Politics
4 stories
While Trump Says the Economy Is Booming, Black America Is Already in a Recession
While the White House sells a booming economy, Antjuan Seawright lays out the numbers that tell a very different story for Black America — a recession that isn't coming, but is already here.
The data he marshals is stark. Black unemployment hit 6.6% in June 2026 against a national rate of 4.2%. Roughly 300,000 Black women lost jobs over a three-month stretch, with more than 600,000 Black women now unemployed, and over 500,000 Black men lost work between November and February.
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News
4 stories
The Money to Get Lead Out of Their Homes Was Right There. They Gave It Back.
There is a poison in the walls of the houses where Black children in this county grow up. Everybody with power knows it. The money to get it out was sitting on the table. And twice this year, the people responsible for spending it let the clock run out and handed it back.
On July 31, Cuyahoga County forfeited nearly $1.2 million of an $8.1 million state lead-remediation grant — Ohio Lead Safe money, funded with federal COVID-relief dollars, aimed straight at Cleveland and East Cleveland, the two places with the highest lead-poisoning rates in the region.
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Cleveland Had Them on Camera the Whole Time. It Still Couldn’t Protect the Neighborhood.
Who Owns Our Neighborhoods? The Capital That Changed Everything
When Courage Costs Something: The Civil Rights Leaders We Quote but Are Afraid to Follow
Community & Health
4 stories
American Medicine Wasn’t Built for Black Bodies. Dr. Gregory Hall Wrote the Prescription.
American medicine was built on a default patient — and that patient was never you. The averages, the algorithms, the first-line drugs: most of it was calibrated on white bodies and handed to everyone else as if biology were one-size-fits-all. For Black patients, that isn’t neutral. It’s dangerous.
Cleveland’s own Dr. Gregory Hall has spent his career writing the corrective — a prescription that starts by naming the bias in the system. His core idea is blunt: Black patients need precision strategies to navigate clinical bias that shows up across more than 150 conditions. Being treated like everyone else is often the problem, not the solution.
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Opinion
4 voices
Reach Is Not Standing
Saturday night in Atlanta, the National Association of Black Journalists gave Stephen A. Smith its Thumbs Down award. The reason they gave was specific: a pattern of tearing down prominent Black women in politics, sports, and media. He was one of five — the most NABJ has ever handed out in a single year, which tells you plenty about the year.
Smith answered inside of 24 hours. Not with a question about why, but with a promise to go find out who at NABJ deserved one. Here is what nobody is saying about it: he holds one of the largest platforms any Black man has ever held in American media. What he does not hold is a constituency.
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Not About Me
Today was a tough day. Tough to the point where my head is still pounding as I write this, hours later, in the quiet that comes after everyone else has gone home and the adrenaline has finally started to drain out of my body.
I was sitting in my car, talking with a good friend, windows cracked, the kind of ordinary evening conversation that doesn’t ask anything of you. That’s when I heard it — commotion coming from the park across the way. Voices rising. The particular pitch that tells you something is shifting from talk to trouble.
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A Community Organizing Breakfast
Cleveland has never been short on organizations doing this work. What it has never had is one table where all of them sit down together.
Council President Blaine A. Griffin, Councilman Richard A. Starr, Ohio State Rep. Terrence Upchurch, the Cleveland Clergy Coalition and the Fraternal Orders are hosting one room, one morning — to put everybody’s turnout work on the table. Who is knocking which doors. Who is registering whom. Where the gaps are, while there is still time to close them.
This is about turnout, and nothing else. No candidate, no party, no endorsement. If your organization moves people to the polls, there is a seat for you.
The Organization Behind The Movement
Voices for a Better Future PAC isn't new to this fight. It's the organization pushing criminal justice reform, protecting voting rights, opening job access, and taking on health disparities and failing schools across Cuyahoga County — work that's been building since before this network existed. RealPower.TV is one of the tools Voices for a Better Future PAC uses to put that work in front of the people it serves.
Get on the list. Back the operation. Every signature and every dollar funds the ground game — the mobilization and the coalition work that decides who actually shows up when it counts.
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Dr. Umar Unfiltered: The Truth Black America Can’t Ignore
Dr. Umar Johnson sits down with Kenn Dowell for a conversation that runs almost two hours and does not flinch. Idol worship and the myth of progress. What freedom and Black autonomy actually require. The role trauma plays in pulling people off purpose, and the difference between rebellion and revolution.
From there it turns to the machinery: the power of the Black vote, special-education misdiagnosis and the school-to-prison pipeline, white teacher dominance in Black schools, funding independent Black institutions, and the economic blueprint he argues we keep refusing to build — schools, banks, supermarkets. It closes on faith, church accountability, and reclaiming our youth.
Watch the full episode →RealPower.TV — Cleveland’s Black Digital Newsprint. Cleveland to the Nation.
Off the Wire
View MoreThe Power Desk on stories breaking elsewhere. Not affiliated with the outlets referenced below.
RTA Is Cutting The Bus That Runs Through Glenville
A second round of service cuts would discontinue the No. 35 Lee–East 123 line entirely and halve weekend service on three more routes — roughly an eight percent reduction in a single year. The same agency is asking voters for a sales tax in May.
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Cleveland Heights Packed City Hall Over The Cameras. Cleveland Did Not.
Every seat was full Monday night as residents demanded their city drop its Flock contract. Cleveland renewed its own through December after voting it down once. Same technology, two rooms, two outcomes — and the difference was turnout.
Read our take on Off the Wire →
Eight Black Candidates Are On The Ballot For Governor This November
The country has elected three Black governors in 250 years. This November there are eight major-party nominees — both parties, men and women. Nobody gets to count on the vote without competing for it now.
Read our take on Off the Wire →
The Show Is The Preview. The Newsprint Is The Full Breakdown.
Every conversation goes deeper the moment it hits the digital newsprint — the strategy behind the story, in plain English, every week. And if you want to fund the ground game behind it, Voices for a Better Future PAC is where that happens.
No fluff. No filler. Just the moves that matter — straight to your inbox the moment we go live.
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About RealPower.TV
RealPower.TV is Cleveland’s Black digital newsprint — a Black-owned media outlet covering African American news, politics, health, business and culture across Cleveland, Cuyahoga County and Ohio. Cleveland went years without a Black paper. We picked it back up.
Published by Strategic Moves Media Network, RealPower.TV also produces Black podcasts and radio out of Cleveland: the The RealPower Radio Show with Kenn Dowell and Dr. Heather E. Burton, live Tuesdays 12–1PM on 95.9 FM WOVU and streaming here; The RealPower.TV Podcast with Kenn Dowell; Sanctified & Stilettos with Dr. Heather E. Burton; and A-1 Conversations with Joe Little III.
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