By Kathy Wray Coleman, associate publisher, editor-in-chief. Tel (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com
Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com -CLEVELAND, Ohio-Longtime civil, social and educational rights activist Norma Jean Freeman of Cleveland has died at 80.
Freeman the wife of educator and activist Don Freeman, the retired director of the League Park Center in Cleveland in the Hough Neighborhood, and a Fisk University graduate who refused to participate in the all-girls university Civil Rights sit-in of 1960 because college students were required to agree to be nonviolent and not to fight back if attacked in order to participate in campus demonstrations.
Services are entrusted to E.F. Boyd and Son Funeral Home with a memorial set for 11 am on Sat., Nov. 16 at Cory United Methodist Church in Cleveland at 1117 East 107th Street on the city's largely Black east siede. (For memorial donations Don Freeman said to contact Doris Willis at (216) 212-6278).
Survivors include her husband; Don Freeman; three sons, Kevin, Bilal, and Kwame; a sister, Hortense Harris, and two living brothers, Edwin Walton and Edsel Walton.
"She [Norma Freeman] did not seek any fanfare and was at nearly all of the Cleveland school board meetings, and she was a champion, like her husband, Mr. Freeman, for families and children," said Cleveland Ward 9 Councilman Kevin Conwell, a Black Democratic councilman who will be among the speakers at the memorial, which will also include family members and community activists. "She warned of what is happening today in public education [with Black inner city children] and slated closures of Cleveland's public schools like Collinwood and MLK high schools."
Don Freeman said Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, the city's third Black mayor who is serving his fourth term and also leads the Cleveland schools, which are 65 percent Black and in a predominantly Black major city, called him to personally offer his condolences.
A Democrat, Jackson, per a state law that took effect in 1998 that handed authority of the city's public schools to the city mayor, controls the public schools and appoints school board members.
He said his wife Norma was a fighter for equal opportunity and equal rights for the less fortunate, and was no pushover, particularly on issues she felt compassionate about.
"It was the Civil Rights Movement and she would not agree to sit-in at Fisk University in 1960, the year she graduated with a degree in math because she had to agree to be nonviolent in order to participate," Don Freeman said during a half hour long interview with Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com since his wife's death on Nov 4 at Cleveland Clinic from a longtime heart condition. "They told her at Fisk that they could not fight White folks back even if they hit them and she refused to participate in student protests on those terms."
Well respected and educated, neither of the Freeman's is violent, but their stance on democracy by any means necessary is indicative of the lengths they were willing to go to seek the freedom and liberation of Black people, and other disenfranchised groups.
Don Freeman said he admired his soon to be wife since they were 12 years old growing up in Cleveland and that they met via bus exchanges, she an Audubon Junior High School student at the time, and he an Alexander Hamilton Jr. High School student.
"I was eyeballing her when we were 12 -years- old," Don Freeman said with a chuckle.
She graduated from John Adams High School in Cleveland and he, from Glenville.
They went their separate ways to college, Don Freeman graduating from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland with a bachelor's degree in education, and Norma at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.
They married in 1965 and became inseparable, and you rarely saw one of them anywhere without the other, a love story in its own right.
They reared three boys in the historic Glenville Neighborhood on Cleveland's largely Black east side, and survived the Hough Riots of 1966.
Norma, said Don, was a homemaker who worked as a bank teller in her early twenties and briefly in special programs for Cleveland schools, and she volunteered as a teacher at the League Park Center were he was director from to 1969-2004, Don Freeman also a former Cleveland schools history teacher.
The Black couple published a community and intellectual magazine on Black enfranchisement for 51 years titled "Vibrations." (Editor's note: Don Freeman is also a writer, and published his latest book, "Reflections of a Resolute Radical." CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE THE BOOK AT AMAZON.COM ).
Don Freeman said one of his favorite memories in politics is when, in 1966, the couple campaigned to help Carl B. Stokes become the first Black mayor of Cleveland in 1967, and of a major American city.
Their activism did not stop there as they established the Committee for Social Justice and fought with community activists, Black leaders and others against racism, excessive force by Cleveland police, housing discrimination, excessive tax abatements that hurt Cleveland's inner city, and the list goes on.
They were active in the community fighting for Blacks during the Cleveland schools desegregation era of the late 1970s and 1980s and 19902 that brought about crosstown busing, their three children, all of them now grown, by products of Cleveland's public schools
They led the effort to get signatures for a community petition to call for the firing of 13 non- Black Cleveland cops who gunned down unarmed Blacks Malissa Williams and Timothy Russell with 137 bullets following a horrific 22 min. car chase in 2012 from Cleveland to neighboring East Cleveland, only one cop, Michael Brelo, ultimately fired, though he was acquitted of two counts of voluntary manslaughter in a 2015 bench trial before Democratic Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas Judge John O'Donnell.
O'Donnell lost a 2016 race for the Ohio Supreme Court by less that one percent to now Justice Pat Fischer after activists, fellow Democrats and Black Cleveland City Council members, led by Councilman Conwell, rallied against his candidacy, O'Donnell making his third bid for the state's high court in 2020.
Though she was a registered Democrat and often voted for Democrats, public records show, Don Freeman said his wife, by virtue of her progressive activism, was neither a Republican nor a Democrat, and was, instead, a revolutionary like he is, and that she was admired and respected across partisan lines.
The Inner City Republican Movement of Cleveland, led by activist Donna Walker Brown, who picketed Cleveland schools officials and protested at school board meetings with the Freeman's and other activists when they would not do right by Black students and their families on issues such as school closings and other educational resources, recognized her with a community service award in January of this year.
"Norma Freeman gave back to the community and we recognized her for her service with an award," said Walker Brown, also a Black educational activist and a member of the grassroots group Black on Black Crime Inc. who also leads the Educational Urban Justice League in Cleveland, an advocacy group for Black Cleveland schools students and their families, among others.
Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, Ohio's most read digital Black newspaper and Black blog. Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. Coleman is an experienced Black political reporter who covered the 2008 presidential election for the Call and Post Newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio and the presidential elections in 2012 and 2016 As to the one-on-one interview by Coleman with Obama CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM, OHIO'S LEADER IN BLACK DIGITAL NEWS.
