Kenn Dowell. Cleveland-born, Glenville-raised. Never afraid to say what needs to be said.

By TJ Dow

When a parent begins treatment for substance use, we understand the need for a plan: appointments, support, follow-up, and people who can help when circumstances change. We should bring that same commitment to a child affected by prenatal substance exposure.

That is the idea behind SMART Plus. It is a proposed approach to connecting children and families with care from infancy forward. Its guiding question is simple: While we help the parent recover, who is consistently following the child?

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Cuyahoga County has hospitals, pediatricians, early intervention programs, behavioral health providers, schools, child welfare professionals, and community organizations doing important work. A child may encounter several of these systems while growing up. Yet a referral from one provider does not always mean an appointment was made. An appointment does not always mean a service began. And a service that begins may be interrupted when a family moves, a caregiver changes, or a case closes.

SMART Plus would help close those gaps. It would provide an identifiable point of coordination for participating families, connect them to existing services, and follow up to see whether recommended care was received. The goal is continuity: making sure a child’s needs remain visible as the child grows and circumstances change.

Consider a baby identified as having been exposed to substances before birth. The immediate medical response matters, but the child’s needs may not be fully known at discharge. A developmental concern might appear months later. A speech or learning need might emerge closer to preschool. The family might need help arranging transportation to an appointment or reconnecting with a provider after a move.

Under SMART Plus, appropriate follow-up could continue through those changes. A coordinator could help the family confirm developmental screenings, connect with early intervention when indicated, and keep track of referrals. If the child later lives with a grandparent, enters foster care, or reunifies with a parent, the program could help preserve the connection to appropriate care, consistent with consent, custody, and privacy requirements.

The proposal begins with the child’s individual needs. Prenatal substance exposure alone should not define a child’s future or determine what services that child requires. Nor should it be treated, by itself, as proof that a parent is unfit. Families deserve dignity and support. Children deserve careful attention to what they actually need.

I believe this approach would strengthen the work already underway in our county. A hospital can provide newborn care. An early intervention provider can address developmental needs. A counselor can support emotional health. A school can respond to learning needs. SMART Plus would help connect those efforts over time, especially when the people or systems around a child change.

That connection must go beyond handing a family a phone number. We should ask whether a referral led to an evaluation, whether a recommended service began, and whether it continued. When there is a barrier, the response should be to understand it and help address it. A missed appointment may involve transportation, work schedules, a change in phone number, or uncertainty about where to go next. Good coordination starts by listening.

The proposal also recognizes that children do better when families have support. A parent working toward recovery may also be trying to secure housing, childcare, food, or reliable transportation. Helping a family reach those resources can make it easier for a child to attend appointments and remain connected to care. SMART Plus should work with families as partners, respecting their rights and the knowledge they have about their children.

If adopted, the program should be accountable for its results. County leaders and the public should know how many families participate, whether referrals are completed, where service gaps remain, and whether children are staying connected to appropriate care. Regular reporting would allow us to improve the program based on what families and providers experience. The proposal calls for an implementation plan and evaluation because a promising idea must also work in practice.

Funding and administration deserve the same careful attention. SMART Plus is a proposal for county review, not an enacted program. County Council, the County Executive, legal and fiscal staff, service providers, and families should examine how it would operate and what resources it would require. Existing programs and available funding should be considered as part of that work. We should build a structure that is clear, practical, and sustainable.

This issue matters to me because I have seen how much a young person’s path can be shaped by what happened long before that young person entered a courtroom. Families can seek help and still struggle to navigate disconnected systems. A child can need support at one stage of life, appear to be doing well at another, and face a new challenge later. Our response should have the patience to follow that child’s development.

SMART Plus expresses a commitment I believe Cuyahoga County can make: when a child needs support, we will work to keep that support within reach. Recovery may begin with the parent, but our responsibility cannot end there. We must also follow the child.

Families may move. Caregivers and providers may change. Through those transitions, a child should have the chance to remain connected to care, to grow, and to build a healthy future. That is why I support SMART Plus.

This story first ran in the RealPower.TV digital newsprint. Read it on RealPower.TV →

Should Cuyahoga County take up SMART Plus? Tell me below. I read every one.

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Kenn Dowell. Cleveland-born, Glenville-raised. Never afraid to say what needs to be said.

I know Pastor Darrell Scott. I know some of his family. So let me say up front that this is not a hit piece, and it is not a victory lap. It is a question about what a seat is worth and who it is supposed to serve.

On Sept. 1, President Trump went on Truth Social and announced that Scott, founder and pastor of New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, would serve “as an Advisor for tobacco health issues on the Advisory Committee to the Director” at the CDC. Ron Calhoun at The Cleveland Observer did what good local reporting does. He didn’t stop at the announcement. He read the fine print. Most of what you need to understand this story is in his piece, and you should read it.

Here is my read.

Loyalty is the currency

Start with how Trump explained the pick. He didn’t lead with a résumé. He led with the relationship. “Pastor Darrell Scott has been with us from the very beginning,” he wrote.

That part is true. Scott has been tied to Trump politically for more than a decade. He co-founded the National Diversity Coalition for Trump in 2016, spoke from the stage at the Republican National Convention that July, and was named to the transition team that November. Before any of that, The Root reported in 2016, he had spent years working to elect Democratic mayors right here in Cleveland.

So this is a man who changed teams early, stayed when it cost him, and got paid in the currency Trump deals in, which is position. I don’t say that as an insult. That’s how power works on both sides of the aisle. You show up early, you stay, and when the door opens your name is on the list. Every operator in this town understands the transaction. The question was never whether loyalty earned the seat. The question is what you do once you’re sitting in it.

What the seat actually is

This is where the Observer’s reporting matters. The Advisory Committee to the Director advises the CDC director and the HHS secretary on strategy, priorities and health disparities. It does not regulate cigarettes, vapes or any nicotine product. It is a voice at the table. It does not touch the lever.

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The committee allows no more than 15 outside members, and 12 of them are supposed to bring expertise in fields like public health, health disparities or biomedical research. Scott’s own church biography lists decades of ministry, juvenile detention and shelter work, radio ministry and anti-drug campaigns. It lists no training in medicine, epidemiology or tobacco control. When the Observer published, the CDC’s member roster still didn’t include him, and nobody had said what his term, category or voting status would be.

On paper, that’s a seat with a lot of empty room around it. Room can be filled with substance, or it can be filled with nothing.

Loyalty got him the chair. What he does with it will tell us who the chair was for.

— Kenn Dowell

The office that went dark

Now look at what he walks into. The Associated Press reported in August that Congress set aside $246 million for the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, and that the office was left with few or no staff after the federal health cuts that began in 2025. That is the office that ran Tips From Former Smokers. The CDC credits that campaign with pushing more than 16 million smokers to try to quit between 2012 and 2018, and with about a million who actually did.

The money is on paper. The people who did the work are gone. And into that hole steps an adviser.

Why this lands on our block

Here is the part that should make every pastor, every mother and every brother on the corner sit up. In 2020, about 81 percent of Black adults who smoked used menthol cigarettes, compared with 34 percent of white adults who smoked, according to CDC data the Observer cited. That didn’t happen by accident. The tobacco companies spent decades putting menthol on our billboards and in our corner stores.

In January 2025, Trump’s FDA withdrew the proposed ban on menthol cigarettes. Now the announcement naming Scott talks about “solutions to reduce harm,” a phrase nobody in the administration has defined. In the tobacco world, harm reduction usually means moving smokers onto vapes and other nicotine products. The Observer noted that days before the announcement, the FDA authorized a new JUUL device. It also noted there is no evidence the two are connected, and I’m not saying they are.

But I know what that phrase can turn into when the people defining it don’t live where we live. Harm reduction for whom? For the lungs in Glenville, or for a balance sheet somewhere else?

Make the seat count

So here is my challenge to Pastor Scott, from somebody who knows him and wants this to be worth something.

You have a seat nobody else from our side of town has. Use it. Put menthol on the table at every meeting. Ask where the $246 million went and who is going to staff that office. Bring the church into quitting the way the CDC itself has asked faith communities to do. Carry Cleveland’s numbers through the door with you. If harm reduction means getting our uncles off menthol for good, fight for it. If it means trading one habit for another sold by the same people, say no, and say it out loud.

Loyalty got him the chair. What he does with it will tell us who the chair was for.

And to the rest of us: don’t sit back and wait on anybody’s appointment. Watch this seat. A year from now, ask what it produced. That is how you hold power accountable, no matter which party handed it out.

Reporting credit: The Cleveland Observer, “Trump names Cleveland Heights pastor for CDC role,” by Ron Calhoun, Sept. 24, 2026. Also cited: President Trump’s Truth Social post of Sept. 1, 2026; CNN on the FDA’s January 2025 withdrawal of the proposed menthol ban; The Root (2016). Photo: Pastor Darrell Scott at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Voice of America, public domain.

This story first ran in the RealPower.TV digital newsprint. Read it on RealPower.TV →

If you had Pastor Scott’s seat at the CDC, what’s the first thing you’d put on the table? Tell me below. I read every one.

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Tomorrow, We Roll to the Polls

Early voting opens Tuesday, and Cleveland is going together.

Tuesday, Oct. 6 · 12–5 PM. Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, 1803 Superior Ave. Free food, fun and live music. Bring your ID if you’re voting, and bring somebody who wasn’t planning to come. Register so we can count you →

Count Me In

Kenn Dowell. Cleveland-born, Glenville-raised. Never afraid to say what needs to be said.

One cardinal rule of our system of justice is that every person accused of a crime is presumed innocent unless and until his or her guilt is established beyond a reasonable doubt. I can’t count the times I’ve given that instruction as a judge, or heard it given by a judge when I was an attorney. There was a time when I, like many of you, assumed that most Americans (except racist Southern segregationists) believed and accepted that as true.

In fact, a national survey by the Center for Prosecutor Integrity found that two-thirds of Americans, 66.8%, believe the presumption of innocence is being lost in our legal system. Even more telling, 74.8% believe our legal system often does not honor “equal treatment under the law.”

If there was any doubt about how far we have drifted from the protections the 14th Amendment promises every man, woman, and child in the United States, we need look no further than the case against the “Glenville High School Eleven.” By now I’m sure everyone in Northeast Ohio knows the story: kids on the Glenville football team were accused of shoplifting from the Dick’s Sporting Goods in Grove City, just outside Columbus.

The team traveled to play Olentangy Liberty and stayed overnight at a hotel because Cleveland is about 150 miles from Columbus. The team, coached by the legendary Ted Ginn Sr., often stays overnight when it plays teams more than 90 miles from Cleveland.

Long story short, about 30 kids broke the rules by leaving the hotel without permission or a chaperone. The hotel sat near the Dick’s. While about thirty of the kids were shopping, eleven of them helped themselves to items they didn’t pay for.

But that’s not the focus of this article. The kids have learned their lesson, and this case cost them a lot of embarrassment and shame, especially once they realized how much they had disappointed their coach and teammates.

This article is about what the Dick’s incident taught me about adults, and how quickly they abandon the presumption of innocence. If you followed the social media commentary, you watched a mob mentality develop fast. There were calls to jail the students, suspend them, and cancel the team’s season.

Some characterized the kids as hoodlums beyond redemption, not worthy of any constitutional rights, including the right to remain silent. It was as if the adult population was a pack of vampires with a huge thirst for blood, and these kids were a fresh source to satisfy it.

The major media outlets in Ohio were no less guilty of fanning the flames of hysteria, especially local Cleveland outlets. Early coverage left the impression that the entire Glenville football team had ransacked and pillaged the store (not true) to the tune of $4,500.

Then came the reports that the team was made up of adults. Yes, two of the suspects were 18-year-old seniors, student athletes on schedule to graduate with their class. But the way the media portrayed them, it was as if two grown men had enrolled in high school to play football. Very misleading, but consistent with the effort to sensationalize the story.

The truth is that the Glenville football team did not raid that store. Of the 81 players who traveled to Columbus and the 30 who broke curfew, 11 were connected to the incident, and 9 of them have already resolved their cases without any long-term stain on their reputations. The two 18-year-olds are still going through the system.

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Now here’s the rub. In 2023, football players from a suburban school (read: predominantly white) stole merchandise from the gift shop at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Yes, you read that right. White kids from a prominent suburb stole from the National Football League’s Hall of Fame. The story made the news, and then it died. Not even the resolution made the front page. You have to dig to find out that no police report was filed, no one was charged, the school handled it internally, and the players involved were not held out of their playoff game.

The point is that while popular opinion was to treat the Glenville kids like they had committed the unpardonable sin, they are still entitled to due process and the presumption of innocence. Too bad the adults in this community don’t know that.

What lesson did I learn from the Glenville–Dick’s incident? Justice is lost on a people unfamiliar with civics, and adults unfamiliar with civics are severely handicapped by not knowing the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution. Let me print the summary in larger print:

The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure.

The Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination, against being tried twice for the same crime, and against the government taking property without just compensation.

The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to a speedy trial, a trial by jury, and the services of a lawyer. Yep. I learned a lot about the lack of knowledge among intelligent people when it comes to criminal justice, and that’s a dangerous thing.

This story first ran in the RealPower.TV digital newsprint. Read it on RealPower.TV →When the Glenville story broke, what did you believe before the facts came out? Tell me below. I read every one.

Cleveland went years without a Black paper. We picked it back up. RealPower.TV is independent, Black-owned, and free to read, and subscribing is what keeps it that way. You get the story before somebody else gets around to explaining it to you.

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Eat Saturday. Vote Tuesday.

Two free events this week. One plan. Bring somebody with you.

Saturday, Oct. 3 · 10 AM–Noon. Get Out The Vote Breakfast #3 at the Warrensville Heights Civic & Senior Center, 4567 Green Road. Free breakfast, real conversations. RSVP for the breakfast →

Tuesday, Oct. 6 · 12–5 PM. Roll to the Polls, the first day of early voting, at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, 1803 Superior Ave. Free food and live music. Register for Roll to the Polls →

Register for both events

Kenn Dowell. Cleveland-born, Glenville-raised. Never afraid to say what needs to be said.

One woman walked up to a microphone at Cleveland City Council and did in one testimony what City Hall had not done in fifteen months. She made Mayor Justin Bibb move.

Her name is Kyanna Bell. She lived through the Rainbow Terrace explosion in June 2025. Her children were burned. Their father died. And on September 21, she stood in that chamber and told the people who run this city, “You left us for dead.”

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I watched that testimony, and then I watched the survivors who came back the next Monday. I tore up Tuesday’s RealPower Radio Show and started over.

I asked the wrong question

I’ll be straight with you. When I first listened, I kept asking what they wanted. Who were they blaming? The city? The owner? The gas company? Then I heard her answer. They want to be heard.

I missed that. So did the man with the biggest title in this city. And that is the whole story.

The Monday the survivors came back, Mayor Bibb’s administration finally released its findings. The mayor promised the city would “show up, support these families, hold people accountable, and make sure they know the city of Cleveland is with them.” Fifteen months late. Then came the bottom line: investigators could not determine what caused it. Undetermined.

“That is impossible”

Judge Michael Nelson wasn’t having it. The mayor, he said, is relying on his fire inspectors. Their answer was one word. “You cannot say there’s no determination on how the fire started,” he told our listeners. “That is impossible.” Every fire has a point of origin, and everybody agrees this was a gas explosion. Investigators rebuild crashed airplanes from wreckage scattered for miles, and they don’t quit until they know. If the local team ran out of answers, the Judge said, bring in independent experts. Don’t close the file and call it a mystery.

“You cannot say there’s no determination on how the fire started. That is impossible.”

— Judge Michael Nelson, The RealPower Radio Show

Then he took it further. The Judge said the building is owned by a Detroit-based company. He wants the NAACP to put displaced families on a bus and take them to that company’s front door.

“Are you willing to take that charge?” I asked him.

“Oh, yeah.”

Where’s the humanity?

Then the Judge told us the detail that stopped the room. He said one displaced mother, whose children had been hurt in the fire, got placed in a house that had itself recently burned. We have not confirmed that placement, and we’re working to. But the Judge called it what it is: “the height of insensitivity.”

Dr. Heather E. Burton went straight to the root. We have lost sight of who the work is for, she said. Too many institutions chase money and forget the people. Families knocked out of their homes by a disaster should rise to the top of every housing list in this county. And there should be an emergency fund and a trained response team ready before the next building explodes. When you’re in crisis, you hear every word differently.

We give people a sheet of paper full of phone numbers and wish them luck. A family that ran from a fire is supposed to sit there and call agency after agency, hoping somebody picks up.

DJ Unicorn spoke for a lot of this city. “Disappointed, angry, outraged, upset.” Over a year, and these families still don’t have housing or answers. She gave the city its technical defense before anybody else could: it’s a privately owned building. “But it’s the right thing to do for the people that voted you in.”

This sits on the mayor’s desk

When people say “the city failed,” they let the man in charge hide inside the building. The city didn’t fail these families. The person running the city did. That’s Mayor Justin Bibb.

“The city didn’t fail these families. The person running the city did.”

— Kenn Dowell

Council members pushed. Councilman Richard Starr has pressed the administration for answers. But council doesn’t run the executive branch. The mayor does. And the mayor holds the one power nobody else in this county has in the same measure: he can call everybody to the table and make them come.

The county. The state. CMHA. The neighboring cities. The agencies, churches and charities. All of them answer when the mayor calls. We are talking about 44 families. One call from the top, one room, one plan, and this gets handled in weeks, not fifteen months.

I have been doing this work for two decades. I know how a phone call changes when the right name is attached. If somebody calls a housing agency and says, “I’m calling on behalf of Mayor Bibb,” it’s a different call. He could have named one point person on day one and told them nobody goes to bed until every family is placed. We pull every group in this county into a room for bacon and eggs. The mayor could have done that for 44 families the week of the blast. The Judge added the leverage: the next time a developer comes asking for a tax credit or a bond, the answer is no until these families are taken care of. We have the resources. What we need is the will.

Now we’re watching, Mr. Mayor

Here’s what that mother already proved. One voice can move a mayor. It didn’t get her the results she came for, not yet. But it got City Hall moving. It got us talking. It got this city talking.

To every organization throwing a black-tie dinner this fall: honor somebody who solves this.

And to everybody who asks why people like her don’t vote: this is why. You can’t tell a woman who has been ignored for fifteen months that her vote matters. You have to show her. The people in these offices work for us. DJ Unicorn put it best. Stop voting for charisma. “Can you do the work?”

Register by October 5. Early voting opens October 6. Then hold every name on that ballot to the standard one mother set at a microphone.

We said our piece on the air. Now we’re watching, Mayor Bibb. We want to see how you fix it, and what you’ll do the next time.

Stay Strategic. Stay Ready. Move with Purpose.

Watch the full RealPower Radio Show → Watch on YouTube

This story first ran in the RealPower.TV digital newsprint. Read it on RealPower.TV →

If you were one of those 44 families, what would you need to hear from Mayor Bibb this week? Tell me below. I read every one.

Cleveland went years without a Black paper. We picked it back up. RealPower.TV is independent, Black-owned, and free to read, and subscribing is what keeps it that way. You get the story before somebody else gets around to explaining it to you.

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Eat Saturday. Vote Tuesday.

Two free events this week. One plan. Bring somebody with you.

Saturday, Oct. 3 · 10 AM–Noon. Get Out The Vote Breakfast #3 at the Warrensville Heights Civic & Senior Center, 4567 Green Road. Free breakfast, real conversations. RSVP for the breakfast →

Tuesday, Oct. 6 · 12–5 PM. Roll to the Polls, the first day of early voting, at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, 1803 Superior Ave. Free food and live music. Register for Roll to the Polls →

Register for both events

Kenn Dowell. Cleveland-born, Glenville-raised. Never afraid to say what needs to be said.

If you have been following this case, you already know the verdict that never came. Eleven to one. Seven days. A mistrial on September 4 and a courthouse full of people who could not believe one man held.

So let me skip the recap and go where the story actually lives.

That is not my characterization. That is juror Paula Devlin, on the record, describing her own jury: he is a Black man, and he was the only person on that panel who was not white.

Now hold that and watch what has happened to him since.

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What They Said About Him

The foreperson, Ronni Carlson, told the story of the moment she thought it was over. “He admitted he had reasonable doubt. I started filling out the forms, I was so excited.” Then he said the rest of it. “But I’m still not going to say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.”

Devlin’s assessment: “He really did not take anything that anybody said.” Her word for him was arrogant.

Read that list again. Arrogant. An agenda. A thief of other people’s time. Won’t follow instructions.

I have heard those four things said about Black people in rooms my whole life, usually by people certain they were describing a personality and not a position.

Then They Went Looking

Here is where it stops being a disagreement and becomes something older.

NBC10 Boston went into his past and put his prior domestic violence allegations on television without naming him. The Boston Globe printed the allegations and added that he was being evicted. A blogger calling himself Turtleboy finished the job and published the man’s name and photograph.

Eleven people voted the other way. Not one of them got a background check run on them for it.

The Same Judge. The Other Mother.

Now here is the part that should stop you cold, because it happened in the same building, in front of the same man in the robe.

Latarsha Sanders is a Black woman from Brockton. She was tried before Judge Sullivan and convicted in December 2022 of killing her two sons. Her only defense was that she was not in her right mind. Her expert had read thousands of pages of records from two state psychiatric institutions documenting schizophrenia, paranoid delusions, and hallucinations. He was prepared to tell the jury she was grossly psychotic.

In plain English: the judge buried the evidence that was her only chance, and it took her almost three years to get somebody to say so out loud.

When Lindsay Clancy came before the same judge, the medical evidence came in and kept coming. Hospital records. Discharge notes. A therapist’s own files. A dozen prescriptions. Two experts for the defense.

Same courtroom. Same judge. One mother’s mind was a matter for the record. The other mother’s mind was a matter the jury was not permitted to examine.

Nobody ran Judge Sullivan’s background. Nobody posted his photograph. No blogger went through his evictions.

What It Costs to Hold

I am not going to tell you the man was right on the law. That is a real argument, and honest people are having it. He acknowledged reasonable doubt and still would not return the verdict, and eleven people in that room believe that means he refused to follow the instruction he swore to follow. Maybe. He has not said a word publicly, so nobody actually knows what he was holding.

But understand what the choice in front of him was, because Black folks know this room.

And do not let anybody sell you the idea that folding is the humble choice. Signing a verdict you do not believe is not humility. It is a sale. A Black man who says a white woman is not responsible when he does not believe it is running the identical play as a Black man who says a Black woman is guilty when he knows she is not. Same lie. Same room. Same reason, because everybody else already made up their mind and it is easier to be agreeable than to be alone.

He was alone for seven days, and he did not sell.

What Comes Next

There is a status hearing on September 29. District Attorney Timothy Cruz has to decide whether to retry Clancy, and separately whether to retry Latarsha Sanders now that her conviction is gone. Nothing is scheduled. Those two decisions, side by side, will tell you more about how mercy gets handed out in Plymouth County than any verdict has.

Watch them both. And when you hear somebody say that man cost those jurors seven weeks, ask them what the judge cost Latarsha Sanders.

What would you have done in that room? Tell me below. I read every one.

Cleveland went years without a Black paper. We picked it back up. RealPower.TV is independent, Black-owned, and free to read, and subscribing is what keeps it that way. You get the story before somebody else gets around to explaining it to you.

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Get Out The Vote Breakfast #3

Good food. Real conversations. A stronger Cleveland.

Warrensville Heights Civic & Senior Center · 4567 Green Road, Warrensville Heights

Free breakfast · Special guests · Community mobilization. If your organization moves people to the polls, there is a seat for you. RSVPs by Wednesday, September 30 help us set the room right — but nobody gets turned away.

Sponsored by Concerned Citizens, Cleveland City Council President Blaine A. Griffin, RealPower.TV, Councilman Richard A. Starr, State Representative Terrence Upchurch, the Cleveland Clergy Coalition, and the Fraternal Orders.

Kenn Dowell. Cleveland-born, Glenville-raised. Never afraid to say what needs to be said.

This one is not mine. Dr. C. Jay Matthews, pastor at Mount Sinai, wrote it for RealPower.TV. I am running it because he says something from the pulpit that most of our politicians will not say out loud. Read it all the way down.

There are moments when the ballot stops being an election-day errand and becomes a statement about who we are and what we intend to leave our children.

This is one of those moments.

So the question before us is not simply, “Who are you voting for?”

The deeper question is: What are you voting for?

The Ballot Has Always Been About More Than Politics

After the Civil War, the 15th Amendment barred denying the vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. During Reconstruction, Black Americans registered, voted, held office, and served in state legislatures and in Congress.

Never forget the order of those events. Someone had to march before Congress acted. Someone had to speak before America listened. Someone had to bleed before the nation changed.

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“Give Us the Ballot”

In 1957, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom and delivered one of his most important speeches on voting rights. King understood that the ballot decides who writes laws, who administers justice, who sets priorities, and who controls public money.

When someone tells me their vote does not matter, I understand the frustration. Communities have heard promises and watched politicians disappear. That disappointment should produce accountability, not abandonment. If someone fails to represent us, we strengthen our voice. We do not surrender it.

Voting Is Choosing

Moses told a people standing at the edge of their future: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life.” One generation had wandered; another stood at the threshold. They inherited history, but they were responsible for what came next.

The text is theological, not partisan. It sets a principle: choices have consequences, and every generation decides what future it intends to build.

So we examine policies. We study records. We demand specifics. And after the election, we remember what we were told before it. Democracy requires an informed electorate, not merely an excited one.

The Jericho Road Is Still Crowded

A man traveling to Jericho falls among thieves and is left beside the road. Religious people pass him. A Samaritan stops and does not first ask whether helping benefits his own side.

The old road warns us that suffering can become familiar enough to walk past. The road we are on asks whether our politics will describe wounded communities or bind their wounds.

The question is not whether our side wins. It is: what happens to our neighbor?

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The Church Is Not Loyal to the Donkey or the Elephant

The Black Church mattered in American democracy because it was one of the few institutions Black people controlled. Our churches became meeting halls and organizing centers. Congregations registered voters, educated communities, and challenged injustice.

The prophetic Church does not ask first which party proposed it. It asks whether it is just, whether it respects human dignity, whether it protects the vulnerable. That is a higher standard than partisanship.

Voice, Power, Access, Representation

The vote is about more than a candidate. It is about who is heard, who influences decisions, who can participate, and whether officials stay accountable.

Those facts do not tell anyone how to vote. They tell us to examine the record of the people who have held the power. Test the claims against the evidence: schools, housing, wages, public safety, health. When one party governs that long, voters have every right to ask what that power produced.

Do not surrender your judgment to a party label, an advertisement, or a personality. Ask who had the power, what the decisions produced, who had access, and whose voices were represented. Then vote from knowledge instead of assumption.

Choose Life

There is anger in our politics and distrust in our institutions. But fear and cynicism cannot govern us. Our ancestors faced far more restrictive circumstances and still marched, registered, voted, and organized, because they believed tomorrow could be different.

Give us the ballot. And once it is in our hands, let us have the courage, wisdom, and responsibility to use it.

Choose life. Choose participation. Choose responsibility. Choose the future.

And then get to work building the community and the country our children deserve.

— Dr. C. Jay Matthews I

The views in this piece belong to the writer who signed it, not to RealPower.TV. Our Opinion section exists so people can argue in public, including with us. If you disagree, write us. We will run that too.

So answer his question, not mine. What are you voting for? Tell me below.

Cleveland went years without a Black paper. We picked it back up. RealPower.TV is independent, Black-owned, and free to read, and subscribing is what keeps it that way. You get the story before somebody else gets around to explaining it to you.

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Kenn Dowell. Cleveland-born, Glenville-raised. Never afraid to say what needs to be said.

Ohio has required a photo ID to vote in person since 2023. If Issue 3 passes in November, you will walk into the same polling place, hand over the same license, and vote the same way you did last year. Nothing about your Tuesday changes.

So ask the question that actually matters: if it changes nothing, what is it for?

That is the entire play. Issue 3 is not about the ID in your wallet. It is about who gets to hold the pen ten years from now.

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Who Put It There

Senate Joint Resolution 10, sponsored by Sen. Jane Timken of Jackson Township and Sen. Theresa Gavarone of Bowling Green. The Senate passed it 22-9 on June 3. The House passed it 61-27 on June 10. Both votes ran along party lines, with Republicans in favor.

What stays unacceptable is the part nobody puts on a yard sign. Student IDs do not count. Out-of-state driver’s licenses do not count. Hold that against a state with more than a dozen public universities and a steady stream of people who move here for work and have not yet stood in line at the BMV. Those are the people the rule reaches, and Issue 3 would make that reach permanent.

They Told You Why

You do not have to guess at the strategy, because the Ohio Republican Party chairman said it out loud.

“There’s no hiding it,” Alex Triantafilou said of Issue 3. “We think this is an issue that animates conservatives.”

Read that again. The chairman of the party that put this on your ballot is not arguing that Ohio has a fraud problem. He is telling you the measure exists to bring his voters to the polls in a governor’s year. That is not a scandal. That is ordinary politics, said plainly. What should trouble you is that the other side has no answer to it.

The Split Nobody Planned For

Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for governor, supports Issue 3.

“This amendment has overwhelming support from Ohioans across the state,” she said in August. “As this doesn’t change what is already law, as governor, I will support it.” Asked directly, she added: “Yeah, I believe that we have to have a way to have voter ID, so I will support this.”

Nothing changes today. Everything changes about what it takes to change it later. A candidate asking Black Ohio for its turnout in November has now endorsed locking a rule into the constitution that her own party’s Black legislators are on record opposing.

Who Is Actually Fighting It

The Ohio Legislative Black Caucus Foundation opposes Issue 3. So does Ohio Citizen Action. The official arguments against it on the ballot were written by Democratic legislators including Sen. Bill DeMora, Rep. Terrence Upchurch and Desiree Tims.

That gap is the story. When the people most affected by a rule are the only ones organizing against it, the outcome is usually decided before anybody votes.

One Thing You Will Hear That Is Not True

Issue 3 does not put a photo-ID requirement on mail ballots. Absentee voters would still be able to use a signature plus another identifier, the last four digits of a Social Security number, for instance. There was a bill to require mail voters to send in a copy of their ID. That was House Bill 472, and Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed it on June 25, saying it would “not discourage fraud, would not add any real security.”

Two different things. Anyone who tells you Issue 3 touches your mail ballot is either confused or counting on you being confused.

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What To Do About It

Your registration has to be current by Monday, October 5. Absentee applications are due Tuesday, October 27 at 8:30 p.m. Early in-person voting runs October 6 through November 1. Ohio does not require a photo ID to vote by mail.

Is your registration current? Check it today, then tell me below who you’re bringing with you.

Cleveland went years without a Black paper. We picked it back up. RealPower.TV is independent, Black-owned, and free to read, and subscribing is what keeps it that way. You get the story before somebody else gets around to explaining it to you.

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Kenn Dowell. Cleveland-born, Glenville-raised. Never afraid to say what needs to be said.

A few weeks ago I looked across the room at my daughter and asked if she planned to keep wearing that nappy fro.

She let me have it. It wasn’t a fro, she told me. It was a twist-out. And the word I used to describe it was an insult.

I’m glad she made the move. My wife doesn’t need a lot of makeup to be beautiful to me, and she doesn’t wear much. She’s a naturally beautiful woman, and I see the same thing in all my daughters. When a woman in my house walks away from the chemicals, I’m not the man standing in the way. I’m the one who already said yes. And don’t get me started on the weave. That’s a whole other conversation.

I’ve carried that outside my house too. I’ve worked alongside Congresswoman Shontel Brown, who put her name on the CROWN Act, the federal bill to ban hair discrimination. I’ve stood with women who believe a Black woman’s natural hair should never cost her a job, a promotion, or a seat in a classroom.

So when my daughter heard an insult, I needed to know whether I’d been carrying one around without knowing it.

I went looking.

On Our Side of the Shop, the Word Stayed Plain

Where I come from, “nappy fro” is a haircut. Not a put-down. A description. It still is. Barbers post it by name. Young men ask for a nappy fro with a taper, and nobody in the chair flinches. On our side of the shop, the word stayed plain.

On the other side of the shop, it never got the chance.

My daughter’s generation came up after that. The word they inherited wasn’t a haircut. It was a headline.

She was still right on the specifics. What I call a nappy fro is texture picked out and shaped. What she wore took hours: twisted, set overnight, unraveled for definition. My word was aimed at the wrong style, in the wrong room.

Whoever Names a Thing Decides What It’s Worth

Now let me tell you why this belongs in a power paper.

Nobody in our community picked the word “nappy.” It was put on Black hair from the outside, by people who decided it was a problem. The words my daughter uses were picked from the inside. Twist-out. Coily. 4C. A whole language built by Black women who decided to do their own naming.

So I’ll put the question to both sides of the shop. Men: What did they call it in your barbershop? Women: What did that word do to you?

As for me, I believe in natural beauty. I said I wouldn’t get started on the weave, so I’ll only say this. Going without the chemicals is good, and so is going without the glue. The American Academy of Dermatology tells women who wear weaves to choose sewn-in over bonding glue, because the pulling can cost you your own hair.

I’m not going deep in those weeds. I don’t need every woman in Cleveland coming at me. But natural is a beautiful thing, on our heads and in how we live, and I felt it needed to be said.

Cleveland went years without a Black paper. We picked it back up. RealPower.TV is independent, Black-owned, and free to read, and subscribing is what keeps it that way. You get the story before somebody else gets around to explaining it to you.

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And I did not walk it.

My grandfather carried me.

He picked me up so I could see over the edge of the casket.

My mother was in it.

Friendship Baptist Church. East 55th and Central.

It burned to the ground on August 21st.

That’s what people mean when they say the church was the institution. Not that folks were religious. That in Central, in that generation, the pulpit was the only structure that answered to Black people directly.

It didn’t need a grant. It didn’t need a councilman’s blessing.

It buried you, married you, fed you, and organized you, on money that came out of Black pockets on Sunday morning. realpower.tv

What I can tell you is that my family’s ties to that pulpit ran through two generations of Stallworths. James, and then Leon after him. And ties like that don’t get built in a season. They get built over decades, by people who show up for each other’s dead.

Most people didn’t know what that building was until the week it stopped existing.

It went up in 1896 as a synagogue. Those families worshipped there, and then they moved east, the way Cleveland always moves. In 1924 they sold it to Mount Zion Congregational, the church of Black Cleveland’s professional class. Mount Zion moved too. And in 1940 it became Friendship Baptist, and it belonged to working Black Central.

And when the numbers came down, and they came down hard, from over a thousand at the peak to about forty by 2014, there was nobody behind them. No congregation waiting to buy it. No developer circling.

So it sat.

For roughly seven years, a landmark that had buried half of Central stood empty on one of the busiest corners on the East Side. And the answer to who was responsible for it was nobody in particular.

Here’s what got reported.

They left twenty-eight minutes later.

The first call came in more than an hour after that.

Firefighters filled that corner. The roof came down. Cleveland Fire ruled it arson and said the motive was not financial.

Now, nobody has alleged a hate crime. No official has said race had anything to do with it. If the warrant is right, three teenagers walked into an abandoned building to make content.

And a hundred and thirty years came down.

That is the point.

Nobody burned down a Black church.

Cleveland left the door open for seven years and waited to see who would walk through it.

So who held title to that building? Who was responsible for securing it. What did this city do, in seven years, about a landmark sitting open at East 55th and Central?

And how many more are sitting exactly like that tonight, waiting on their own three teenagers with a phone.

I never got to go back as a grown man. Stand at the front of that sanctuary. Look at the spot where they laid my mother, and then my grandfather, and understand it with a man’s eyes instead of a four-year-old’s.

The pieces came together for me over a long time.

The building was supposed to still be there when they did.

How many more are sitting open tonight? We’re counting. Subscribe and follow this one with us. → realpower.tv

Reminder September 19th 10am-12Noon

For twenty-five years I have watched the same thing happen in this city every cycle.

And almost none of them knowing what the group across town already had covered.

That is not a shortage of effort. Cleveland has never been short on effort. That is a coordination problem, and coordination is not some small administrative detail. Coordination is the whole difference between a hundred people working and a hundred people working together. One of those moves a city. The other one wears good people out and hands us the same result in November.

So we put everybody in one room. realpower.tv

What happened in that room

Just under a hundred people came out to Mt. Sinai Baptist Church on Woodland — Rev. C. J. Matthews’ house — for the first Get Out The Vote Breakfast. Concerned citizens. Organization leaders. People who came alone, and people who brought their whole team.

Council President Blaine A. Griffin spoke. State Representative Terrence Upchurch MC’d and kept the room honest about what is at stake this year.

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But the speeches were not the part that mattered.

We went around that room, and every organization said out loud what they are actually doing. Who they are registering. Which wards they are working. Where they are knocking. What they have covered — and, more importantly, what they don’t.

That is the first time I have seen that in this city. Not a rally. Not a photo op. An inventory. People eating breakfast and telling the truth about their capacity.

You cannot build a turnout operation on enthusiasm. You build it on knowing exactly where the gaps are while there is still time to close them. realpower.tv

Then the room set a date

Here is what I did not expect, and it is the reason I am writing any of this down.

Before anybody left, the whole room committed to the same thing.

October 6. The first day of early voting in Ohio. Every group in that room — organizations and individuals both — committed to bringing at least twenty-five to fifty people with them to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections that day.

Do that math across a room that size, and you understand why it matters.

Nobody had to be talked into it. It came out of the room on its own, which is how you know it is real. Every group also committed to keep meeting and keep comparing notes — not one breakfast, not one push, but a standing table.

That is what a coordinated operation actually looks like. Not a slogan. A date, a place, and a number everybody signed onto. realpower.tv

What we are building behind it

I got up and laid out what comes next, because a breakfast that ends in applause is just a breakfast.

A canvass program. Open to the organizations in that room. If your group is already knocking doors, there is a structure to plug into now instead of running parallel to everybody else.

Every cycle, somebody with money decides Black Cleveland turnout is a line item. They fly in a vendor, rent a room, run a program for six weeks, and leave. The relationships walk out the door with them. The infrastructure never stays.

We are building the opposite. Local organizations, local people, paid for their work, in a structure that still exists in December. That is not a campaign. That is infrastructure — and infrastructure is the only thing that compounds. realpower.tv

Breakfast #2 — Saturday, September 19

Saturday, September 19 · 10:00 AM – 12:00 Noon, Mt. Sinai Baptist Church, 7510 Woodland Avenue, Cleveland

Free breakfast. Special guests. Community mobilization.

RSVP at realpower.tv — the form is right on the front page.

Three things before you come.

We want organizations. Fraternities. Sororities. Churches. Block clubs. Nonprofits. Business associations. Reentry groups. Youth programs. If your organization touches people who vote — or people who should be voting and are not — we want you at this table.

And to be as clear about what this is: no candidate, no party, no endorsement. This is about turnout and nothing else. Every organization that moves people to the polls has a seat here regardless of who they like. realpower.tv

Why I wrote this down

Because rooms like that one disappear if nobody records them.

The question that decides whether that morning mattered is whether the second room is bigger than the first, and whether October 6 looks like what we said it would.

September 19. Ten o’clock. Woodland Avenue. RSVP at realpower.tv, and bring somebody with you.

I break down how power actually moves in Cleveland — who is deciding, who is getting decided about, and what it means before it hits the news. If that is useful to you, subscribe. The work continues here.

Right now there is a recession running through Black households that nobody in Washington will say out loud. There is lead in the walls of houses where our children sleep in this county, and the money to take it out went back to Columbus. Somebody has to say that in plain English, on the record, with our name on it.

So We Built Our Own Front Page. realpower.tv

That is today’s edition. Politics, community, opinion, and the Cleveland stories that carry a national argument inside them. Click it and read.

But do not just read it. Use it. realpower.tv

RealPower.TV/contact. Deadline is the Friday before each edition.

A community that tells its own story is a community that can defend itself.

Come see what we built.

— Kenn Dowell

On August 22nd, six hours in a Cleveland park will do more for Black political power in Cuyahoga County than most campaigns manage in six months. That's the bet behind Freedom Summer 2026. Not a rally. Not a canvass shift. A civic media festival built to put voter mobilization inside a room people actually want to be in — food, music, spoken word, live podcasts, and a radio signal broadcasting the whole thing to anyone not standing in Garden View Hill Park that day. Here's the strategic problem Freedom Summer solves.

Every cycle, campaigns show up in Black neighborhoods in October asking for something they never built the relationship to earn. They mail a flyer, knock on a door, and disappear until the next election. Cleveland's East Side has been on the receiving end of that pattern for decades. Freedom Summer flips it.

This is infrastructure built in August for a vote that happens in November — trust first, turnout second. Ohio decides races on margins, and Black turnout in Cuyahoga County is the margin. That's not a talking point; it's arithmetic.

A civic festival that puts hundreds of people in direct contact with voter registration, candidate information, and organizing infrastructure — wrapped in music and culture rather than a clipboard — is a mobilization tool disguised as a good time. That's the point. Here's what's actually happening on August 22nd. Real Power TV and the Freedom Summer 2026 coalition are running a full civic media production out of Garden View Hill Park, East 88th and St. Clair, from noon to 6 PM. Free. Everyone welcome.

The anchor conversation of the day: I'm sitting down with Fred Ward to talk about power — what it actually is, who has it, and how you get it. This is the next chapter of the Power storyline we've been building on this newsletter, pulled out of the studio and put in front of the people it's actually about.

Santana Says is bringing her platform into the mix — organizing conversations and call-in forums on what's actually moving in Cleveland and around the region. DJ Aweiss is running his own podcast segment that day, sitting down with entrepreneur and author Derrick Grace, in from Florida. Look him up before he takes the mic — his story is worth knowing going in.

Then the stage turns over to the people. Open mic. A rap cypher through BKA Watts and the Lyricist Cypher League. Spoken word. Live music. This is where “your voice matters” stops being a tagline printed on a flyer and becomes the actual format.

WOVU 95.9 FM is broadcasting live from the park all day, so none of this stays contained to the people standing in the grass. And there’s food — because infrastructure has to feed people, literally. We’re giving away close to 500 free meals throughout the day. The ask is simple: show us you’re subscribed to the channel, eat for free. That’s not a gimmick. That’s the exchange — value for value, community for community.

Every one of those elements is doing double duty. The podcasts build the media record — content that lives on past August 22nd. The open mic and music pull in people who’d never come to a “voter mobilization event” but will come to hear their neighborhood’s own poets and artists. The vendors turn the day into economic activity, not just political theater. The radio simulcast means people who can’t physically be there still get the message. None of that is a coincidence. That’s how you build civic infrastructure that outlasts a single Saturday.

None of it runs without the people who funded it, and they get named, not buried in fine print. Cuyahoga County Council Member Pernel Jones Jr., ArchWell Health School House Production, Pastor Aaron Phillips of the Cleveland Clergy Coalition. Representative Eugene Miller. Fred Ward, The Nelson off 93rd, all are major sponsors of this event. Every one of them put resources behind Black civic infrastructure before they had to. That’s the difference between a sponsor and a supporter, and Freedom Summer has supporters.

This is the anchor event for Freedom Summer 2026, the mobilization campaign building toward the November general election. Cuyahoga County is the anchor. Cleveland is the laboratory. What gets proven here — that culture and civic power can share a stage without either one getting diluted — is the model for what comes next.

If you’re in Cleveland on August 22nd, be at Garden View Hill Park. If you’re not, WOVU 95.9 FM carries it live — and this newsletter carries the strategy behind it, what worked, what didn’t, and what it means for November, every week between now and election day.

Get the strategy behind Freedom Summer 2026 every week: kenndowell.substack.com [insert live Substack link]

This is Kenn Dowell. Cleveland-born, Glenville-raised, and never afraid to say what needs to be said.

Before we get into it — thank you for Realpower.tv. If you’re new here, welcome. If you haven’t already, subscribe for free — it costs you nothing and makes sure you never miss a breakdown. And if this work is worth more to you than the free tier, a paid subscription helps keep this operation running and keeps the analysis coming every week, no matter who’s uncomfortable with it. Either way — glad you’re here. Let’s get into it.

That’s the whole story people will tell you about Cuyahoga County Council and the sheriff. It’s not the real one.

Here’s what nobody’s saying: Chris Ronayne won a fight he never had to show up for. He didn’t need to whip votes. He didn’t need to survive a floor count. He needed one thing: for Sweeney to not have eight votes by August 4th. He got it without ever casting a ballot himself. That’s not losing gracefully. That’s winning quietly, and quiet wins never show up on a scoreboard, so nobody has to answer for them.

Both needed eight votes to reach November’s ballot. Neither got there. Council killed Ronayne’s firing power in July. Tuesday, Sweeney’s bill died the same way: not by vote, but by the sponsor admitting the math wasn’t there.

Now pay attention, because this decides who runs this county going forward. The elected-sheriff question isn’t dead. It moved to a charter review commission that won’t be seated until September 2027, reporting in June 2028. Right now, Ronayne appoints that commission, all of it. Councilmember Michael Gallagher said the quiet part out loud in July: “That cake is already baked.” He wasn’t talking about the sheriff. He was talking about who controls the table where the sheriff question gets decided next.

That’s the move. You don’t have to beat your opposition on the floor if you can move the fight into a room you own. Council’s already fighting to split those commission appointments so it isn’t Ronayne’s board alone deciding what goes back on the ballot in 2028. Watch that fight. It matters more than the vote that didn’t happen.

That’s not an accident. That’s strategy. You take a question about accountability, about who can fire the person running a 1,200-person department and a county jail, and dress it up as a question about representation. Representation is harder for Black elected officials to vote against in public, even when they know exactly what’s happening. It fractures opposition without anyone whipping a single vote.

I need to say this plainly. I was in some of those rooms. For years, Black leaders in this county believed what Ronayne and Miller are arguing now: that getting a Black person appointed was easier, and safer, than getting one elected. An appointment only needs one person to say yes. An election needs a majority of a county that hasn’t always voted the way we needed it to. So the thinking went: take the sure thing.

Cuyahoga’s running that same argument right now, new names attached. Keep the job appointed, diversity gets protected by design. Put it on the ballot, and you’re trusting electorates that run 91 percent white and 98 percent male nationally. It sounds like caution. It functions as control. Convert a fight over who holds power into a fight over who deserves protection, and you don’t have to win the argument. You just make it too costly for the other side to keep pushing.

One more thing, because it’s getting buried. The sheriff Ronayne appointed, Harold Pretel, said publicly he thinks the job should be elected. He called it critical, constitutional, a model that works in the other 87 counties. When the man an executive hand-picked won’t defend the system that put him there, that’s the appointed man telling you the appointed system doesn’t hold.

So no, Tuesday wasn’t a story about a sheriff. It was a story about how you win in this county without ever losing in public. Run the clock. Move the fight to a room you already own. Use representation as a wedge before anyone can call it what it is. Sweeney gets another shot in 2027. Whether it’s a fair one depends on who’s sitting on that commission, and that fight is happening right now, mostly out of sight.

I’ve spent 25 years in the rooms where Cuyahoga County’s decisions actually get made: campaigns, council fights, corporate tables, church basements. If you want the analysis that comes from the room, not the press release, subscribe at Realpower.tv The work continues there.

"This is Kenn Dowell. Cleveland-born, Glenville-raised, and never afraid to say what needs to be said."

Before we get into it — thank you for reading Strategic Moves. If you’re new here, welcome. If you haven’t already, subscribe for free — it costs you nothing and makes sure you never miss a breakdown. And if this work is worth more to you than the free tier, a paid subscription helps keep this operation running and keeps the analysis coming every week, no matter who’s uncomfortable with it. Either way — glad you’re here. Let’s get into it.

I Was in the Room

Twenty-five years in the rooms where this county’s decisions get made. I’ve said that before. I’ll say it again here because it matters for what comes next: I was one of the people at the table in 2009 when Cuyahoga County threw out the old government and built the one we’re operating under right now. Not watching from outside. In the room.

Retired Judge Michael Nelson was in that room too. We said it together, out loud, on my own show this week, because it’s time the record was straight: the elected sheriff was one of the biggest pieces left on the table when we built this government. The reason it got left there wasn’t an accident. And it wasn’t really about the sheriff.

What We Actually Traded Away

Here’s the truth. At that moment, in 2008 and 2009, many of the African American leaders in that room did not believe we could win an elected sheriff outright. Not for lack of candidates. We ran Clayton Harris for it and lost. We looked hard at Sandra Williams, military background, fully qualified, and still couldn’t make it happen. Not for lack of will.

It was the relationship. The relationship between the African American community and the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party at that time was tumultuous, and had been for years. Getting our people elected to anything countywide — judgeships, commissioner seats, recorder, any of it — was a fight in that political climate, at that particular moment.

So when the government got rebuilt, the calculation among Black leadership wasn’t “let’s choose appointment.” It was survival math: we don’t believe we can win this seat right now, so get one guaranteed point of access instead of none.

An appointed sheriff wasn’t the goal. It was the fallback position of people who’d already run the numbers on an election they didn’t think they could win.

One Guaranteed Seat Is Not a Movement

It worked, briefly, the way it was designed to. The first sheriff under the new government was a Black man, appointed under Ed FitzGerald. Then it stopped working, because a single appointed seat depending on one executive’s discretion was never power. It was an arrangement. Arrangements end the day the person who made them leaves office or changes their mind.

Look at what elected countywide power actually looked like when Black candidates could win it outright. Virgil Brown and Peter Lawson Jones, elected county commissioners, running their own departments, answering to voters, not a boss. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, elected prosecutor, four hundred people under her, and when the government got rebuilt in 2009, that’s the office everybody in the room agreed had to stay elected.

There’s a difference between a seat you’re given and a seat you win.

We knew the difference then. We settled for the fallback on the sheriff anyway, because in that specific moment, winning it outright looked out of reach.

That Calculation Doesn’t Hold Anymore

Judge Nelson said it on my show. I’ll say it here without hedging: it should have been elected. The politics in that room in 2009 didn’t allow it, and that backfired terribly. Nine sheriffs in fifteen years, spanning three different executives. A jail with a body count that made the county’s own prosecutor read a number into the record at Council. None of that is what anyone at that table was trying to trade for.

But the reason we settled — the belief that Black Cleveland couldn’t win a countywide seat outright in that political climate — isn’t the reality of 2026. Twenty years of organizing. Twenty years of a different relationship between Black political leadership and the county party than existed in 2008. What’s winnable has changed.

The insurance policy we took out because we didn’t believe we could win the real thing isn’t insurance anymore. It’s just a ceiling we agreed to a generation ago and never questioned again.

Dale Miller stood up last week and argued for keeping this exact arrangement, holding up Sheriff Pretel’s appointment as proof the system delivers for diversity. He’s making the same bet Black leadership made in 2009 — from the other side of the table now, defending it. We already know how that bet turns out. We watched it for fifteen years.

Where This Lands

I’m not telling you this to relitigate 2009. I’m telling you because the people who made that trade — myself included — are saying plainly, now, that it should have gone the other way, and the reason we didn’t fight for it then doesn’t hold anymore. Not nostalgia. A correction.

If they can’t answer that plainly, you already know how they’re voting on August 4th. And you know exactly what they think of you.

Tell me what you think in the comments. I want to hear where you land.

If this is the kind of civic intelligence you need, subscribe at kenndowell.substack.com. The work continues there.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Before we get into it — thank you for reading Strategic Moves. If you’re new here, welcome. If you haven’t already, subscribe for free — it costs you nothing and makes sure you never miss a breakdown. And if this work is worth more to you than the free tier, a paid subscription helps keep this operation running and keeps the analysis coming every week, no matter who’s uncomfortable with it. Either way — glad you’re here. Let’s get into it.

I Gave Up On Fireworks A Long Time Ago.

When my kids were small, we made a whole day of it. Cook all day. Clean the house. Get everybody dressed and fed and ready to sit outside for two hours. Then drive clear across town, fight for parking, and wait on twenty minutes of sky. After that, you drive home in traffic that doesn’t move, and you still gotta clean the kitchen before bed because you got work in the morning.

Somewhere along the way, that got old. My wife still wants to go every year. This year, our usual spot didn’t even have fireworks. I wasn’t about to drive across town for somebody else’s show. So we stayed home.

Being who I am, I got on YouTube instead. I wanted to see what America did for its two hundred and fiftieth birthday. Missed it live, watched it the next day. What I saw stuck with me more than any fireworks show ever could.

Subscribe now

The Reveal

DC lit the sky for almost an hour straight. Big show, right outside the White House, and from what I saw, the president slept through most of it.

Two hundred fifty years, and the party still didn’t want our contribution. Just our songs.

Now Picture This

I started thinking about what that day would’ve looked like under different leadership. Say Kamala Harris had won. Say it was still Barack Obama’s America. Say Joe Biden got four more years.

Can you really imagine what that day would’ve felt like? Not just who’s on stage. What it feels like to actually be counted in your own country’s birthday.

This Isn’t Just A Feeling. It’s Policy.

That same week, this administration was in court deciding who actually gets to be American. They pulled the Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants. Congresswoman Shontel Brown broke down exactly why that matters when she joined Dr. Heather Burton and me on the show:

“You can’t look at a Haitian and tell they’re Haitian or a Black American and tell that they’re not Haitian. This is a dangerous precedent that they are setting for all Black people.”

The Supreme Court also ruled 6-3 to keep birthright citizenship in place. Six justices got it right. Three didn’t want to. Brown wasn’t about to let anybody celebrate that split like a victory:

“It’s like celebrating that your refrigerator keeps your food cold. That’s what it’s supposed to do.”

Here’s What This Really Means

A cover band on a stage is a symbol. Who gets to be an American citizen is not. Both are answering the same question: who does this country actually count, and who just gets to watch?

Dr. Burton, Congresswoman Brown got into all of it this week — the TPS fight, the birthright citizenship ruling, and what a year under the “big ugly law” has actually cost Ohio families. Listen to the full conversation here →

This is exactly the kind of breakdown you get every week when you’re on this list — the strategy behind the story, not just the story. If you’re not subscribed yet, fix that now. → kenndowell.substack.com

My question for you: If Kamala Harris had won, do you think you would’ve felt like you were part of America’s 250th birthday? Or would it have taken more than just who’s in the White House?

This is Kenn Dowell. Cleveland-born. Glenville-raised. And never afraid to say what needs to be said.

Before we get into it — thank you for reading Strategic Moves. If you’re new here, welcome. If you haven’t already, subscribe for free — it costs you nothing and makes sure you never miss a breakdown. And if this work is worth more to you than the free tier, a paid subscription helps keep this operation running and keeps the analysis coming every week, no matter who’s uncomfortable with it. Either way — glad you’re here. Let’s get into it.

Twenty Deaths Since 2020.

That’s not my number. That’s Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley’s number, said out loud, on the record, to his own county council. Since 2020, we have lost twenty lives in the county jail. — Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley, July 21, 2026

Not one council member voted yes. On that same night, Councilmember Martin Sweeney’s bill to let you elect your own sheriff again cleared committee with six or seven votes already locked in. It needs eight of eleven for final passage. Council votes again on August 4th. That’s thirteen days away, and this is one vote, maybe two, from becoming law.

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He Asked for More Power. He Lost, Completely.

Ronayne wanted the authority to suspend, discipline, or fire the sheriff outright, a power voters took away from the executive back in 2019 after this county’s last sheriff scandal. He compared it publicly to how a governor oversees the Ohio Highway Patrol.

Ask yourself why he wanted more unilateral power over that office at the exact moment his relationship with his own appointee was already broken.

Look at What It Actually Takes to Hold Either Job

The charter requires a sheriff to have at least five years of experience in law enforcement or corrections management, and a degree in the field. Within the first year, that sheriff also has to obtain a professional jail-operations certification. Miss it, and the office is automatically vacant. A hard floor written into law.

A sitting sheriff from Portage County told council the same thing to their faces that day: trying to run a sheriff’s office you’ve never worked inside is like a stranger walking into a kitchen and telling a five-star chef how to cook. Council’s rejection wasn’t a courtesy to Ronayne. It was common sense.

Say That Number Again

Twenty deaths since 2020. Nine sheriffs in fifteen years, six of those in just the last seven, according to Summit County Sheriff Kandy Fatheree, who put that stat on the record at the same meeting.

Not a rumor.Not an estimate. The county’s own prosecutor and a sitting sheriff from a neighboring county, both saying it to Cuyahoga County Council’s face. That’s not stability. That’s a revolving door with a body count, and it happened entirely under the system Ronayne is fighting to keep.

What Happens If You Fall One Vote Short

Ronayne argued for a third option that night: send the whole question to a charter review commission instead. Council President Dale Miller backed him. Here’s what that path actually costs. The commission isn’t picked until September 2027. It doesn’t report until June 2028. The earliest anything it recommends reaches your ballot is November 2028.

I’ve spent 25 years in the rooms where this county’s decisions get made, and I helped build the government we’re operating under right now, back when this county threw out three corrupt commissioners for the executive-and-council model we have today. We never finished the job on the sheriff. August 4th is our chance to finish it.

What We Actually Lost in 2009

In 2009, Cuyahoga County eliminated ten countywide elected offices in one motion. Three commissioners. An auditor, treasurer, recorder, clerk of courts, coroner, engineer, and sheriff. Every one of those offices ran its own countywide campaign. Every campaign built turnout.

We didn’t just streamline government in 2009. We dismantled the machinery that used to turn people out, and never rebuilt it.

Putting the sheriff back on the ballot restores one of those ten. One more countywide race. One more reason to organize.

Why This Isn’t About One Man

I know Chris Ronayne. I’ve watched him govern. This isn’t a verdict on him personally. I sat down with him years ago, before he was ever elected, when he was still just a candidate, and even then he talked about being in charge of the sheriff’s department like it was already settled. This fight didn’t start on July 21st. It’s about the chair itself, and everyone who sits in it after him.

An elected sheriff takes that risk off the table. It stops depending on who we happen to have in that chair. It starts depending on us. That’s true no matter who wins the seat, or who’s sitting in the executive’s office next time. The point was never to win one friendly relationship. The point is to stop needing one.

I helped build the government that put that chair there. I don’t say that to brag on it. I say it because I know exactly which parts of the job we finished, and which parts we left half done. The sheriff’s office is unfinished business, plain and simple.

Where This Lands

Thirteen days. One vote, maybe two. That’s what stands between Cuyahoga County deciding this at the ballot box in November, or watching it disappear into a commission that won’t even be picked until 2027.

Then ask yourself the bigger question I keep coming back to: if this county still ran on ten countywide elected offices worth organizing around instead of two, do you think turnout and accountability would look different than it does right now?

Tell me what you think in the comments. I want to hear where you land.

If this is the kind of civic intelligence you need, subscribe at kenndowell.substack.com. The work continues there.

My name is Kenn Dowell — Cleveland-born and Glenville-raised, and never afraid to say what needs to be said.

Before we get into it — thank you for reading Strategic Moves. If you’re new here, welcome. If you haven’t already, subscribe for free — it costs you nothing and makes sure you never miss a breakdown. And if this work is worth more to you than the free tier, a paid subscription helps keep this operation running and keeps the analysis coming every week, no matter who’s uncomfortable with it. Either way — glad you’re here. Let’s get into it.

Cleveland City Council just voted on two things that got reported everywhere as wins. Neither one closes the door it needed to close.

Here’s the part nobody’s saying out loud.

Council renewed its contract with Flock Safety, the company running the license plate readers watching this city, 9 to 6. In the same amendment, they cut off the Northeast Ohio Regional Fusion Center — a Homeland Security-linked local-federal data-sharing hub — from access to that camera network. They shortened the deal to six months instead of a year. They cut Flock’s fee in half. They added a transparency portal and quarterly reporting. On paper, that reads like accountability is working exactly as it should.

Watch what that accountability actually protects against.

It protects against this specific vendor, under this specific contract, for the next six months. It does nothing about the next fusion center, the next data-sharing partner, the next vendor with a new name and the same appetite for access. The amendment closed one door. It didn’t ask why the city keeps building doors that need closing after the fact instead of getting the terms right before signing.

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Same meeting, same instinct, bigger blind spot.

The city rejected a permit for a $1.6 billion, 150-megawatt data center proposed for a 35-acre site in Slavic Village. This working-class neighborhood found out about the project the same way most residents find out about deals that affect them: after it was already moving.

The mayor’s office cited “serious concerns about hyperscale, standalone data centers being placed in residential neighborhoods.” No further explanation. No public criteria. No standard anyone can point to and say, “Here’s exactly why this one failed and what the next one has to do differently.”

“That’s not a win. That’s a black box that happened to open in the community’s favor this one time.”

Here’s the detail that should be the actual headline.

Council followed the rejection with a three-month moratorium — but read what it actually covers. The freeze applies only to standalone data center buildings. Server farms built inside multi-tenant or mixed-use developments are explicitly exempt.

Nobody covering this story flagged what that means in practice: the same computing capacity Slavic Village just fought off can come back next month, wrapped inside a “mixed-use” development, and the moratorium will never touch it. The loophole isn’t closed. It’s been renamed, and the rename is sitting in the ordinance text right now, waiting for the first developer smart enough to read it.

This is the pattern underneath both stories, and it’s the same pattern every time.

The city doesn’t get ahead of the terms. It reacts, after the fact, to whichever version of the problem showed up first and made enough noise to force a response. A camera network gets a data-sharing hookup nobody approved, and the fix is a six-month patch on one vendor’s contract.

A data center gets proposed on land nobody consulted, and the fix is a three-month pause with a hole in it big enough to drive the same project through under a different label. Neither fix asks the actual question: what’s the standing rule, applied before the crisis, that prevents this category of problem regardless of which company or which neighborhood shows up next?

That’s the difference between winning a fight and building a floor. Slavic Village won a fight. Cleveland still doesn’t have a floor.

This isn’t unique to Cleveland, and that’s exactly why it matters here first. Every city adding data center capacity right now is running this same reactive playbook — approve first, regulate after the backlash, patch the specific loophole that got caught, and leave the adjacent one wide open.

Full breakdown — the fusion center language, the exact moratorium carve-out, and what a real standing policy would need to look like — on the newsletter this week.

What’s the version of this “temporary fix, permanent loophole” move happening in your city right now? Drop it in the comments — I’m building the file on this pattern, and I want your entries in it.

My name is Kenn Dowell — Cleveland-born and Glenville-raised, and never afraid to say what needs to be said.

Before we get into it — thank you for reading Strategic Moves. If you’re new here, welcome. If you haven’t already, subscribe for free — it costs you nothing and makes sure you never miss a breakdown. And if this work is worth more to you than the free tier, a paid subscription helps keep this operation running and keeps the analysis coming every week, no matter who’s uncomfortable with it. Either way — glad you’re here. Let’s get into it.

Cleveland City Council just voted on two things that got reported everywhere as wins. Neither one closes the door it needed to close.

Here’s the part nobody’s saying out loud.

Council renewed its contract with Flock Safety, the company running the license plate readers watching this city, 9 to 6. In the same amendment, they cut off the Northeast Ohio Regional Fusion Center — a Homeland Security-linked local-federal data-sharing hub — from access to that camera network. They shortened the deal to six months instead of a year. They cut Flock’s fee in half. They added a transparency portal and quarterly reporting. On paper, that reads like accountability is working exactly as it should.

Watch what that accountability actually protects against.

It protects against this specific vendor, under this specific contract, for the next six months. It does nothing about the next fusion center, the next data-sharing partner, the next vendor with a new name and the same appetite for access. The amendment closed one door. It didn’t ask why the city keeps building doors that need closing after the fact instead of getting the terms right before signing.

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Same meeting, same instinct, bigger blind spot.

The city rejected a permit for a $1.6 billion, 150-megawatt data center proposed for a 35-acre site in Slavic Village. This working-class neighborhood found out about the project the same way most residents find out about deals that affect them: after it was already moving.

The mayor’s office cited “serious concerns about hyperscale, standalone data centers being placed in residential neighborhoods.” No further explanation. No public criteria. No standard anyone can point to and say, “Here’s exactly why this one failed and what the next one has to do differently.”

“That’s not a win. That’s a black box that happened to open in the community’s favor this one time.”

Here’s the detail that should be the actual headline.

Council followed the rejection with a three-month moratorium — but read what it actually covers. The freeze applies only to standalone data center buildings. Server farms built inside multi-tenant or mixed-use developments are explicitly exempt.

Nobody covering this story flagged what that means in practice: the same computing capacity Slavic Village just fought off can come back next month, wrapped inside a “mixed-use” development, and the moratorium will never touch it. The loophole isn’t closed. It’s been renamed, and the rename is sitting in the ordinance text right now, waiting for the first developer smart enough to read it.

This is the pattern underneath both stories, and it’s the same pattern every time.

The city doesn’t get ahead of the terms. It reacts, after the fact, to whichever version of the problem showed up first and made enough noise to force a response. A camera network gets a data-sharing hookup nobody approved, and the fix is a six-month patch on one vendor’s contract.

A data center gets proposed on land nobody consulted, and the fix is a three-month pause with a hole in it big enough to drive the same project through under a different label. Neither fix asks the actual question: what’s the standing rule, applied before the crisis, that prevents this category of problem regardless of which company or which neighborhood shows up next?

That’s the difference between winning a fight and building a floor. Slavic Village won a fight. Cleveland still doesn’t have a floor.

This isn’t unique to Cleveland, and that’s exactly why it matters here first. Every city adding data center capacity right now is running this same reactive playbook — approve first, regulate after the backlash, patch the specific loophole that got caught, and leave the adjacent one wide open.

Full breakdown — the fusion center language, the exact moratorium carve-out, and what a real standing policy would need to look like — on the newsletter this week.

What’s the version of this “temporary fix, permanent loophole” move happening in your city right now? Drop it in the comments — I’m building the file on this pattern, and I want your entries in it.

My name is Kenn Dowell — Cleveland-born and raised, and never afraid to say what needs to be said.

Before we get into it — thank you for reading Strategic Moves. If you’re new here, welcome. If you haven’t already, subscribe for free — it costs you nothing and makes sure you never miss a breakdown. And if this work is worth more to you than the free tier, a paid subscription helps keep this operation running and keeps the analysis coming every week, no matter who’s uncomfortable with it. Either way — glad you’re here. Let’s get into it.

A Senate seat changed hands in three days. No primary. No debate stage. No vote from a single South Carolina resident. A recommendation from the President, a signature from the governor, a blessing from the sitting senior senator — and a woman who has never run for anything in her life is sworn in holding the gavel her brother held for twenty-four years.

Here’s what makes this one different.

The same coalition spent two years telling federal workers, university staff, and corporate employees that their jobs “never should have existed” — that DEI meant unearned, unqualified, handed out on identity instead of competition. Strip it out. Make them prove it. Zero tolerance.

Watch what happens the moment the seat is theirs to give away.

By their own definition — a position awarded on identity, zero competitive process attached — the seat that just went to Darline Graham Nordone is the textbook case. Except nobody on that side is reaching for the phrase. They’re calling it a tribute.

Pay attention to the detail that makes it impossible to walk back.

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I had this conversation over a year before it had a name.

In May 2025, Dr. Heather E. Burton sat across from me on this show, days after Case Western Reserve shut down its Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusive Engagement and laid her off from her post as associate vice president. She had a bachelor’s, two master’s, and a doctorate behind her.

“I am more qualified than half the folks within spaces that I occupy. But yet, because I worked for an entity to improve the services of marginalized community, I no longer have a job.” — Dr. Heather E. Burton, Strategic Moves Radio Show

Then she named the whole game before South Carolina ever handed her the receipts.

“Folks that have been laid off from the federal government, they’re more qualified than the people who’ve been appointed to lead these new entities within the government. But yet this is DEI.” — Dr. Heather E. Burton, Strategic Moves Radio Show

She said it again months later, sharper, still talking about her own building:

“How many people at that institution has a doctorate, two master’s, and a bachelor’s, plus twenty years of experience? It’s aggravating to see the mediocrity that can still be in a place.” — Dr. Heather E. Burton, Strategic Moves Radio Show

She was fifteen months ahead of Columbia. She just didn’t have the name for it yet.

Same mechanism, every time. Every appointed board seat. Every council vacancy is filled without a special election. Every “caretaker” position is handed to whoever’s closest to the outgoing officeholder instead of to whoever earned it. Cleveland runs this play at a smaller scale. The zip code changes. The move doesn’t.

They don’t have a standard. They have a switch.

Flip it on for the people they want out. Flip it off for the people they want in. The rule was never the rule — the rule was whoever’s asking and who is controlling the switch.

Call this Entry One in a pattern I’m going to keep building — the Double Standard File — because South Carolina won’t be the last place this move gets run this year, and I intend to catch every one of them.

Somebody’s going to explain the seat as tribute, as family, as grief. Fine. Just don’t let anybody tell you it was earned through a process the rest of us get held to — because the same week they proved the process was optional for her, they were still telling somebody else their job never should’ve existed.

Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Burton — she called this before it had a face → Case Western Fired Her After DEI Success

Where else have you watched this exact switch get flipped — on you, or on somebody you know? Drop it in the comments. I’m building the file, and I want your entries in it.

If this is the kind of civic intelligence you need, subscribe at kenndowell.substack.com. The work continues there.

This is Kenn Dowell. Cleveland born. Glenville raised. And never afraid to say what needs to be said.

Somebody in Washington is supposed to save us every election cycle. That’s the story this district has told itself for almost sixty years. It was true, twice. It stopped being true in 2021, and nobody’s updated the plan.

Three Different Washingtons, One Congressional Seat

Carl Stokes won the Cleveland mayoral office in 1967 with twenty percent of the white vote and near-total Black support, a year after Hough burned. His brother Louis spent the decade as a civil rights attorney before becoming Ohio’s first Black congressman in 1968.

Carl learned his politics from John O. Holly, who organized Black economic boycotts decades earlier to force white businesses to hire. Leverage first, ballots second, built by the community itself.

I ran point for Congresswoman Fudge as her political director for all thirteen years she held that seat, and I still work with her today. Fudge was never the loudest person in Washington — that was the strategy, not a limitation.

Thirteen years of quiet relationships got her a national budget to work with as HUD Secretary, the highest office anyone from this seat has held: millions into first-time homeownership, housing protections restored, targets beaten on rehousing the homeless. That’s what the discipline was for.

Here’s the most important difference in this whole story: Shontel Brown is the first person in this seat’s modern history who wasn’t handed it by the machine. Fudge couldn’t do for Brown what Stokes did for her — not because she didn’t want to, but because federal law wouldn’t let her. A sitting Cabinet secretary is bound by the Hatch Act, which bars using a federal office to pick a successor.

Same seat. Three different Washingtons — and only one of the three had to win it in the open. Brown isn’t the exception to this district’s tradition of machine-built power. She’s proof of what happens when the machine is gone and you have to build real power instead of inheriting it.

Here’s The Argument That History Sets Up.

You can see what that crutch cost in the apathy sitting in front of you right now. My generation lived that fight and felt what it cost.

Cyrus Carmack-Belton — fourteen years old, shot in the back over four bottles of water he never took, and the man who chased him down walked out of that courtroom a free man.

Karmelo Anthony — convicted by a jury with zero Black members, in a Texas county where exactly three Black jurors qualified and the prosecution struck every one of them.

Nolan Xavier Wells — eighteen years old, gone missing on a boat trip with friends, found two days later, and a family still waiting on a coroner’s report nobody’s finished. Three different states, three different circumstances, one lesson landing on the same generation over and over: the system doesn’t explain itself to you, and it does not remove itself for you.

This generation, the one coming up right now, has never been shown power working in the one form that would actually convince a skeptical seventeen-year-old: removal. Addition, we’ve done. Subtraction, we haven’t.

Here’s What I Mean, Plainly

Here’s what I mean, plainly. We tell a young man to vote for good judges. Fine. But when’s the last time we showed him the other half — a judge who hurt people, actually removed because we organized to do it? If the only lesson is “vote, and maybe something good happens eventually,” that’s a weak sell to somebody who’s never seen the reverse: vote, and something is removed, on purpose, because we said so.

Power you can’t see work doesn’t feel like power. It feels like a rumor.

There’s a reason we default to waiting instead of removing. This community has always been told which way to move — by King, by Malcolm, by whoever the machine picked — and the few who said build it yourself, like Huey Newton, got labeled dangerous for saying it. That’s a hard lesson to unlearn, and it’s still standing between us and real leverage right now.

Here’s What Real Leverage Looks Like

if this community were organized year-round — not reactivated every two years — voter registration here would be at an all-time high without anybody spending a dollar.

Campaigns already know our turnout runs low, and they know the ones of us who do vote go Democrat almost every time. That's not luck — that's a number they count on. A small, guaranteed return is cheaper to bank than a big one they'd have to work for, so they take the sure thing and spend real money elsewhere.

Build the organizing first, and the math flips. Right now, we wait to be activated. Real power means somebody else has to worry about activating you the wrong way.

Which is exactly why building our own turnout infrastructure changes the negotiation. Right now, we’re a cost campaigns have to build from scratch every two years, so they triage, and we lose. Build it ourselves, and we stop being a cost.

We become a delicacy — something already built, already counted, that they need and can’t build in time. That’s a different position to negotiate from.

None of that requires building anything new. It requires using what’s already standing — the churches, the schools, the fraternities and sororities, the Masons, the nonprofits already doing work here — and pointing them at civic organizing and voter education twelve months a year instead of four.

The real power was never only the vote total. It’s what the vote total buys afterward: the jobs, the appointments to boards and commissions that make the real decisions, whether the legislation that follows actually builds something here or just thanks us for showing up.

We treat the win as the finish line. It’s the starting line for the part that matters most.

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What New Black Power Has to Look Like

Shontel Brown isn’t a question mark anymore. Three elections in, sitting in that seat like she plans to keep it — and she’s not alone. Justin Bibb runs the mayor’s office. City Council is the youngest it’s been in a generation.

This isn’t just Cleveland, either — across the Eleventh District and the eastern suburbs, a whole new slate of Black and white officials is coming up where our people live. This district is its first fully post-machine generation of Black leadership.

Neither got handed anything — no closed-door meeting, no godfather on the phone. They won it the hard way, in a political culture that rewards loud over careful. Shontel ran through that twice; some say it helped elect Bibb, too. Neither built that water, and nobody knows how to reach a generation more comfortable posting than showing up. That’s the job now.

Heavy is the crown. Real leadership isn’t a press conference — it’s rolling up your sleeves until people feel like somebody’s fighting for them. Carl Stokes carried that weight, and so did Michael White and Frank Jackson. It’s a seriousness you grow into, not handed to you — and it’s Bibb’s turn now to build that thing between men.

None of this runs one way. Bibb needs men willing to follow — leadership nobody follows is just a title. Same with Shontel: one person can’t hold up a roof and call it a system. This was never only a men’s project — rebuilding this takes women too; we all know that women are much better organized.

I was in the room in 2020 when Fudge and I tried to organize local elected officials, just to keep some order. Even that isn’t built out for what’s needed now.

This seat mattered to Louis Stokes and Carl Stokes. It mattered to Stephanie Tubbs Jones and Marcia Fudge. It has to matter the same way now — to Shontel, to Bibb, to everybody named here — or everything argued for stays exactly where it is: waiting.

This isn’t a call to vote in one election. It’s a wake-up call — figure out what it takes to get out of a situation we helped build, and set a blueprint the next generation can use, here and across the district. Two years to the next presidential election. This year’s a real chance to win.

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