Cleveland NAACP, community activists, Imperial Women to hold community forum on deadly shooting by Cleveland police, foreclosures, sentencing disparities, judicial assignments and reassignments in Ohio trial courts, Emilliano case, and education issues with new Cleveland NAACP Executive Director Sheila Wright and new legal redress chair Retired Judge Una H.R. Keenon on Monday, February 4 , 5 pm to 7 pm, MLK Public Library in Cleveland, 1962 Stokes Blvd., Cleveland officials to attend, Rep. Patmon to moderate forum, public can speak, 15 speakers to date, Activist Art McKoy to speak, Cleveland NAACP President Hilton Smith to speak at noon today, February 1, at City Club in downtown Cleveland, Cleveland NAACP President Hilton Smith to speak at City Club in downtown Cleveland

The Rev. Hilton Smith, president of the Cleveland Chapter NAACP and an associate minister at the Greater Abyssinia Baptist Church in Cleveland

Sheila Wright, the newly appointed executive director of the Cleveland Chapter NAACP

By Kathy Wray Coleman, publisher, editor-n-chief, Cleveland Urban News. Com and The Cleveland Urban News.Com Blog, Ohio's Most Read Online Black Newspaper(www.clevelandurbannews.com)

CLEVELAND,Ohio- Community activists groups and family members of slain 137- bullets unarmed Cleveland police shooting victim Malissa Williams will meet with newly appointed Cleveland Chapter NAACP Executive Director Sheila Wright and newly appointed legal redress committee chairperson Retired East Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Una H.R. Keenon (pictured to the right) on Monday, Feb. 4. from 5 pm to 7 pm for a community forum at the Martin Luther King Public Library in Cleveland, 1962 Stokes Blvd. The MLK library is near University circle and a block from John Hay High School.(Editor's Note: Cleveland NAACP President The Rev. Hilton Smith is the keynote speaker at noon today, Feb. 1, at the City Club in downtown Cleveland. He will not be available for the meeting on Monday of the legal redress committee chair but is expected to meet with community activists on a date in the near future, Cleveland NAACP officials have said).

Williams, 30, (pictured at far left) and Timothy Ray Russell, 43, (also shown) were gunned down on Nov. 29, 2012 on Cleveland's predominantly Black east side by a group of White Cleveland police officers following a 25 minute police chase from Cleveland that took some 60 area police unit cars into the city of East Cleveland behind Heritage Middle School  and near Lee and Terrace Roads for a one-sided deadly shoot out. Neither was armed and police shot off an unprecedented 137 rounds of ammunition, killing the pair instantly. Whether criminal charges will be filed against the 13 Cleveland police officers involved with the deadly shooting, 12 White, and one Hispanic, is the subject of unrest in the Black community, and a pending investigation by county, state and local authorities. 

State Rep. Bill Patmon (D-10) (pictured to the left), a Cleveland Democrat,  will moderate the community event that is open to the public. Following the scheduled speakers, the forum will be open for Judge Keenon, Wright and others to hear from any others wanting to speak or needing help from Cleveland NAACP officials. 

City of Cleveland Community Relations Board Director Blaine Griffin, also chair of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party, said that he will attend, as did Cleveland Ward 6 Councilwoman Mamie Mitchell, who said that she must leave early for a 7 pm regular  Cleveland City Council meeting.

 Also joining the activists for the meeting is City of Cleveland community relations specialist James Box, who is also a community activist.

State Rep. John Barnes Jr. (D-12), a Cleveland Democrat like Mitchell, said that he will likely attend too.

For more information contact the Imperial Women at 216-659-0473 or the Cleveland Chapter NAACP at 216-231-6260.

"Process is important and we will listen to community concerns and respond back on them," said Wright, a lawyer and former judicial clerk for Cleveland Municipal Housing Court Judge Raymond Pianca.

Also the former chair of the 11th congressional district caucus, a community arm of Congressional Black Caucus Chairperson Rep. Marcia L. Fudge, Wright, 43, is native Clevelander and a self made woman who was a teen single mother who went on to college and then completed law school at Cleveland Marshall School of Law. 

The congresswoman's office noted that her executive director, John Hairston, will be there, as will her community liaison and scheduler Linda Matthews.

Judge Keenon, who is also president of the East Cleveland Board of Education, said that her role is to listen to concerns, take them back to the full legal redress committee, and to also respond at a later date, if people act right at the meeting, she said. 

Grassroots organizations or members of such organizations that will participate include The Imperial Women, The Cleveland African-American Museum, The Northeast Ohio Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, Organize Ohio, Stop Targeting Ohio's Poor, The Carl Stokes Brigade, Black on Black Crime, Revolution Books, The Oppressed People's Nation, The Audacity of Hope Foundation, Ohio Communities United, Ohio Family Rights, The Educational Strategy Group, The National Organization for Parental Equality, The People's Forum, The Cleveland Chapter of the New Black Panther Party and the Family Connection Center. 

Both Wright and Judge Keenon were recommended for support for their positions by the executive board by Cleveland Chapter NAACP President the Rev. Hilton Smith, 66, who was elected last year and is the first president to lead the local chapter of the nation's most prominent Civil Rights institution since former Cleveland City Council President George Forbes was elected in 1992. 

Still general counsel of the Call and Post Newspaper, Ohio's most notable Black press, Forbes, 81, (pictured to the far left) resigned as Cleveland NAACP president last year amid rumors that his health might be failing. He remains a part time attorney for his Cleveland-based local law firm Forbes, Fields and Associates, a partnership with one of his three daughters, Helen Forbes Fields, and his son-n-law, Darrell A. Fields. 

Wright gets an annual salary. But Judge Keenon, a long time public servant, is in a volunteer role.

Emilliano Terry 

Camalia Terry

Issues to be discussed during the two hour meeting include the unconstitutional state public school funding formula, sentencing disparities, and the treatment of Black and other families by the Cuyahoga County Department of Child and Family Services in the wake of the death late last year of three-year-old Emillano Terry, whose 20 year old mother, Camilia Terry,  faces aggravated murder and other charges. A product of the foster care system, her cries to the county agency for help were ignored and the boy's lifeless body was found late last year in a a garbage landfill in Oakwood Villiage, Oh, a Cleveland suburb.

 A housing rights community activists will discuss what he says is corruption in demolishing homes to allegedly steal the land from innocent homeowners by City of Akron officials with harassment allegedly as egregious as tossing those that fight back in mental hospitals.

Additionally, community activists seek changes in public policy by Cleveland area Black state legislators through the amendment of applicable state laws including for county sheriffs from Ohio to no longer have the authority to appraise foreclosed homes under state law to arbitrarily reduce the prices to sell to mortgage companies and their friends for cheap. They want the appraisals of foreclosed homes in Ohio to be based upon the last legal county appraisal undertaken  for tax purposes, a request supported by some employees of the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Office, data show.  

And they want the state law  (Ohio Revised Code 2701.031) that gives presiding judges of state common pleas courts sole authority to determine if area municipal court judges should be removed from hearing cases when a valid prejudice affidavit is filed amended to instead require that a  panel of judges decide coupled with a clear vehicle for a final appelable order to appeal any denial of the affidavit of prejudice to state appellate courts. And for affidavits of prejudice filed by a party to a civil or criminal case for removal of a common pleas court trial judge in Ohio that hears felonies and other cases, community activists want the state law amended to require that the entire seven member Ohio Supreme Court decide,  instead of only the chief justice as provided under R.C. 2701.33, the current state law.

Additional speakers for the meeting include Cleveland Chapter NAACP Legal Redress Committee Member and Carl Stokes Brigade Member Genevieve Mitchell, Cleveland Area Criminal Defense Attorney Edele Passalacqua, Cleveland Mayoral Candidate Donna Walker Brown, Akron Housing Advocate George Zakaib, and Betty Simpson.

Gunned down unarmed Blacks Malissa  Williams, left, and Timothy Ray Russell

Cleveland area community activists slated to speak include Ohio Family Rights Leader Roz McAllister, Educational Strategy Group Leader Gerald Henley, Revolution Books Member Bill Swain, Cleveland Entrepreneur Michael Nelson, Imperial Women Leader Kathy Wray Coleman, Oppressed People's Nation Leader Ernest Smith, Cleveland African-American Museum Executive Director Frances Caldwell, Northeast Ohio Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign and Organize Ohio Leader Larry Bresler, Black on Black Founder Art McKoy, Stop Targeting Ohio's Poor Leaders Valerie and Dr. Stuart Robinson, Ohio Communities United Representative Mariah Crenshaw, and WERE 1490 AM Radio Art McKoy University Show Co-Producer Al Porter. (Editor's Note: Many of the above are also members of The Imperial Women).

Art McKoy, founder of Black on Black Crime Inc. and a longtime East Cleveland community activist leading the charge for demands by select Black elected officials and key community activist for murder charges against Cleveland police  in the shooting deaths last year of Timothy Ray Russell and Malissa Williams. 

Also at the meeting, community activists will announce support of a bill by Rep. Patmon for Ohio trial court judges in mullti-judge municipal and common pleas court to at all times be assigned and reassigned to criminal and civil cases at random. And they want a discussion with Cleveland NAACP officials  and Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas Judge Nancy Fuerst as to a study commissioned by the group that shows that the 34 majority White judges of the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas where felony criminal cases and other matters are heard give harsher sentences to Blacks than their similarly situated White counterparts.

 If it is too difficult of a task for the judges to be fair and  to undergo effective cultural diversity training community activists want the Cleveland NAACP to files suit against the state of Ohio on behalf of affected Blacks and any other members of a protected class at issue and their families, for systemic disparities in sentencing in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. 

Finally, activists say that the Cleveland the Cleveland Chapter NAACP should sue on behalf of Black children and their families under the thorough and efficient clause of the Ohio Constitution and the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution relative to Ohio's still unconstitutional school funding formula that hurts poor Black and other disenfranchised children. 

The Rev. Al Sharpton

They want compliance with the DeRolph decision handed down in 1997 by the Ohio Supreme Court that deemed Ohio's method of funding public education unconstitutional, or a sliding scale of student assessment by the Ohio Department of Education based upon how rich or how poor a school district might be.   To date Ohio's poor children, through property taxes that form a part of the state public school funding formula,  and given  no equitable subsidy by the state, are denied equal access to a quality education, a disproportionate of whom are minority. They are judged academically and stigmatized accordingly based upon their zip codes, an educational travesty of magnitudes, the Rev Al Sharpton said during a speech two years ago in Akron at a baptist church gathering while pushing his national community outreach organization, the National Action Network. 

Activists say that they will also seek a meeting with Congresswoman Fudge, Ohio's only Black congressperson. 

Though they have met with the congresswoman and her staff following the Imperial Ave Murders of 11 Black women on Imperial Ave in Cleveland by since convicted serial killer Anthony Sowell, the women activists especially want another audience with Fudge on the aforementioned issues, they say. 

(www.clevelandurbannews.com) Reach Cleveland Urban News.Com by email at editor@clevelandurbannews.com and by phone at 216-659-0473.