Louis Stokes was the first black congressman in Ohio. In 1968, he was elected to serve a district covering Cleveland's east side and eastern suburbs, a district that was created after his successful Supreme Court challenge on behalf of the NAACP of a redistricting that diluted the black vote. He served for 30 years. I am proud to say he was my congressman for a good number of those years. I also had the privilege of meeting him on a few occasions after he left office and went into private practice.
In February, he turned 90, and yesterday it was announced that he has been diagnosed with brain and lung cancer.
Please hold him in your thoughts as he begins this new fight.
Louis Stokes, elected to Congress in 1968, grew up poor in Cleveland's Outhwaite Estates public housing development with [his brother, the first black mayor of a major US city] Carl and his widowed mother, Louise, who supported the family by working as a housekeeper.
Stokes graduated from Cleveland Central High School and later earned his law degree from Cleveland Marshall School of Law in 1953, after serving three years in the military in World War II. He argued three cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including a racial gerrymandering case that led in 1968 to the creation of Ohio's first mostly minority congressional district that he would later represent.
He has been a mentor to a lot of people, both in and out government, including my current representative,
Marcia Fudge (and her predecessor,
Stephanie Tubbs Jones, whose promising career was cut short when she suffered a brain aneurysm and crashed her car at the end of my street; it still haunts me to see the spot), and my senator,
Sherrod Brown.
The news of Lou's cancer is very sad to hear. He has been a familiar face in my community since I was a small child. It is hard to think of him as anything less than immortal.