What’s wrong with this picture?
That’s the question I asked myself last Friday morning when I looked at the image that photographer Chuck Crow captured for that day’s first page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer Metro section. The photo in question was taken at Cleveland Municipal School District CEO Eugene Sanders’ first State of the Schools address and is below in scanned Jpeg format (getting a photo off the Cleveland.com site is a pain in the ass - for logical reasons, so the following is a scan from my personally purchased Plain Dealer dated February 2, 2007).
The answer to the question posed in this post’s title is nothing - there’s nothing wrong with the photo. What’s obvious about the photo though is the incredibly limited number of non-African American faces you’ll see in the crowd. Why is that OK? Because the overwhelming majority of students currently enrolled in the Cleveland public schools are African American and if the African American community is not engaged in the district’s affairs, then there is no way other community leaders will be convinced to get involved.
And that is what’s wrong with this photo.
While the group gathered around Sanders in the photo is like a “who’s who” of leaders in the local black community, it is not indicative of who actually runs this town. Like it or not, to find the people in charge one needs to look over at the power brokers located at Key Corp, National City, Eaton, Sherwin Williams, the Cleveland Clinic etc. - and that’s what’s wrong with this picture, because I don’t see any of those guys there.
The other night I had the pleasure of participating in a Meet the Bloggers session with former Cleveland Planning Director Hunter Morrison. During the discussion we kept returning to the theme of how was it that so many incredible civic projects were accomplished during the late nineteen eighties and into the nineties? Hunter’s response was that the city’s leaders were engaged. Not the politicians, but the business leaders. The guys and gals (well mostly guys, and mostly white) that could shake down their well-heeled friends and get things moving behind a project. Hunter went on to add that the reason this string of civic projects died had a lot to do with the loss of guys and their respective companies like Joseph Gorman with TRW and David Hoag with LTV Steel from the Cleveland landscape. They were committed to Cleveland and in turn did what was necessary to bring this city back from the brink.
Contrast that with our current situation and the picture above. Where are the Gorman’s and the Hoag’s of today? Ancillarily speaking, why are there no African American Gorman’s or Hoag’s?
The answer as far as I can determine is that the time when business leaders were once a part of the fabric of this community is over. The folks that head the few remaining multi-billion dollar enterprises are a new generation of suburban northeast Ohioans, not Clevelanders and until Clevelanders gain a seat at the big table, nothing will change.
