By Mansfield Frazier
A few months ago I was assigned to write a profile of Karamu’s Artistic Director Terrence Spivey for a local publication. In conducting background interviews I immediately became aware of the volatile situation Anastasia Pantsios chronicles in her recent article for Scene magazine entitled “Dark Days for the Black Arts.” Unfortunately, her reportage is spot-on accurate… serious trouble has been brewing backstage at the historic theatre for years.
A bit of tension between executive and artistic directors at theatre companies across the country are somewhat par for the course since each have a different mission: The former has the job of balancing the books, while the latter is charged with mounting compelling productions. In most cases, board members act as lubricants between these two polar opposites and the show goes on… but this has not been the case at Karamu. While the show has gone on, the tension is reaching the boiling point.
When I queried Spivey in regards to the conflict, he demurred, only willing to say he was still hopeful things between him and Executive Director Greg Ashe would work out; so far he has proved to be wrong — they haven’t, and they won’t. Their relationship, for whatever reasons, has crossed the Rubicon.
The board of directors at Karamu must understand that making no decision is still a decision… albeit the wrong one. They are faced with the dilemma of firing either the executive director who has kept the books balanced, or the artistic director who has brought Karamu back from the abyss… the theatrical Dark Ages he found upon his arrival almost a decade ago.
To attempt to keep them both is foolhardy in the extreme and only courts disaster. Eventually funders will tire of the warring factions and begin withdrawing their support… one of them suggested as much to me months ago.
The decision will eventually come down to a business one — which of the two is easier to replace: The guy who balances the books, or the award-winning, nationally recognized artistic director. The simple fact is, there are only a small handful of African-Americans in the country with the skills and reputation of a Terrence Spivey.
If he’s forced out, does anyone on the board think any competent African-American artistic director (by the way Spivey probably knows them all) would be willing risk their career by coming into the toxic environment that has been created at Karamu? Whistling past the graveyard simply isn’t going to work… the board at Karamu has to act, and act soon. This situation is not going to simply go away of its own accord.
More on the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s race
The contest to become the chief law enforcement officer in the county is playing out in strange ways. While truth, perception and reality can each play a role in the formulation of opinion, they don’t necessarily have to connect with each other.
Last week I wrote about candidate Jim McDonnell getting all 37 of the votes from the Parma Democratic executive committee members when they met to make endorsements. To me — and a lot of other folks — it was an indication that some kind of deal was afoot between him and current prosecutor Bill Mason, who many believe controls politics in many southwest Cuyahoga County communities. And, reflecting back on how politics have been played in the county for the last decade or so, such a belief is entirely justified.
However, McDonnell vehemently denies making any kind of deal with Mason… he staunchly says the truth of the matter is, he got all of the votes by politicking very hard for them over the last year. While I don’t personally know McDonnell, I know quite a few lawyers (professionals I greatly respect by the way) who have known him for years, and they all tell me he’s a standup guy who is above being in anyone’s pocket. Based on the aforementioned mini-testimonials, I retract my accusation and accept what he says as the “truth.”
But that still leaves McDonnell with the problem of “perception”… which is rampant in the minority community and is going to be harder for him to combat. His dilemma is similar to the guy who’s admitted to a mental institution because he thinks he’s a chicken; the doctors work with him, and eventually convince him that he’s not a chicken. So, when the man is ready to leave the institution the doctor says “So, you know you’re not a chicken, right?”
The guy responds, “Yeah, I know I’m not a chicken, but out there, do they know I’m not a chicken?” In other words, “perception” can sometimes have a stronger influence on “reality” than “truth” ever has. McDonnell has his work cut out for him.
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To fully comprehend the importance of the prosecutor’s race, one would be wise to read the brilliant new book, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice by recently-deceased Harvard Law Professor William J. Stuntz. While he never references any particular counties in the country by name, he does, in sometimes revolting detail, explains how the Bill of Rights and Constitutionally-guaranteed protections our Founding Fathers intended for the citizenry to possess have, over time, been seriously eroded. The author posits this erosion is exemplified — at least in one iteration — by the wide disparities in sentences currently meted out by American courts.
One of the most egregious examples locally is the case handled by current ACLU attorney Jim Hardiman, when he was in private practice. Two drunk drivers, driving the wrong way down thoroughfares, killed innocent people. The driver whose record was slightly worse received a sentence of six years while the other driver received 20 years. The same prosecutor handled both cases. The difference one might ask? One driver was black and the other was white… I’ll leave it to you to figure out which was which. In his book, Stuntz argues this happens over and over again throughout America, and suggests one of the strongest defenses against such abuses is to have a fair county prosecutor — something many would argue we have not had in Cuyahoga County in over half a century. Yes, I said half a century.
A timeline that takes us back to the beginnings of the John T. Corrigan era, a man who many in the county still swear could walk on water. But my friend and mentor Roldo Bartimole stated in an October 2007 column (quoting writer and historian Barbara Tuchman) “Honor wears different coats to different eyes.”
Roldo wrote the column in response to the unveiling of the statue of John T. that sits across Lakeside Avenue from the Justice Center. The article was entitled “An undeserved honor,” to a man he felt had “strong but often wrong principles.” And many in the African-American and Italian communities would agree with that statement.
However, a well-respected lawyer of Irish heritage told me years ago that people really didn’t completely comprehend John T. “He wasn’t just prejudiced against Blacks and Italians,” the man said. “He was just as hard on some Irishmen, if you weren’t from the right side of town.” The attorney explained that fresh out of law school he applied for a job at the County Prosecutor’s Office, but since he’d graduated from Benedictine High School and not St. Ignatius, he wasn’t hired. “I was a good enough lawyer to get hired by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, but I wasn’t good enough for that stiff-necked ol’ John T.”
When the country took a sharp turn to the political right under Nixon/Reagan, local assistant prosecutors under John T. were leading the charge. “They were so brutal,” more than one attorney has told me, “some of us called them the Hitler Youth.” Indeed, a virtual two-tiered system of justice was erected in Cuyahoga County (as well as most other counties around the country) that some posit still exists in a truncated form to this very day.
The bigotry was so entrenched that even when Stephanie Tubbs Jones won the job of country prosecutor in 1991 and held it for seven years, in spite of her best efforts, only a few insignificant procedural changes occurred; and when she left office, allegedly, incoming prosecutor Bill Mason had his staff expend hundreds of hours attempting to find some indictable wrongdoing on the part of Tubbs Jones… but the “investigation” came away as dry as a popcorn fart.
The time spent chasing the chimera of wrongdoing by his predecessor could have been better spent by Mason instituting changes that would improve how fairly justice is dispensed at the Prosecutor’s Office. However, in order to “fix” something there has to be an admission that indeed something is wrong… and that’s not an admission Mason was, or is, willing to make. Not even in the face of a withering four-part series ran by the PD back in November of 2010 entitled Presumed Guilty.
Part one of the series started off with “Bill Mason has repeatedly neglected his No. 1 duty as prosecutor: to seek justice for the people of Cuyahoga County.” And it went downhill from there. However, instead of instigating a top-down review of the Prosecutor’s Office’s policies and procedures, he took a page from the playbook used by other prosecutors around the country who found themselves in a similar position: Circle the wagons, pretend to do a cursory study, and then pay a university to issue a whitewash report exonerating the person or agency who paid for the study.
Prosecutors around the country depend on the public to be: A… too dense to see what is actually happening, or B… too uncaring, just as long as the unfairness falls mainly on the heads of “those other guys.”
Indeed, while many in the minority community over the years have stated they believe Mason is a racist, I’ve always disagreed; close to a decade ago I wrote, “Mason’s not a racist, he’s worse: he’s a politician.” By that I meant there was no racial animus at the root of how unfairly he treated to persons of color — to him it was all business, and the “business” was positioning himself for the Governor’s Mansion.
As Stuntz notes, prosecutors routinely positioned themselves as “tough on crime” as a way to advance their careers, and it certainly has worked for many governors, members of congress, and U.S. senators. Hell, Bill Clinton turned his political fortunes around in his first quest for the White House by rushing back to Arkansas to sign the death warrant for a mentally retarded young man, thus “proving” he was tough on crime.
Another of the candidates in the current race for prosecutor is a man who’s alleged to be so far to the right of Attila the Hun that, if he’s elected, folks will soon be wishing they had Bill Mason back. More about him next week.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://www.neighborhoodsolutionsinc.com.