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The recent actions of Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones (whose District 11 misses my house by about twenty feet by virtue of a classic Stokes-era gerrymander) on district-mapping and winner-take-all voting reveal just how much things have changed racially in the Cleveland area. And, regrettably, how much they haven't.
Tom Brazaitis's column in the Sunday Plain Dealer (14 March 1999) informs us that Jones cosponsors legislation that would allow multi-seat districts for Congressional elections, on the grounds that the scheme might improve minority representation. One possibility for Ohio is to have three big five-member districts and a somewhat smaller four-member district. Says Brazaitis, "[Jones] recognizes that the majority-black districts designed to get blacks into Congress is a system that creates a ceiling rather than a floor on black representation."
By using "preference" voting, in which voters get to pick candidates in some kind of order of desireability, there is in theory a good chance for minorities of ethnicity and ideology to be better represented. Under one type of preference system, a voter might be able to cast a ballot that says, "I like Candidate A best, but if she's not elected I'd accept Candidate B, C, and D in that order." That voter would not worry about "wasting" her vote if Candidate A got clobbered; the idea is that there are likely to be a lot more Candidate A's seeking office and attracting votes from people who otherwise might sympathize but instead vote for someone who is perceived as a contender.
Federal legislation doesn't currently permit such a voting scheme. I think that's unconstituional to begin with, but nobody else is taking the matter to court and I'm personally a bit strapped for time. Representative Jones seeks to give states more options that include multiple-member super-districts.
What makes this so interesting is that her predecessor, Louis Stokes, got that seat--as the first African-American from Ohio to be seated in Congress--as a direct result of his brother Carl's successful efforts to move state legislative election policies in exactly the opposite direction.
When Carl Stokes first became a candidate for the Ohio House of Representatives in 1960, legislative primary elections were on a county-wide "bedsheet" ballot; in Cuyahoga County, the top seventeen vote-getters in each party were entitled to run in the general election. With the county being overwhelmingly white, and given the typical voting patterns in which people tend to support candidates who resemble them ethnically, a Black candidate faced hard going. He would need moderate support from all over the county, not only dedicated support from the East Side of Cleveland. Which in 1960 was just not going to happen.
Carl Stokes did what he could; he worked the West Side church basements and drove to suburban Candidate Nights. He even admitted to mailing out two sets of campaign literature, with his own picture deliberately overexposed in the version that went to white neighborhoods. It didn't work. After a couple of recounts, Carl Stokes ended up eighteenth, losing by a mere eight votes. His defeat in that primary was largely due to the countywide ballot. Carl Stokes received immensely favorable publicity from that campaign and was easily elected in 1962.
Carl Stokes did not succeed in reforming the bedsheet ballot. But just after his 1967 election as Mayor of Cleveland, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Stokes-inspired NAACP suit to force the creation of an Ohio congressional district in which an African-American candidate was likely to win. Carl Stokes tells in his autobiography Promises of Power what happened next:
A few days later, I was in Columbus and met with Governor Rhodes. We discussed the decision of the court and he said, "We'll bring out your congressional district, Carl."
It was my district. I had fought for it. Now three black Democratic councilmen lined up for it--George Forbes, Leo A. Jackson and George White. They hadn't supported me in my fight against the party to create a district a black could win in, and I'd be damned before I'd let them reap the benefit. I ran my brother Louis--who had been one of the lawyers who argued the case--and put behind him all the machinery which had just elected me as mayor.
Louis Stokes easily defeated Forbes, Jackson, and White in the primary, then won the general election for the newly created 21st District seat. He held that seat, now called the 11th, until his retirement in 1998.
Carl Stokes in 1960 had identified at-large multi-member voting districts as discriminatory against African-Americans seeking election to the state legislature. Almost forty years later, we're being asked to consider multi-member Congressional districts as a means to better representation for ethnic minorities.
The efforts by Jones indicate something remarkable: it is now actually being taken for granted by Black political leaders that Black candidates stand a good chance of being selected proportionately within multi-member districts. Jones surely has some confidence that she would continue to hold her own seat in a four-member or five-member Northeast Ohio super-district. This is something that never would have been countenanced by any realistic observer forty years ago. In fact, Brazaitis believes that the result would be two African-American U.S. Representatives from Ohio.
It's exciting that American society has evolved to this point. It's discouraging that we find the election of an African-American from a non-majority-Black district still so unlikely.
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