What goes around comes around, sometimes in different form.
Back in the day, before Cleveland’s current mayor was born, the United Negro College Fund's Salutations gala was perhaps the signature charitable event on Black Cleveland's social calendar. Its arrival just after Labor Day signaled the start of a new year for the community. An opportunity to reconnect with friends and associates you hadn’t seen all summer, the evening was a multi-layered, multi-flavored black-tie gala that celebrated black business, black cuisine, and black culture. Appropriately enough, it was held on multiple levels of what was then known as the BP Building on Public Square.
The evening typically opened with a reception in the five-story atrium and moved on to programming on the lower floors. Dining options were abundant and live music and good vibes were everywhere. The evening ended reluctantly following a wee hours party on the top floor, programmed by dee jay Shelton Moore.
A scholarship fundraiser for UNCF, Salutations was a unique amalgam of the positive charitable, cultural, social, and political streams that comprised the city’s then vibrant black middle class community.
For reasons that some scholar should investigate, the event ran its course over the years and seemed, like other black community entities and institutions — The Future Outlook League is Exhibit A — suddenly to fade and disappear. Even its sponsor, the Cleveland UNCF chapter, eventually left the area for several years.
But Cleveland is too large a community not to have a UNCF presence, and the organization enjoyed a welcome renaissance here last year with an inaugural Mayor's Luncheon. It was a virtual event, executed with impressive precision, and it raised over $100,000 in scholarship funds to support black students who attend either HBCUs or PWI's [Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Predominantly White Institutions, respectively].
The ante has been upped this year. The 2023 Mayor’s Luncheon will be live, and with Cleveland Mayor Justin M. Bibb now in his second year in office as opposed to his second month last February, the event's target fundraising goal is @250,000.
JOining Mayor Bibb at tomorrow's luncheon and delivering brief remarks will be Eric Gordon, CEO of Cleveland Metropolitan School District; WEWS-TV-5 anchorwoman Danita Harris; Dr. Elfred Anthony Pinkard, president of Wilberforce University; Congresswoman Shontel Brown; MetroHealth's new president and CEO Airica Steed; area businessman Quentin McCorvey; UNCF Ohio development director Steve Miller, and Case Western Reserve University student Sydney Evans, a UNCF scholarship recipient.
The John Marshall Drumline and Band will be performing.
The luncheon is being held at the Huntington Convention Center, 300 Lakeside Ave. [44113] The venue is large enough that tickets are still available here.
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