The City of Cleveland is nearing a significant milestone in its efforts to strategically remove blighted structures from its neighborhoods. The City has now demolished 9,700 blighted, abandoned and nuisance structures during Mayor Frank G. Jackson’s tenure. The Department of Building & Housing (B&H) has taken a systematic approach to identifying properties, often based on citizen complaints and routine inspections.
The City has dedicated $72 million since 2006 –from a variety of funding sources— to its ambitious demolition strategy. Funds include $13 million from the Mayor’s Safe Routes to School Initiative, General Fund monies and grants. The removal of these properties is part of a comprehensive strategy to eliminate blight while encouraging neighborhood investment and increasing property values –a goal of Mayor Jackson’s Healthy Neighborhoods initiative.
From 2013 to 2017, B&H has razed 3,450 structures, conducted 16,647 board-up actions, and issued 6,540 condemnation violations. It has also closed 8,175 vacant property complaints during the same period.
The City is committed to addressing vacant and abandoned properties and ensuring all citizen complaints are addressed. Clevelanders are encouraged to support the Healthy Neighborhoods initiative and report blighted or vacant structures by dialing 3-1-1 or emailing bhcomplaints@city.cleveland.oh.us.
The friendship that grew between Lorraine and Jimmy is storied. It was both an intellectual and a soulful partnership. Jimmy first saw Lorraine in 1958 at the Actors Studio in Manhattan. She was there to see a theatrical workshop production of his novel Giovanni’s Room. She sat in the bleachers. But when the lights came up and luminaries of American theater expressed how much they disliked the play, little and unknown Lorraine argued with them intensely. Jimmy was grateful. “She seemed to speak for me, and afterward she talked to me with a gentleness and generosity never to be forgotten. A small, shy, determined person, with that strength dictated by absolutely impersonal ambition: She was not trying to ‘make it’ — she was trying to keep the faith.”
They both participated in a roundtable titled “Liberalism and the Negro,” hosted by Commentarymagazine, a publication that vaulted the literati of the 1950s and 1960s into the sphere of public intellectualism. This discussion consisted of a group of writers: Langston Hughes (Lorraine’s mentor and Jimmy’s sometime nemesis), Alfred Kazin, Nat Hentoff, Emile Capouya, and Lorraine and Jimmy. At one point, Jimmy responded to a question from Hentoff, who wondered whether black writers had sufficiently questioned the value of assimilation.
Baldwin: I feel that there’s been far too little. Hentoff: In other words, equal for what? Baldwin: Equal for what, yes. You know, there’s always been a very great question in my mind of why in the world — after all I’m living in this society and I’ve had a good look at it — what makes you think I want to be accepted?
Then Lorraine jumped in:
Hansberry: Into this. Baldwin: Into this. Hansberry: Maybe something else. Baldwin: It’s not a matter of acceptance or tolerance. We’ve got to sit down and rebuild this house. Hansberry: Yes, quickly. Baldwin: Very quickly, and we have to do it together. ... You know, in order to be a writer you have to demand the impossible, and I know I’m demanding the impossible. It has to be— But I also know it has to be done. You see what I mean?
In the same discussion, they echoed each other another time, this time with Jimmy responding to Lorraine’s calls. In considering the failures of Southern white writers Carson McCullers and William Faulkner when it came to racial matters, Lorraine said:
William Faulkner has never in his life sat in on a discussion in a Negro home where there were all Negroes. It is physically impossible. He has never heard the nuances of hatred, of total contempt from his most devoted servant and his most beloved friend, although she means every word when she’s talking to him and will tell him profoundly intimate things. But he has never heard the truth of it. ... The employer doesn’t go to the maid’s house. You see, people get this confused. They think that the alienation is equal on both sides. It isn’t. We’ve been washing everybody’s underwear for 300 years. We know when you’re not clean.
And then Jimmy said Lorraine’s point was very important, and remarked that Carson McCullers’s treatment of black people “doesn’t reveal anything about the truth of Negro life, but a great deal about the state of mind of the white Southern woman who wrote it.”
That said, Lorraine’s and Jimmy’s politics were different. He wasn’t ever going to call himself a Marxist, communist, or nationalist. He was just committed to honesty, ideology be damned. Lorraine was insistently though creatively ideological. Lorraine leaned more toward social theorist, and Jimmy was to his core a critic, truth teller, and doer. And Jimmy didn’t refer to himself as gay, he just happened to “fall in love with a boy” a number of times, whereas Lorraine, though closeted, embraced the words lesbian and homosexual to define herself.
However, the spirit of their work was always mutually sympathetic. Jimmy called A Raisin in the Sun a play in which Lorraine served as a witness to black America. He did too. In perhaps his most famous book, the 1963 epistolary text The Fire Next Time, he answered Walter Lee’s climactic action. In Raisin, standing before his son, Walter Lee insists upon moving into the white neighborhood and rejects the offer of a lot of cash in exchange for maintaining segregation and abdicating his dignity. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin testifies to his nephew about his late father. Jimmy wants his nephew to see how his father (like their father before him) had been crushed by the forces of white supremacy in his life. He issues an appeal to his nephew’s generation to make use of their righteous anger rather than be distorted by it. Jimmy, a former child preacher, preaches to the Walter Lees of the world and to the others. He makes plain the wages of white supremacy.
In this video: James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Emile Capouya, Alfred Kazin talk together in 1961.
Check out this playlist of other Baldwin videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
