Louis Stokes

Louis Stokes was born on the twenty-third of February 1925 at Cleveland, the elder of two sons of Charles Stokes — a laundry worker who died of pneumonia when Louis was an infant — and Louise Stone Stokes, a domestic worker. He was raised in straitened circumstances at the Outhwaite Homes public-housing project of Cleveland with his younger brother Carl Stokes (placed in this archive). He attended the Central High School and graduated in 1943 at eighteen.

He served the United States Army in the European theatre from 1943 to 1946 — the segregated infantry regiments of the 92nd Infantry Division at Anzio and the Apennines. He completed the bachelor's at Western Reserve University in 1948 on the GI Bill and the LL.B. at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in 1953. He entered private legal practice at Cleveland in 1954 and built across the following fifteen years a substantial criminal-defense practice. He argued the case Terry v. Ohio before the Supreme Court in 1968 — the precedent on which stop-and-frisk law subsequently turned.

He was elected to the United States House of Representatives in November 1968 from the new Ohio Twenty-First Congressional District — the seat redistricted under the 1965 Voting Rights Act to produce the first majority-Black congressional district in Ohio. He took office on the third of January 1969 as the first African American congressman from Ohio.

He served fifteen consecutive terms across thirty years from 1969 to 1999. He was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus in January 1971 and served as Caucus chair from 1972 to 1973. He chaired the House Ethics Committee from 1981 to 1985 and from 1991 to 1993 — making him the only member to have chaired the Ethics Committee twice.

His decisive committee assignment was the chairmanship of the House Select Committee on Assassinations from 1977 to 1979. The Committee under his chairmanship conducted the principal congressional re-investigation of the assassinations of President John Kennedy of November 1963 and of Martin Luther King Jr. (placed in this archive) of April 1968. The Committee's final report of 1979 concluded that the King assassination was likely the result of a conspiracy.

He died of lung cancer at Cleveland on the eighteenth of August 2015, at ninety.

He is honored here as the first African American congressman from Ohio.