A weekly webinar series highlighting the voices and progress in Downtown Cleveland.
Since 2018, Downtown Cleveland Alliance’s “Downtown Now!” spotlight in Community Leader, a quarterly publication by Cleveland Magazine, has highlighted the voices and progress of our community.
Now, as we navigate the challenges specific to our neighborhood and beyond – and continue to work to make Downtown a clean, safe and investment-ready environment– it remains of the utmost importance to provide a forum to inform and engage everyone connected to Downtown Cleveland.
Our new “Downtown Now!” weekly virtual briefings will deliver resources and updates, promote health and wellness, bolster economic resilience and give insight on the latest information and initiatives to responsibly reopen from voices across our community.
Historically, Cleveland has played an instrumental role in Black political and social progress. During the Great Migration, thousands of Black Americans traveled to Cleveland from southern cities for better job opportunities. In 1967, Cleveland elected Carl B. Stokes, the first Black mayor of a major U.S. City, and the city hosted the historic Ali Summit, an iconic meeting between Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell, Jim Brown and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Downtown Cleveland has always been the place where Clevelanders gather to create memories, celebrate milestones, and when necessary, express their first amendment rights. This summer, the murder of George Floyd and the events that took place thereafter revealed the longstanding inequities in our society and the collective work that must be done to address systemic racism. We know systemic racism is everyone’s problem and what we have learned over time is that this is not a fight of one race but rather a fight of one community – our Cleveland community. In that vein, this fall, Cleveland’s three sports teams joined together to form an alliance to address social injustice.
On this episode of the Downtown Now! Webinar, in honor of Black History Month we are talking to former Cleveland Cavaliers Campy Russell and Jim Chones and former Cleveland Indian Marquis Grissom for a conversation about their personal experiences and the roles Black athletes and sports in Cleveland play in the ongoing struggle for racial justice and equity.