"He [Carl Stokes] ran against Seth Taft and the campaign became very vicious. At many times it turned racial and…many nasty pictures and representations were made of Carl Stokes. The tensions in Cleveland had begun early on." - Clarence Bozeman
"I told them that the issue was Cleveland's problems, not whether the mayor was black or white, that the city could not survive another man who didn't understand the town, all of its people and their concerns."
~ Carl Stokes, 1973
~ Carl Stokes, 1973
On September 28, Carl Stokes won the primary against Ralph Locher (running for a second term). This proved that Stokes could face a white man head on, and defeat him. However, Locher was already a target of hatred by the urban African Americans before the political race began. Republican Seth Taft would be much more difficult to defeat.
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"I got their support. Slowly the movement built, and when I formally threw my hat into the ring I had two leading business executives playing major roles in the campaign. There was another thing going for me. I had been repeatedly invited to Presidential conferences and dinners, and it had become clear to people what electing me might help the city."
~ Carl Stokes, 1973 |
"There was a push, a heavy push, to get African Americans to register to vote for Stokes. Many of them had never registered; never cared about politics. They said there was certain viciousness to politics that excluded African America."
~ Clarence Bozeman |
"There were a lot of white liberals who saw that Stokes was eminently qualified to be mayor. So you had a combination where the African American vote was imminent and a lot of white liberals came to his rescue." ~ Clarence Bozeman
Stokes had been working for years on his political career, and now with a substantial base of supporters beneath him, it seemed that he would finally have his chance to truly rise to power.
"At 2 A.M., Dr. Martin Luther King...joined me at the Rockefeller Building. At 2:30, it was announced that Taft was about to make his victory statement. A few minutes later, it became apparent that all the votes left to count were coming from the black community, and Taft was getting less than five percent of those votes. It was close to 4 A.M. when I passed him. The great-grandson of a slave had defeated the grandson of a U.S. President." ~ Carl Stokes, 1973