Cobb’s refusal to remove his fez, in the face of being held in contempt of court and jailed, symbolized the Black Nationalist’s belief that the existing institutions were inherently racist and the only option was to refuse to play by a set of rules stacked against them.

By Ryan Miday

Contributing Writer

In the fifth and final part of the Call and Post’s series on Emmett Cobb, writer Ryan Miday looks at Cobb’s legacy. The man who Cleveland came to know as “Tonelli” would have been 90 this past December. In 1954 his trial was sensational and in its wake came Cleveland’s uprising of Black power pride in the 1960s, including Malcolm X’s “Ballot or Bullet” speech at Cleveland’s Cory Methodist Church in 1964 and the election of Carl B. Stokes in 1967. Miday looks into how Cobb stood as a vanguard to a national movement and a Clevelander who many have never forgotten.

Cleveland’s first Black Nationalist was defiant up until he died in a Columbus hospital, still confined, in 1999. That defiant posture – most vividly remembered when he refused to remove his fez – created an indelible moment in the consciousness of Blacks growing up in Cleveland. For a Muslim Black Nationalist to have the audacity to defy the system in 1954 in Cleveland was vanguard and remnants of his memory live throughout Cleveland’s history.

He did it alone. There were no protests outside the courtroom. There was no petition drive. Even though Cobb’s trial was watched by hundreds daily, none of the spectators wanted to be associated with the trial. Fez wearing men were conspicuously absent. When a Call & Post photographer positioned his speed graphic to take a crowd shot, the spectators quickly ducked their heads.

This was 1954. There were few powerful Cleveland Black elected officials. There had never been a Black mayor of a major city elected in the nation. There was comprising effort, but not aggressive, confrontational effort, in the Cleveland area, at that time, devoted to fighting racial injustices. The emerging civil rights leaders in the South were not focused on urban problems in northern cities like Cleveland.

Yet, Cobb’s trial was timely. Given the media saturation of the trial, the number of potential people paying attention had never been higher: the trial occurred right in the middle of the Second Great Migration of Blacks to the north between 1940 and 1960. The millions who moved north illuminated the simmering racial problems beyond the southern borders.

Fredrick M. Brown Jr. was part of the Second Great Migration. Brown, who turned 70-years-old this year, moved with his father, mother, five brothers, and sister to the Glenville area in 1956. Unlike most of the southern transplants to Cleveland, Brown was not from Alabama. Being different, kids from the neighborhood called him Mississippi.

Brown remarked that he knew another Emmett before arriving to Cleveland. “I liked a girl who was the cousin of Emmett Till’s family. When they murdered him (in August 1955) in a town nearby, my mother told my father they needed to leave.” His mother had a friend in Cleveland who got his father a job at GM’s Fisher Body plant.

Being a 15-year-old, cotton-picking, country boy looking to fit in, Brown looked for role models. “He was gone when I got to Cleveland but he was a folk hero…everyone wanted to be Tonelli,” said Brown. “I have a lot of love for Tonelli, and the Marcus Garveys, the Malcolm Xs.” Brown explained: “They kept saying no more; we ain’t got to be bothered with them [Whites]; we’re Kings and Queens; and you need to look at yourself other than a Black boy picking and chopping cotton.”

The changing demographics coupled with a burgeoning civil rights movement propelled the quite 1950s into the turbulent 1960s. Activists in the 1960s began displaying similar defiance as Cobb, like Malcolm X, which turned into a measuring stick for Blacks; the prevailing spectrum of acceptable behavior of Blacks was being reshaped by a more confrontational approach in their pursuit of inalienable rights. Less than 10 years after Cobb’s trial, the Cleveland NAACP chapter was bolstered with new groups that reflected the doubling of Cleveland’s Black population. There were 50 separate civil rights groups in Cleveland by 1963, ranging from Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to Black Muslims, as reported in the Masotti Report on the 1968 Glenville Riots.

These groups, in Cleveland, organized under the umbrella group United Freedom Movement (UFM) and boldly challenged the Board of Education’s de facto school segregation policy. Whereas Cobb elicited scorn by violating society’s morals by venturing into the realm of White women, the UFM caused an acid firestorm when it took on White children. It took the death of a White minister, Rev. Bruce W. Klunder, in 1964, who was crushed by a bulldozer in protest of the building of a school in the Black community designed to insure segregation, to attain footing in the fight for school equality.

Black Nationalism, which Cobb professed in the 1950s, would gain momentum as Blacks from urban centers sought a different approach than their southern brethren, according to Leonard Moore, in “Carl B. Stokes and the Rise of Black Political Power.”  Mainstream America could no longer ignore the Black Nationalism movement. Millions flocked toward the gifted orator, Malcolm X, whose philosophy was rooted in Black Nationalism, because he was publicly saying things about Whites that many Blacks believed privately.

Cobb’s refusal to remove his fez, in the face of being held in contempt of court and jailed, symbolized the Black Nationalist’s belief that the existing institutions were inherently racist and the only option was to refuse to play by a set of rules stacked against them. They sought, instead, their own path. Black Power was born and a central tenet, as Moore points out, was Black Political Power. At a rally hosted by CORE, Malcolm X’s Ballot or Bullet speech at Cleveland’s Cory Methodist Church on April 3, 1964 was a harbinger for the historic election of the nation’s first Black mayor of a major city, Carl B. Stokes.

Cobb’s courage to be different, to strike a different path, in the exploration of his African heritage, and to question the status quo, to challenge conventions, in the sacred halls of justice, created threads that were to be weaved into the fabric of Blacks charting their own course in the quest for freedom. The bad boy from Cedar Avenue stared down authority on his terms. Cobb’s extreme posture of defending himself hurt him in the end. But Cobb only operated at the extremes, and because of that, he is not forgotten.

* Editors note: We at the Call & Post have been pleasantly surprised by the overwhelming interest in our 5-part “Tonelli story.” Feel free to log onto to the C&P website at www.callandpost.com to view and comment on all five portions as published in the paper. We look forward to presenting other similar stories highlighting legendary Clevelanders, both famous and infamous.

Read all parts

Read Part 1

Read Part II

Read Part III

Read Part IV