But it’s not just black workers who are struggling. Ohio’s median wage is no higher than it was in 1979, despite the growth in the economy. Raising Ohio’s minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would boost the wages of a staggering 47 percent of black workers and 32 percent of white workers. Of the top 13 occupations in Ohio, 11 now pay less than $34,000 a year, leaving a small family in or near the official poverty level. That is a broken economy. People who knew him say Carl Stokes would agree. “Carl Stokes would be extremely tormented if he were around today,” Peery said. Stokes would have acted, Miller said. “I often think, ‘Where is the Carl Stokes of 2017, a person who can make very difficult decisions in the face of all kinds of conflicts?’” Since the Stokes era, upward mobility has declined. College is more crucial but less affordable. America is much, much wealthier—but far less of that wealth goes to regular families. Stokes supported public jobs, higher wages, extensive federal support to cities, deep public investments to clean up the environmental crises of the times, aggressive action to reduce discrimination and inequality, and infrastructure investments that supported people who lived and worked in the city. He took on corporate and union elites, fought projects that would carry resources out of cities, interpreted his role broadly, and favored a bold agenda over a safe one. Today, Stokes would want a higher federal and state minimum wage (the federal one peaked during his term), federal resources for struggling cities, and big projects to employ people while tackling challenges like education, pollution, lead abatement, and abandoned homes. Peery thinks he would demand a permanent ongoing fund for neighborhoods before any money went to sports facilities, such as the Quicken Loans Arena. He would want more resources and better outcomes for the schools, Miller said. Then again, those were different times. Columnist Roldo Bartimole, who was critical of Cleveland: NOW! as insufficiently radical at the time, admitted, “He had a lot of vision, but the times allowed for greater vision.”101 In the late 1960s, outrage seemed like it might be channeled to solve America’s major problems. Safety nets, public investments, and the environmental and civil rights movements did indeed solve many challenges. Carl Stokes was, according to Bartimole, anti-corporate, at least sometimes, and that helped him wrest victories for poor and working people. Today, few American politicians would want to be labeled anti-corporate. Letting moneyed interests call the shots doomed the dreams of Stokes and leaders like him and made it so that the economy could nearly double in size while workers just treaded water. The Civil Rights Movement, the War on Poverty, and leaders like Stokes eliminated the problem Peery identified of black college graduates having to be waiters. These forces opened opportunities and reduced discrimination so many people of color could get jobs that matched their skills and training. But the economy later undermined that progress. As Peery said ruefully: “What we never dreamed was that in 2017, white college graduates would have to work as waiters.” But Stokes wouldn’t want to end on that note.
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Interview with Roldo Bartimole, July 18, 2017.
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