Speaking to an auditorium full of Clevelanders in the closing days of a heated mayoral campaign, Democratic candidate Carl B. Stokes said the quiet part out loud.
“I am going to be brutally frank with you,” Stokes, a Black man, told a crowd that The Washington Post described as “1,500 hostile white faces.”
The experts, Stokes said, were predicting that his Republican opponent might win the election only because “his skin happens to be white.”
The audience, The Post reported, roared in outrage. The newspaper called Stokes’s comments a “major political blunder.”
But not a fatal one. Fifty-nine years ago Saturday, Stokes, the great-grandson of Seaborn Brinson, an enslaved man, defeated Republican Seth Taft, the grandson of President and Chief Justice William Howard Taft.
The World War II veteran and lawyer took 50.4 percent of the vote on Nov. 7, 1967, to become the first Black person elected mayor of a major U.S. city. Black Democrat Richard G. Hatcher, meanwhile, was elected mayor of Gary, Indiana.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who was in Cleveland on election night, called the victories of Stokes, Hatcher and civil rights-minded Boston mayor-elect Kevin White a “one-two-three punch against backlash and bigotry.”
Election analysts told The Post shortly after the election that 80 percent of White Democrats in Cleveland and 90 percent of White Democrats in Gary “broke with Stokes and Hatcher and supported their white Republican rivals.”
Stokes won reelection in 1969 by a similarly narrow margin. As mayor, he worked to hire Black people and women at city hall, revitalize neighborhoods and address industrial pollution.
On the night King was assassinated, as other cities erupted in violence, Stokes rushed to a local television station to urge calm: “I appeal to all Clevelanders to do honor to the memory of MLK by reacting to this tragic loss in the peaceful manner in which he lived.”
He then ordered White police officers out of Black neighborhoods — a decision that would further strain a tense relationship with the police department — and assembled what he called a “peace patrol”: “Clergymen, athletes, street clubs, militants out patrolling, working to keep the lid on,” he wrote in a 1973 autobiography. He joined them in walking the city through the night, “calming people, talking them into cooler emotions.”
Stokes declined to seek a third term in 1971. After leaving office, he became an anchorman with WNBC-TV in New York, a municipal judge and, under President Bill Clinton, U.S. ambassador to the African island nation of Seychelles.
(His brother and law partner, the civil rights attorney Louis Stokes, was the first Black congressman from Ohio. He served 15 terms from 1969 to 1999.)
In the years since Carl Stokes’s victory, Black people have occupied all levels of public office in the United States up to the presidency. The National Conference of Black Mayors says it now represents more than 640 municipal chief executives across the country.
Photo Almanac is an occasional series from The Washington Post, using photo archives to examine where we’ve been to understand where we are.
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