The Cleveland Foundation board set high leadership expectations for its third director, Leyton E. Carter (see video), recommending that the former political science professor and municipal researcher lend his personal expertise to civic endeavors to a much greater extent than had been the case with his predecessors.

Within a few years of his appointment as director in 1928, Carter had become involved as a trustee or officer with an impressive list of area organizations, including the Adult Education Association, Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, Cleveland Music School Settlement, Cuyahoga County Home Rule Association, Ohio School Survey Commission and the YMCA. He taught at the YMCA’s Cleveland School of Technology, a predecessor of today’s Cleveland State University, for 34 years, staying on to conduct evening courses in government, business and statistics at Fenn College, the result of the Y’s 1930 restructuring of its advanced education program.

In 1931, Carter accepted the call to become grand jury foreman (although his agreement came with the understandable qualifier that he would serve “as long as he could”). He played his most significant leadership role in directing an effort to redevelop Cleveland’s slums that led to the Depression-era construction of the first public housing in America.

Carter’s path to the Cleveland Foundation was similar to that of the foundation’s first director. Like Raymond Moley, who was six years his senior, Carter was born in rural, late 19th-century Cuyahoga County (the Carter family farm in North Royalton was settled by Leyton’s great-grandfather in 1814). He studied at Oberlin College and did graduate work in political science and constitutional law at Columbia University before returning to northeastern Ohio to teach political science at Western Reserve University. Prior to joining the foundation, Carter directed the City of Cleveland’s Municipal Research Bureau. His sudden death in 1953 left the Cleveland Foundation leaderless.