The Death of Social Justice Turns Cleveland Bland

A community is only as strong as its people. There is a need for honest police officers, studious trash collectors, and smart teachers of young people for the community to prosper. We also need people who know how to listen to neighbors for problems and can suggest solutions to those in office or they can run for office themselves. A strong community will put in place quality medical doctors in the emergency rooms, workers who can help find people jobs, competent postal inspectors to keep drugs and scammers out, and quality lawyers who can represent poor people. We also need dentists, regulators, bankers and social justice warriors for society to function effectively. We need someone to listen to constituents and bring those concerns to the attention of media and elected officials. Cleveland is losing those committed to social justice and is danger of becoming a Riverside or Bakersfield, California or a Henderson, Nevada. All rather large and I guess, fine cities, but they are known for nothing. They are the white bread of American cities. You can put some peanut butter on it to stay alive, but you wouldn’t pay for a meal at a restaurant featuring peanut butter on white bread.

Cleveland was a union city built on the hard work of steel workers and those who punched a time clock on the auto assembly line. We were a blue collar town accepting of immigrants with our Slavic Villages and our Hispanic, Hungarian or Irish neighborhoods. We had a powerful African American political group housed at the NAACP that teamed with great Black Ministers to become an unstoppable force in the region. And we had a rich culture of neighborhood centers, social service providers and advocacy groups that could take the anger of those who live in a community and convert it into public policy or form a counter to powerful institutions keeping people poor or segregated such as banks, utilities or property owners. When that soldier in the convoy in Good Morning Vietnam says he is from Cleveland and Robin Williams/Adrian Cronauer says, “Oh, really? So, Viet-Nam's not that big a change for ya?” everyone from the United States understood the joke because we all know about Cleveland. Everyone knows that Cleveland was a tough city that had a crime problem but also had a personality. There is no broad universal impression for the movies of Riverside, Corpus Christi or Aurora, Colorado.

The closing of the Cleveland Tenants Organization is, in my opinion, the final nail in the coffin of Cleveland as a hub for social justice and community organizing after a 20 year decline. Who is talking to the firefighters in West Park about their concerns or asking the tenant leaders at King Kennedy how we can improve safety in the schools? Who is talking to the elderly in South Euclid about their fears over changes in the federal budget or young moms over in Brook Park looking for housing to be close to their job because public transportation is so expensive? I have seen powerful groups such as the NAACP, LMM, ESOP, Templum House, the Catholic Commission, and Welfare Rights all fold, virtually close or merge into a social service organization. This merger mania in the non-profit sector has not helped small disenfranchised populations in our community. There was a reason that congregations got together to form the East Side Interfaith

No one is listening and there is no venue for collective action anymore. When we were funding community organizing and acting with one voice we made changes despite the corrupt or disorganized County and city governments. We improved the shelters and fought for guaranteed access; we battled against any net loss in affordable housing; we fought for keeping at least one local public hospital after the health care system collapsed; we broke discriminatory hiring practices; Cleveland accepted a local landlord/tenant law and purveying wages in contracts; and we successfully battled discrimination of people with AIDS/HIV in both the public and private sector.

How did this happen? The power in Cleveland shifted to the Board rooms with their spokespeople

United Way and the Foundation community pushing mergers. People who represent money sit on boards, and how do those people support solutions that impact their bottom line. Are banks going to provide funds to groups criticizing their predatory lending practices or WalMart executives going to support groups that support unions or a raise in the minimum wage? People with money have no problem caring for homeless babies, but once you say that inherent racism is one of the reasons that so many black babies are taken into custody compared to white babies, they show you the door. The people with money decided that criticism of redlining and predatory lending practices was too much for the corporate leaders in the community who sat on boards and decided where money went in the community.

From my experience when you attack the organization that your board members get their pay checks it is not good for your own salary. Your board members will tell you in a calm yet cold manner not bite the hand that feeds you or you have no one with any access to money on your board and you wither and stay small. It tones down your advocacy and limits the ability to amplify the voices of your constituents. It is hard to talk about segregation and the lack of diversity in the Board room when your board represent some of the whitest organizations in the community. Cleveland also saw a dramatic change in the media landscape. While we have a lot more opportunities to read news, there are far fewer resources dedicated to investigative journalism and many of the champions of crusading journalists retired or got jobs that pay real money. Facebook is great for sharing individual news, but it is lousy for providing context and the broader impact of budgets and policy changes on the population. Even the small outlets of local news which were great for features withered over the last ten years. My kid previously delivered the Sun Newspaper. Remember them? They were critical to provide hyper-local news about gatherings of advocates to talk about the future of Severance Mall or why there are so many vacant properties still in Maple Heights.

Government changed as well over the 15 years at the state and national level with corporate lobbyist their only audience.

When I started lobbying in Columbus and Washington in the 1990s, I sometimes got to talk to the actual elected officials about policies and budgets. They would listen and reach out to housing or other experts for help on solving problems. This ended in the early 2000s and even Democrats would send low level staff to listen but they could make no commitments. They would basically shake their heads and say that they would pass the information onto the boss, but I knew they were just putting it all in the garbage. These state and federal office holders were no longer afraid of the people. They were only afraid of their donors and attacks from the extremes of their own party. The voters were a nuisance that they had to lie to every couple of years. There was no group, non-profit, or religious organization that inspired fear. They were slaves to the dollars and that was all that mattered. Democracy had been killed by capitalism.

Local government is still fearful of voters, but they have not helped to support democracy building organizations. They have actually done all they can to undermine democratic institutions because no one likes a bunch of no-it-alls telling them what to do. It is much easier to please a couple of donors who just want to be left alone without regulations and keep stuff the status quo compared to the poor people who want change and spending more money on housing or enforcement of fair housing regulations or broaden access to health insurance. It is much easier for local politicians to do nothing when compared to the heavy lifting of passing new laws, bringing in new revenue, and fighting for changes in civil rights. The dominant party locally protects incumbents and those within the party system. They do not seek out new ideas or people who could effectively govern, but instead focus on those who can bring in donors. Isn’t that the job of the party and aren’t those who can raise money from big donors not always compatible with those who want to govern?

I helped with the first Frank Jackson for Mayor campaign. I knocked on doors in the rain. I went to rallies and passed out materials and whatever he needed. Then after he advanced past the primary, he got a new campaign team and he seemed to focus on big money interests and not tenant leaders to beat Jane Campbell. I thought this guy from the highest poverty ward in the city who was a tenant leader would take on big absent landlords and would be the best guy for the housing crisis that was devastating our city. He could deal with temp companies exploiting Clevelanders, and he could take on the state legislators who kept striking down local laws. This turned out to not be the case. Jackson has done nothing about the lead issue, rebuilding the housing infrastructure, pushing the state legislators or getting jobs for Clevelanders. It is demoralizing. Now, I know what those homeless people who were hired by Mike White to pass out literature felt like when only a year later they were arrested because of Mayor Mike White policies to sweep homeless people off the streets.

There is a real lack of understanding for the value of community organizing in a neighborhood.

Listening to the concerns of tenants does not fit neatly into a foundation’s checkboxes for outcomes that are demanded with any support today. It can take months to get consensus and enough support before action, but without this outlet tensions boil until they explode. It is strange that so few understand community organizing especially since our last President was a community organizer. It seems that we all long for the good-ole-days of the Obama Presidency, but we could care less about his job before he got into politics. What do the moms living off Kinsman feel is the best way to reduce violence and all the guns in the neighborhood? How would the dad who lost his daughter to opioid addiction feel our society should deal with the issue? What are the most important projects to spend casino revenue on in our community? We have no idea because no one ever asks, and who knows what happens with all those Facebook polls.

It is probably our fault because the non-profit sector modelled ourselves after the worst behavior of corporations. The non-profit community became more like competitors and less like collaborators. The big charities stopped doing public policy and advocacy even though they could see the problems up close and personal. For example, the Red Cross can see how difficult a family does in the shelters after their fire assistance runs out, but they do nothing. The Boys and Girls Clubs, Applewood Centers, and Center for Families and Children know how slow it is to get assistance to families, but they do nothing about it. They know that childcare assistance takes forever which complicates the ability to find employment. They know that cash assistance to moms is worthless and time limited. They know there is no help for transportation, and they do little or no advocacy. In addition, they have adopted something else from corporations: high salaries compared to the average employee. Some of these CEOs of larger non-profits are making over $200,000 to $400,000 which could pay lots of bus passes for their clients. We also allowed everything to be focused on outcomes, but lost sight of the big picture. The agency can get away with being paid for how many people fill out a form or go to a class, but no one is in charge of reducing poverty or moving a family out of poverty.

What does all this mean? Social justice was one of the backbones of Cleveland so we lose a portion of ourselves with the death of social justice. It causes more people to not have confidence in government so the expression of that is that they do not vote. What does it say that a minority of the eligible voting population actually takes the trouble to vote? Community organizers can defuse tensions in a neighborhood by finding a healthy outlet for the anger that exists. They can mediate disputes and can solve problems. The basis of community organizing is I help you with your problem of a broken elevator or slow police response to the public housing complex if you will help me with my issues of low voter turnout or pushing for every public employee paying their fair share of the union expenses. This is how we become a better functioning society with people who care about their neighbors and social justice is something that is real and not just a term used by FoxNews as shorthand for educated people pushing unpopular positions on the rest of society. I have seen how social justice can change people’s lives and how much we will miss it when we realize it is only talked about at the CWRU social justice center as a part of our history.

by Brian Davis