Pictured are the late Congressman Louis Stokes (wearing maroon tie) and Vice President Joe Biden, who will attend funeral services for Stokes, who died August 18, at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland on Tuesday, August 25 at 11 am.
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-Led by Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, and family members, with dignitaries such as former U.S representatives Mary Rose Oakar and Lacy "Bill" Clay Sr., on program, and Sam Miller of Forrest City Enterprises and Attorney Fred Nance of the prominent law firm of Squires, Sanders and Dempsey, also at the helm, former longtime Congressman Louis Stokes was honored in Cleveland, Ohio yesterday as he lied in state at the rotunda at City Hall.
The program, where all of the aforementioned spoke, Oakar and Clay, who both served with Stokes in Congress, and Nance, the managing partner of the law firm where Stokes was an executive attorney after his retirement from Congress, began at 5: 45 pm. It was a prelude to funeral services set for today, Tuesday, August 25, beginning at 11:00 am at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church on the city's majority Black east side.
Vice President Joe Biden will attend the funeral, White House officials said in a press release.
Ohio's first Black congressman, Stokes, 90, represented Cleveland and several of its eastern suburbs in Washington and served 15 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, from 1998 until his retirement in 1968. He died on August 18 at his home in Shaker Heights, a Cleveland suburb, with his wife Jay by his bedside, and after a brave battle with lung and brain cancer.
Among others at the public viewing earlier in the day were Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty and Civil Rights icon the Rev Jesse Jackson Sr, who was also in attendance at the City Hall ceremony.
Eleanor Hayes, a former Cleveland Fox8 News anchorwoman and currently the director of communications for the human resources division for Cleveland Clinic hospitals, was the mistress of ceremonies at the City Hall event.
The Rev. Dr. E. Theophilus Caviness, senior pastor at the Greater Abyssinia Baptist Church in Cleveland and first vice president of the Cleveland NAACP, did the benediction. (www.clevelandurbannews.com) /(www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com).
