Clarence Holmes

AF:      Hello my name is Aaron Fountain today is January 28, 2022, and I am interviewing Clarence Holmes over the telephone. I can start my first question. My first question I like to ask everybody is can you tell me about yourself? Where were you born? Where you’re from? Your parents and childhood upbringing.

CH:     I was born in Birmingham, Alabama on October 15, 1926. My father was a Methodist minister. My mother was what we in the olden days used to call a housewife. I lived in the state of Alabama in different places as my father was transferred from one church to another. I finished high school in Decatur, Alabama in 1945, and I was drafted into the segregated army before I finished high school. After I was discharged two years later, I came to Cleveland to attend Case Western Reserve University from which I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1950. And then I attended law school and graduated in 1953, and I subsequently passed the Ohio bar examination. I practiced law 62 years, and I retired in 2015. I married in 1953, and we have three children. Karen, who is the oldest and she lives in Boston. She works for a TV station in Boston. She is a community relations director, and she graduated from Boston University. Our second child is Clarence Jr. He attended and graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. He worked for Pfizer and then for Johnson and Johnson. Now he is an independent photographer as a photography business. Our youngest child who is also a daughter, is Leslie and she works for Key Banks. She’s the assistant vice president at Key Bank, and she had one daughter who is a senior in Case Western Reserve University. We hope and expect that she’s going to graduate Phi Beta Kappa, but that remains to be seen. She’s a senior and she’ll be graduating right now in late May or early June. My wife and I have been married 68 years. We are into our sixty-ninth year. So that’s it. That’s a short history of the short and simple annals of the poor.

AF:      What would you say the difference between growing up in Alabama and coming to Cleveland being in the Jim Crow south and going up north?

CH:     I guess it’s hard to put in words but some of the same things that we encountered in Alabama, we also were faced with in Cleveland. Though we didn’t have segregated schools in Cleveland by law, but in effect they were segregated. What the lawyers call de facto segregation. But in Alabama the school systems were segregated and the lawyers call that de jur segregation. But otherwise housing is very segregated in Cleveland. Even now, not just when I first arrived. I came to Cleveland in 1947. That’s when I got to Western Reserve University as a freshman. But anyhow, things are different. The French have a saying the more things change the more they stay the same. That’s it.

AF:      If you remember, what encouraged you to go into law and become an attorney?

CH:     The flip answer is it didn’t involve heavy lifting. That is to say, not physically but psychologically there’s a lot of heavy lift. But I think I was encouraged and inspired by my father who always wanted to be a lawyer, but didn’t have the opportunity to go to law school down there. He’s originally from Georgia. But Georgia and Alabama, at the time, there were no avenues for a black person to become a lawyer. So that’s what happened.

AF:      I’ve been learning a lot more about the United Freedom Movement, and its campaign against school segregation. I know you headed the organization once, so do you have any memories of the organization?

CH:     I do, but just what area you want?

AF:      I read a lot about what it did against school segregation in the various protests, and the superintendent and mayor who are very irresponsive in terms of the complaints. Do you know how the UFM came together?

CH:     As I already indicated in my opening remarks, my memory is deficient because that was over 60 years ago. But what happened. I was president of the NAACP, the Cleveland branch. There were a lot of organizations that wanted to participate in the civil rights movement. So we kind of organized an umbrella group. That’s what the United Freedom Movement was. It had many organizations, churches, church members, other organizations, urban league, and the Jewish community federation. I forgot the name of the church organization but there was an organization of Protestant churches. I can’t remember their name.

AF:      Like Abyssinia?

CH:     Well that was an individual church. But I mean there was an organization of Protestant churches that was part of the United Freedom Movement, but I don’t remember their names. One of my regrets is I didn’t keep a journal, which I would urge anybody involved in any kind of civic activity to keep a journal. But I didn’t, so some of the things I can’t fill in for you.

AF:      I’m curious what was your role as the president of the NAACP at the time? Like what was your responsibilities?

CH:     As head of the organization, I guess the mundane activity was to preside over the meetings of the governing board, as well as to be the leader when we did community-wide meetings. I don’t think it’s accurate to say master ceremonies, but I usually was deeply involved. Then we would have planning meetings where we would discuss tactics and strategies such as when we were working with trying to integrate the Cleveland school system. So that’s generally what we did.

AF:      I’ve read a book chapter about the integration campaign and I know that oftentimes you guys were met with violence and the police didn’t respond. Do you have memories of those incidents?

CH:     I do, but strangely enough I was never present when the police were anti-NAACP. I never had an encounter with the police all during the time I was president, which was five years from 1960 through December 1964.

AF:      I did read about the tragic incident of reverend Bruce Kluder, the young man who was accidentally killed by a bulldozer. I mean do you have any memories of him?

CH:     I do.

AF:      How was he like as a person?

CH:     I didn’t know him very well, but I knew him and I knew who he was. I knew about his activities. I can’t give you a personality sketch of him because I didn’t know him that well. But he was deeply involved in civil rights activity. He gave up his life. He lay down in front of a bulldozer with the expectation that the driver would see him and the driver didn’t see him and ran over and killed him. So what book were you reading from?

AF:      It’s a new book. It looks at children in the civil rights movement. He mostly talks about an article somebody published and it looked at the campaign to desegregate Cleveland public schools. A lot of stuff I didn’t know about. I didn’t know that the school board originally tried to educate a certain segment of black students for a half a day and allowed them to go home and brought in another group of black students just to completely make them have no contact with students on the west side that had a lot of room.

CH:     Go ahead that’s right.

AF:      It had a lot of room and when they did originally let black students attend the schools they couldn’t interact with the white students. Then eventually they’re like, okay they can interact, [but] it was only like 50 minutes per day. It seemed like they were trying to juggle, like trying not to offend white parents but at the same time not trying to fully integrate the schools. It’s like this juggling act that did not placate either side.

CH:     That’s right, exactly. What was the name of the book?

AF:      It’s called the Young Crusaders. It recently came out but it’s only like a small section of a chapter that talks about that.

CH:     I’m not familiar with that book.

AF:      I think Harambee City, I think she talks about CORE and their campaign against like police brutality as well as school segregation too.

CH:     Incidentally, CORE was a part of the United Freedom Movement. I can’t think of all the organizations that were part of the movement, but CORE was one of them.

AF:      I think the book also talked about how the United Freedom Movement came together as a way to deter more militant groups from organizing. Even though UFM, it was pretty confrontational but definitely was not militant in any kind of way how people define it at the time.

CH:     Yeah, but whenever you’re doing anything, whatever it is, there’s going to always be people who take exception with what you’re doing and think you should do it another way. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re not right. We had divergent opinions back in the heyday of the civil rights movement. Some people thought that non-violent protest was suicidal, and some people thought that was the way to go.

AF:      Do you have memories of any interactions with city officials like Mayor Locher or superintendent McAllister? They seemed very irresponsible.

CH:     He was president of the school board. This was an elected position. I had encounters with both him and mayor Ralph Locher. Ralph Locher was not, how can I say this, as far as I remember he was not an open racist. But like many white people, he believed, as far as I can tell, he never said this to me, but he believed in the status quo as many white people did then as well as now. Ralph McAllister, no that wasn’t his first name. I forgot what his first name was. But McAllister was president of the school board and he was, in my judgment, and open racist. But not a member of the Ku Klux Klan. As far as I could remember, he never made any valid racist speeches as far as I know. But he was of a certain attitude like many white people then as well as now.

AF:      That’s interesting because my dissertation looks at the San Francisco Bay area, and I kind of realized how racism in northern cities and out west it was very subtle. It was never really like the South where it’s pretty brutally honest. It’s more so people talking in codes.

CH:     You’re right, you’re right. Even now many whites tend to, how can I say it, hide their attitudes but their actions tell us where they stand.

AF:      I was curious were your kids enrolled in school at the time when you were active in the NAACP?

CH:     Yeah. But even though we live in Cleveland, we we’re also in the Shaker Heights City School District. So they went through school in the Shaker Heights City School District and not the Cleveland district. They all graduated from Shaker Heights High School.

AF:      What so what encouraged you to move there because I’ve been learning more about Ludlow recently.

CH:     Well, Ludlow Community Organization wasn’t in flower when we moved here. The reason we chose this house was for more mundane reasons. It was the first house after looking at eight or ten houses that my wife and I both liked. This is how we chose this house. But we didn’t choose it because of the Ludlow Community Association. Matter of fact, we didn’t know at the time that this house was in the Shaker Heights City School District, but that was an added bonus once we moved in.

AF:      What year was that?

CH:     We moved here November 1^st, 1959.

AF:      So this is when some whites were leaving and the neighborhood organized to try to keep Whites moving in.

CH:     Yeah, and the other side of that same coin was to keep blacks from moving in. The more whites you move in, the fewer blacks would have a place to move in to. I had some differences with the Ludlow Community Association about their housing policy. Because I thought, my mind was that Blacks are at such a disadvantage generally, not just in housing but in general, that it didn’t make sense for me to be involved in something that would say, ‘well once I move in here, I want to bar the gates so other blacks can’t come.’ That didn’t appeal to me. Also, there was no incentive for blacks to move like they were, I’m not sure the source of the funds, but down payment assistance was given to whites to move in. I don’t know where the money came from.

AF:      It came from, whenever they did community gatherings and fundraisers like Ellis Fitzgerald came, they would raise money and use that to back second mortgages for white families.

CH:     All right. See I told you my memory was.

AF:      It’s perfectly fine. I talked to Shelly Stokes-Hammond, and she didn’t even know that until she became an adult and started interviewing people for her master’s thesis.

CH:     Shelley got a master’s, huh?

AF:      Yeah, I just talked to her today actually, like probably like an hour after you called me.

CH:     Her father was head of the legal committee when I was president of NAACP. He and I passed the bar the same year.

AF:      Did you maintain [a] relationships with him afterwards?

CH:     Yeah, well of course he went to Congress. While we were still friendly, I didn’t have any contact with him because he was in Washington, and I was still here in Cleveland hanging on by my fingernails.

AF:      So even though you had disagreements did you get to know some of the people in the association?

CH:     Oh yeah. I did.

AF:      I’m kind of curious like who? I just I just talked to Bernard Isaac’s daughter, she’s like the first person I interviewed about two days ago.

CH:     He was a big up in the community association. I don’t want to characterize him because he isn’t here to defend himself. He was one of the people who felt that x number of blacks was enough and once a certain quota was reached that’s why some of the people tried to get whites to move in.

AF:      Did you ever join the association?

CH:     Yeah, at one point I was, for one year I was the treasurer of the association. I joined. I figured I could do more good inside than outside, so I joined.

AF:      I know when you joined did try to get them to end that quota against some black home buyers?

CH:     I was vocal about it altogether, but my view didn’t prevail. So I became less active.

AF:      What year was this when you like became less active?

CH:     I knew you were going to ask the first one. I would have to make a note of that question and look up, and then call you back because. It’s probably 19, let’s see we moved here in ’57, ’59, it probably was. I can’t remember. I’ll have to look I have to look at that question and call you back.

AF:      It’s no problem. I’m kind of curious about your career after your tenure as president of the NAACP. I’ve seen your name involved in youth employment opportunities and still very active with bettering of the life of Black Clevelanders.

CH:     After my last term as president of NAACP, which was December 31, 1964. I went back to the private practice of law incidentally. It wasn’t generally known that when I was president of NAACP I was not on salary. The only thing I got out of the presidency was, only compensation was psychic satisfaction. Some people think I was on salary but I wasn’t. I didn’t even have an expense account. So that was that. But I went back to practicing law. Matter of fact, I practiced law all during the time I was president of the NAACP because even though it took up an increasing amount of my time, I still had to make a living. Pay the mortgage and buy groceries, gasoline for the car, and so forth. I had to keep my practice going.

AF:      That makes sense. I talked about my professor because he studies the Black Panther Party and he said a lot of people when they got to old age they kind of struggled because being a revolutionary doesn’t come with a retirement package.

CH:     That’s right.

AF:      This is just quick question. Is it normal for a president of the NAACP to get a salary?

CH:     No it’s not. I’d be surprised if, of course you know there are many chapters all over the country, so they may have different policies. But we had an executive secretary who was paid, who was full-time. Theoretically, I was, but it evolved into being almost full-time

AF:      I’m kind of curious, what area of law did you practice?

CH:     I was a general practitioner. My practice evolved so that after a while I was doing primarily probate work that is estates, and wills, and trust sometimes. Not many trust, but wills and probating the states. I did very little criminal work.

AF:      I would say that was most of the questions I had because some of them we covered.