Old cemeteries can be most fascinating for the window they provide into the live and times of long-gone residents, and Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio, offers an especially interesting look at the city's history and culture with its wealth of well-known and distinguished residents.
Since February is Black History Month, it seemed like a good time to share a few stories of interesting African Americans I found during our most recent visit to Lake View Cemetery.
I vaguely remember hearing about Carl B. Stokes when he became Cleveland's mayor in 1967. Stokes defeated Seth Chase Taft, grandson of former President William Howard Taft, to become the first African American mayor of a major American city (although Robert C. Henry became the first African American mayor of an Ohio city with his election as mayor of Springfield in 1966). Stokes followed up a long political career in Ohio by serving as a U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of the Seychelles, and he was the first African American to anchor broadcast television news.
Garrett A. Morgan was an especially inventive guy, patenting the first traffic signal in the United States in 1923 after witnessing a crash between a car and a buggy. Morgan demonstrated the usefulness of another one of his inventions, the gas mask, in 1916 to help save lives and recover bodies among a group of miners trapped in a shaft below Lake Erie.
William Otis Walker is another prominent African American memorialized at Lake View Cemetery. The journalist, publisher, and political leader was the publisher and editor of the Cleveland Call and Post, which became one of the most influential African-American newspapers in the country after Walker started publishing it in 1932. Walker used the weekly newspaper as a platform to expose racial inequities and to support the Republican Party.
You'll find a number of African Americans buried in Section 50 of the Lake View Cemetery, reserved according to the book "Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery", for African American burials, although you'll also find African Americans buried throughout the cemetery.
Be sure to check out my previous posts about Lake View Cemetery:
Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio, recalls grand European memorial gardens
Wade Chapel houses Tiffany treasure at Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery
More Tiffany treasures inside Wade Chapel at Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery
Cleveland home to Father Christmas Tree
© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved
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