As a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Lou Stokes engineered a vehicle that would foster collaboration and strategic alliances for generations.
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Obama says former Rep. Louis Stokes believed in fairness and the idea that every American should have the same opportunity to succeed.
Although Monday is the official public viewing of the late Congressman Louis Stokes, a Cleveland church offered it’s Sunday worship service as a dedication.
An Ohio lawmaker is proposing an annual “Louis Stokes Day” to recognize the state’s first black congressman, who died this week. In the 1970s, Stokes served as Chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, charged with investigating the murders of President John F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
Stokes served in the Army from 1943 to 1946 in a segregated unit where he said he experienced racism for the first time in his life.
He also spoke of his mother, Louise C. Stokes, a widow with an eighth-grade education who supported her sons by working as a cleaning woman. Why should you have to be a super black to get someplace?
“So often in life people serve in office and then they disappear and Lou didn’t disappear and to me that’s the icing on the cake of a career, he didn’t have to do that but he did”, Voinovich said.
Years later, when an anti-busing amendment was debated on the House floor, Stokes described the humiliation of segregation.
Struggles with racism lasted a lifetime. “The problem is that a black man has to be extra special to win in this system”.
Stokes’ tenure in the House of Representatives included service on the House Appropriations Committee, where he was influential in bringing revenue to Cleveland.
The G.I. Bill made it possible for Stokes to go to college and law school.
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As an attorney, he argued one of the most renowned cases in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, Terry v. Ohio, which established the constitutional standard of “reasonable suspicion” for stop and frisk searches.
