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 six different editors, at the Call and Post Newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio. (www.clevelandurbannews.com) / (www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com).

CLEVELAND, Ohio-Cleveland Urban News.Com, Ohio's most read digital Black newspaper, spoke one-on-one with members of the greater Cleveland Black community, namely elected officials, community activists, Democratic Party affiliates, Cleveland NAACP officials, retired judges and the president of  the Black Women Political Action Committee, all of them more than  eager to pay tribute to the legendary Louis Stokes, the first Black from Ohio to serve in Congress who died on August 18 at 90-years -old at his home in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. (Editor's note: Stokes died following complications relative to brain an lung cancer. A public viewing will be held from 7 am to 5 pm on Monday, Aug., 24 at the rotunda at Cleveland City Hall,  where the former congressman will lie in state. It will be followed by a memorial service. Open-to-the public funeral services are Tuesday, Aug. 25 at 11 am at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church on Cleveland's east side at 8712 Quincy Avenue).

His legacy, they say,  reflects a lifetime of achievements that are, no doubt, beyond reproach, one that began in the Outwaite Homes, the city's first federally funded housing projects, which were situated on the largely Black east side of the majority Black city of Cleveland. There, he and his younger brother and only sibling grew up poor, Black, and proud, and were nurtured by a widowed Black working class mother determined to make a better life for her two children.

He was yet determined, say his admirers, to advocate for Black and poor people, and others, and to make his mark in life as a federal lawmaker with impeccable credentials and an uncanny zeal to change America for the better.

Interviewed by Cleveland Urban News.Com Editor-in-Chief Kathy Wray Coleman,  who trained as a reporter for 17 years for the Call and Post Newspaper in Cleveland, knew Stokes and covered a fraction of his congressional tenure were state Rep. John Barnes Jr. (D-12),  a Cleveland Democrat, East Cleveland community activist Art McKoy, retired Ohio Eighth District Court of Appeals judge Sara J. Harper, who is also the third vice-president of the Cleveland NAACP, Carnegie Roundtable President Charles E. Bibb Sr., and retired East Cleveland judge Una H.R. Kennon president of the Black Women Political Action Committee of greater Cleveland and president of the East Cleveland Board of Education.

"He was seven years old and I was six when we lived in the housing projects in Cleveland," said Harper, 89, a retired Ohio Eighth District Court of Appeals judge, and currently the third vice president of the Cleveland NAACP. "At that time in the projects it was a wonderful time, and we stayed close the rest of our lives."

Harper said that Stokes' leadership skills were evident in his youth, and that he cherished the right to vote, and fought all of his political life to protect that constitutional right, which she says is being carelessly taken for granted.

"The right to vote is being ignored today by too may people,"said Harper.

Stokes was a Democrat who served 15 terms in Congress representing the 11th congressional district, formerly the 21st congressional district, a largely Black congressional district that he was first elected in 1968, and after he help to create it by successfully arguing that year as a lawyer for the Cleveland NAACP for a reprieve from racial gerrymandering before the U.S. Supreme Court.

As a congressman and chair of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Stokes led investigations relative to the the Iran Contra Affair, and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And he also served as chairman of the House Ethics and Appropriations committees, among a laundry list  of high tech congressional assignments and endeavors.

"Congressman Stokes was a change agent in a critical time in American history, said state Rep Barnes Jr (D-12), a protege of his father, John Barnes Sr., a former Cleveland Ward 1 councilman during the Stokes era and that of the Old Black Political Guard, which in 1967 helped to elect Stokes' younger brother, the late Carl B. Stokes, the first Black mayor of Cleveland, and of a major American city.

"It was a pleasure being in a congressional district of a congressman who was the first Black elected to Congress in Ohio," said  Bibb Sr., a Cuyahoga County Democratic Party operative and a former East Cleveland Councilman during the Stokes era who now leads the Greater Cleveland Carnegie Roundtable.

Local community activist Art McKoy, who leads the grassroots group Black on Black Crime Inc., which is stationed in East Cleveland, a largely Black impoverished Cleveland suburb, said that Stoke's influence was universal.

"I made the Congressman nervous sometimes as a community activist," said McKoy, who said that Stokes was personable and made time to hear pertinent concerns from community activists and others one-on-one.

"I am a veteran, said McKoy. "What I remember most about the congressman, in addition to his bubbly smile, is that  he used his influence to bring in money and other resources to revived the Veterans Hospital, which was once a second class medical facility."

Kennon told Cleveland Urban News.Com that Stokes supported women and made sure that other greater Cleveland Blacks and women got elected to office, including members of Cleveland City Council, judges, and state legislators. She said that she became an East Cleveland judge, an election position that she held from 1986 until her retirement from the bench in 2005, because the congressman recommended her appointment to then Democratic governor Dick Celeste to fill a vacancy on the court.

Members of the Black women's political action organization that she leads, a local group whose mission is to get Black women elected to office, are "saddened by his passing," said Keenon.

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