CLEVELAND, Ohio-The Imperial Women, a majority female grassroots group founded around the unprecedented murders of 11 Black women by since convicted serial killer Anthony Sowell (pictured) on Imperial Ave. in Cleveland, Oh., are voicing opposition to efforts by City of Cleveland officials to change the name of the street where the women were raped, strangled and murdered, asking if all streets of Cleveland where women were raped, strangled and murdered partly because of malfeasance by city officials and police will be changed to different names, and why Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson chose two Black male prominent area ministers to lead the project.

"I would not be surprised if the street were renamed Shirley Temple Lane and with a subordinate Black male statute in the Sowell front yard tap dancing in White face where these decision making men at issue cannot internalize that one must accept both triumphs and tragedies in a community and that the necessary entities for this decision are not at the table, including a great number of the families of the murdered women, the families that live on Imperial Ave., and elected officials and grassroots factions that have pushed for changes in public policy and missing persons units in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County.," said Kathy Wray Coleman, the leader of the Imperial Women and the Imperial Women Coalition, a group of over 30 grassroots organizations from Northeast Ohio. "If the dead women were affluent blond and blued- eyed White women from Beachwood or Shaker Hts, city officials would not rush to judgment in isolation of the grassroots community and others simply because some of the families have lawsuits pending and some city officials want to forget that the women ever existed, and we say this while also noting that we are a diverse group of women and men that fights for equal opportunity and equal justice for all people, and across racial, ethnic and gender lines."

Coleman said that the activists question why the venture is being led solely by the Rev. Larry Harris, senior pastor of Mt. Olive Baptist Church in Cleveland and head of the United Pastor's in Mission, and the Rev. Eugene Ward, pastor of Greater Love Missionary Baptist Church in Cleveland, both men, and neither of whom invited the women's group to the table on the matter, which, she says, is symbolic of some Black Cleveland clergy that are use to subordinating women.

The issue unraveled when Fox 8 News ran a story on the controversial subject last week reporting  that Harris and Ward were allegedly slated to make the name change proposal, which must be sanctioned by Cleveland City Council and Jackson, if it goes that far.

Rev. Eugene Ward (left) and Rev. Larry Harris

No family member of the Imperial Ave murder victims was quoted in the story as agreeing to changing the name of the street where their loved one was raped, strangled and murdered in cold blood.

Other members of the Imperial Women were upset too.

"They see the women that were murdered on Imperial Ave as a stigma, but we don't," said Community Activist Marva Patterson, who is also a member of Black on Black Crime, the Carl Stokes Brigade and People for the Imperial Act. "And I am all for a picket if we need to have one."

"I support a protest too if they are serious about changing the name of the street," said Frances Caldwell, Executive Director of the Cleveland African American Museum.

And so does Roz McAllister, an Imperial Women member of native American descent who leads Ohio Family Rights and lives on Cleveland's predominantly Black east side not far from where the murders occurred.

"I'm all for it and for the reason that you don't just change the names of city streets, particularly without first asking the taxpayers," said McAllister.

A Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas jury found Sowell guilty  last summer of murdering the 11 women and a host of other crimes, and he was sentenced to death by lethal injection by Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas Judge Dick Ambrose, a former Cleveland Browns football player.

His convictions are on appeal, and the celebrated case is complicated civilly by the fact that city law enforcement authorities released Sowell from police custody in 2008 on a rape complaint, even after going to Imperial Ave, a now infamous street in Cleveland's Mount Pleasant neighborhood, and allegedly smelling death and seeing blood that lined the walls of the serial killer's home, a CNN report said.

And community activists want to know why a search warrant was not issued when police went to the Sowell home in 2008 on a rape complaint not taken seriously until it was too  late, and only after the women were found at the since demolished home beginning in 2009.

After his release release from police custody in 2008, Sowell went on to murder the last six of the 11 Black women that fail prey to his wrath.

The women were reportedly murdered between 2007 and 2009 with police following a second rape complaint to Sowells' home for a second time in late Oct. 2009 and then announcing what would prove later to be Cleveland's, and, in some eye's, the nation's most gruesome murders mystery.

Several of the members of the victims families have said that their missing persons reports were ignored, some because some of the women had substance abuse problems, and others due to par for the course by insensitive police and a cadre of sexist and incompetent city law enforcement officials.

Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson

Currently the mayor, who appoints the top brass by city charter, has no Blacks as law director, safety director, chief of police, EMS commissioner or  chief prosecutor in the predominantly Black major metropolitan city where public records show that Black women and community activists are routinely prosecuted in a malicious manner and harassed by select judges of the Cleveland Municipal Court for political favors.

Reach Editor and  Journalist Kathy Wray Coleman at editor@clevelandurbannews.com and phone number: 216-932-3114.