In September, I had the opportunity to travel to Montgomery, Alabama, with the Black Environmental Leaders (BEL). BEL is a nonprofit organization focusing on environmental justice and climate activism with a mission to “advocate, incubate and inform.”
The purpose of the trip was to visit the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Sites and to call attention to a young Clevelander whose life ended more than 100 years ago. The Black Environmental Leaders want everyone to know the story of John Jordan’s life and his murder –- believed to be Cuyahoga County’s only documented lynching. Through BEL’s work, it will be included in the Legacy Museum in Montgomery.
Carrying on the tradition for Jacquie
I discovered BEL after a Signal Community Team meeting where we discussed how we wanted to cover April’s solar eclipse. BEL hosted an eclipse watch party at the Intercity Yacht Club.
Jacquie Gillon, a former member of the East Cleveland City Council, founded BEL in 2020. Her goal was to bring environmental justice to people who knew nothing about it. Sadly, Gillon passed away in 2021. After her passing, Se’Mia Bray was one of many members who stepped in to make sure Jacquie’s quest to bring light to injustice continued.
All aboard
Visitors to the Legacy sites move through exhibits ranging from the history of slavery in the United States to present-day conditions for African Americans. Our first stop was Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. The site can be reached by shuttle bus, but the folks behind the experience encourage visitors to use the available boat service, so I joined members of BEL to cruise 15 minutes down the tree-lined Alabama River. We learned the river was used by slave trade ships to deliver slaves to auction.
During the boat ride, Bray shared with me how this trip came together.
“A few years ago, we had some members come to us because they had learned of the story of John Jordan, a young African American man in Cleveland who was a victim of racialized violence in 1911,” Bray said. “He was chased down and lynched because he ate cherries from the cherry tree of a local white farmer.”
“The members wanted to do a community remembrance project in partnership with the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). We shared that we wanted to commemorate Jordan with a marker in Cleveland and a token in the museum. They asked us if we would partner with them and take the lead on advocating for this project.”
The remembrance project has three parts: community conversations around racialized violence and healing, collecting a soil sample from the location of where the lynching occurred, and the placement of a marker that commemorates Jordan.
“It took about three years of having conversations with EJI before they approved our project,” Bray said.
What comes next
Over the next six months, BEL leaders plan to host community listening sessions and commemorative events, with the first listening session on Monday, Dec. 30, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. The session will be hosted by the Golden Ciphers and the National Rites of Passage Institute during their Kwanzaa celebration at 4450 Cedar Ave., Suite 3.
Starting in January, there will be monthly listening sessions leading up to a spring ceremony at Elizabeth Baptist Church in Slavic Village. While the exact date of the ceremony has not been finalized, it is expected to be in early May.
