One of nine Black council persons on the 19- seat Cleveland City Council, Reed represents parts of the impoverished predominantly Black Mount Pleasant and Kinsman neighborhoods on Cleveland's largely Black east side. He has been on city council about a decade and a quarter.

Next year, however, city council will be reduced to 17  seats pursuant to the November election this year and a voter adopted charter amendment pushed by Reed's foe, city council president Martin Sweeney, a west side White councilman whom Reed supporters say is out to destroy him.

The Kathy Wray Coleman Online News Blog.Com, Ohio's No 1 and No 2 online Black newspapers (www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com) and (www.clevelandurbannews.com). Reach us by phone at 216-659-0473 and by email at editor@clevelandurbannews.com

ORIENT, Ohio-Cleveland teen rapist and kidnapper Ariel Castro was found dead in his prison cell yesterday evening, just over a month after  a common pleas judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole after he pleaded guilty to raping and holding captive Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight for a decade at his since demolished home on the predominantly Black city's largely White west side of town.

A fired Cleveland schools bus driver and highly violent and abusive widower with two grown children, Castro, 53, allegedly hanged himself in the Correctional Reception Center in  Orient, Ohio, though he was in protective custody after sentencing on August  1, 2013 by Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Michael Russo.

He was not on  suicide watch, prison authorities said.

He was reportedly found hanged in his cell at about 9:20 pm when correction officers' staff were making rounds, and  was pronounced dead an hour and a half after he was transported to a nearby hospital. Prison officials said the cause of death is a likely suicide, though autopsy reports have not been concluded.

His death has stunned America as the case drew national attention across racial lines and highlighted the sensitive issue of violence against women.

Castro admitted at sentencing as part of a plea deal that he  raped DeJesus,  Berry and Knight, and he told Judge Russo moments before his sentence was handed down, that  he and the three girls, and the child he fathered with Berry, were one "happy family."

Over 100 feet of chain was found in the Castro home when police raided it after his neighbor Charles Ramsey, who is Black,  rescued them in May.

Berry was 17 when he kidnapped her not even a mile away from her home, DeJesus, who knew his daughter, was 14 and also grew up close to the Castro home like Berry, and Knight, now 32 and a women's advocate spokesperson, was 21 at the time.

Women's activists groups had no mercy on the child rapist an kidnapper and commented upon reported news of his death.

"While we would not condone any malfeasance around Mr. Castro's death, and to date that does not seem to be the case,  and while we certainly believe that life is worth living, we hope he rots in hell," said Cleveland area community activist Kathy Wray Coleman, who leads the Imperial Women, a grassroots group founded in 2009 around the unprecedented murders of 11 Black women on  Imperial Avenue on the city's largely Black east side by convicted serial killer Anthony Sowell.

Coleman said also that her group is "pleased that Mr. Castro has moved on to a better place for himself."

Like the home of Castro, that he turned over to the county land bank as part of a plea deal, the home of Sowell on Imperial Avenue, the now infamous street by which the Imperial Avenue Murders drew its name , was demolished too.

A former marine, Sowell (pictured), 53, sits on death row  while his  appeal of his rape, aggravated murder and other convictions is before the seven-member largely Republican Ohio Supreme Court, which is led by popular Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor.

"It is up to us, the Congress of the United States of America to pass a jobs bill that ensures decent jobs for all citizens..." Congresswoman Marcia L. Fudge of Ohio, also chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, at the 50th anniversary ceremony on the March on Washington on August 28, 2013

WASHINGTON, D.C- Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States of America, was privileged yesterday to preside over the 50th-year anniversary ceremony of the March on Washington on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. where the late Civil Rights icon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his historic "I Have A Dream" speech five decades ago. Some 250,000 people were there to support King in 1963 when people from across the nation marched for jobs, justice and freedom.

At the time King was 34-years-old and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a  Civil Rights organization that  has been unable to regain the status that he brought to it during the height of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. He would be shot to death five years later on a Tennessee balcony before a scheduled labor rights boycott that he intended to lead.

Thousands of people stood steps away and joined the president and First Lady Michelle Obama in the celebration yesterday, one with a long list of speakers in addition to Obama, including two of King's children, Civil Rights Activists Merlie Evers- Williams and the Rev. Al Sharpton, Congressional Black Caucus Leader Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-11) of Ohio, Oprah, and U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia (D-5),73, the only original speaker at the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington that King led.

"Because they marched, America changed," said Obama. "The doors of opportunity swung open."

But the president cautioned that more work is needed to bring America to a Democracy where equal opportunity flourishes.

Others that spoke echoed the sentiment, including two of the presidents's predecessor presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both Democrats like Obama.