Keeping up Linden fight is truest tribute to Clarence Lumpkin

As city and community leaders push on with the effort to bring new vitality to the Linden neighborhood, the recent passing of the man known as “the mayor of Linden” should bolster their motivation.

That Clarence Lumpkin didn’t live to see his beloved neighborhood become as safe and prosperous as he hoped is sad. But he unquestionably left it better and with a legacy of inspiration and example that should make today’s Linden advocates more determined than ever to make sure his vision becomes reality.

From the time the 22-year-old WWII veteran from Georgia moved to E. 20th Avenue with his wife after the war, he fought the forces of crime, poverty and official neglect that undermined a neighborhood that was once a thriving workingclass community. At one point he led a procession of 500-plus supporters through the streets, yelling through a bullhorn, telling gangs to get out of the neighborhood.

As an NAACP activist, he participated in the lawsuit that brought about courtordered desegregation of Columbus schools in 1978.

Beneficial buildings throughout the neighborhood bear his name or are associated with him, not because he could write big checks to make them happen — he couldn’t — but because he worked hard to push for them, year in and year out. There’s city Fire Station 18 and the St. Stephen’s Community House, both of which he supported. There’s the Four Corners redevelopment at Cleveland and 11th Aves. which includes the Clarence Lumpkin Point of Pride Building; there’s the Clarence D. Lumpkin U.S. post office, which might have closed had he not lobbied to keep it open.

For all of the blight that Lumpkin helped erase and bricks and mortar he helped bring, Linden still hasn’t achieved the critical mass of profitable businesses and stable, prosperous families it needs to be economically healthy. The city’s One Linden plan launched in the fall aims to change that.

There’s more bricks and mortar — the plan includes a new $20 million community rec center — plus aesthetic boosts such as decorative streetlights along a section of Cleveland Avenue.

But some of the more innovative elements, such as incentives for city police officers to live in the neighborhood and putting retail ventures in concentrated clusters, might start to grow the truly sustainable redevelopment that has been elusive so far.

We hope the effort starts to bear fruit soon. It would be the greatest tribute yet to Clarence Lumpkin’s lifelong dedication.

How a teen becomes a lawmaker

Lots of schoolkids get the “how a bill becomes a law” lesson; usually, though, it doesn’t include so much actual experience in the nitty-gritty.

The four Westerville youth who in 2014 launched the effort to have the barn designated as Ohio’s official “historical architectural structure” were barely teens when they began the effort as seventh-graders at Genoa Middle School.

Now — after seeing their bill stuck in the Senate, waiting years and spending hours researching and advocating, then having the proposal rescued by being folded into a larger Senate measure that passed in a lame-duck rush in December — they probably know more about the legislative process than, oh, 95 out of 100 Ohioans.

Here’s hoping Rachel Kaufman, Anna Borders, Sarah Gellner and Adriane Thompson and their teachers Caley Nestor Baker and Debbie Pellington take an interest in school funding or Medicaid.