Carl Stokes

Carl Burton Stokes was born on the twenty-first of June 1927 at Cleveland, the younger of two sons of Charles Stokes and Louise Stone Stokes. He was raised at the Outhwaite Homes public-housing project of Cleveland with his older brother Louis Stokes (placed in this archive). His father died when Carl was two; his mother supported the two boys by working as a domestic. He attended the East Technical High School and dropped out at seventeen to join the United States Army.

He served in the Army from 1945 to 1946 in the post-war occupation of Germany. He returned to Cleveland on his discharge and completed the high-school diploma at the East Technical High School at twenty-one. He worked through his early twenties as a state liquor enforcement agent at the Ohio Department of Liquor Control. He completed the bachelor's at the University of Minnesota in 1954 and the LL.B. at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in 1956. He entered private legal practice at Cleveland with his brother Louis in 1956.

He was elected to the Ohio State House of Representatives in 1962 from the Cleveland Twenty-First Legislative District — the first African American Democrat in the Ohio legislature. He served three terms.

He stood for mayor of Cleveland in 1965 against the incumbent Ralph Locher and lost by under three thousand votes in the Democratic primary. He stood again in 1967 and won the Democratic primary against Locher by eighteen-thousand votes and the November general election against Republican Seth Taft by under two thousand votes. He took office on the first of January 1968 — at forty, the first African American mayor of a major American city.

His four-year mayoralty was conducted under the conditions of the July 1968 Glenville shootout between Cleveland police officers and the Black Nationalists of New Libya group of Fred Ahmed Evans. He directed across the period the Cleveland: Now urban-renewal programme that raised approximately five million dollars in private funds for neighbourhood investment, the desegregation of Cleveland city employment, and the founding of the Cleveland Department of Public Safety.

He declined to stand for a third term in 1971 and moved to New York to become an NBC News national correspondent. He returned to Cleveland in 1980 to private practice and served from 1983 as a Cleveland Municipal Court judge. He served as United States Ambassador to the Seychelles from 1994 to 1995.

He died of cancer of the esophagus at Cleveland on the third of April 1996, at sixty-eight.

He is honored here as the first African American mayor of a major American city.