Pictured are Cleveland Ward 2 Councilman Zack Reed (wearing gray tie), and Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams

By Kathy Wray Coleman, editor-in-chief, Cleveland Urban News. Com and the Cleveland Urban News.Com Blog, Ohio's Most Read Online Black Newspaper and Newspaper Blog.

Tel: 216-659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. Coleman is a 22-year political, legal and investigative journalist who trained for 17 years, and under five different editors, at the Call and Post Newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio.

(www.clevelandurbannews.com) / (www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com).

CLEVELAND, Ohio- The annual Unity Day Festival at Luke East Park, sponsored each year by Cleveland Ward 2 Councilman Zack Reed, drew thousands of people on Saturday, an indication of the growing influence of the Black east side councilman who has represented the Kinsman and Mount Pleasant neighborhoods since 2000.

Headliners Stephanie Mills, Evelyn "Champagne" King and the S.O.S. Band were the featured groups this year, and performed free  to the community, though Reed has been skilled in drawing corporate sponsors each year to help fund the picnic gala, a gathering replete with concession stands, vendors, fire works, and all.

Last year the legendary R & B singing groups The O'Jays, natives of Canton, Ohio,  and After 7, an 80's singing group, performed.

Numbers range anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 people on a given year that the event attracts. This year it was mid-range, but still the draw that has made it so popular.

Reed told Cleveland Urban News.Com then that the event, this year in its 12th year, is a community and family event and was initiated for everybody to "have a good time."

The councilman said that in previous years the Temptations, George Clinton and Cameo were among the performers.

Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams, who is Black, drew applause when Reed recognized him, support from the Black community of a police chief appointed by a Black mayor, three term mayor Frank Jackson. That community acknowledgement of Williams, a who is a Cleveland native and home grown, comes following a court negotiated settlement last month relative to a  consent decree between the city and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for police reforms.

Last December the DOJ, then under U.S. attorney general Eric holder, and now led by Loretta Lynch, a former New York prosecutor, announced findings of systemic problems in the city's largely White Cleveland Police Department. Those scathing findings include a pattern of illegal excessive force killings, vicious pistil whippings of innocent women and children, and cruel and unusual punishment against the mentally ill.