All eyes were focused on Cleveland throughout the summer leading up to the mayoral elections of 1967. The political contest between Seth Taft, the grandson of a U.S. president, and Carl B. Stokes, the grandson of a slave, seemed destined to make international headlines. For the first time in history it looked as if a major American city might elect an African-American mayor.
Realizing that the future of the city depended on inspired, perhaps even heroic, political leadership, the leaders of the Cleveland Foundation were not content merely to watch the drama unfold. Many of them had played active if behind-the-scenes roles to ensure that whoever emerged victorious would not be simply another caretaker mayor. Once the outcome of the race had been decided in Carl B. Stokes’s favor, they laid the full resources of the foundation at the disposal of the winning administration. Whatever the new mayor needed in the way of supplementary personnel, discretionary funds, advice or connections to heal the social and economic wounds of the city, the Cleveland Foundation stood ready to help provide.
Carl Stokes called on all these proffered resources in conceiving and attempting to implement his civic vision, a $1.5 billion redevelopment plan called Cleveland: NOW! that was conceived in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In a 30-minute speech broadcast on all three local television stations on May 1, 1968, Stokes proposed to turn the city around in 10 years through new programs in the areas of employment, neighborhood rehabilitation, youth development, health and welfare and downtown revitalization.
In its first phase, Cleveland: NOW! called for the expenditure of $177 million on training 11,000 of the city’s hard-core unemployed; rehabilitating or building 4,600 low-income housing units; creating 10 new multiservice health centers, 10 new daycare centers and a variety of summer youth programs; and pushing the completion of the city’s stalled urban renewal projects. While Stokes envisioned that the federal government would pick up most of the tab, he explained to the television audience that he expected Greater Clevelanders to contribute $11.25 million in seed money to “stop the downhill slide, to start the city moving forward, to create a climate in which our city can become someday a great one….”
The response to the challenge was immediate and overwhelmingly positive. Propelled by a lead gift of $1 million from the Schubert Foundation, $5.2 million had been pledged in support of Cleveland: NOW! by that fall. Had not a street activist by the name of Ahmed Evans used monies he earned in running a NOW!-sponsored youth program to buy guns, the public-private partnership that the foundation helped to assemble around NOW! might have indeed jump-started Cleveland’s physical and socioeconomic revival. But the community’s hopes for a better day were brutally and quickly dashed when Evans and his followers engaged in a gun battle with police, during which three officers were slain. The so-called Glenville shootout in July 1968 also seriously wounded prospects for the success of Cleveland: NOW!
The Cleveland Foundation had broken with longstanding philanthropic tradition by working arm-in-arm with a political leader on the delivery of summer programs to Cleveland’s most severely alienated African-American youth. Fortunately, the experience did not sour the board on the concept of public-private partnerships. In fact, the foundation’s aborted attempt to improve municipal governance served to renew the Goff precedent for involvement in public affairs. Successive generations of foundation leaders, operating in a less volatile atmosphere, would offer support to public officials to more lasting effect.