“She would speak her piece
and let them know where she stood on things,” says her
mother, Marian Garth Saffold. “I really did not have to
advocate for her.”
Fudge recognized that people would listen to her, but
not necessarily to other Black students. “I had a big voice.
I was a star athlete. I knew the teachers well,” Fudge says.
“But I did feel that the voices of my people didn’t matter,
which made me more vocal.”
She wasn’t alone. She says there were plenty of
students in her class – Black and white – willing to stand up
to the school administrators and teachers and “pull them
to see what we were seeing.”
“There was a group of us who would take on anybody
or anything,” Fudge says. “We were a very diverse group
and we were a very influential group. I think we had a
heightened sense of what was right and wrong and we
always fought for what was right.”
Leadership runs in Fudge’s family. Her grandmother,
who lived downstairs in their Chelton Road duplex and
worked as a domestic, was a deaconess at their church.
And Fudge’s mother, Mrs. Saffold, turned a job as a
hospital laboratory technician into a trailblazing career
as one of the first Black female union organizers in the
American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Employees. Even at age 90, Mrs. Saffold still remains active
in the union as president of three local retiree groups.
“Marcia grew up in a household surrounded by union
people and worked with me on campaigns,” says Mrs.
Saffold, who now lives in Warrensville Heights. “We did a
lot together and she did learn a lot from her involvement
with the union.”
“Growing up, I always knew my mother did important
work, I just really didn’t’t know how important,” Fudge says.
“I knew that people had great respect for who she was.
But that’s no different from my grandmother, who was a
domestic all her life. She was someone people respected.”
Fudge says she still turns to her mother for advice on
her life and career, even as her new job has limited her
trips back to Ohio.
“She is my biggest cheerleader. My mother has
always made me believe that there were very few things I
could not do.”
The other major influence in Fudge’s career was close
friend Stephanie Tubbs Jones. Although Tubbs Jones was
a couple of years older, the two connected through Delta
Sigma Theta, a historically Black sorority. Fudge later
served as national president of the sorority.
Fudge graduated from The Ohio State University and,
in 1983, earned her law degree at Cleveland-Marshall
College of Law. It was then that Tubbs Jones encouraged
her to clerk in Cleveland Municipal Court and Common
Pleas Court. When Tubbs Jones later won election as
Cuyahoga County’s first Black prosecutor, she brought
Fudge on board as her budget director. And when Tubbs
Jones became the first African American woman elected
to Congress from Ohio – succeeding Louis Stokes – Fudge
followed her to Washington as her chief of staff.
“Stephanie was a nurturing person who would push
you to places where you didn’t think you could go,” Fudge
says. “She would push you and you’d realize she saw
something in you that you didn’t see in yourself.”
Before Tubbs Jones, “it was never my intention to be
involved in politics at all,” Fudge adds.
Graduation from
Cleveland-Marshall College of
Law, 1983.
Ohio State
University
graduation,
1975.
Delegate to United
Nations 3rd World
Conference on
Women in Nairobi,
Kenya, 1985.
Sworn in as Cuyahoga County
prosecutor’s office budget department
director, 1988, with Judge Lloyd Brown.
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