Carl Stokes; Former Mayor of Cleveland

Ambassador Carl B. Stokes, who in 1967 became the first black elected mayor of a major U.S. city, tackling the urban crisis that “threatens to strangle and destroy our entire urban civilization,” died Wednesday at a clinic in his native Cleveland. He was 68.

Stokes, who had been ambassador to the Seychelles Islands since 1994, took a medical leave of absence in June after he was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus.

“I have lost a brother and the nation has lost one of its most famous sons,” said his brother, Rep. Louis Stokes (D-Ohio). “My brother utilized his brilliant mind and intellect to challenge this nation’s political system.”

Carl Stokes was the the first black Democrat elected to the Ohio House of Representatives in 1962. A black Republican had been elected to the Legislature in 1880.

Stokes first ran for mayor as an independent in 1965, narrowly losing to Democratic incumbent Ralph Locher, who had come under fire after his police chief made racially insensitive comments. Two years later, Stokes defeated Locher in the Democratic primary.

The great-grandson of a slave, Stokes then went on to defeat Republican Seth Taft, the grandson of a president, in November 1967. Cleveland, which now has a majority black population, was 37% black when Stokes narrowly defeated Taft with 50.5% of the vote.

As he addressed supporters that night, Stokes said he never before knew the “full meaning of the words ‘God bless America.’ ”

Stokes had used humor and hard work to ease the misgivings of Cleveland’s white voters. He said afterward that white opponents thought the city’s overwhelming white majority would elect a white candidate, but “Carl Stokes fooled them. I went into every white home that would let me in there. . . . I didn’t sit back. Carl Stokes doesn’t sit back.”

As mayor, he emphasized jobs and housing, and said the crisis of the cities “threatens to strangle and destroy our entire urban civilization. . . . We must mobilize our brainpower, our talents and our human resources without delay.”

Stokes won a second two-year term in 1969, again getting 50.5%, this time in a three-way race.

He didn’t seek a third term. In 1972 he became a news anchorman for WNBC-TV in New York City, a job he held for eight years.

He returned to Cleveland in 1980 and was elected a Cleveland Municipal Court judge in 1983. President Clinton appointed him two years ago as ambassador to the Seychelles, an island nation in the Indian Ocean.

In later years, the Stokes brothers would show visitors to the city the housing project where they grew up and explain that they had not known as youngsters that they were poor.

Stokes and his wife, Raija Kostadinov, had four children, Carl Jr., Cordi, Cordell and Cynthia.