erie was her primary concern. “When we visit the lake in certain areas (Edgewater for one), we find junk floating all around. The lake is filthy looking. The smell is almost overpowering. It’s enough to make one sick!” (Clearly the “pool in the lake” couldn’t solve the odor problem at the beach.)8 At the end of the letter, Ryba politely asked Stokes or someone from the administration to come to the school to discuss environmental policy and what students could do to help.

The administration’s replies to such letters sometimes went beyond the we’re-doing-everything-we-can responses you’d expect from a politician. In April 1971, just a few days before announcing that he would not seek a third term, Stokes signed a response to John Chambers, who had written about Cleveland’s pollution problem from Mentor, a distant eastern suburb. The letter thanked Chambers for his concern, said a bit about the administration’s efforts and accomplishments, and asked for his continued support for environmental improvement. But the letter closed with what had become Stokes’s caveat: “I feel very strongly that dealing with matters of pollution, although very important, must not keep us from dealing with more important problems such as providing decent housing for those who are forced to live with rats and cockroaches, and seeing to it that the children of Cleveland have adequate food, clothing, and medical care. We must also assure Clevelanders that our city is a safe place for them to live in.” In a world of increasingly scarce resources, and with just seven months left in office, Stokes had decided to make poverty, not pollution, his priority.9

From the spring of 1970 through the end of the Stokes administration in the fall of 1971, the language of ecology and its philosophy of connectedness permeated the broader society. In those years and the ones that followed, legislators at all levels of government passed a torrent of environmental legislation, and Americans expressed concern, took action, and improved their environment in a number of significant ways. But from where Stokes sat, in the City Hall of a crumbling city, the barriers of the American metropolis remained visible and strong. The meaning of the municipal boundary in particular became ever starker, as it increasingly overlapped with class divisions. In a nation pulled apart by the war in Vietnam, a racial divide as disruptive as ever, and growing suspicions in suburban and rural America about the fate of urban communities, breaking down barriers to create regional solutions to pressing environmental problems simply wasn’t politically viable.

FORWARD TO OBLIVION?

College campuses were alive with activity on the first Earth Day, as students and faculty engaged in the national teach-in on ecological concerns. Universities had long been central to ecological research and teaching, of course. Just eighteen months earlier, Kent State had hosted a symposium on the Cuyahoga watershed, during which half a dozen scientists shared their water quality research. Eugene Odum, the leading figure in American ecology, gave a talk titled “The Watershed as an Ecological Unit,” concluding, “If we ‘tell it like it is,’ as our young people would have us do, then we must own up to the fact that our agriculture and our cities are grossly inefficient in terms of the basic ecological necessity for recycling of materials.” Although he was an academic superstar, Odum wasn’t a particularly political figure, unlike other scientists, such as Barry Commoner and Paul Ehrlich, who had dedicated their efforts to popularizing ecological ideas. Still, Odum’s ideas permeated national discussions about the need for a holistic approach to studying the environment—the need to understand entire ecosystems, which had both living and nonliving components.10

Scientific symposiums held on campuses are commonplace, but the range of discussions and the numbers of participants made Earth Day a singular moment. Case Western Reserve University got a head start, holding its environmental teach-in a week early, on April 10 and 11. The student newspaper, The Observer, called these activities “Project: Survival.” It began with a series of talks, many of them from visiting scholars, most of them scientists. Up first was Dr. Eugene V. Perrin, a Case pathologist, who spoke on the need for a “radical ecology.” Scientists and physicians from Johns Hopkins, the University of Kentucky, and Washington University followed. They spoke about radioactivity, the biological hazards of chemical pollutants, and air pollution and young citizens, among other things. The last speaker was Murray Bookchin, the radical environmental activist whose Our Synthetic Environment (1962) and Crisis in Our Cities (1965) had made urgent pleas for fundamental changes in American society, emphasizing decentralization and the return to human-scale agriculture and urbanism. The latter book, which concerned the mental and physical health costs of living in cities, included a Plain Dealer aerial photograph of Cleveland Harbor, in which the relatively clean, dark water of Lake Erie resists mixing with the highly polluted, gray Cuyahoga discharge. At Case, Bookchin spoke about political action.

The following day, Case sponsored a series of workshops on a remarkable range of topics. Students could join conversations such as “Chemical and Biological Warfare,” “Labor and the Environment,” “Life or Death for Lake Erie,” “Legal Aspects of Pollution,” and “Surplus People and Instant War.” All these sessions, and a score more, would be staffed, The Observer reported, “by coordinators and ‘Experts.’” The quotation marks around “experts” provided just a hint of the growing tension between the younger generation’s desire to challenge authority and the environmental activist’s need to accept knowledge created by scientists. As the range of topics that day and the range of speakers the day before made clear, understanding the environmental crisis required at least a basic understanding of ecological science.

On April 10, The Observer published a special supplement on the environment, with articles on a range of topics that nearly matched the workshops for their diversity. Most of the articles read like student reports on assigned topics—“The Problem of Solid Waste,” “Air Pollution,” “Women’s Liberation and Birth Control.” An editorial called “Forward to Oblivion?” introduced the supplement, asserting that environmental issues “united all of our futures.” “No one can escape the effect of the environmental crisis, nor can the concern for the quality of the environment lie with a few selected intellectuals or a group of ‘radicals’—it is everyone’s problem.” And like so many of the talks and articles, the editorial implicitly linked the environment to other concerns of the day, including crime and disorder. “Air and water pollution, noise, pesticides, etc., are forms of violence perpetrated on the American people.” Another editorial ran in The Observer that day, making even more overt links to another pressing issue. “Polluting Vietnam” connected the problems in metropolitan Cleveland, such as air and water pollution, with destruction in Vietnam, saying, “While we must be concerned with our own polluted environment, we must realize that we are the primary polluters of Southeast Asia.”11

The peaceful, thoughtful, and earnest campus events around the nation on Earth Day served as a reminder that universities were indeed still primarily places of teaching and learning, despite the fact that the conflicts surrounding the free speech movement, civil rights demonstrations, and anti-war protests had dominated media coverage of college campuses in recent years. The Earth Day events suggested ways in which diverse communities might come together around a unifying cause, but most observers of college campuses couldn’t help but notice the development of yet another boundary in American society—the generation gap.

WHO GETS HELPED AND WHO GETS HURT?

On October 11, 1971, the Plain Dealer ran an especially rancorous column by one of the mayor’s fiercest critics, Wilson Hirschfeld. Under the headline “Freeway Fantasy at City Hall,” Hirschfeld lambasted Stokes for a recent “anti-freeway manifesto,” which, among other things, demanded that state and federal governments compensate the city for any costs associated with continued highway building—a proposal which Hirschfeld assumed would bring to an end the building of highways within the city and which he called “an invitation, loud and clear, for more factories and office buildings to move away.”12 In addition to the financial compensation, Stokes and his city planning director, Norman Krumholz, who joined the administration in 1969, proposed a new way of siting highways. Instead of pushing freeways through neighborhoods or parks, Stokes and Krumholz proposed building elevated highways above rail lines, especially on the East Side, where the controversial Clark Freeway would link Interstate 90 near the steel mills with the Outer Belt Freeway (Interstate 271) in the far eastern suburb of Pepper Pike. The Clark Freeway and the north-south Lee Freeway, which would have linked the Shoreway in the north to the Outer Belt Freeway in the south, bisecting Cleveland Heights in the process, had been part of the county’s highway plan since the mid-1950s, but a detailed location study only appeared in late 1963. The Clark Freeway would have sliced through the beautiful, planned city of Shaker Heights, but engineers, following common practice, decided to minimize the destruction of homes by running the highway through parkland—in this case Shaker Lakes Park, which belonged to the city of Cleveland. Opposition was fierce, especially in Shaker Heights, where seventy-five homes would have to be destroyed despite the use of parkland. In his objection, Shaker Heights Mayor Paul K. Jones asked, “Have we become so callous that we can disregard the value of irreplaceable parks and historical landmarks?”13

Freeway opposition grew and organized after the Cuyahoga County Engineer’s office, headed by Albert Porter, announced its expansive plan in late 1963. Most important, a number of garden clubs joined forces in a new Park Conservation Committee led by Mary Elizabeth Croxton, and their rhetoric and action swirled around the park itself, not the communities the highways would disrupt. “To exchange this park of irreplaceable beauty for a mass of concrete roadway would be an unthinkable act of vandalism,” Croxton said. The women proposed to build a nature center at the site where the Clark and Lee freeways would intersect, in part to draw attention to Shaker Lakes but also to add another layer of protection to the park. Given the strength of the opposition, and the wealth and position of those who organized it, the Clark and Lee freeways were in trouble even before more detailed engineering studies appeared in 1966. (Interestingly, the Clark Freeway would have cut along the Cleveland–Shaker Heights border and directly in front of the home Carl Stokes purchased in 1968, after having been elected mayor, although this seems to have played no role in the highway’s fate.) After years of protest, in 1970 Governor Jim Rhodes removed the Clark and Lee freeways from the state’s highway plans, effectively ending the threat to Shaker Lakes and Shaker Heights.

By the time Shaker Heights got a reprieve from the governor, the women who led the opposition to the Clark Freeway were part of a national movement that had significantly slowed, diverted, or stopped highways, saving neighborhoods in New York, San Francisco, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Baltimore, and many other cities. A. Q. Mowbray, contributor to The Nation, summarized the rationale of the nation’s anti-highway movement in his 1969 book Road to Ruin, in which he argued that throughout the country “the body of the city is being destroyed by freeways,” through a process he called “auto-erosion.” Not everyone was as observant as Mowbray, but by the late 1960s it should have been clear to urban residents that highway construction did not serve cities well, as they lost residents, structures, and character, while gaining noise, pollution, and a new set of physical barriers.14

In this context, Hirschfeld’s attack on Stokes for opposing continued highway building takes on greater meaning. Claiming Cleveland needed a good laugh “after Stokes’ four years at City Hall,” Hirschfeld wrote, “Whether or not the Clark Freeway is built, it is a joke for City Hall to come up with some impractical, unachievable, elevated expressways which will not serve present or future auto, truck and bus traffic flows.” Stokes fired back, sending a lengthy letter to the editor the next day, which ran on the editorial page two days later. Stokes wondered why Hirschfeld thought that “citizens of Cleveland, through their taxes and displacement, should be delighted to subsidize the destruction of their own community for the convenience of regional and highway interests.” Noting that he wasn’t opposed to all future highways, he clarified his administration’s position. “We have done two things: 1) attempted to minimize freeway destruction to the city and its people by carefully locating future routes and 2) merely asked the question (which I heartily suggest to Mr. Hirschfeld and other fire-breathing members of the highway lobby) ‘Who gets helped and who gets hurt by the freeway?’”15

Despite Hirschfeld’s reference to the Clark Freeway, the timing of this exchange was driven by concern for a different road, the Parma Freeway, a proposed north-south highway on the West Side. Stokes claimed that this freeway would cost Cleveland $10.6 million in construction costs, force the demolition of 932 homes in the city, and require the taking of 123 industrial and commercial properties. Because highways pay no taxes, the taking of land would cost the city $352,000 annually in lost property taxes, and because of the loss of housing, cost nearly $50,000 in lost annual income taxes. According to Stokes, all this urban destruction would primarily serve suburban commuters. But to make his point Stokes went further, well beyond the Parma Freeway. “To date, the City of Cleveland has suffered the loss of more than 6,000 housing units and is slated to lose 3,500 more,” Stokes wrote, referring to the number of homes expected to be demolished by highways still on the drawing boards. He added that the Ohio Department of Highways estimated that nineteen thousand Cleveland residents had already been displaced by highways, and another eleven thousand could be forced out of their homes if all the proposed freeways were built. Stokes argued, “The freeway program has disrupted and sometimes utterly destroyed whole neighborhoods by ripping through them with total abandon.” He cited one obvious example: Tremont, the West Side ethnic neighborhood just above the Cuyahoga, which had been “quartered” by I-90 and I-71, and where residents had complained bitterly about their treatment at the hands of city and state officials as their properties plummeted in value. And although Shaker Lakes might have been saved, highways had already destroyed precious urban parkland. On the West Side, I-71 had sheared parts of Brookside, Emery, and Gunning parks, while the Edgewater and Gordon lakeside parks had lost acreage to the Shoreway. Not surprisingly, Stokes also made an argument about the injustice of the nation’s highway-only transportation policy. Freeways had “improved the mobility of many people with cars,” but ridership of public transportation had declined, meaning “higher fares and restricted service to those too poor, elderly or infirm to own or drive a car—which is about 30% of our population!” Finally, Stokes noted that if all the highways proposed for the city were built, they would cover about 10 percent of the city with “non-taxable concrete.”

The anti-highway movement in Cleveland coalesced around the effort to save Shaker Lakes and the wealthy communities of Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights. But in all the noise about the Clark and Lee freeways, little was said about other proposed highways that would have carved up the East Side and the small, integrated city of East Cleveland. The Clark’s impact on Shaker Heights would have been significant, but in Cleveland the freeway would have destroyed 810 homes and 75 businesses. In communications to the Ohio Department of Highways, which had ultimate authority over federal highway spending in the state, Stokes and Krumholz demanded “fair and equitable” treatment for Cleveland. As the controversy over the Parma Freeway heated up, Stokes wrote to state highways director Philip Richley, “We are unwilling to continue merely to supply the body upon which the transportation surgery is performed without any compensatory benefit.” Throughout the highway planning process, however, Krumholz and Stokes couldn’t help but sense that city interests garnered little attention at the state level or from the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency, the regional body created in 1968 to coordinate federal grant applications.16

The Clark Freeway would have been just the start of the demolition on the East Side, as three other highways, with a series of interchanges that linked them, would have brought even more destruction. A series of route location studies conducted by Howard, Needles, Tammen & Bergendoff, consulting engineers, and published in 1966 and 1967 described the destruction in detail. One study issued in March 1967 placed the east-west Heights Freeway running from East 55th Street out to the Lee Freeway. It would replace dozens of blocks of housing in Hough, south of Superior, then cross over Rockefeller Park, separate Glenville from Wade Park and the cultural center, and enter East Cleveland adjacent to the area where the Glenville Shootout would take place one year later. A month earlier, the route location study for the Bedford Freeway showed a north-south highway connecting the Heights Freeway with the Clark Freeway, running along the eastern edge of Hough, and demolishing blocks and blocks of housing. A third freeway, Central, was mapped two months later. It would have run from the Inner Belt (I-90) to the Lee Freeway, mostly replacing the small factories, warehouses, stores, homes, and apartment buildings in the blocks between Cedar and Carnegie as they ran from downtown toward the Cleveland Clinic. The amount of demolition imagined in these designs is staggering, but as the introductory letters to the various reports make clear, the goal was to increase access to urban renewal sites, especially around University Circle and downtown. Demolition in surrounding, troubled neighborhoods was tolerable, if not actually desirable.

Figure 14. In the mid-1960s, Cuyahoga County planned a web of highways that would cover Cleveland’s East Side. This planning map showed how Bedford Freeway would link the Outerbelt with the Clark Freeway and eventually the Central and Heights freeways. None of these were built as planned. Howard, Needles, Tammen & Bergendoff, Route Location Studies: Bedford Freeway, Outer Belt South Freeway to Clark Freeway (1967). Courtesy of Cleveland State University.

IN THE INTEREST OF TRULY BRINGING US ALL TOGETHER

On April 14, 1970, Mayor Stokes issued a statement encouraging “all members of our community to endorse the April 15th march against the war in Vietnam.” The statement urged orderly and peaceful participation, clearly an indication that Stokes feared violence, but he also took the opportunity to assert that the war had begun to affect domestic spending. “Our nation, and particularly our cities, cannot tolerate a conflict which saps our national resources and divides our people. Our government can no longer neglect its grave domestic needs. The wars we must wage are those against hunger, woefully inadequate medical attention, lack of housing, pollution of our air and water, and inflation.” Ironically, given the growing divide over the war, Stokes wrote, “In the interest of truly bringing us all together, I urge everyone to join in this peaceful quest for an end to this war.”17

Of course, Cleveland and the nation didn’t come together over the war, and just two weeks after the march, when President Nixon announced that American forces would enter Cambodia, the nation further fractured on the issue. College campuses, the site of so many peaceful events on Earth Day, erupted in demonstrations, some of them violent. At Case Western Reserve, about fifty students occupied the Air Force ROTC offices on campus, demanding that the program be dropped. At Kent State University, even more disruptive protests forced the city of Kent to call in the Ohio National Guard, which used tear gas and fixed bayonets to disperse students who had moved their protests into the town on May 3, two days after Nixon’s announcement. About fifty students were arrested that night. The next day, a weekend of protests and violence culminated in the guardsmen firing fifty rounds into a crowd of students on Kent’s campus, killing four. The community, state, and nation were shocked—and fearful of more violence. Kent canceled classes and sent students home, and other Ohio campuses followed suit. Mayor Stokes, like other public officials, decried the violence, demanded an investigation, and called for calm. Although none of the dead was from Cleveland, Kent was just forty miles from City Hall, and many of its students came from the metropolitan area. “Now, more than ever before,” read Stokes’s May 5 statement, “Clevelanders and Ohioans must put aside their differences and personal hostilities and by reasoned and rational behavior bring some order to this grave situation.”18

The Ohio National Guard had been busy that spring. On April 8, Stokes put the Guard on alert because of spiking racial violence at the integrating Collinwood High School on the city’s far East Side. The school board, on the principal’s advice, had kept Collinwood closed for two days after white demonstrators had broken windows and damaged furniture in the school, but Stokes demanded that it reopen. While more than one hundred fifty police officers kept the peace at the school that morning, seven hundred soldiers stood by at nearby Forest Hills Park and the Shaker Heights Armory. (About the same number of students did not attend school that day—30 percent of Collinwood’s student body stayed home.) Meanwhile, addressing the Cleveland Foundation at a luncheon downtown, Stokes said, “It is going to take a bigger man than I am” to solve the problems of race, adding, “But I appeal to you businessmen to help solve problems in the schools and in housing, jobs and food and clothing for the inner city residents. I am going to do all I can within my powers to see that those who want to use clubs, bricks and violence to achieve their ends do not do it.”19 This was a message of nonviolence, but also of steadfastness. Fortunately, Collinwood remained peaceful over the remainder of the week, and the Guard stood down after school on Friday.

Just two weeks later, on April 30, Stokes and other mayors asked Governor Rhodes to call up the Guard to patrol interstates in northeast Ohio during an intensifying wildcat teamsters’ strike centered on Cleveland, Chicago, and St. Louis. Up to six thousand drivers, many of them independent steel haulers, had been on strike for most of April. Hoping to prevent attacks on drivers ignoring the strike, guardsmen took up positions along Interstate 71, stationed on bridges and patrolling in military trucks. Some even escorted convoys to their destinations. For their part, the strikers set up response teams, vowing to stop any truck that wasn’t carrying food, drugs, or beer. By late April, the strike had taken its toll, with nearly forty thousand other workers idled in Cleveland alone, and now Republic Steel, its products piling up outside its riverside plants, was warning that it might have to idle ten thousand employees. Fortunately for the city’s economy, the teamsters voted to end their strike on Sunday, the day before the shooting at Kent State.

Three days after the shootings in Kent, Stokes appeared on the local NBC affiliate, Channel 3, with students from four local colleges—Case Western, Cleveland State, John Carroll, and Cuyahoga Community College—to talk about the war, the protests, and the deaths at Kent State. In his opening remarks that evening, Stokes said:

We must understand each other. If there is a generation gap, we should bridge it with dialog and discussion, with knowledge and understanding of differences, rather than with violence and recrimination which contribute nothing. My whole public life has been dedicated to making government responsive to people’s needs and legitimate aspirations. It has been dedicated to eliminating barriers between people and groups, and if I can be of any help in this present crisis on our campuses and in the community generally, I do not shirk that responsibility, heavy as it may be and surely of no personal or political advantage whatsoever to me.

Stokes closed his opening statement with questions for the students: “Do you think society has failed you? Has government failed you?”20

NO LONGER STOPPING AT THE CITY LIMITS

In late August 1971, Ruth Sicherman of University Heights wrote an especially vehement letter of complaint to Mayor Stokes, even though his term would expire in three months. She claimed that Muny Light and the city asphalt plant “discharge more pollutants into the air than human beings can survive in health, but they refuse (1) to repair death-dealing waste elimination processes, and (2) to accept community warnings and fines for that destruction.” She concluded, “It is bad enough that private industry breaks the law (with government’s collusion) but municipal government must not be allowed this corruption.”21 Sicherman’s complaint was part of a letter-writing campaign organized by the Air Conservation Committee of the Tuberculosis & Respiratory Disease Association of Cleveland & Cuyahoga County, led by Ann Felber of Shaker Heights. Felber’s activism had made her well known at City Hall, and although she was a valuable ally in the effort to improve air quality, the Stokes administration had grown tired of the attention to Muny Light. Stokes had long ago proposed to sell the municipally owned system, with the expectation that the private power company, Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, would operate it more efficiently. That proposed sale tinged the mayor’s relationship with employees at the Muny plant, which remained an albatross around the administration’s neck through Stokes’s four years in office. Although the city had upgraded the facility, spending $6 million, the stacks continued to smoke, and the administration blamed the incompetence or ill-will of the workers. After a power outage during Memorial Day in 1970, Stokes even suggested—publicly—that failures during holidays (there had been outages the previous Christmas and New Year’s, too) were acts of sabotage perpetrated by disgruntled employees.

The administration hoped to redirect the energy of the Air Conservation Committee to the county, as the city attempted to create an air control district that stretched beyond municipal boundaries. In May 1970, Stokes sent a letter to Hugh Corrigan, one of the three county commissioners, asking him to engage in collaboration to create a county-wide air quality program. Stokes argued that since Cleveland’s air pollution problems were not confined by the corporate boundaries, “effective control can only come about through a regional program.” In 1969, the state of Ohio expended just $250,000 on air pollution control, and although state law allowed the creation of county-wide programs, none existed. In other words, municipal governments were forced to take the lead on air pollution control. Cleveland’s program cost $400,000, and Akron, Canton, and Lorain also spent local dollars on air pollution control. The day after Stokes sent the letter to Corrigan, his assistant Robert Bauerlein sent a note to Ann Felber. “Here is your big chance to aim in another direction many of those wonderful letters the Mayor has been receiving from misinformed suburbanites,” he wrote, enclosing a copy of the previous day’s letter. “I would hope that the Air Conservation Committee will get behind this proposal with as much enthusiasm as was exhibited in other recent activities,” he continued. Despite the belligerent tone of the letter, or perhaps because of it, he signed his name under the closing “Peace.”22

The Air Conservation Committee was already engaged in the effort to set up an effective regional approach, backing the short-lived effort to create the Greater Metropolitan Cleveland Intrastate Air Quality Control Region. The federal Air Quality Act of 1967 required that states create regulatory regions, but as of 1970 none existed in Ohio. As the 1967 law dictated, the National Air Pollution Control Administration was charged with creating the regions, and then the states would set standards, with the approval of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Finally, states would create and implement plans to meet those standards. Not surprisingly, progress was painfully slow around the nation, and Congress recognized the difficulty of creating regions, since boundaries would have significant consequences for industry and potentially for future economic growth. To rectify the problem, the Clean Air Act of 1970 did away with the regional approach, substituting states for regions, and initiated the creation of federal standards and enforcement.

In sum, the federal government’s regional approach was short-lived and ineffective. It was also just a part of a broader discussion of the proper boundaries of government authority. Along with air pollution, issues of transportation and watershed management were central to the national discussion about proper planning, regulation, and, perhaps most important, appropriate funding sources. Cities argued vehemently that they needed financial support in environmental regulation—support that could come through the creation of a regional regulatory approach. As Patricia Smith of the Air Conservation Committee noted in 1972, as the state of Ohio continued to debate the proper role of local governments in environmental regulation, “city boundaries are not large enough to cope with the air pollution problem in this area.” Although she and the other members of the Air Conservation Committee had worked to expand pollution control regulation, either to a new regional authority or to the county, nothing had come of it. At a committee meeting concerning the revision of the Ohio constitution, Smith said, “The one main argument that we have for going county-wide rather than remaining within city boundaries is that, even though most of the industrial complex is contained within the city, we feel that we needed the larger tax base to cope with the problem. It is ridiculous to ask the City of Cleveland residents to cope financially with the problems created by this industrial complex from which the whole county benefits.”23

Smith’s argument relied on a logic similar to that used by Stokes when he discussed the funding of government services: since everyone in the region would benefit from improved air quality, everyone in the region should contribute to the cost of regulation. Other observers expanded this argument for fairness to one of justice. At the same 1972 meeting concerning the Ohio constitution, W. O. Walker, the long-time editor of the Call and Post and a trusted adviser to Mayor Stokes, argued for regional government to coordinate transportation and pollution control, to help spread the cost of improvements. He maintained, as had Stokes, that transportation policy focused on highways had hurt the city—it had taken land off tax rolls, forced the reduction of support for public transportation, and left inner-city communities stranded because automobile transportation was more expensive. Walker asserted that regional authority must expand to match reality because “people are living in a region now, not just in a small community or not just in one county.” Lives had sprawled along with the metropolis, but government had not kept pace. “So we finally admit that services and the attendant cost that follows, that we are going to have to approach some regional form of government on many of the things that people are demanding service,” Walker said, “like pollution, transportation, garbage disposal, water and a lot of other things that are no longer stopping at the city limits of any community.”24

Wayne C. Dabb, assistant director of law under the new mayor, Ralph Perk, agreed with Walker and Smith on the fundamental issues, noting at the 1972 meeting, “There has to be some change in the city, a broadening of what we know now as a city, if we are going to solve many of the problems and revitalize local government.” But he was realistic: “Everyone likes their little kingdoms. These do not fall easily.” As Dabb well understood, the suburbs—fifty-six municipalities in Cuyahoga County alone—had created local control intentionally, and they would defend it vehemently. Watershed management, air quality regions, and metropolitan governance all sounded like improvements in an age swimming in ecological thinking, at least to those who struggled to solve urban problems, but for many Americans, municipal boundaries served a purpose: local control, especially of tax rates, schools, zoning and housing policy. Some “little kingdoms” might fare well enough, but the boundaries that ran through metropolitan Cleveland impinged on the making of the service city, restricting resources, impeding effective regulation, and speeding economic decline—for the entire region.25

THE WATERSHED IS A COMPLEX POLITICAL SYSTEM

On April 15, 1970, the day Stokes simultaneously introduced Cleveland’s Crisis in the Environment Week and expressed concerns about putting pollution ahead of poverty on the nation’s priorities list, the Ohio Water Pollution Control Board held a hearing at the Hotel Sheraton-Cleveland. Several industries and communities were called to defend their progress, but the primary focus of the hearing was the city of Cleveland, which the state had already warned because it had been so slow to act on water pollution. As Stokes feared, the state took a firm position and, for the first time ever, imposed a ban on new sewer connections, effectively prohibiting the city from issuing new construction permits. Stokes was irate, and while the city didn’t fully comply with the order, the mayor spoke frequently about the fundamental injustice of the state bringing the city to a halt without having spent any of its own money on the water pollution problem.

Although the city had been making incremental improvements in its sewage system, real progress awaited the construction of major intercepting sewers that would gather wastes for delivery to expanded and improved city treatment plants. These intercepting sewers would traverse municipal boundaries, in many instances moving into communities that did not yet have an agreement with the city to treat wastes. Not surprisingly, suburban communities balked at having the city maintain control over the spreading system for fear that it would impose excessive rates. Most suburbs argued for a county-run system, but the city countered with a proposal to create an independent sewer authority, run by a board to which the city and suburbs would appoint members. The long delay in water pollution control, then, was not technical or even economic, but political, as suburbs and city struggled for control.

Sporadic negotiations dragged on for months, outlasting the Stokes administration, and Cleveland suffered through the building ban all the while. Even after Common Pleas Judge George McMonagle, empowered by state law to oversee the process, extended the ban to an additional twenty-nine suburbs, giving everyone at the table a sense of urgency, the parties could not reach an agreement. Finally, in April 1972, two years after Cleveland’s building ban began, McMonagle imposed a regional sewer plan from his bench. The Cleveland Regional Sewer District represented a compromise for both sides. The city gained the independent agency structure it favored, along with majority representation on the board, while the suburbs gained a relatively low price for the city’s extant treatment plants, which would be purchased by the regional district. Nearly three months later, after the details had been worked out, the judge lifted the building ban on both the city and the suburbs. The Plain Dealer cited unidentified local officials who claimed the ban had cost the region $500 million in economic development and seven thousand jobs.26

While the political wrangling about metropolitan sewage treatment was under way, technical planning for an upgraded system continued, seemingly oblivious to political realities. In 1966, the state created the Three Rivers Watershed District, a powerless board charged with overseeing water resource planning in the region. The three watersheds—the Cuyahoga, Chagrin, and Rocky rivers—drained most of Cuyahoga County and land in six other counties. With a tiny budget and no real authority, the district merely served as an observer of city, county, state, and federal planning, but its chairman, Wendell La Due of Akron, became a cheerleader for more comprehensive planning. “The Watershed is not only a complex ecosystem; it is also a complex political system,” he wrote in 1970, in recognition of how difficult it would be to bring the various political entities into an accord on resource management.27

One of the planning processes the Three Rivers Watershed District observed was the Army Corps development of sewage treatment plans. In late 1971, Congress authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to create a variety of viable plans for the district. In 1973, the corps provided preliminary data on twelve different plans based on the use of two very different technologies. Most of the plans relied on building advanced biological and physical-chemical treatment plants along the region’s rivers and lakeshore, mostly through the improvement of existing facilities. Other plans involved land disposal of sewage sludge, which would require the construction of aerated lagoons to provide preliminary treatment, a large effluent tunnel to transport this waste beyond the county, and perhaps 160 square miles of farmland on which the lightly treated sludge would be sprayed. The Army Corps imagined this disposal taking place mostly in Huron, Seneca, Crawford, and Richland counties to the west, well outside the Cuyahoga watershed. All the plans involved combinations and variations on these two approaches, with some adding the piping of sludge to the coal mining region of eastern Ohio, where the waste would be an important ingredient in the restoration of strip-mined land.

The Army Corps had long been involved in local projects—from dredging the Cuyahoga River to creating and maintaining Cleveland Harbor—and it had planned and completed its work without much public engagement, beyond communication with local business leaders, and it had historically ignored the ecological consequences of its work. But 1970 initiated a new era for the corps. The National Environmental Protection Act, signed into law in January 1970, required that any project receiving federal money create an environmental impact statement. Later in the year, President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency to serve as a stronger, centralized bureaucratic force at the federal level, and the Water Pollution Control Act, passed in late 1972, would set quality standards. In sum, the Army Corps could no longer operate without public involvement or without concern for ecological outcomes.

In this new context, as the corps worked on its Three Rivers Watershed plans in 1972, it organized a series of public meetings, held workshops, and gave presentations to interested groups, including chambers of commerce, the League of Women Voters, and some environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club and the Izaak Walton League. The corps also issued a newsletter, “Purewater Press,” beginning in April 1972, and distributed a feasibility report that outlined the twelve alternatives. Altogether the corps engaged in a great deal of teaching of fundamental science, especially ecological principles. This was particularly true as it attempted to explain the value of land disposal of sewage. Corps programs and materials emphasized that land disposal allowed for the recycling of nutrients and the natural filtering of waste, what the corps called “a living filter,” which meant that land disposal required far fewer chemicals than traditional sewage plants. This system would be especially valuable in eastern Ohio’s coal lands, where hundreds of square miles had been stripped of topsoil. The corps clearly favored land application, not just because it brought considerable savings in capital investment but because it struck the engineers as the more ecologically sound approach.

Public participation quickly revealed flaws in the corps’ thinking, however, and the universally negative reaction of local officials in the affected counties revealed how much ecological thinking they were doing as well. They raised questions about the millions of gallons of water used to transport the sludge through the pipeline that would leave the Three Rivers Watershed. Would all this water swamp the lands in the disposal counties? And what about heavy metals contained in the sludge? In January 1973, Dr. George Linn, Huron County health commissioner, expressed his concern about the disposal of wastewater in his area in a letter to the Ohio Department of Health, which he copied to the Army Corps and many other officials. Sounding very much like an ecologist, Linn asked a series of useful questions: “What new kinds of organisms would find this a desirable habitat? Bacteria? Other micro-organisms? Parasites? Insects? What kinds of changes might occur in the weather itself? What effect on stream water quality due to erosion?” In addition to these sensible ecological concerns, Linn revealed the primary issue, which had to do with justice. “Needless to say,” he wrote, “this proposal has our entire farming community in an uproar, to say nothing of the senses of the rank and file citizens who are offended by the thoughts of having Cleveland’s dirty water dumped on our greatest asset—our land.”28 Striking a similar tone, the Huron County Regional Planning Commission commended “the idea of the local recycling of wastewater through the soils for the benefit of ecology and environment, as well as economic gain,” but like everyone who responded, it was simply unwilling to accept metropolitan Cleveland’s waste.29

Despite the consistent opposition to the land disposal proposal, in August 1973 the Army Corps ended the process by publishing three potential plans. Plan A (which had two variations) relied on advanced sewage treatment plants, essentially an extension of existing practices. Plan B combined new plants with the transportation of sludge to eastern Ohio strip lands. Plan C would pipe the majority of metropolitan Cleveland’s sewage and storm water runoff to 147,000 acres in Huron and surrounding counties. By keeping—and in fact favoring—the land disposal plan, the Army Corps had badly misjudged the situation. It had underestimated the power of certain boundaries, especially the line on the map indicating “Land Treatment Area,” and the boundary between city and country, which might appear blurred within metropolitan Cleveland but was remarkably clear from the fields of Huron County. The people of north-central Ohio rejected Plan C, and the state of Ohio dismissed it immediately. And so the Army Corps planning process revealed more than just the growing influence of ecology in government planning. It showed that science and engineering simply could not offer a single best solution to sewage control. Acceptable solutions could be derived only through politics, and political negotiations required a very different skill set than the Army Corps possessed in 1972.

Clearly the early 1970s push for regional environmental management had a limited impact on local government, but the spread of ecological knowledge continued along with calls for a regional approach. This effort reached a new apogee in 1993, when freelance writer and editor David Beach published the first issue of EcoCity Cleveland, a sixteen-page newsletter with articles about brownfields, PCBs, wind farms, sustainable development, and “the Cuyahoga River Suffocation Zone,” concerning the lack of oxygen that prevented fish from inhabiting the shipping channel through the flats. The cover story appeared under the headline “Thinking Bioregionally in Northeast Ohio” and opened by asking readers to “start by erasing the artificial lines on the map. Block out all the human-drawn boundaries—city limits, county lines, census tracts, roads. Then look at what’s left—the land, water, plants, wildlife, people—and think again about where you live.” A Cleveland Heights resident, Beach proposed calling this unbounded area the “Cuyahoga Bioregion,” using the watershed to help define the place in which he lived. This reconception of place would be critical to creating “a more ecologically-healthy region,” Beach’s fundamental goal.30

Figure 15. In the early 1970s, the Army Corps of Engineers attempted to become more responsive to both ecological concerns and citizen input. In planning improvements to Cleveland’s sewage treatment system, however, the corps failed to hear the unified opposition of those who lived beyond the metropolitan region but were targeted to receive the city’s waste. Army Corps of Engineers, Wastewater Management Study for Cleveland-Akron Metropolitan and Three Rivers Watershed Areas Summary Report (August 1973), 148.

Erasing the artificial lines on the map, thinking more bioregionally, was closely akin to removing other archaic structures of the industrial era—the hulking warehouses, empty factories, unused rail lines—and creating a more fluid city, as Mabel Walker had described nearly fifty years earlier. Creating a just and effective governmental system that kept pace with the demographic and environmental changes in the region should have been part of the process by which Greater Cleveland worked its way through its urban crisis. But Cleveland failed to overcome its jurisdictional fragmentation, ensuring that it would continue to be held back by the carcass of its past.

THE STOKES YEARS

In the fall of 1971, as Stokes prepared to leave office, his staff created a nicely illustrated, boosterish summary of his administration’s accomplishments, which appeared under the title The Stokes Years. In an introductory letter, Stokes expressed pride in what they had been able to accomplish, especially in enlarging “the vision and understanding of the role of local government.” He admitted to “some mistakes and failures,” but he also noted the special obstacles his administration had faced. “As the first Negro Mayor of Cleveland—in fact, of any major American city—my administration faced heightened resistance and sometimes outright hostility from some members of City Council, from many suburban officials bent on exploiting the central city and from the old-line political establishment unwilling to accept change,” he wrote. The nearly forty pages that followed listed a wide range of accomplishments grouped around nine themes. The order in which these accomplishments appear give us some sense of how the administration prioritized its goals, or at least how it ranked its successes.

Stokes emphasized his communication with residents, listing “Citizen Participation and Involvement” first among his accomplishments. In his four years in office, Stokes held twenty-one town-hall meetings, some of them on very difficult topics. One of those contentious issues was the construction of public housing, which Stokes listed second among his accomplishments. His administration had resuscitated the public housing program, which had stalled during the previous administration, and had built 4,206 housing units in four years. Third, Stokes listed “Jobs and Small Business,” emphasizing the expansion of equal employment opportunities, despite the fact that the employment picture remained bleak in the poorest sections of town. The city had lost eighty thousand jobs in the previous decade, and the concentration of poverty was evident not just in statistics but in wide swaths of the city. Next, under “Health,” Stokes stressed the acquisition of state and federal grants, the construction of new clinics, and the initiation of new programs, mentioning the rat control program specifically—even though rat infestations remained common in the city’s troubled neighborhoods. In 1970, Director of Public Health Frank Ellis wrote in an internal memo: “Complaints continue to come to my office as well as to the mayor about vacant structures which are rat infested and demolished, with resulting disturbance of the rat colonies. On several occasions our community hygiene staff has verified the existence of active rat burrows on these premises.”31

In the fifth section of The Stokes Years, “Pollution Control,” Stokes touted the new air pollution code and the passage of the $100 million clean water bond, although these were but small steps on the road to a cleaner environment. Under “Downtown Development,” Stokes claimed that $223 million had been invested in Erieview, although he clearly counted some buildings that had been completed before he took office. Seventh, Stokes listed advances in public safety before turning to “Recreation,” a section in which he emphasized the pools in the lake, claiming, “Thousands and thousands of Clevelanders enjoyed the recovered opportunity for safe swimming and bathing at the two beaches.” Indeed, the “swimming pools in the lake” had become so popular that when budget cuts threatened their reopening in 1971, an anonymous benefactor donated the money to install the plastic barriers, purchase the chlorine, and even pay the lifeguards. The Stokes Years also praised the administration’s acquisition of the nation’s largest federal grant for the purchase of open space, used to create new parks, including a number of “vest pocket parks,” which largely replaced abandoned and unkempt lots. Finally, in the ninth section, Stokes described his administration’s participation in urban renewal, including the federal Model Cities program, although even by 1971 the results of these programs could at best be described as modest.

All this rhetoric, putting the happiest face on Cleveland’s not-so-happy fate, gave a sense of hope even while Stokes admitted that his administration had made only a start in all these areas. In reality, the Stokes administration was limping toward its finish line. As in all American cities, Cleveland’s budget was reliant on property taxes, but falling property values, property abandonment, and tax delinquency cut into the city’s income. By 1970, 15 percent of city property tax bills went uncollected and 28 percent of property in the city was tax-exempt. Stokes pleaded with voters to approve an income tax hike (from 1 percent to 1.8 percent) to help compensate for flagging property taxes, but the issue failed badly in November, having gained wide support only in the heavily African American neighborhoods. The administration responded quickly by slashing its budget for 1971, actually shrinking city spending at a time when the national inflation rate approached 6 percent. The city stopped hiring immediately and initiated plans to lay off one thousand workers. The administration attempted to pass a smaller income tax hike (to 1.6 percent) in a special election in February, but that also failed. Although The Stokes Years praised advances in recreation, the administration relied heavily on the Recreation Department for cuts, taking millions from parks and playgrounds. The Health Department saw significant cuts, too. In what would become the norm for struggling cities facing shrinking tax revenues, police and fire budgets remained intact while quality-of-life spending plummeted.

Two years removed from office, Stokes published a more honest assessment of his time in City Hall. Unlike The Stokes Years, the book Promises of Power: A Political Autobiography was a frank exposition of the headwinds into which Stokes sailed as a progressive black politician and as a city leader in the age of suburbia. Although largely tactful, as he tended to be, Stokes occasionally revealed his bitterness about the forces lined up against reform: the conservative ethnic bureaucrats inside City Hall who “had held their jobs so long that their control was impenetrable”; the conservative white leaders outside the city, “with their built-in hostility toward the central city,” who saw little political advantage in aiding Cleveland; the white newspapermen, who “indulged themselves in a form of steady, slow assassination”; and Ahmed Evans, the “stupid, phony so-called revolutionary” who “decided to shoot it out with the police one night in Glenville.” In Stokes’s estimation, many of his dreams for real reform died along with the police officers that night.32

More than just political forces lined up against Stokes and the city of Cleveland. Suburban growth in population and resources had left “the central city with its dwindling resources, its ever-diminishing tax base, its high concentration of the poor, the elderly and the politically impotent,” Stokes wrote. “As mayor you are in control of territorial boundaries, but you have nothing with which to sustain yourself. You cannot look to the people in the central city, for they have more needs than they have resources.” Stokes had few allies and few options. “You cannot look to the people in the suburbs, because that is why they are out there,” he wrote. “You cannot look to the state, because the legislature is controlled by a suburban-rural coalition.” Only the federal government could “reach to suburbs, make them part of a health or transportation or air-and-water-pollution control system, make them help support the city.”33

Promises offered a thorough explanation for why his administration left only a modest record of accomplishment and why Stokes decided not to seek a third term. “In 1967 it still seemed that the cities could be turned around; three years later the economic tide had turned and we were headed for even more problems than before,” he wrote. And on cities more generally: “Our lack of resources, the high crime rate, the seemingly inexorable slide into decay and deterioration, the continued desertion of the cities by even the marginally affluent, the increasing unemployment and labor problems—all these things were making cities virtually unmanageable. I could see that, for at least the time being, during a disastrous economic slump that was eroding our already pitiful tax base, the managers of cities could barely hold their ground.”34

The book says little about the crisis in the urban environment that had consumed so much of his time and energy. The Cuyahoga fire warrants no mention. But Stokes relayed a story from June 1969 that conveys a great deal about Cleveland’s predicament and its long road to recovery. Stokes describes the “damnedest period” in his life, which began with the death of Donald Waight, the young white man stabbed by a black man down the hill from Stokes’s home. Incensed, many of the neighborhood’s white residents took to the streets. Stokes drove to the scene to beg for calm, and after a tense confrontation with the dead man’s father, the mayor climbed into his car and headed home up Woodland Avenue. There he found his darkened house encircled by police cars and officers carrying shotguns. They had been given word that the crowd of angry white residents was marching up the hill. An officer asked the mayor to join his family inside, keep the lights off, and get on the floor. His wife, Shirley, six months pregnant, lay on the floor upstairs with their two frightened and confused children. Stokes sat downstairs in the dark, listening to the screech of walkie-talkies outside and the ruckus of the approaching crowd—“a committee of my neighbors,” Stokes called them—numbering as many as two hundred. The police used tear gas to halt the crowd. “The yard is filled with police to protect me,” Stokes wrote later, “not from some foreign enemy but from a mob of people who live twenty blocks away from me.” That night, sitting besieged in his own house, Stokes had no illusions about the power he held as the black mayor of a white city. Here was a city badly in need of change, and here was the man who might force it through, both of them trapped and powerless.35