By Kathy Wray Coleman, Editor
CLEVELAND, Ohio-Former Cleveland NAACP President George L. Forbes, also a former Cleveland City Council president and currently a part time local attorney who is also legal counsel for the Call and Post Newspaper, Ohio's Black press, still has clout, at least with Ohio's governor.
Forbes summoned Black Democratic leaders of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County to a meeting with Republican Gov. John Kasich last week to the renowned Cleveland Clinic, though only about 50 people showed, and only four of them were Black elected officials, with some others questioning its impact on the neck and neck presidential race and President Obama's standing in the battleground state of Ohio.
The elected officials that were there were state Reps. John Barnes Jr. (D-12) and Bill Patmon (D-10), both Cleveland Democrats, and Cleveland City Council members Mamie Mitchell, Jeff Johnson and Michael Polensek, who is White, and one to freely antagonize Black youth and men that he sees as thugs and wishes were "dead. "
But noticeably absent was everybody else, such as state Sen. Nina Turner(D-25), the four Blacks on Cuyahoga County Council, including county council president C. Ellen Connally, the other six on Cleveland City Council, Congresswoman Marcia L. Fudge (D-11), and key Whites like labor leader Harriet Applegate, executive secretary of the North Shore AFL-CIO Federation of Labor.
Kasich used the meeting to push his and Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson's controversial education plan, which is a pending bill in the state legislature that calls for a state law to strip only Cleveland teachers of seniority and would hand public funds from the coffers of the majority Black impoverished school district to a few charter schools, among other radical provisions.
The plan has the reluctant endorsement of the Cleveland Teachers Union leadership team and that of the Call and Post Fudge, Turner, state Rep. Sandra Williams (D-11), and all but two White members of Cleveland City Council, among some other people
Community activists, however, have collectively shunned it, and have called it anti-Black, anti-Democratic, anti-student, anti-community, and illegal.
State Sen. Shirley Smith (D-22), a Cleveland Democrat, blasted the mayor's educational plan in an editorial in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Ohio largest newspaper, and another entity that backs the plan.
Those that Cleveland Urban News.Com interviewed following the first-of-its-kind meeting said the governor was warm, and amenable, and that he bragged of what he has done for Cleveland and Ohio, such as helping to get $750 thousand in the state fiscal budget for an upcoming East Side Market in Cleveland's Glenville neighborhood, and increasing minority business development monies throughout the state.
A former U.S. Rep. from Ohio who lost both of his parents in a car accident at 38, Kasich, 60, shot down a request by Cleveland Defense Attorney Michael Nelson for financial help from the state for Central State University, Ohio's only Black publicly funded institution of higher learning, saying before the Black audience that university officials must help themselves first.
And he took such a position even though data from the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights denotes that CSU has been disenfranchised, first with the building of the predominantly White Wright State University down the street to siphon monies and students away from CSU, and because of other discrimination, including unfunded mandates and fewer state resources on a proportinate basis than that accorded to majority euro-centric public universities in Ohio like The Ohio State University.
And the governor is accused of misquoting data at the meeting, saying allegedly that Cleveland spends $15 thousand per student annually, more money than any school district in Ohio, when even the neighboring school districts of Shaker Hts. and Cleveland- Hts. University Hts. school districts spend nearly $4 thousand more per kid. The Ohio Supreme Court, in DeRolph vs. State of Ohio, has repeatedly deemed Ohio's school funding formula and its reliance heavily on property taxes unconstitutional, and the state legislature has repeatedly ignored court orders to revise the state's s funding formula for its public schools in compliance with DeRolph.
The governor's deputy press secretary said by phone on Wed. that Kasich had actually said at the meeting that Cleveland schools spend more money per student annually than other major school districts in Ohio such as Columbus and Cincinnati.
But she said also that the governor continues to lobby state legislators to revise the state's method of funding education so that all children of Ohio get a fair shake educationally.
"The governor still supports a constitutional school funding formula ," said Connie Wehrkamp, Kasich' s deputy press secretary.
The Rev E. Theophilus Caviness, senior pastor of Greater Abyssinia Baptist Church in Cleveland and the executive director of the Cleveland Chapter of the SCLC, was at the meeting too, as was Marcia McCoy, the greater Cleveland head of the Rev. Al. Sharpton's National Action Network.
Angry over his initial refusal to hire a single Black in his cabinet when he took office in 2011, Caviness and McCoy had led the charge against Kasich, along with Black state legislators, including Turner and Williams, also chair of the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus, to urge him to be more sensitive to Ohio's Black community. And they picketed with Ohio Civil Rights organizations, including some local branches of the NAACP and SCLC, causing a stir at the Statehouse, and putting pressure on the Republican White governor.
Since then, the controversial governor, who is at odds with Ohio's public sector unions that won a repeal of Senate Bill 5, a Republican backed state law that would have dismantled public sector collective bargaining, has appointed two Blacks to his cabinet.
Some of the elected officials that went said that they were for the most part uncomfortable going at Forbe's request during a presidential election year since Kasich is a Republican and they, Forbes Jackson and nearly all others at the meeting are registered Democrats.
Others that went said that business is business and as long as Kasich is Ohio's governor it is proper for Black leaders to convene with him on issues of public concern.
Kasich did win some friends by meeting.
One public official said on condition of anonymity that Kasich is now willing to give money and other resources to the Black community and that President Obama should step up his game and bring Black leaders more firmly into his fold during this year's presidential campaign
A few political wannabes that went to the meeting were excited that the governor took the time to meet with them.
Others said that both Kasich and Forbes were scheming against Obama and the Democrats since Ohio is a pivotal state.
Yet some said that Forbes, Caviness, and Cleveland NAACP President James Hardiman, who joked to Kasich at the meeting that he is now in charge of the Cleveland NAACP, not Forbes, are merely part of Cleveland's Old Black Political Guard that political hopefuls still have to recon with.
Community Activist Donna Brown, who announced earlier this year that she will run for Cleveland mayor next year, said the meeting was suspect.
Governor Kasich is acting like a closet Democrat and the Democrats that went to the meeting are acting like closet Republicans," said Brown, a Black Republican herself. "And what Mayor Jackson and Governor Kasich are doing with their educational plan is illegal because House Bill 269, the state law upon which mayoral control was crafted, does not permit the intervention by the mayor and the governor, and the mayor is essentially limited to appointing a school board ."
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