I will simply quote the conclusion from that same article that attempts to put a bad light on a man who doesn't have a racist bone in his body. Btw, did you know Kucinich grew up in the projects and color-blind?
Soon thereafter, a federal judge ordered Cleveland schools to use busing to integrate. Despite anger among whites, Mayor Kucinich kept the peace.
"The thing that people have never given Dennis credit for was the desegregation," said Esther Weissman, who was a lawyer for the court clerk's office and campaigned for Kucinich for mayor. "There was never any problem, in contrast to Boston, in contrast to other major cities."
Pinkney, a former political strategist for Carl Stokes, says that while Kucinich frequently criticized Stokes "to make himself visible and to build his base among whites on the West Side," Kucinich today is popular among Cleveland's black voters because of his fights for the disadvantaged and blue-collar workers.
Louis Stokes says that when Kucinich was mayor, he gave many jobs to blacks and eventually healed his rift with Carl Stokes. The two often met for breakfast at Shaker Square before Carl Stokes died in 1996.That from the smear article too!
Now... So researching into this... Who do I find out was Carl Stokes was? He was a political rival who just happened to be Black. And now, just because Kucinich didn't get along with Carl Stokes - the smear campaigners imply that Kucinich is a racist in general. Jesus! Thank God Carl Stokes wasn't an Etiopian Jew. We'd be hearing that Kucinich was an anti-Semite too! Political rivals disagree all the time, sometimes vehemently and all that is fine and well but playing the Clarence Thomas racism card is unacceptable!!
You know what's really sad. We Black folks can smell insincerity and hypocrisy a mile away. We smelled it when Gore wouldn't have any Black secret service men (btw, did you make a stink about that for us?) and we smell ROTTEN politics when people smear a man Blacks have overwhelmingly voted for in Ohio and who has done more for Black advancement and for the improvement of race relations than most candidates put together.
It seems that all that's out there is one smear article from an author with a vendetta on a web-site with a vendetta? If there were any basis to that smear, one would think there would be a lot more than that insinuating article. Black people aren't shy. Don't you think we would have spoken up and spilled this long ago?
So I went to research
Carl Stokes... And here's what I found.
Here's what
Melvin Holli, had said about him:
((Melvin Holli is Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He's just written a book called The American Mayor: the Best and the Worst Big City Leaders. 90.3's April Baer spoke with him about some of Cleveland's luminaries))
AB–Are you familiar with the tenure of
Carl Stokes here in Cleveland?
MH–Yes.
AB–Now here's a fellow who really set a great impression in a lot of people's minds, in terms of what he was able to accomplish - simply by becoming Cleveland's first black mayor. And yet I notice
he did not happen to make your list. MH–No, he did not. He suffered a very bad shoot-out and riot that occurred in his city, a black versus white shoot-out which you may recall having read or heard about, and it was discovered that some of the black militants and nationals had been using public money to buy guns and firearms, which they then used against the police. And when the riot occurred, he pulled all the white police off out. He thought he could control the riot by putting black police officers in. It flopped completely. It didn't work as a strategy, and
toward the end of his term, Carl Stokes became more and more militant and played the race card over and over again, and recognized he could not be re-elected. So the riot really crushed his career, as it would many other mayors. The riot would also crush Jerome Cavanaugh's career in Detroit - and Cavanaugh was a white mayor! But riots are very costly to a mayor's reputation. Let me give you another example - one of the great mayors who's mentioned in our top ten, a black mayor in Los Angeles: Tom Bradley, a very successful mayor in his twenty years in office. He was also crushed by the LA riots of 1992. He realized he could not be re-elected after that riot, saw the handwriting on the wall, and walked away from the office. So Stokes was not unusual, although Stokes suffered more than Bradley did.
AB–One wonders if any mayor could stand such a challenge - such serious racial unrest as that - and come out completely unscathed.
MH–Well, Mayor Richard J. Daley did. He was one of the tough guys who survived the 60s.
http://www.wcpn.org/spotlight/news/0301mayor.htmlAbout Melvin Holli: Melvin Holli, a professor of history at the University of Illinois in Chicago, has written the book, The American Mayor: the Best and Worst of the Big City Leaders.He is a member of the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. Holli has been awarded the Woodrow Wilson fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and the Society of Midland Authors prize for best history.
-----
More about just what a racist opportunist :eyes: Kucinich is:
Excerpt from From David C. Ruffin’s “Fairness Agenda in a Conservative Congress” Oct 1999
Going President Clinton’s New Markets Tour this
summer one better, the members of the Progressive Caucus
((of which Kucinich is the co-chair))will launch an “Economic Human Rights” bus tour of the Deep South from Atlanta to Birmingham, between November 11 and 13. During the tour, participating Caucus members will visit local health clinics, schools, and work sites, including abandoned textile mills that have been relocated overseas. At each stop, the Caucus members will hold field hearings in economically depressed areas where they will listen to testimony from local organizations. The primary focus of the hearings will be on the issues of health care, education, and income equity.
The members expected to join the tour are: John Lewis and Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, Earl Hilliard of Alabama, Luis
Gutierrez of Illinois, Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, John Conyers of Michigan, and Caucus Chair Peter DeFazio of Oregon. They will be accompanied by Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover.Members of the Caucus plan to use the information
gleaned from the hearings to craft legislation to implement
various elements of the Agenda. Some bills have already
been drafted, including the Corporate Welfare Reduction
Act, Income Equity Act, and the American Jobs Act.
www.jointcenter.org/focus/pdffiles/oct99.pdf
((Kucinich all alone with such a huge group of black folks- they would have eaten him alive if he were a racist opportunist!))
--- More about Carl Stokes:
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Up from the Depths, Down Again, Then Up: 1971-1975
When Ralph Perk became mayor of Cleveland in November 1971, his first job was to pick up the pieces that Carl Stokes had left, after Stokes blew his big opportunity to pull the city together. It was strictly a rescue job, to overcome a $13.5 million cash deficit, give a raise to city employees negotiated six months previously without the money to pay it, to get rid of incompetents Stokes had loaded on the payroll, but most of all to start the citizens believing in themselves again. It looked like a Herculean job.
http://clevelandmemory.org/SpecColl/porter/Chapt15.htmlAfter reading all I read about Carl Stokes I would certainly hope Kucinich had some harsh words for him! What I am disappointed in is that Carl Stokes would use the race card and that others would repeat that smear simply because Kucinich is not their candidate.
Repeating this garbage is beneath you.
And while we're on the subject. Here's what I found out about that web-site www.kucinich.com (and no you're not responsible for it but
you and everyone else should know what's behind that so-called "parody" site) that grabs any e-mail with the word BUSH out of your e-mail system ((see my post above))
In an April 9, 2003 e-mail Motley commented on his "Truth About Dennis Kucinich" site,
I have learned that some people can take a joke and some cannot. A few people opposed to my site actually have a sense of humor which is comforting.
Motley explains his motivation in the "About Us" section of the site:
This website is run by me as a personal project. I guess you could call it a "labor of love".
I picked up the domain about four years ago when I realized that it was available and Dennis had not grabbed it. I originally had www.kucinch.org as well but it didn't get that many hits so I dropped it. I started getting tons of hits when the Kucinich for President Campaign (hee hee - I snicker when I hear that) announced it was using www.kucinch.us as it's official site. I've gotten over 7,000 hits (as of March 25) since the announcement in late February! Most of these hits are from folks looking for the official site so you can imagine the response I get from them.
As a Cleveland native, I have followed Dennis' career for the last three decades and have grown to despise him.
Quite simply, Dennis is a communist, baby-killing, carrot-chomping, opportunist who is DANGEROUS and who drove us to war with Iraq with his so-called peace efforts. He has done NOTHING in his 30 + years on the public dole except grab headlines. He has created no jobs, has no ideas and is just out for himself. He has no idea what this region needs and doesn't care. He's an embarrassment to Northeastern Ohio and I am trying, in a little way, to get the word out about him. If people know what he really stands for, there's NO WAY he will be able to keep his job.
By the way, the web site has no connection to Dennis Kucinich. And while
I am a registered Republican and am active in local politics, the site is not sponsored or supported by any political party. I have a regular job in the private sector, pay taxes, am married and am trying to raise my kids in this world being corrupted by Dennis and other "evil doers". The site is funded by me and operated by me. My only motive is to spread the truth about Dennis Kucinich!
John Motley
http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/cands/web0403b.html ----
Election 2004 March 03, 2003
Strongsville GOP's Childish Tactics
Tonight I happened upon www.kucinich.com... which turns out to be a juvenile, hateful, anti-Kucinich web portal.
BY Brian Douglas
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Disgusted with this, I decided to find out who is behind it. Well, I did a domain look up, and the best I could find was that the web site was registered by a "J Motley", with additional contact information pointing to P.O. Boxes and unaffiliated phone #'s. So whoever is behind it is too cowardly to admit it. So after some googling, I finally found this:
http://www.strongsvillegop.com/Contact%20Us.htm ((GOP ??? HMMM- More Rove tactics from these Freeper Nazis or what?! ))You'll note the Vice President is John Motley, and in the "Links" box on the right side of the page you'll see Kucinich.com
I was very disgusted and discouraged by www.kucinich.com. I am doing my best to support candidates like Kucinich, and am doing my best to spread the word about his recently announced candidacy, and it really pisses me off that a lot of people who will want to find out more about him, may just go ahead and type in www.kucinich.com only to find that the GOP has gotten their hands on it.
The twisted minds of the republican campaign managers have been pretty web-savvy in the past. I remember reading an article a while ago about how GW's campain went and bought roughly 200 domains that could have been used against them (i.e. www.dontvotebush.com bushsucks.com nobush2000.com etc). ((And yes that article is in the DU archives))There's got to be a way to make this work against the Republicans. I think that anyone and everyone who supports Kucinich shouldn't boycott this site, rather they should promote the hell out of it. Why? Because
it so brashly demonstrates the immature, dirty political tactics of the republican party. Everyone I've shown this site to found it just as disgusting as me, and thereby either strengthened Kucinich, weakened his opposition, and many times both.
http://216.239.33.104/search?q=cache:4Wvbhfb_n7MJ:www.just-cause.org/archives/000005.html+%22John+Motley%22+Republican+kucinich&hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8
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