Carl Stokes: Cleveland's Mayor and a Pioneer of Environmental Justice

Carl B. Stokes, elected mayor of Cleveland in 1967 — the first Black mayor of a major U.S. city — took a people-first approach to the environment that we now call environmental justice: sharing the benefits of environmentalism fairly. He didn't call himself an environmentalist, because the movement of his day ignored people living in urban poverty. But he used his fame to show how communities of color suffered most from pollution. With his brother, Congressman Louis Stokes, he pushed for environmental laws to improve living conditions, and the two helped define America's "urban agenda" — about two decades before the environmental justice movement took shape in the late 1980s.

Why the park cares

Cuyahoga Valley National Park follows this legacy because it:

• explains the Cuyahoga River's place as an icon of the environmental movement;
• may connect to the park's founding in December 1974 under President Richard Nixon's 1971 "Legacy of Parks" initiative, which favored urban parks — did Stokes influence it?
• informs the NPS Urban Agenda (launched in the 2016 centennial) and the park's 50th anniversary in 2025, as well as the nation's 250th in 2026.

Growing up in "hazardous" Cleveland

• Home: the Stokes brothers grew up in the Outhwaite Homes, among the nation's first federally funded public housing projects, in the Cedar-Central neighborhood — giving Carl a view of urban problems earlier mayors lacked.
• The Great Migration: his parents came north in the first Great Migration, during Cleveland's industrial boom of 1910–1930. As the city crowded, intolerance grew.
• Redlining: federal home-ownership policies from the 1930s until the Fair Housing Act of 1968 color-coded neighborhoods for mortgage insurance; areas where people of color lived were routinely rated D, "Hazardous," and shaded red. It was the conditions, not the people, that were hazardous.
• Pollution: environmental laws began with the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 but had little real effect until 1970. The Cuyahoga caught fire at least 12 times before its famous 1969 fire; the 1952 fire caused $1.5 million in damage and spurred calls for better sewage and pollution control, and a river basin water-quality committee formed in 1963.

Cleaning the water

• 1968: in office, Stokes called for better sewage service, stormwater management, harbor operations and debris removal. Voters approved a $100 million bond for the river cleanup by two to one.
• Safe swimming: Stokes and utilities director Ben Stefanski built barriers to make chlorinated "pools" along the Lake Erie shore, funded by a $325,000 federal grant. They began at White Beach on the East Side — once a target of the civil rights "wade-in" movement — where Stokes swam with neighborhood kids on July 31, 1968; the next year the project expanded to Edgewater Park. It was a stopgap, needing 350 pounds of liquid chlorine a day, and the water outside the barriers stayed unsafe.
• Asking Washington: on June 5, 1969, Stokes asked a House Appropriations Committee for billions to fight water pollution, arguing that water resources mattered to the economy as much as highways.
• A marina: on June 17, 1969, he and Governor Jim Rhodes opened the East 55th Street Marina near one of the city's poorest neighborhoods — and Stokes reminded the governor of the housing, welfare, pollution, education and policing problems still waiting.
• The fire: all this came before the river fire of June 22, 1969. The next day Stokes led a pollution tour for the press, and within months the fire was an international story.

Cleaning the air

On April 10, 1969, Stokes proposed a Division of Air Pollution Control in the Department of Public Health and Welfare, funded by federal and local money and staffed by scientists, engineers, legal workers and enforcement officers to update codes and limit emissions. Citizen testimony helped the new ordinances pass that October.

Fighting rats

Stokes spoke of a "crisis in the urban environment" that included rats and the lack of green space in minority neighborhoods. As suburbs grew, cities neglected inner neighborhoods, where rats burrowed in vacant lots and old houses, spreading disease and biting children — Stokes remembered covering rat holes with tin-can lids as a boy. On June 2, 1969, he announced a citywide, federally funded rat-control program in the Hough neighborhood. After a year, infestation rates fell in most areas, from 41% to 19%. He framed rats as a symptom of urban decay.

Places to play

• Cleveland: Now!: on May 1, 1968 — a month after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. — Stokes launched a $1.5 billion, 10-year plan of public and private money for housing, jobs, urban renewal, recreation and youth services. It fell short of its goals but left lasting benefits, especially green spaces for children.
• Pocket parks: it built small "vest pocket parks" and "totlots" in underserved neighborhoods. As NPS civil rights historian Deanda Johnson has described, such parks — first tried in Philadelphia in the mid-1960s — were tucked into dense, low-income areas, often on lots left vacant by riots, with a few benches and tables, swings, a tree, a mural and sometimes a shelter.
• Summer camp: Cleveland: Now! also paid for city children to attend camps in the countryside — in 1968, two boys won places at Camp Mueller in the Cuyahoga Valley through a $145,000 interracial camp program.

The first Earth Day

On April 22, 1970, some 20 million Americans demonstrated; Greater Cleveland held a "Crisis of the Environment Week" with an estimated 500,000 students, and a second-grade class wrote to the mayor asking for clean air. Stokes stayed away. He criticized politicians who gave Earth Day speeches but would balk at paying for real action, and worried that the new focus on air and water might come at the expense of housing, food and clothing.

• April 28, 1970: he testified before Senator Edmund Muskie's Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution for the National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, calling pollution a national problem for cities and noting Cleveland's now-legendary river and lake.
• July 4, 1970: despite a thunderstorm, he swam with Cleveland children in the chlorinated "pool" at Edgewater Beach near the river's mouth — a milestone for recreational water.

The legacy

Soon after came major federal environmental laws and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Half a century later, the Cuyahoga River's recovery has exceeded expectations — and the federal investment includes the national park just upstream of where the river burned.

Learn more: Where the River Burned: Carl Stokes and the Struggle to Save Cleveland by Richard and David Stradling; the Stokes exhibits and archives at the Cleveland History Center; Mapping Inequality for historic redlining maps; and EPA's EJScreen for pollution near you.

Sources

Based on "Carl Stokes: A Pioneer of Environmental Justice," Cuyahoga Valley National Park, National Park Service, which quotes Stokes's speeches and testimony, a 1968 Cleveland Press article and NPS historian Deanda Johnson — summarized here; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article's photographs, from the Cleveland State University Michael Schwartz Library and the Cleveland Public Library, are left out.