Retired Plain Dealer Reporter Richard Peery, Activist John Boyd, Black men take on Mayor Jackson, Cleveland Black elected officials over Gov. Kasich

Retired Cleveland Plain Dealer Newspaper Reporter and Community Activist Richard Peery

Cleveland Ward 6 Precinct Committeeman John Boyd

Cleveland Mayor

Frank Jackson

By Kathy Wray Coleman, Associate Publisher, Editor, Cleveland Urban News.Com and the Kathy Wray Coleman Online Newsblog.Com www.clevelandurbannews.com0

CLEVELAND, Ohio-The newly found relationship between Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich and a select group of Cleveland area Democratic Black elected officials and civic leaders has some other Black people in a quandary.

The Black state legislators from Cleveland, at least two Blacks on Cuyahoga County Council, controversial Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, some Cleveland councilpersons, and Black civic leaders such as Cleveland NAACP former president George Forbes, its current president James Hardiman, and Cleveland Chapter Southern Christian Leadership Conference Executive Director the Rev. E.T. Caviness are being called out by Black men upset with the Kasich-Black -leaders- are -my -friends thing.

"Ohio Gov. John Kasich signed voter suppression bills with targeted habits of African-Americans and Cleveland's Black politicians heap praise on him," said Richard 'Dick' Peery, a retired Cleveland Plain Dealer Newspaper reporter who was a union steward at the newspaper and is long time community activist. "Don't they know they are committing suicide by kowtowing to the man who crippled the voters that send them to office and who will be needed and missed by President Obama in November? (Editor's note: The voter suppression statute in Ohio slashes early voting by two weeks, among other provisions, mandates that Civil Rights activists and Black elected officials of Ohio such as 11th congressional district congresswoman Marcia L. Fudge say targets minorities, poor people and the elderly)

John Boyd, a community activist too and a Cleveland Ward 6 precinct committeeman who has run unsuccessfully for Cleveland City Council and Cuyahoga County Council, said that the Black leaders and elected officials at issue "are spineless and have short memories."

And Peery's nephew, Anthony Peery, told Cleveland Urban News.Com that "they've been bought by the neo-liberal Blacks that we were warned about in the 1990s."

Kasich, 60, was in Cleveland last week for the ceremonial signing of a criminal records sealing law that recently passed the Republican controlled state legislature and was sponsored by state senators Shirley Smith (D-Cleveland) and Bill Seitz (R-Cincinnati).

Among other provisions, the new law gives sentencing judges the discretion to seal criminal records of non-violent crimes to the limit of two, either a single felony or misdemeanor, or two misdemeanors.

The Black elected officials that attended the ceremony on the law, which they dubbed symbolic of helping a Black community often saddled with malicious, inhumane and unconstitutional felony and misdemeanor convictions, include Smith, state Reps. Bill Patmon (D-10) and John Barnes Jr. (D-12), and Cuyahoga County Councilpersons Yvonne Conwell (D-7) and Pernell Jones Jr.(D-8)

Ohio Governor John Kasich (R-OH)

The governor visited Cleveland two weeks ago too, for a ceremonial signing of another state law, one associated with passage of a 15 mill schools levy that adopts Jackson's Cleveland schools education plan, a plan that replaces teacher seniority with merit pay and hands public funds slated for the majority Black and financially strapped school district to charter schools.

Among those at that gathering were Jackson and state Sen. Nina Turner (D-25), a Cleveland Democrat who sponsored the mayor's education plan bill along with three other state legislators, including state Rep. Sandra Williams (D-11), also a Black Cleveland Democrat, and the chairperson of the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus.

And last month Kasich met at Cleveland Clinic with state Reps. Barnes and Patmon, Cleveland councilpersons Mamie Mitchell and Jeff Johnson, and about 50 other Black movers and shakers, a meeting scheduled by Forbes, also the general counsel for the Call and Post Newspaper, Ohio's Black press, and Hardiman, the legal adviser to the Ohio American Civil Liberties Union who represented the NAACP in the now defunct Cleveland schools desegregation case of Reed v. Rhodes.

At that meeting Kasich talked of resources he has pushed through for Cleveland's Black community, including renovation projects in the state budget such as the Eastside Market in Ward Eight's Glenville neighborhood that councilman Johnson leads on the local level and rep. Patmon represents in the state legislature.

The governor of a state that is pivotal for presidential elections had angered the Black community and Black state lawmakers and Caviness, a prominent Cleveland minister and the senior pastor at Greater Abyssinia Baptist Church, after he took office in 2011 and hired not one Black for his cabinet, though he now has two.

And Caviness, with the help of now the Rev Al Sharpton's Cuyahoga County Chapter of the National Action Network Leader Marcia McCoy, led a protest at the Statehouse around it.

While the governor may be getting along with some Black elected officials of Cleveland, the state's unions are still at odds with him, to put it mildly.

Kasich , who has publicly endorsed Republican Party nominee Mitt Romney for president, is at war with Ohio's public sector unions, and through their aggression voters last year repealed Senate Bill 5, a now defeated state law that would have stripped unions of the power to strike on wages and other work conditions and eliminated key provisions of Ohio's public sector collective bargaining law.

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