Arnold Pinkney (1931-2014), veteran Cleveland political organizer and strategist

Arnold Pinkney during his 1971 run for mayor.  (clevelandmemory.org)

Arnold Pinkney ran for mayor twice, but that's not why most people in Democratic Party circles remember him. Nor is it the main reason they're mourning today's news of his death at 83.

Pinkney lost in his attempt to succeed Mayor Carl Stokes in 1971, and in his second run in 1975. His political talents lay instead in getting other people elected.  He ran successful campaigns for all three black mayors of Cleveland -- Stokes, Mike White, and Frank Jackson -- and Louis Stokes' successful run to become Ohio's first black congressman.  

He worked on national presidential campaigns too. He was the No. 2 guy on Hubert Humphrey's 1972 campaign and Jesse Jackson's run in 1984. He also served for years on Cleveland's school board. But Pinkney was best known locally as the go-to guy for get-out-the-vote efforts in black neighborhoods on Cleveland's East Side.

In 2001, I spent a day watching Pinkney and his machine work on behalf of mayoral candidate Raymond Pierce.  I rode with him in his car as he visited his ragged army of polling station canvassers, employed for a single 13-hour shift.  At one stop, he got out, shook hands, and asked people to choose Pierce in that day's primary race.  Most of the voters recognized him. "How come you're not running?" one asked, 26 years after Pinkney's second try.

His job that day was a challenge: mobilize political support for Pierce, a former Clinton Administration lawyer and political unknown. On a floor of his Pinkney-Perry insurance agency, converted into a war room, volunteers fired off phone blitzes based on mid-day precinct vote counts and a floppy-hatted professor's projections. He deployed 400 people across "each side of town, northeast and southeast," as he put it.

His effort lifted Pierce into the runoff election (where he lost to Jane Campbell). That night at the victory party, the crowd cheered for Pierce, then chanted "Arnold! Arnold!" I remember Pinkney's offhand confidence, even cockiness, as he talked to one side of the stage.  I'm paraphrasing from memory, but it was something like this: I don't know why people are so surprised. We've been doing this for 30 years. 

Jesse Jackson, Louis Stokes, others recall King's 1967 Cleveland campaign

In 1967, Rev. Jesse Jackson was a 25-year-old aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., accompanying him on his many trips to Cleveland. King visited the city about every two weeks between April and November 1967, trying to prevent a repeat of the Hough riots and to help elect Carl Stokes the first black mayor of a major American city.

But, in one of the great ironies of the civil-rights era, Carl Stokes felt he could not afford King's help. In a meeting at the Call & Post offices, Stokes, fearing a backlash from white voters, asked King to cancel his plans.

"I remember that meeting," Jackson told me last month for my new oral history of King's 1967 Cleveland campaign. "Carl felt he had to have a coalition to win. That meant relieving white fears. ... Dr. King was the anti-war guy. He was the challenging-the-white-power-structure guy. He was, for many, an object of fear rather than a source of hope. So I think Carl was walking that thin line."

My oral history, "King's Speech," appears in the April issue of Cleveland Magazine and is online now. It tells the often-overlooked story of King's many visits to Cleveland in 1967, leading a major activist effort by his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, one of only two campaigns King ever conducted outside the South.

My piece includes interviews with Jackson; Andrew Young, a top aide to King who later became U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; Louis Stokes, the former congressman and Carl's brother, who spoke with King on the night of Carl's victory; former city councilman George Forbes, who often accompanied King on his barnstorming tours of Cleveland's East Side; and several other Clevelanders who knew or met King.

The civil-rights leader's Cleveland connections have attracted renewed interest this year, the 45th anniversary of King's Cleveland campaign, with the re-discovery of a recording of King's April 26, 1967 speech at Glenville High School.

Today, at 3:30 p.m. downtown, Louis Stokes and three other Clevelanders are speaking about their memories of King in Cleveland. The event, hosted by the law firm Ogletree Deakins, takes place on the 27th floor of Key Tower. Admission is free, but there are space limitations, so RSVP to salona.novak@ogletreedeakins.com if you're interested.

To link to "King's Speech," use this shortcut: tinyurl.com/MLK-CM.

(photo: Cleveland Public Library Photograph Collection)

Jean Murrell Capers, pioneer

Anyone who knows local politics knows Cleveland was the first major U.S. city to elect a black mayor -- Carl Stokes in 1967. Plenty of other black political pioneers in Cleveland helped create the path that led Stokes to the top. We wrote about one such figure, councilman Charlie Carr, in the fall.

My interview with another pioneer appears in the January issue of Cleveland Magazine. Jean Murrell Capers, one of our 2010 Most Interesting People, was the first African-American woman elected to the city council of any major city. She joined council in 1949, at age 36. Compare that milestone to other big cities: New York, Chicago, and Detroit each elected their first black councilwoman in the 1970s, Los Angeles in the 1990s.

Now 96, Capers, also a former city judge, still practices law. She met Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Langston Hughes. She is a font of knowledge about Cleveland's black community in the mid-20th century and earlier. Talking to her, I learned that black electoral politics in Cleveland goes back more than a century: The first black city councilman in Cleveland, Tom Fleming, was elected in 1909.

To read my piece about Capers, click here.

U.S. Rep. Betty Sutton, who authored the Cash For Clunkers bill, is also one of our 30 Most Interesting People. You can read my piece about Sutton here.

Mansfield Frazier's "Carr Talk"

I've often linked to Mansfield Frazier's political writing. Now, I'm happy to say he's making his debut in My Town, Cleveland Magazine's first-person essay section.

Our November My Town, "Carr Talk," is Frazier's memoir about Charlie Carr, city councilman from 1945 to 1975. Carr (pictured, left) helped make Cleveland the birthplace of the black political rights movement, paving the way for the historic 1967 election of Carl Stokes (right) as mayor.

Frazier's an interesting writer, and sometimes a political activist too. Yesterday I got an e-mail from him asking why the Congress of Racial Equality and the Ohio Black Legislative Caucus are teaming up with a payday lender for this financial seminar on Saturday.

"If CheckSmart is so concerned with folks' financial well-being, then why are they charging such exorbitant interest rates?" Frazier writes. "I plan to attend the 'seminar' and ask them this question in person." That should be an interesting meeting.

Update, 10/29: Frazier takes up the subject in his Cool Cleveland column this week, subtly titled, "Ohio Black Legislative Black Caucus: A Den of Prostitutes?"