Upfront

Students Call for Immediate Removal of John Marshall’s Name from CSU Law School

last year or people being shut out of [VoteBuilder] access, or even highranking party officials using their resources to push forward candidates that do what they want.”

Klein said he was running because he wants to help the party more effectively get out the vote, keep people engaged, and be “far more transparent and equitable” in its internal conduct.

“If they keep trying to shut out younger people like me,” he said, “It’s gonna be harder and harder to be successful down the line.”

— Sam Allard

DIGIT WIDGET

50

Number of RTA buses stuck in the snow on the morning of MLK Day before the transit agency decided to suspend service for the remainder of the day.

50%

Minimum percentage of Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse employees who couldn’t get to work for the Cavs’ MLK Day game against the Brooklyn Nets. For fans who braved the elements, the Cavs offered free tickets to a future game due to long concession lines.

$50 million

Amount that the Cleveland Clinic will donate to the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition over the next five years. The City of Cleveland will also allocate $17 million in ARPA funding to dramatically increase the coalition’s impact.

107.3

Local FM radio station that has dispensed with its “JenY” branding and become “Alternative Cleveland,” aligning with its alternative rock programming. A working group of CSU Law School students calling themselves “Students Against Marshall” sent a formal request last week to the school’s dean, Lee Fisher, and the naming committee he chairs asking that former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall’s name be immediately removed from the law school.

“Our single objective,” read the letter to the 29-member Naming Committee, “is for the CSU Board of Trustees to remove the name of this slave master who built his wealth through ownership of human beings, from all aspects of the law college prior to the Spring 2022 Commencement, ensuring no other C|M|Law student graduates with the name of a brutal slave owner on their diploma.”

Students had been individually petitioning school leadership to make such a change in recent years, mobilized by the national reckoning with race in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis Police in 2020. Many of the arguments were advanced in guest columns in this publication.

Fisher formed the naming committee at the behest of CSU President Harlan Sands. With representatives from the student body, faculty and alumni, the committee was tasked with making a recommendation to the university’s board of trustees—keep the name or don’t—and then with proposing an alternate name if necessary. Current students say they’ve been frustrated by the lack of the committee’s progress.

“It just wasn’t doing anything,” second-year law student Emily Forsee told Scene in a telephone interview Tuesday. Forsee is one of two “public-facing” members of Students Against Marshall and the letter’s lead author. “The committee was formed in the aftermath of George Floyd, at a time when the CSU website was slapping woke labels on itself, promising to do better. In that context, the fact that we’re commemorating a slaveholder is absurd, and it’s taking way too long for them to see that.”

Forsee said that the Fisher-led committee has been unwilling to commit to a timetable, and that the ad hoc student group Students Against Marshall finally took it upon themselves to force the issue with the university’s board of trustees.

“It’s so simple,” Forsee said. “They could call a vote tomorrow and vote to remove the name. Period. All they need is a simple majority.”

The letter demands immediate action. It acknowledges that the renaming discussions have been lengthy and deliberate, but argues that this shouldn’t preclude the board from removing Marshall’s name before a new name is selected. (The situation is not unlike asking for the immediate removal of Chief Wahoo, even before a new name for the Cleveland MLB franchise was established.)

The letter asks that the naming committee “commit to severing the renaming issue from the removal issue, and commit to submitting a recommendation for removal to the Board of Trustees” in time to appear on the agenda for the board’s next meeting on January 27.

“This has taken so long that we’ve had a whole class of law school colleagues who graduated with a slaveowner’s name on their diplomas,” Forsee said. “There are only two more meetings of the board before Spring Commencement. We sent the letter because we want to make sure that it won’t happen again.”

The letter also follows closely on the heels of an emergency resolution in Cleveland City Council, sponsored by Glenville Councilman Kevin Conwell, urging the CSU Naming Committee to change the law school’s name as well.

In response to emailed questions from Scene, a university spokesperson confirmed that the naming committee had no timetable for its decision and had nothing further to add beyond the statement below:

“The College of Law is working through a process evaluating its name. This is a consequential decision that requires careful study, and a thoughtful, inclusive process that considers different viewpoints from our entire law school and university community. Our process has modeled what we teach our law students – to listen and learn, and to withhold judgment until we have had a chance to evaluate what we have heard.”

— Sam Allard

Warrensville Heights Mayor Brad Sellers Withdraws from County Executive Race

Citing the “distraction” of recent reporting on his personal financial history, Warrensville Heights Mayor Brad Sellers announced that he suspended his campaign for Cuyahoga County Executive less than two weeks after he’d announced his candidacy.

“I entered the race for Cuyahoga County Executive on January 5, 2022,” Sellers said in a brief statement last weekend. “Recent reports have now become a distraction in this race, so today I am announcing I am withdrawing my candidacy for the position of Cuyahoga County Executive.”

Authored by cleveland.com’s Kaitlin Durbin, the stories in question reported that Sellers had certified a 100% tax abatement on his home in Warrensville Heights in 2018. The suburb’s “Good Neighbor” abatement program allowed teachers, law enforcement officials, firefighters, and EMS personnel to receive a full tax abatement for 15 years on their home’s value. Sellers argued that as Mayor of Warrensville Heights, he was also the city’s safety director and therefore a “law enforcement official,” eligible for the full abatement. Other residents are entitled to 75% abatement on newly constructed homes.

The fact that Sellers applied for and certified his own abatement was questionable, Durbin reported, but also improper because of his outstanding tax delinquency. Sellers owed more than $13,000 in back taxes to the County at the time

Warrensville Heights City Council nevertheless approved Sellers’ abatement, and the mayor’s annual tax liability fell from more than $5,000 to less than $800. Sellers still defaulted, Durbin reported, which the mayor attributed to an ongoing misunderstanding.

Though Sellers has now repaid his back taxes and said he has thrown up his hands on previously disputed taxes, the cyclone of reporting by Durbin and others on his “troubled finances” was enough to make him reconsider his bid for the top position in Cuyahoga County.

His departure means that former University Circle Inc. CEO Chris Ronayne now has a much clearer path to a Democratic Party endorsement this week. Shirley Smith, the former state legislator and perennial candidate, will be running for the seat too, though as of late last week she had not formally launched her campaign. Former County Commissioner Lee Weingart, of Shaker Heights, is running for the seat on the Republican side.

Cleveland Green Book Project is Mapping Black Entertainment in Northeast Ohio from 1930s to 1960s

Mark Souther, the Cleveland State University professor and historian who you might know from his essential book “Believing in Cleveland,” recently launched a new project aimed at exploring and adding to the historical record of Black life in Cleveland from the 1930s to 1960s.

Green Book Cleveland, a mapbased historical site filled with hundreds of entries, includes the bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, barber shops, clubs, theaters and other entertainment spots that were included in one of the Green Books, published for 30 years during the Jim Crow era as guides to where African-Americans could enjoy courteous service and a safe, friendly environment in their travels.

But the project goes further, adding places that weren’t included in the guides, and parks and natural spots where African-Americans enjoyed recreation during those decades.

Scene spoke with Souther about the project. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

SCENE: Where did the idea to do this come from?

MARK SOUTHER: The idea is something I’ve thought about in various forms over the period of years. It comes out of several areas of my work as an historian. One: I spent a number of years earlier in my career looking at urban tourism, including in New Orleans. When Green Book Guides for Black travelers began to get new attention, I wanted to know more, as someone who was interested in tourism.

Second, for the past 15 years I’ve been working with students and community organizations on space-based story platforms. I’ve been doing that for eleven years with Cleveland Historical. The Cleveland Green Book project is a more thematically focused extension — the idea of using a map-based website to shine new light on places whose histories aren’t that well understood, and in some cases hidden or forgotten.

And third, there’s a piece of it that goes beyond documenting the sites that appeared in the Green Book Guides. I was interested in going beyond that and going to leisure and entertainment beyond the city itself, places that didn’t make it in the Green Book, places that African-Americans went for leisure activities. That kind of squares with researching and teaching in more of a metropolitan focus rather than the city and its near cities: How do we think about a metro region?

SCENE: Many of the parks, beaches and other natural places included on the site either don’t exist anymore or have different histories than most might know.

MS: Edgewater, for instance, was generally not a welcoming place. It’s included on there because we found evidence Black groups occasionally did, in earlier years, gather there, but it was not a choice place. Euclid Beach, if you look at the story on that, there’s the well-known 1946 Euclid Beach Park riot, and there had been efforts to exclude Blacks as a whole from certain parts of the park going back to the early 20th century. It was not a friendly and welcoming place, but we chose to include it because it helps tell the story of the struggle to overcome exclusion.

On-Erie Beach, on the other hand, was a place that was carved out as a separate place, and actually envisioned by a Kentucky woman who had migrated up to Oberlin. She envisioned it as what she called a Black utopia, a leisure resort for African-Americans. It would cross regions. It would invite speakers, like Chautauqua. It would have a religious component, but it was mainly recreational. It would have a cottage community and a beach. Access to water and beaches has historically been one of the most fraught aspects of racial struggle in the country.

SCENE: How much of what is on the site now appeared in the Green Books at some time and how many are additions by you and your students?

MS: There are about 240 sites right now. Of those, about 100 were in the Green Book, either in Cleveland or Lorain or Akron, and a few other cities. The other 140 were never in the Green Book, but the Green Book is very idiosyncratic. Some places that were very, very popular in the Black community in Cleveland for many years may only appear in one or two years of the Green Book, for reasons I don’t necessarily understand. Some places come and go, some places stayed for 30 years, some places were only in there for one year, but you can read about them in the Call & Post and find lots of evidence they were very popular and attracted not only locals but people from other cities and even celebrities.

SCENE: Midtown had a great documentary recently on the history of Leo’s Casino, and while there weren’t interviews with any famous musicians, there were tons from people who lived in Cleveland and went there over the years. Hearing about their experiences was so valuable to add to the story most people might get reading about Leo’s.

MS: That’s precisely what needs to happen here. I would like people who find out about this project to reach out. I hope that people will share stories, if they have them, from their family or themselves, that give a feeling for the lived experience rather than basic facts. I’m interested in oral history interviews and would like to get people recorded so that stories can be preserved and added to the project. I could also see the project being used in schools. Place-based history is an incredible way to learn social studies — using local examples to learn about national events or trends of importance.

SCENE: Is there other ways the project can come alive outside of the virtual component?

MS: Public art is another aspect. People have done public art around the Green Book. And as for historical markers, there’s a real shortage of historical markers of Black history. There’s been some great work in the last few years by the Cleveland Restoration Society and others in funding and supporting historical markers of Black Civil Rights importance. But getting the public involved in general is important. I want to hear, ‘That’s not how I remember it,” or, “You’re missing something.”

The State restaurant, which appeared in multiple versions of the Green Book.

SCENE: A lot of work.

MS: It’s a student project, and they deserve so much credit. They’re learning, maybe for the first time, about putting together a narrative based on what sources suggest and seeing the gaps. It humbles you. You realize how little made its way into print. If we’re talking about the West Side Market or Lake View or the Terminal Tower, you have reams of photos and stories.

For more information and to explore for yourself, visit GreenBookCleveland.org.