A Cleveland chef who was once told by doctors she wouldn't live past 30 spent Labor Day marching a Michael Jackson-themed float down Kinsman Road, using the city's biggest civic gathering outside St. Patrick's Day to put a face on a disease that has quietly shaped her life for 27 years. Latasha Adams, 48, designed the float with her family and friends, featuring life-size dolls handcrafted by her father to resemble the pop icon, and displayed a Lupus Foundation of America banner as she marched for people living with lupus and those who have died from it.
Adams was diagnosed with lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks healthy tissue instead of fighting infections, and was told by doctors early on that she would likely only live to be about 30 years old, according to News 5 Cleveland WEWS. Nearly three decades later, she works as a chef and uses her platform to raise awareness about the disease, which still has no cure. Her float rolled through the 54th annual 11th Congressional District Community Caucus Labor Day Parade, an event first launched in 1971 by U.S. Rep. Louis Stokes following a 1967 community picnic held for his brother, Carl Stokes, Cleveland's first Black mayor.
A 1.3-Mile Route Steeped in East Side History
This year's parade, led by Grand Marshal U.S. Rep. Shontel Brown, followed its traditional 1.3-mile route from Kinsman Road to Luke Easter Park, a route the event has run for more than five decades as Northeast Ohio's second-largest annual parade behind the city's St. Patrick's Day celebration. Luke Easter Park itself carries its own layered history: the city acquired the land in 1900 as Woodland Hills Park before renaming it in 1980 for former Cleveland Indians player Luscius “Luke” Easter, and the park has long served as a central gathering space for Cleveland's Black community, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. The parade has also become a political rite of passage for local and statewide candidates, giving Adams's float extra visibility as it moved past crowds lining the route.
Parade organizers, the 11th Congressional District Community Caucus Parade Committee, require all participating vehicles and floats to complete registration and unit assembly between 7:30 and 9:30 a.m. on parade day, with late entries and the throwing of candy or objects into the crowd explicitly prohibited. Those rules shape the logistics every float builder, including Adams's family, has to navigate before the procession even begins moving toward Luke Easter Park.
Why Black Women Bear the Heaviest Burden
The urgency behind Adams's tribute to lupus patients who have died is rooted in stark epidemiological disparities. CDC data published in 2024 shows roughly 204,000 Americans live with systemic lupus erythematosus, and about nine out of ten of those diagnosed — some 184,000 people — are women. Research highlighted by the Lupus Foundation of America found Black and African American women are two to three times more likely than white women to develop the disease, with the LUMINA study showing it affects 1 in 537 young African American women.
The same CDC mortality records indicate Black individuals with lupus die at significantly earlier ages than white patients — on average, more than 10 years younger. A multi-year study published through the Lupus Foundation of America also found that Black women's self-reported experiences of racial discrimination were directly tied to elevated blood levels of C-reactive protein, a key biomarker of bodily inflammation, offering a scientific link between social stress and physical symptoms in minority patients. According to a study available through the National Institutes of Health's PubMed Central, Black females with prevalent systemic lupus erythematosus were three times more likely to die than Black females in the general population, with a standardized mortality ratio of 3.38. Another study available through the National Institutes of Health's PubMed Central examined whether racial discrimination was associated with disease outcomes among 427 Black women with a validated diagnosis of systemic lupus erythematosus living in Atlanta.
Next Stop: The Cleveland Walk to End Lupus Now
Adams is now preparing for the Lupus Foundation of America Greater Ohio Chapter's annual walk, scheduled for September 26 at the Cleveland Metroparks Polo Field in Chagrin Falls, a shift from previous years when the event was held at the Flats East Bank. The Brecksville-headquartered chapter operates as the only remaining patient-led chapter in the national Lupus Foundation of America network, a distinction that underscores the grassroots nature of the advocacy work Adams and others are doing on the ground in Ohio. The nonprofit describes itself as a health organization helping lupus patients across the state, and Adams's parade appearance doubles as an early fundraising push ahead of the walk.
For Adams, the Michael Jackson-themed float was never just spectacle. It was a way to turn a parade watched by thousands into a moment of remembrance for those who lost their lives to lupus and a rallying point for those still living with it, carrying her story from Kinsman Road toward the next chapter of her advocacy later this month at the Polo Field.
