Abstract
Albert B. Ratner is a native Clevelander. He is an avid philanthropist and the co-chairman of Forest City Realty Trust, a nationwide real estate development firm. For twenty years he was the CEO of his family owned business Forest City Enterprises, Inc. This 2017 interview was collected as part of a yearlong, community-wide commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Carl Stokes' election as mayor of Cleveland.
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Interviewee
Ratner, Albert (interviewee)
Interviewer
Perry, Dee (interviewer)
Project
Stokes: Honoring the Past, Inspiring the Future
Date
7-7-2017
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
71 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Albert Ratner interview, 03 July 2017" (2017). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 501001.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1222
Transcript
Dee Perry [00:00:03] This is Dee Perry, and I am here at Tower City Center with Albert Ratner. And we’re going to talk for the Stokes Commemoration Project. And that is A L B E R T, R A T N E R. And thank you for being with us, sir.
Albert Ratner [00:00:21] Happy to be here.
Dee Perry [00:00:23] I want to start by talking about the fact that philanthropy, giving back to the community, is something you and your family are well known for. And I’d like to talk about where that impulse began. Who was a role model for you as a philanthropist?
Albert Ratner [00:00:40] Well, I think it was a combination of people. I think it started out really with my grandmother, who came to the United States in 1920, and she came with nine children. One died on Ellis Island. And the others, a couple were here earlier, but they all settled in Cleveland at the time, and she died when I was twelve. But from the time I was about six years old on, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. And she was an Orthodox Jewish lady. She was the daughter of a very famous rabbi in Poland, who unfortunately only lived for 40 years, but was a brilliant rabbi. And she just was a phenomenal role model. My mother, who was American, born in America, and my father were a combination of the best of the old world and the best of the new world. And on both sides of my family, I came from philanthropic people who knew the history of our people for 2,000 years, and you just lived it every day. It wasn’t called philanthropy. It wasn’t thought of as philanthropy. And I don’t consider myself to be a philanthropist. That’s not what we do. We just live our life, and somebody else judges what we do. But I don’t consider what we do engaging in philanthropy. I consider it more engaging in self-interest because the better the world is, the better we’re going to be. But those would be my role models, and they continued on and on through my life. I’ve had people who have been exemplary examples of what the right thing is.
Dee Perry [00:02:46] So speaking of making a better world, I’m wondering how you saw the world as you were growing up in Cleveland. I mean, what kind of environment was the city at the point when you were a young man?
Albert Ratner [00:03:02] Well, it started out, you know, my earliest recollections are that my grandparents lived in the city, what is now Glenville, and my family lived at different times in Willowick and in Euclid and settled in Cleveland Heights. It was a very segregated city in the sense that there were Italian neighborhoods, Hungarian neighborhoods, Jewish neighborhoods. So there was very little interplay in my earliest years with people other than people that were Jewish. And when we moved on to Cleveland Heights in 1934, we were the first Jewish people on the street. There weren’t Jewish people who lived in Cleveland Heights, so from that point on until really the end of World War II, most of my interrelations were with Jewish people. When I moved to Cleveland Heights, the schools were half Jewish, half not Jewish in time. But in my everyday life, it was almost strictly Jewish people. So what happened was if you were Jewish, you couldn’t go to medical school. Very few people if you were African American. Bob Madison, for example, couldn’t get into Western Reserve Architectural School because he was African American. So from that time till the end of World War II, it was very very segregated. When I went to elementary and junior high school, we never had a person of color in our class. At Cleveland Heights High School, I graduated 1946, we had one African American in the whole school. So it was very segregated. And when I think of it, I don’t remember where the African Americans lived because I was going from Cleveland Heights to the city of Cleveland, which, in the areas that I was traveling, it was almost all Jewish. Those are the areas of Glenville, Kinsman and that’s what it was. And there was all kinds of discrimination. You saw it in all kinds of different ways. You saw it what colleges you could apply for. And all of this held for the Jewish people until after the war. So, for example, the Van Sweringens, who developed Shaker Heights and a lot of the real estate in those days, if you were Jewish, you couldn’t live in Shaker Heights. If you were Black, you couldn’t live in Shaker Heights. If you were Catholic, you couldn’t live in Shaker Heights. So there were all kinds of restrictions within the city. So it was very very segregated. None of that changed until after World War II. And that was what life was like. I played basketball in high school and college in the Army. Never played basketball with a Black basketball player. Look at any professional team today and you don’t find a white basketball player. We would play basketball with Black basketball players in the summertime because we’d go to Shaw High School. Some of the Black kids would come, but never played in intramural or high school sports with people of other races or religions. Well, we did with religions, but not race. And of course, the other thing you have to remember, and this was true more of Lou’s growing up than mine was, the Depression was on. So everybody’s thinking of this in terms, well, this is America. And everybody had a job. Very few people had jobs. So it was a difficult time for everybody, which made it particularly difficult for minorities. So one of my very dear friends who became the president of the Jewish Community Federation, Larry Williams, when he married, when they came back from their honeymoon, his wife moved in with her mother because he couldn’t afford to have a place, because he couldn’t get a job as a lawyer because they were not hiring Jewish lawyers. The Cleveland Clinic did not have a single Jewish doctor, so there was a Jewish hospital, Mount Sinai Hospital. So it was a very segregated kind of city. And if you were Jewish, they couldn’t tell you were Jewish. But if you were Black, everybody knew. So as hard as it was for Jewish people, it was that much more difficult for people of color. But the truth of the matter was, people were much nicer to one another than they are today, which sounds like they were funny, but I remember very well. My mother, this was in 1939, was involved with the Community Chest, which became the United Way. And my mother came up with the idea that when they had a drive for the community fund, that they should go to the minority communities and ask them to give money. And everybody said, why would they give money? And they said, well, why wouldn’t they give money? Maybe they could only give a penny, but why are they different than we are? Why don’t they want to help people the same way that we did? So this continued on at colleges and universities. And it was true. If you were Catholic, you had problems. Each group had its own particular group of problems. And I became really more cognizant of this. I didn’t think of it until I started to read Lou’s book. And then I looked at the way I was brought up, and I was taught that I had to be better than anybody else if I wanted to be the president of my class. Because I was Jewish. And I looked at my life in growing up and Lou’s life in growing up, and I could understand all the handicaps that all of us had, but the added handicaps that people of color, or if you were Catholic and wanted to move in the neighborhood, you couldn’t. So it was a very, very difficult time.
Dee Perry [00:10:17] Which makes the accomplishments of the Stokes brothers that much more remarkable. That they were able to break through all of the barriers that stood in their way to get to the places they got to. I’m curious if you remember or if you met Carl and Lou Stokes before 1967, before Carl’s election, or if you became aware of them after?
Albert Ratner [00:10:49] I really became involved with them after. Part of what happened because of the age differential between the two brothers was- They call Lou’s generation the greatest generation that ever lived. My generation should be called the luckiest generation that ever lived because it so happens that in my generation, I was in high school when the war ended, and I enlisted in the army after attending a semester reserve. But I missed the war. I remember the Depression, but anecdotally I didn’t live it. But I remember what a nickel meant, and that ice cream was a nickel, and you could get sprinklers for a penny. But Lou’s generation actually lived it. What I believe is the reason that the Jewish refugee, the Italian refugee, the African American that became successful, became successful was because they lived through very hard times and had the resilience to overcome it. So my belief was it was remarkable in one sense, but it was predictable in another sense. If you understood who their mother was, those kids were not going to fail. They were going to make it. And it was, at that time, the living story of America. It’s where everybody came from. Very few people came here with money, so everybody that came had some kind of baggage. They couldn’t talk, or they didn’t have money, or they didn’t have training, and yet that was the blessing of America. That if you worked hard, you could overcome everything. Everybody who made it believed it. We didn’t have the kind of media we had that told us how terrible everybody was. You didn’t have to tell them how bad things were. They knew how bad things were. Nobody had to interpret for them that things were bad. So it was their resilience. So I don’t. It’s remarkable anecdotally, but practically, it is the story of America, of America at its best. It’s unfortunate that we weren’t at our best in many ways, but the opportunity was there if you could overcome it. And they, through learning how to read, in working when they were very young, into suffering all the indignities that they could suffer, and yet didn’t have any bitterness in what they did because they understood that it was on them, that if they were going to succeed, it would have to be by what they would do. And they also understood, which is remarkable about both of them, that they couldn’t do it by themselves, that they couldn’t isolate themselves to do it. And people talk about, well, how easy is it for white people to have conversations with people of color in those days, but how easy was it for Black people to have conversations with white people and go through that experience? And yet Come through it saying, things will get better, I’ll suffer this, but they’re not going to change me. I know what I want to be, and I know where I want to go. So in one sense, it’s remarkable. If you spent an hour with Louis, you’d understand it.
Dee Perry [00:15:00] And I want to talk about the relationship that you developed with Lou Stokes. But I also want to get a sense of what your reaction was following the 1967 election. Did you have any thoughts on it before the election happened? Any predictions, anything?
Albert Ratner [00:15:19] So let me go back just a little bit and tell you just a little bit about my experience. Starting out, I spent the bulk of my time with Jewish people within the Jewish community. I went to Cleveland Heights High School, basketball scholarship reserve, and then I enlisted in the Army because I had thought I would always be in the Army. And I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t in the Army. So I enlisted in the Army so I could save the world. And I ended up being a basketball player. So I played basketball in the Army, and I was in Fort Benning, Georgia, for most of the time. And it was a different experience to me because I left what was supposed to be the liberal North to go to the prejudiced South. So I found myself in a situation in which I go into the Army and I’m in the Army and I’m in a totally segregated environment, which I wasn’t in the North. So I have a white drinking fountain. There’s a white and a Black theater. If a white missed a movie at the white theater, they could go to the Black theater, which got the movie after the white theater, but a Black could not go to the white theater. So I played basketball on a segregated team. The barracks were totally separated. We ate separately. If I jump, but not a paratroopers, but the paratroop, the white paratroopers were here, and if there were Black paratroopers, they were there. So it was a very interesting experience for me. It was very different for me. So, for example, we took a bus trip to Atlanta to play a basketball game, and on the way going back on the bus the bus broke down, and we were in Columbus, Georgia. And a bus from Columbus, Georgia, drove by, and they saw we were stuck. They came back. It was a Black group that had performed in Atlanta, Georgia, and they said, we’ll take you back. And none of the guys would go back. And I said, I’m tired. I’m getting on the bus. And I went back to camp - but none of the people, they were all southerners, because most of the Army at that time was from the South - and went back to Columbus, Georgia, because I was tired. I didn’t think Black, white. I was just tired. I wanted to go. And we go back to the barracks, guys, how could you do that? What are you doing? Don’t you understand? I said, Listen, this is just what I’m used to. I’m not used to what you’re used to. It’s different. So it was a very interesting experience for me because I came from a family which I consider to be a very understanding and liberal family. When I was in the Army, just about as I was being discharged, I had a call from the major who I had worked with when I did my basic training, who said, the Army is getting ready to integrate and we’re having an A and E, which is an arts and education program. You’re the only guy who’s had any college education. Would you come back and do the spiel for the battalion? And I said I’m happy to. So at 7 o’clock in the morning they send me the papers. At 7 o’clock in the morning I go to the theater. The guys are there, and I start out saying, effective 0700 hours, which was the time the United States Army is integrated. Now, what you have to understand at this time, the way it got integrated was not through a congressional act. Harry Truman took it upon himself to issue this order as Commander-in-Chief. And if you read his biography, he would tell you it was not something he believed in, but he believed as the President of the United States this is what the country had to do. So I’m standing up in front of this group of people and I’m going through this spiel, and I start out saying 700. And then we start talking about how it’s going to be integrated and there will be Blacks and whites living together when you go back to your barracks. And then there’s a whole explanation of possible questions. And it starts out and it says, these are the myths that we have, that there is difference between bloods in whites and bloods in people of color. And you’re going through it and are there any questions? A friend of mine puts his hand up and said, I had a blood transfusion at the Battle of the Bulge. Are you telling me I could have n—– blood in me? And I said, well, there is no such thing as n—– blood. Blood is red and it’s A, B, C and O. Well, you don’t understand what I’m saying. Are you telling me I could Have a transfusion from somebody who was of a different color? I have no idea whose blood you have, but the point is that the blood you have is red. So the conversation keeps going on and it keeps getting worse until one fellow gets up and said, I fought with n—–s and they were yellow. And I said to them, there were no instances where Blacks and whites actually fought together. They were separate battalions. They were doing separate things. At which point my major came to the microphone, I thought, to rescue me, and says, I think they were yellow. And the guys come toward me. I get in my Jeep, I run to the commanding general who knew all the athletes. I had a conversation with him, told him what happened, said, tomorrow morning be back at the theater at 0700. It was General Iron Mike O’Daniel. He was the guy. At 7 o’clock, I walk into the arena. There are four soldiers lying on their stomachs with machine guns in front of them with ammunition. The general goes to the mic and says, Corporal Ratner will repeat what he did yesterday. And the person that makes a move is going to be shot. So behave yourself, Corporal. And I get up and say, I had a tough time talking because I didn’t enlist in the Army to do this. The next day, the Army was integrated and it was done by a single person. So I come from that experience, and I want to come back home. I want to come back home where everything’s going to be terrific. But I left as a kid doing kid stuff, and I come back home and what do I find? Somebody wants to buy a home in a neighborhood, so the neighbors get together to buy the home so a Black can’t live in the neighborhood. And I actually felt less comfortable in the North than I did in the South because in the South I understood what the rules were, and it was out there and it was open. But in the North, it was all insidious. It was all insidious, so that was what I came back to. I started to go to college, and one of the interesting things for me, I ended up at Michigan State because I had a school in lumber merchandising. And that was totally refreshing to me because it was an integrated university and they had people from other parts of the world. It was a very different experience. So I spent the years prior to when they were elected pretty much in the business. But what I was fighting when I was in the business is buying all this land in Beachwood that the Van Sweringens had a right to decide who lived there because it was deed restricted and they every time I sold a lot, you had to have it cleared by them as to who the buyer was. But we knew from the federal court that it couldn’t be enforced. So the first lot I sold to a fellow by name of Bob Stein, and they call me up. Do you know him? Yes. Tell me about him. I said he’s a gorilla. What do you mean, he’s a gorilla? What about his wife? She’s an ape. And what about the kids? They’re the cutest monkeys you’ve ever seen. Because I knew that they couldn’t do anything about what I was doing. But even though they couldn’t enforce the restrictions, which were the deed restrictions, they still went through the deal. I remember a deal I did in Pepper Pike where I had an argument with the people and they said, you need to sign these restrictions. I said, I’m going to go to federal court. So my experience as I was in the business, we had a Japanese person that bought a house in Willowick, and we almost had a riot because people felt so horrible because the Japanese had killed- You couldn’t even understand what they were talking about. But that was where things were at, so to say. Well when Carl was elected the mayor- Don’t think the way things were now. Think of the way that things were then. There are a lot of people that would argue that things are worse now. There are a lot of people who say things are terrible now, but compared to the way they were, they’re much better. So at the time that Carl was running for mayor, it was a very unusual period of time. But what you have to remember, and to some extent this is a credit to Cleveland, that while we have been a prejudiced and a bigoted community in many ways, we also have had some great leaders. So Carl could not have been mayor if there had been not also been a whole bunch of people that said he ought to be mayor not because he’s Black, but because he’s good. You have to look at the role in the press, but I got to know him. One of his kids ended up going to school with my son, but we were just friendly. But really we weren’t doing anything in Cleveland at the time. So I was like a bystander as to what took place. What I remember so well is what happened at the time of the Hough riots turned out at the time of the Hough riots. I was living in Shaker Square and my late wife was a school psychologist. In the middle of the riots somebody knocked on the door and I answered the door, and there were four large-size African Americans at the door and said, we’d like to see Mrs. Ratner. I had no idea what was going on. So I went to get Fay. We invited them in and they said, we’d like to take you into Hough because your kids need you. And I said to them, my wife isn’t going into Hough. There are riots going on, and she said, I’m going in the Hough. And she actually went into Hough for a couple of days and then came back out again. So there was this real contentiousness. And like everything else, it wasn’t everybody. It’s always what kind of leaders you have at both ends, the good end and the bad end. So when the riots ended was really the first time I became involved because I was very active in the Jewish community. So when the riots ended, what happened was we put a group together of people to try to raise money to make things better within the district. And I remember this. This is probably one of the blackest days I had in my life. The Jewish Community Federation was asked to join the group. I was the only one that voted against it. And I voted against it because I did not want to have our community join a group in which we didn’t have decision-making power because we didn’t know what that group was going to do. And my father voted against me. The only time my dad and I, it turned out that that group, I forget what we called it, ended up not doing what we had hoped it would do. Because what tends to happen with those groups is you get one group that wants to do one thing or one group another thing. But from that point on, what began to happen was the community itself began to change. So you’d get your first Jewish doctor, you’d get more, you’d start getting basketball scholarships for African Americans at Case Western Reserve. So it was just the dawning of change. But you have to remember between 1940 and 1945, when the war ended, and this period of time while there were riots at Hough, we had left the Depression, all the stuff that Roosevelt had done, the WPA, Social Security, all of that stuff got us out of where we were. And then we had an economy. So it wasn’t a question that if you were a person without a high school diploma that you couldn’t get a job because you had gone through the war years in which nobody had a college education. And then when the boys came back, they didn’t go into the workforce. They had the GI Bill. So how did Carl and Lou get to where they were, it was the federal government and the GI Bill that made that possible. So what began to happen there began to become opportunity. When there’s overall opportunity, there’s opportunity for all. But my grandmother used to have a saying that when things are great, the wealthy are rich and the poor do well. When things are bad, the wealthy do poorly and the poor do horrible. So what happened was you now have all this opportunity. You have the GI Bill. The GI Bill can’t discriminate on culture. Harvard and Yale on color can. But these are state institutions, and you have law, and that began to change everything. So you have a booming economy, you have all these GIs coming home, and they’re starting their own life, so they’re not into all of this stuff. They can’t worry about anything else. When I went back to my reunion in Michigan State, what I realized was everybody I went to agricultural school with was a farmer. They never intended to go to college because they were in the Army, and they got the GI Bill, and then their life changed. So it was a period of time, if you went to a city council, you could sit down with a mayor, and nobody came to any meetings because everybody was busy and they were buying houses and they were having their kids. So that was the period of time that took place. And when the riots came- When the riots came, what happened? And you find this in society. The basic response, from my view, to the riots were there were a group of people who understood it, but what most people really believed was, if you take care of them, they won’t bother you. So it really wasn’t a feeling about equality or it was bad. But you have to remember that so much of the people who were making this judgment were as bad off from 32 to 48 as the people who were doing the Hough riots. So there was a different kind of feeling. So the idea was, look it, take care of them in Hough. They’ll stay in Hough, they won’t bother us, everything will be fine. So what began to happen, you begin to get the Civil Rights Movement, You begin to get King. So what began to happen was what I consider to be a different kind of prejudice, which was a prejudice that said that these people have rights. And the way the people have rights is they deserve an education. So we start out, we’re going to do a great thing for all of these people. We have these segregated schools, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to desegregate the schools, and it’s a great thing. I’m sitting and having dinner with my wife, and she says to me, you think you’re a smart guy and you think desegregating the schools are going to be a good thing? It’s going to be horrible. What do you mean it’s going to be horrible? How can it be horrible? So the first thing that’s horrible is a kid gets sick and has to go home, and they’re 10 miles from where they are, where their house is. That doesn’t make sense. The second thing that’s going to happen is when you desegregate the schools, all of the people of money, forgetting what their color is, are going to leave, and they’re going to go to the areas that will be desegregated, but they’ll be basically white people. So you’re going to end up with a worse kind of segregation in which you’ll put into the city the people who can’t leave, and you’re going to see property values go to hell. I said to my wife, listen, honey, you’re a psychologist. You’re not a real estate guy. I’ll handle the real estate. You handle the psychology. It wasn’t the only time that my wife was smarter than I was, but that’s what took place. So what happened was you get the riots, you get the Los Angeles riots. The community thinks that we can buy our way out of it, which is the fund that we put together, a group of people who wanted to make things better. And you can look at white who would. A Jewish shoe guy helped him be where he was. But you began to now see the first really beginning of opportunities taking place by people, because you start going to Michigan State and you’re meeting different kinds of people, and it’s a very different kind of world when it was. So at the time that Carl is mayor, you have a city. You have the bulk of the Jewish people, or a lot of them living in the city because you hadn’t had a total leaving of what’s taking place. But the problem when Carl was mayor was when you get a riot, everybody wants to get the hell out. No Black wants to stay. No white who wants to stay in a war zone. It doesn’t make sense. So what happened was there was an enormous amount of enthusiasm, but the truth of the matter is, not a lot changed during that period of time because they were almost like independent incidents. It wasn’t like there was a plan that when the Hough riots took place, would start to train people. It wasn’t the way it worked. And you have to remember at that time that who were the great Black baseball players in 1945? There weren’t any. So there weren’t role models for people. So you’re growing up and you’re looking around and you’re saying what are my opportunities? So the opportunities weren’t there. So at the time that the mayor was elected and through that period of time, it was a real transition period from my mind of going for what was ingrained discrimination. What I learned in the south, for example, I’m driving, I’m in a car with a friend of mine, Somebody cuts him off and he says, that goddamn Jew. And I said, you told me I’m the first Jew you ever met. Why do you call him a goddamn Jew? He says, that’s what we do. If you get cut off, goddamn Jew cut you off. They don’t know what they’re talking about. But that was the prejudice. So the reason that the two brothers were pioneers was because they were there at a time at the very beginning of when change was made. So Lou could become a head of the Black caucus because as he pointed out in his book, there were enough Black members that you could have a caucus. But it’s one thing to be there, it’s another thing to understand it and to change what was there. That’s what the difference was. So it wasn’t that we didn’t have Lou Stokes before, who were great people, but who never had the opportunity to do it. So what distinguished this, with Carl’s being elected mayor really meant was you had your foot in the door and then you had to begin to push like hell to get through the door and in the house and be able to sit at the dinner table and then finally to become a neighbor. So I knew Carl, I knew him better actually after he was mayor than when he became the mayor. And it was a good time for Cleveland in a sense, there was a lot of optimism, but the conditions weren’t on the ground that would allow the kind of changes that we saw taking place.
Dee Perry [00:41:53] Now you mentioned Lou Stokes, and I want to bring the conversation around to him because I wonder if how early you met Lou? I mean, you saw Carl in place as mayor. When did Lou make your acquaintance?
Albert Ratner [00:42:09] Well, Lou actually made my acquaintance because my brother in law, Sam Miller, who was very friendly with Carl, he always called Lou Uncle Louie, started dealing with Carl and then dealing with Lou. And when Lou became both a lawyer, they would see each other on occasion. But when he became a congressman, because we were doing all this development and all this stuff in Cleveland and we’ve always been kind of interested in that political stuff. Lou and Sam became very, very dear friends and did a whole bunch of things together. Meals during Christmas time for people in the black community, whole bunch of philanthropic stuff that they did together. And our office was on St. Clair, Sam’s was on Brook Park. And it was really as we moved downtown that I got to know Lou better and started to spend more time with Lou. And again, I was spending the bulk of my time on Jewish stuff. I wasn’t spending much of my time in the city.
Dee Perry [00:43:29] But on that note, you’ve described Lou Stokes as a real friend to the Jewish people. And I wanted to have you talk about what were some of the ways he demonstrated that friendship through his office and personally?
Albert Ratner [00:43:43] Well, during this period of time and throughout this period of time, the Holocaust had taken place and we started to have a number of displaced persons they would call coming within the community. And during this period of time, we had all kinds of issues. We had the Jackson–Vanik Amendment, which was an amendment that said that if you boycotted that you couldn’t do business with Russia as long as they would not allow the Jews to leave. So during that period of time we had all kinds of bills coming up about how do you pay for the displaced persons and if we needed a passport or somebody was being deported on all kinds of individual basis. But I could say this about Hungarians, Latvians, I could say about everybody. But we developed a very, very close personal relationship with Lew. And then as he became a congressman and was doing things within his district, we became involved with a lot of the things that he was doing within his district. So somebody needed a passport. I could call him up, somebody had somebody trying to get somebody. Families were dislodged, bringing the families together. But there are any number of incidents and all kinds of people could say this. It wasn’t just unique to the Jewish people. When you started where I started, you don’t get very far from where you live. And I think the same thing was true with Lou, which is you could take me out of a Jewish atmosphere, but you couldn’t take the Jewishness out of me. Well, it was the same with Lou. He was the most broad minded person you could ever find. But he never forgot who he was and he never forgot where he came from. And he never forgot the suffering that he saw not of himself but of his people. And he never forgot how hard his mother worked to make a life for he and his brother.
Dee Perry [00:46:24] It makes me think of other groups that he lobbied on behalf of veterans the plight of veterans and their families were really close to his heart. Did you two work on any issues related to veterans?
Albert Ratner [00:46:40] Well, you have to remember he was in the service, and Lew is what I would call a really current guy. So the issue at that time was veterans. So all the veterans come back to war. He’s not in Congress. You have the Korean War, you have the Vietnam War. So now you’re a Vietnam veteran and you’re Black, and you’re having problems, and who do you go to? You go to Lou, and Lou would deal. We’ve always said he was the best constituent congressman that you ever had, because whatever you. Your water doesn’t leak, and it’s not a federal issue. He has something called the water department. So because you had these wars and the people coming back, it was always involved. But he was always cognizant of the disproportionate number of Blacks that served in the military after World War II and the other the Korean and the Vietnam War wars compared to the population. And he always believed that one of the reasons that they didn’t get the same kind of benefits was because there weren’t that many whites that were in the service. When you looked at the 14 million and a percent of whites, and then you looked at Korean was few more Blacks. And then Vietnam were a lot. And you now look at it, and it’s almost predominantly maybe half African American. So he’s always cognizant of that. And then you look at when he became the head of Health and Human Services and he had the veterans, hospitals within, what his responsibility was. It was a good part of his life, just Health and Human Services generally.
Dee Perry [00:48:55] I want to have you speak to what you think the legacy of Carl Stokes was? What should he be remembered for? What was his best accomplishment, do you think?
Albert Ratner [00:49:08] I think Carl to some extent reminds me of President Kennedy, which was, first of all, very charismatic. Very charismatic. So the way he talked, the way he looked, his body language was very charismatic. I think what happened was that his career was much too short, so we never really got to see the full Carl. But we got the same with Kennedy. But we got to see enough of him to understand that he was different. He may have been the same as everybody else who. Who had been mayor, but he was different. And he was a different color, but he was the same. And I think it made some people realize that you weren’t looking at him as a Black mayor, you were looking at him as a mayor, and it was subconscious. So people started out saying, well, we elected a Black mayor, and then they started talking about the mayor. And I think that that was like Larry Doby coming to the Indians. He started out as the first Black player in the league, in the American League, and he ended up being a darn good baseball player. So people don’t remember him as the Black guy. They remember him as a really good hitter. I think the same thing ended up with Carl. That the first thing was a jolt, and then settling back and saying, you know what? He’s doing a good job, and that’s where you’d want things to be. And I think the fact is that we so underestimate what a role model means to people. And what I’ve often said is that the really great people I know have no idea of the effect they have on other people. And if they knew the effect they had on new people, they’d be terrible because they couldn’t be themselves because they’d always be on stage. So he wasn’t always on stage. He was doing what he believed in. He was doing what he thought. And the interesting thing is he didn’t have a role model. So he had to go back to all of the experiences of his life. And those experiences, when they played out, led people to say, there goes Mayor Stokes. So we keep making a big deal about the fact that he was the first Black mayor in the city. But the truth of the matter is, he was a good mayor. And that’s the best legacy you can have, is people saying, hey, he was a good mayor. So that’s the way I think of Carl now.
Dee Perry [00:53:02] Lou had a much longer tenure in public office.
Albert Ratner [00:53:08] Sorry.
Dee Perry [00:53:09] So what- Would you look at his career as a congressman and say, that’s his best legacy?
Albert Ratner [00:53:19] So let me just take a minute and tell you the way I feel about legacy. David Brooks wrote an article in which he said, are you living your eulogy or are you living life? And the goal is you should live a legacy. So you should think of what you’d like people to say when you’re not here. And that would be your legacy. But the truth of the matter is that it works the opposite way. That Lou did not start out to create a legacy. Lou started out to be Lou. And his greatest legacy was that he was Lou. So he didn’t do these things. So you and I would sit here and talk about how great he was. One of the amazing things about him was I never found anything about him from him. He never told me anything he did. But when I sat with other people who were involved with Him. That’s when I learned who Lou was. So one of his legacies is something my mother taught me. There is no limit to what you can get done if you don’t care who gets credit. There was never a day that Lou said to me, he invited me to University Hospital, where he was being honored. They were naming something after Lou. And it kind of surprised me because I didn’t know what Lou did at University Hospital. I was sitting and talking to the head of the medical school, and she started to number the number of things that Lou did for the hospital. I didn’t have a clue. But you don’t name the Stokes Medical Building after just anybody. You name it after somebody who’s given tremendous service to that organization. So I would honestly say that if there’s any message to take away from Lou Stokes is try to understand who you are and try to be yourself. He is absolutely one of the most consistent people that I ever met. If my wife and I went into Corky and Lenny’s and he was having a sandwich, he loved going to Corky and Lenny’s. And we sat down with him and had a conversation with him. And it was no different when you saw him in the halls of Congress. And it was no different when he was president. It was no different when he was at the assassination committee. He was the same person. Now, he had certain characteristics. Absolute integrity. Absolute integrity, absolute loyalty. So he was very dependable. But to him, dependable meant that if you did something wrong, he would tell you. So we owned the Ritz Carlton Hotel. Lou went to check in, and the guest didn’t- The person behind the desk didn’t treat him properly. And he came back, said to me, you can’t run the hotel like that. You can’t run the hotel like that. And we went back to Ritz and straightened it up. At our board meetings, he was constantly saying, you don’t have enough people of color in this business. And he worked with us to see that we could accomplish it. But I think his legacy was that it wasn’t so much that he invented things. There’s a saying in the Jewish religion that a person that says amen to a prayer is holier than a person that says the prayer. And the reason is, you may say a prayer, you may believe it, you may not. But for somebody else to listen and say what they want and for somebody else to say, so let it be. That’s who Lou was. To me, he was the amen guy. You had a prayer, he listened, he made it happen, and he had this tremendous ability, wherever he was, to make something happen. So not a great philosopher. I mean, he was, in a sense, a fantastic philosopher, but he was an action philosopher. You didn’t sit and have a conversation with Lou, and when it was over, it was done. You usually ended up having to do something. So he came to us, for example, with NeoMed and a program, they had to take people who would become doctors and have scholarships and work in the inner city. And he knew that we as a company were very involved in the inner city. And he knew that that was something very close to us. And when they started the program, we were among the first people he came to. And when we sit and sat and listened to Lou’s spiel, it was no different than everything we talked about. It was just a question of how much money was he going to ask us for. But it wasn’t a question of him having to tell us what was needed. Because in that sense, we were brothers. We were trying to do the same thing. And he would help us with everything we tried to do, and we would help him. And what were we trying to do? We were trying to see that things were better at the end of the day. So, you know, in one sense, a legacy. I say to my kids that your legacy is how many people you remember. Remember you when you’re not here and when they’re all gone, it’s how many people who you talk to that are remembered by other people that they helped. So his legacy is as long as we’re talking about him, and as long as the people who he affected are helping other people, that’s a legacy. The legacy for anybody is continuum, is knowing you want your children to do better. What do you want? You want the world to be better. And you understand. You understand what your limitations are. Because if you think you’re going to solve it all, there’s no hope. In the Jewish community, what we’re taught is tikkun olam, you have to repair the world. You wake up in the morning, God says, repair the world. You take your covers, you put them over your head and say, I ain’t getting out of bed. But there’s an asterisk that says you can’t, but it doesn’t allow you to desist from trying. So what Lou understood was, with everything we do and did, we’re going to make a little difference. But if that little difference helps somebody else and they can make a little difference, then we’re going to have another world. So he didn’t dream that he was solving the problems of the world. He was ending discrimination and people were going to love one another. He understood the world as it existed and understood both the opportunities and the limitations. But he never let the limitations stop him. He just understood them. And that’s important because he never gave up. There was never a time I sat with Lou and said, I can’t solve it. I don’t know what to do next. He would say, who do we have to talk to next? And that was the beauty of being with him, that it was worthwhile, that it was meaningful, even if you had a casual conversation with him.
Dee Perry [01:02:49] One last question, because part of the exhibition is trying to figure out how you can take the legacies we’ve been talking about and translate that into current and future leaders.
Dee Perry [01:03:07] So how do you advise young people on how to create their own legacy of leadership and public service? And by the same token, why is it important for them to do that, to be civically engaged and give back?
Albert Ratner [01:03:21] So let me start out by saying, I don’t think you should start out thinking about your legacy. Legacy is something that happens during a lifetime, and you can’t plan it because you don’t know where you’re going to be or what you’re going to do. What you can begin to do is to make a determination of what’s really important to you, because you have to start out in believing what you’re doing. So you have to start out by saying, what are my values? And if your value is that you want to play golf, and that’s your value, you ought to go and play golf because that’s what your value is. So you have to start up by saying, why am I doing this? And going on the assumption that you come to why you’re doing this. Then what you do is you have to develop the passion for it, because you just can’t do it. You can just say, well, you know, I really believe that education should be better, but my kid’s going to Harvard, so I don’t have to worry about what happens in the city of Cleveland. So then you have to have a passion for what it is. And I would say the last thing you have to do is you have to learn to love yourself. You have to be comfortable enough to do the things you need to do to make a difference. Because in order to do the things you want to do, you cannot do the popular things. Because the popular things are not the things that make a difference. The things that make a difference are the kind of things you do, like saying, we’re going to take Black kids that want to go to medical school and give them a scholarship, and they’ll work in the city. That’s not a popular thing to do. That’s not what medical schools want to do. So you have to be comfortable in your own skin. And people talk about leadership, and people say, well, the way you learn leadership is you take leadership courses. Lou, Carl, they never took a leadership course. Now, today, we all take leadership courses. It’s not what makes you a leader. What makes you a leader is what’s inside of you. I was very close to Scoop Jackson, who was a great senator from Washington State. And I remember I had supported Scoop, and Carter won. And Carter had asked a small group of us to switch over after Scoop last lost to Carter, to switch to Carter. And I sat down with Scoop, and I said to Scoop, tell me about Carter. What kind of present would he make? He said to me, a person ends up being the president that he is because of what is in his or her heart. And you never know what that is until they become president. It’s true of all of us. I don’t know what I can do, and I don’t know what I can’t do. My mother used to say to me, the worst thing you could say was, just do the best you can. Well, what’s the best you can? No matter what you do, can’t you do better? But the truth of the matter is, the struggle in life is how do you live with yourself? How can you be comfortable enough to do the things that you believe in? So my advice to the kids would be two things. Get to know yourself and the last thing. And this would be what would be my tribute to Louis. My mother taught my sister Ruth and I a poem when we were kids. He drew a circle and shut me out. Heretic rebels. A thing to flout but love. And I had the wit to win. We drew a circle and took him in. Lou Stokes story was he was an outsider. He created his own circle, and there were bigger circles, and Lou became a part of the bigger circle. And when he became a part of the bigger circle, he kept drawing circles. He kept drawing people in. So my last piece of advice is, it isn’t about me and it isn’t about you. It’s about us. And that means you can’t do it yourself. You can only do it with other people. That was Lou’s gift. And if you’re a young person and you’re saying to yourself, how do I do it? Just change the I to we. If you do that then you’re on the road to getting where you want to be. You wanted to bring up the work he had done for the company.
Dee Perry [01:09:19] He was in the course of talking about the legacy.
Albert Ratner [01:09:23] Let me just take a piece on the business, tell you one funny story. So Lou becomes a director of our company, and we’re sitting at a board meeting, and we’re going through figures, and I’m chairing a meeting, and I turn to Lou and I say, Lou, what’s the difference between being a congressperson and being a director at Forest City? And he looks at me, and he said, about 25 zeros. And yet he was as much at home with us as he was in Congress. So we were blessed.
Dee Perry [01:10:10] Okay. Was there anything else that you wanted to bring up? I know there’s a lot to talk about.
Albert Ratner [01:10:17] Yeah, there is one other thing that. That I’d like to talk about, and that is the one thing that we probably shared the most in common, was there was almost never a time that we got together that we didn’t talk about our kids and our wives. That family to him was so important. And because he had this great feeling about the importance of family, it was a driver for him, for everybody who didn’t have what he had. He could look at what he had and look at all the people that didn’t have it and see if he could make it better. Better for them, so you can’t talk about Lou and not talk about family. So that’s it.
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