Cleveland's Patrick Henry school renamed Stephanie Tubbs Jones school, Tubbs Jones a late Black congresswoman from Cleveland and Ohio's first Black congresswoman...Patrick Henry was a racist slave owner and politician known in American history for declaring "Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death" ....Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, Ohio Black digital news leader

The late former Ohio 11th congressional district congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs-Jones of Cleveland

Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com 

CLEVELAND, Ohio (Clevelandurbannews.com) - Patrick Henry school, a public elementary school at 11901 Durant Avenue on Cleveland's largely Black east side, will now be called Stephanie Tubbs Jones School as a ribbon cutting ceremony at the school was held at 2:30 p.m. on Tues, Aug 30.

The open-to-the-public event drew a wealth of Cleveland's mainstream media and prominent Black elected officials such as Ohio 11th Congressional District Congresswoman Shontel M. Brown, Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, Council President Blaine Griffin, city council persons Joe Jones and Kevin Conwell, and Cuyahoga County Councilwoman Meredith Turner and Yvonne Conwell, Councilman Kevin Conwell's wife.  Also there were students, parents and school administrators, and schools CEO Dr. Eric Gordon, who organized the event. Tubbs Jones' only child, Mervyn Jones Jr, was also in attendance for the celebratory occasion. 

A slaveowner his entire adult life, Patrick Henry (May 29, 1736 – June 6, 1799) was an American attorney, planter, politician and orator known for declaring to the Second Virginia Convention (1775): "Give me liberty, or give me death!" A Founding Father, he served as the first and sixth post-colonial Governor of Virginia, from 1776 to 1779 and from 1784 to 1786. Henry was an influential leader in the radical opposition to the British government but only accepted the new federal government after the passage of the Bill of Rights, for which he was in great measure .

Three Cleveland Metropolitan School District schools have been given new names via a board policy passed by the school board in June that prohibits naming schools for people who have enslaved Black people or others, or White supremacists and sexist people who subordinate and discriminate against women. The city's public schools are controlled by the city mayor per state law, and the mayor appoints school board members in place of an elected school board, also per state law. 

Councilman Kevin Conwell, a seasoned councilman who leads Ward 9 in historic Glenville where Patrick Henry School sat for decades without a name change was among those pushing for the name change of the school. 

A staunch Democrat, Tubbs Jones was the first Black woman elected to Congress in Ohio.  She succeeded Louis Stokes into office in 1998, Stokes Ohio's first Black congressperson. She died suddenly in August of 2008 while in office, and of a brain aneurysm. She grew up in the Glenville neighborhood and graduated from Cleveland's public schools prior to desegregation. 

Before joining Congress, Tubbs Jones was the prosecutor for Cuyahoga County, the first Black to hold that post also. She was succeeded into Congress by Marcia L Fudge, who vacated the congressional post last year to serve as President Joe Biden's secretary of Housing and Urban Development, 

Current Congresswoman Shontel Brown, a former county council woman who led the county Democratic party of Cuyahoga, succeeded Fudge into office after winning a special election in 2021 for the congressional seat. Fudge and Brown are also Black, like Stokes, and Tubbs Jones, also a former municipal and common pleas judge, before becoming county prosecutor, and then the congresswoman. 

Both Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, Ohio's second largest of its 88 counties, are Democratic strongholds.

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