Hard Reign

Council President Frank Jackson is one of the most powerful people in Cleveland. He has a say in everything from who lands million-dollar contracts to how many new dogcatchers the city will hire. When he raises an eyebrow or nods approvingly, his colleagues take note.

Trim and bespectacled, his temples flecked with silver, he presides over council like a wise uncle, benevolent yet distant. Though he often dresses in conservative suits, his tall, elegant bearing would make a pitchfork and a pair of overalls seem statesmanlike.

A taciturn man, Jackson took center stage last year when Jane Campbell was elected mayor. Since Campbell is white, city council thought it proper to elect a black president to preserve racial balance.

For that reason, Mike Polensek, the white councilman who had been president for more than a year, decided to step down. "I could've said, 'I'm gonna jump in there and run again,'" says Polensek. "But I felt that council needed to have a black president. And I was prepared to support that."

To fill his shoes, Polensek nominated Jackson, who had diligently represented Central, the poorest neighborhood in Cleveland, for 12 years.

"I truly believed he cared deeply about his neighborhood," says Polensek, who's been a councilman for 25 years. "That, to me, is important. There are people who've come and gone down here, and a lot of them didn't give a rat's ass about their neighborhoods."

To the people of Central, the neighborhood along Central Avenue from East 22nd to East 79th streets, Jackson is practically a saint. He's paved the way for the construction of more than 500 affordable homes where vacant lots once stood. He checks up on old people, cracks down on drug dealers, and organizes residents to fight their own battles against bureaucrats and gentrifiers.

"Frank, he don't tell his constituents no," says 77-year-old Louise Harris, a resident of Central since 1948. "He's a good councilman. I guess everybody say that about their councilman, but we got a good one. We call him 'our Frank.' When his birthday come, we throw him a birthday party. We love our Frank."

His main concern has been rebuilding an area that looked like postwar Dresden by the time 1970s urban renewal (a.k.a. "Negro removal") and 1980s crack cocaine had their way with it.

"I won't be shy," he said when he first ran for council in 1989. "I'm willing to hold up anything that doesn't help Ward 5."

As symbolic protection for the tough times ahead, Polensek presented Jackson with a hard hat and a fatherly note: "Take care of council." The gesture summed up Polensek's leadership style: Fight hard, get your hands dirty, and never let council become a rubber stamp for the mayor.

Perhaps Polensek should have kept the hard hat: A few months later, his protégé turned on him, abruptly asking for his resignation.

To some, Jackson's decision was just politics, a way to make short work of a scrappy, outspoken veteran known for questioning authority.

But to Polensek, it was an underhanded move by a colleague he thought he could trust.

"I endorsed him because I thought he would've been the fairest," says Polensek in retrospect. "I found out differently."

What Jackson lacks in mouth, he makes up for in muscle. "Those are the guys you have to be scared of," warns Hough Councilwoman Fannie Lewis, a colleague of Jackson's since he was first elected. "Them hermits. Frank can be a dangerous man."

In a city where yelling and name-calling are considered vital components of a healthy democracy, Jackson is an anomaly because he doesn't put on a show. But he's still every inch a politician. A complex mix of humility and aloofness, he's both a man of the people and a power-player who's sure he knows best.

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As a young man in the 1970s, Jackson was known as one of Central's "Three Musketeers," recalls Louise Harris.

He and two friends, Lonnie Burten and Dave Donaldson, were visible in the neighborhood as tenant organizers fighting for police protection and decent affordable housing. Being so empty and so near downtown, Central was a blank canvas ripe for gentrification, and upscale developers were already clamoring for a piece of it.

The three crusaders had an arduous road ahead. Since the 1920s, Central had been known as a neutral zone where criminals could go to escape the cops. It might as well have had "Free-for-All" written on its section of the map in big block letters.

"People would do something on 55th and run in the projects, and the police wouldn't pursue them," says Harris. Trash pickup was sporadic, and burned-out streetlights could stay that way forever.

"We were the poorest of the poor," she adds. "If they could kill us all, they would. We was in the city, but the city didn't do nothing for us."

From about 1920 to 1950, Central was home to about 65,000 people, mostly blacks, Jews, and recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. It was one of the few Cleveland neighborhoods where landlords would rent to blacks.