Looming high above the polluted waters of the Cuyahoga River Valley and the rancid smokestacks of Standard Oil of Ohio and Republic Steel stands a sign which greets visitors to the shores of Lake Erie: ‘“Welcome to Cleveland, the Best Location in the Nation.” I grew up in and around Cleveland, Ohio and for me it truly was the best location in the nation. Cleveland was the valiant Slovenian who saw his home flattened by the terrible East Ohio Gas explosion of 1944 (which killed or injured scores of persons) and yet returned to rebuild his neighborhood, cleaner and brighter than before, with neat little brick homes studded with flower boxes. Cleveland was the mounted policeman who patrolled the lovely parks which formed a fabulous emerald necklace about this dull, grimy steel and ore center. Cleveland was Santa Claus ho-hoing simultaneously at the May Company, Taylor’s, Higbee’s and Halle’s. It was children playing tag in the shadow of the bronzed military figure which was the dilapidated Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in the heart of Public Square. Cleveland was sitting in the bleachers at Municipal Stadium on an unseasonably warm December day in 1954 amidst a cheering throng of Negroes and whites who delighted in seeing their Browns massacre the Detroit Lions 56-10 for the National Football League championship. It was in that same stadium nine years later that an emotional crowd of 80,000 stood and cheered Ernie Davis, the All-American halfback from Syracuse, as he walked across the field illuminated by a spotlight. The people knew that Davis, a Negro stricken with leukemia, would . never play a single moment of football for their city. Cleveland was George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra; the Freedom Train; Satchel Paige and his hesitation pitch; the rose-colored fumes of Republic Steel spewing forth across Broadway Avenue and discoloring the homes in the Polish ghetto; Euclid Beach and innocuous insects called Canadian Soldiers; swans in the lagoon outside the city’s Art Museum and a weird abstract called “Bottle Farm” winning a May Show award at the same museum; boating in Rockefeller Park; American Legion baseball with a squat Negro catcher named Hank who formed an impenetrable barrier for any base runner foolish enough to attempt to score; an Innerbelt Freeway which was impossible to follow and which led nowhere. Cleveland was kosher corned beef and_ lox, country-fried chicken, greens and grits, ham and eggs, real Hungarian borscht, kishke, and Polish sausage. All of that seems long ago now. After Cleveland the Deluge Today Cleveland is known as a racial trouble spot, a target town for CORE’s professional do-badders, a potential powder keg for the annual “Jong, hot summer.” To sanctimonious journals of the East (Saturday Evening Post, 7/29/67), it is a town where George Wallace can count on a bevy of supporters, a town whose mayor is an incompetent bigot. To the Federal Government, it is a town unworthy of any urban renewal funds. Between July 18 and 22, 1966, Cleveland was four deaths and two score injured in riots. It was 240 fires and $500,000 in property damage. It was 200 arrests and a Negro councilman calling for martial law in his district. Cleveland was 2,000 National Guardsmen from such spots as Lake Milton, Ohio, costing the state $18,000 per day for maintenance and God knows how much more to the men themselves in lost wages from individual employment, standing with bayonets at the ready on the corners of 79th and Hough, East 105th and Grantwood, 55th and Chester, Murray Hill and Mayfield. It was a U.S. senator frothing about “trigger-happy” National Guardsmen and a leading daily retorting, ‘In truth, Buster, the Ohio National Guard fired no shot whatsoever at anyone.” It was the child of Watts, the precursor of Newark and Detroit. More Trouble in Cleveland? In the past year, an army of social theorists and political opportunists (some of them from leading academic institutions across the nation) have descended on Cleveland, either vicariously (for remoteness apparently does not preclude problem-solving by self-proclaimed pontiffs) or in person to scrutinize the city’s ills. Generally, they have focused their attentions on the 2.2 square miles of the near East Side known to the world as Hough. In this area, termed a ghetto though it is bounded on the southwest by the district known as Central-Scovill, the southeast by Mt. Pleasant-Kinsman, the east by University-Euclid, and the northeast by Glenville, all Negro sections of Cleveland, live 70,000 people, better than 90 per cent of whom © are Negroes. The unemployment rate, ranging from 10 to 20 per cent of the adult labor force, is the highest in Cleveland. The median number of years of schooling, only 9.1 years per individual as of 1960, was the lowest in Cleveland. Proportionately, the district has four times the number of Aid to Dependent Children recipients as Cuyahoga County as a whole. With 8 per cent of the city’s population, Hough accounts for nearly 20 per cent of the major crimes reported in Cleveland. The crime rate in the area has tripled since 1950 and its delinquency rates are the highest in the city. Better than one-fourth of its buildings have been described as deteriorating. Small wonder, then, that upon cursory examination of “the worst slums we’ve ever seen,” pompous Pollyannas who had not seen Hough in 1950—when it was a slum —or 1940—when it was a slum with a predominantly white population— could cluck that in view of federal aid available to combat urban blight, the prevailing conditions could only be attributed to “lack of leadership from City Hall.” Some of these seers have since packed their carpetbags and wandered off to build more castles in the sand. Others have stayed to fan the flames of racial hatred which could well erupt once more in Cleveland this year. Whirlwind Tours Useless It is senseless and futile for critics of any city’s administration to attempt a whirlwind tour of a trouble spot in several days, interview several notorious figures, then attempt a superficial analysis of the city’s woes based on such slanted information. Having spent two years as a field worker in the heart of Hough, eating soul food in Negro _ restaurants, _ tramping the halls of virtually every school in the district, viewing the riot scene for months before the tragic events of July 1966, then every day while the riots were happening, sitting in the homes of depressed families and watching roaches skitter across sofas, I must state that if interviews are to be sought, they must come over years, not days. Let the Monday morning Jeremiahs speak with the twelve-year-old boy who refused to divulge the location of an illegal bar which was sapping the physical and financial resources of his parents, because of the peculiar reigning morality in Hough. Let the same scripters stand by at the Metropolitan General Hospital and allay the tears and fears of a sixteen-year-old Negro girl in the psychiatric ward who wanted to go home, and could not, because she had attempted suicide by swallowing sewing needles when a Juvenile Court Referee had committed her to a girls’ “reform” school. Her delinquent act: sexual activity. The girl was pregnant, the child stillborn. Let the same champions of unrestricted welfare and free love visit a home where “Uncle Ed” has made it impossible for a sixteen-year-old boy to live because of personal friction. Let them be wakened at 2 A.M. or called from dinner at 7 P.M. because a divorcee is unable to control a dispute over television programs between her children. Let them try to reason with a woman whose children don’t go to school when they leave home in the morning. She doesn’t care because she is too sick, in bed, watching television. Let them sense the feeling of defeat after priming an eighteen-year-old boy for a post office job, then having it all evaporate when the boy wanders out of the office and steals a car. No reason given. Let them talk with the mother of a boy who was spared incarceration in the Mansfield Reformatory because of our efforts and hear of the terror felt by decentcitizens of Hough as they cringed in their apartments during the riots. There was no hatred of City Hall ex_ pressed by such people—only contempt for the maniaes who had precipitated the vandalism. The truth is that the guilt for conditions which exist in Hough and Cleveland today must be shared by four quarters. They are: the city’s administrations dating back at least 29 years, which consistently failed to meet the problems of rapid migration of unskilled Negroes from the rural South during the war years and after; the Federal Government, which has decided insanely that since racial tension is so high and previous urban renewal funds have been squandered it would punish Cleveland by cutting off all urban renewal aid; social workers who came to treat the social ills of the community and went away with their professional standings enhanced and the ills more pernicious than before; and the Negro community of Cleveland itself, accounting for better than one-third of the city’s population, which for too long has dabbled in unrealistic daydreams of a messianic epoch just around the corner. That incumbent mayor, Ralph Locher, derided as “minor league Locher” by his critics, should be singled out as the principal culprit for last year’s riots is an absurdity to those who know anything about Cleveland’s history. It has been said that Locher’s urban renewal programs have been failures, that they did not provide adequate housing for residents of Hough who were displaced by hospital, highway, high-rise apartments and college projects in Central-Scovill. The mental picture created of Caterpillars and wrecking balls chasing families from their homes into filthy hovels farther down the boulevard is heart-rending, to be sure, but it just is not accurate. Far from being composed of refugees from urban renewal projects instituted by Locher’s predecessor, Anthony Celebrezze (a man, incidentally, who could be re-elected mayor of Cleveland anytime), the major portion of migrants to Hough between 1955 and 1960, 62 per cent to be exact, came directly from Southern states. That they did not find garden apartments when they arrived was regrettable, but the city was already committed to improving the 837-acre University-Euclid region which directly abuts Hough to the east. Additional funds and personnel to handle urban renewal in Hough just were not available. Urban Renewal a Pariah Recent. efforts by the city administration to effectuate some kind of urban redevelopment in Hough itself have been consistently frustrated by governmental hostility and red tape. It was said that portions of Cleveland’s applications for assistance were poorly drawn, but high-ranking officials in the Urban Affairs Department admitted that aid would have been denied anyway because of the alleged refusal of the Locher administration to deal forthrightly with racial problems. Even when decent proposals were submitted to the Department of Health, Education and Wel-_ fare, Cleveland was told that the money was not there. In May 1967, the Cleveland Press expressed its dismay at learning that plans for a $500,- 000 settlement house for the Hough area had been turned down because the government pleaded insufficient funds. Cleveland should have been given priority over any other city at the time, but it was not. Hamstrung by the Federal Government, weakened by resignations of planners who sustained torrents of personal abuse from the Negro community, and stung by the lack of cooperation of that community itself (one of the prime targets of the rioters in last July’s uprising was the headquarters of the city’s urban renewal project in University-Euclid), the urban renewal department has become the pariah of Cleveland’s civil service. Since Locher succeeded Celebrezze, who resigned to became Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in July 1962, his administration has been deluged with demands from the Negro community. At first, he met frequently with leaders of CORE, the NAACP, the Urban League, and other responsible organizations to discuss the reasonable demands of Negroes. A series of unfortunate events, however, has led to his present rupture with the community and a reluctance to meet the moderate demands of Martin Luther King. During the summer of 1963, the city of Cleveland was shocked by a particularly brutal crime which took place at the Sowinski Playground in. Wade Park, just to the north of the Superior Road boundary of Hough. This spot had always been the site of friction between Negroes from Hough and whites of East European extraction who lived above Superior. On this occasion, a gang of Negro teen-agers mass-raped a white girl in the park and stabbed her male. companion almost to death. Only the calm and constructive leadership of City Hall, coupled with resolute police enforcement, headed off what could have been a first-class race war. Locher called in leaders of both the white and Negro communities and was able to cool their passions, but his actions did not endear him to the Negroes, who have felt that the whites did not understand the deeper sociological implications of the incident. Mayor Is Rebuffed Subsequently, in the spring of 1964, Negro militants and their sympathizers delivered what was to be the first of several rebuffs to the Mayor when they quite illogically attempted to impede construction of an elementary school in a totally Negro neighborhood on Cleveland’s East Side. It was argued that the school’s location was unsafe for children, that traffic was too heavy, that it was too far for some students to walk to. Though all of these issues were squarely met in conferences held in the Mayor’s quarters, the protests went on until finally the Rev. Bruce Klunder lost his life in a tragic accident beneath the treads of a tractor. His death, symbolizing the Negroes’ assault on de facto segregation in Cleveland public schools, marked the complete alienation of Locher from the Negro populace, though few realized it at the time. When newscasters ventured into Hough during the daylight hours of Cieveland’s military occupation, they heard all kinds of complaints from Negroes. “The rats,” said one man, “get rid of the rats!” Another shouted, “We want better police protection!” Another, “We only get our garbage picked up once a month.” Better than a year before, Ralph Locher in an honest effort to meet the needs of his constituents proposed a city income tax of less than 1 per cent of each individual’s gross income. According to the Plain Dealer of May 2, 1965, such an income tax would have provided the city with more than $18 million in the next year. Part of the revenue would have gone toward lowering Cleveland’s property tax of 18.30 mills, highest of any city in the state, six times higher than that of Columbus, the capital of Ohio. Approximately $1.7 million would have gone to pay for 200 police to be hired for 1965, plus an additional 175 »policemen, firemen and traffic engineers to be hired the following year. The income tax would have permitted the city to raise city employees’ pay about 5 per cent across the board, thereby retaining many civil servants who were leaving for better paying jobs in private industry. The tax would have paid for the services of 40 more building and housing inspectors, relieving the pressure on an undermanned and overworked staff that found it virtually impossible to keep up with all building code violations; $200,000 would have been spent on additional street lighting, $100,000 for air and water pollution control, $100,- 000 for updating the city’s general plant and zoning code, $100,000 for more Health Department doctors and nurses (utilized primarily in neighborhoods such as Hough), $100,000 for additional recreation personnel, and $80,000 for demolition of abandoned houses. Every major Ohio city, including Columbus, Cincinnati, Toledo, Akron, Youngstown, Canton, Warren, Springfield and Dayton had an income tax. Only Dayton’s tax of .75 per cent was lower than that proposed by Locher. : On Tuesday, May 4, 1965, the income tax measure was put to the voters of Cleveland. It had the support of all major dailies in town, including the influential Negro Call & Post. In fact, the press, including radio and television, had conducted an elaborate pre-primary campaign of voter education, stressing the importance of passage for the underprivileged elements of the city. The AFL-CIO, the ADA, the Cleveland . Development Foundation, the Cleveland League of Women Voters, Senator Frank Lausche, and a host of bishops and ministers endorsed the proposal. It was opposed by the Chamber of Commerce, the Citizen’s League, and the NAACP. The city income tax was defeated 89,290 to 62,816. The fascinating story, however, was how it had been beaten. On May 6, 1965, the Cleveland Press ran a breakdown of ward voting on the issue. In the Hough wards (18th, 20th, 21st) the vote was 3,525 for, 6,- 789 against. In the city as a whole, 59 per cent of the voters went against the tax. In Hough, where many of the voters were receiving welfare assistance and could therefore not possibly have been taxed, the vote was 66 per cent against the measure. In other predominantly Negro wards of the city (11th, 12th, 17th, 24th, 25th), the vote was 6,471 for, 10,257 against. Locher’s measure would have needed 13,239 more aye votes to pass, and in these eight wards alone he was faced with 17,000 Negro nays. White opposition to the measure was generated by a feeling that the measure was specifically designed to help the Negroes and yet the Negroes voted against the tax just the same. Lacking the funds which the tax could have supplied, the city drifted until July 1966, when Hough erupted—for the very causes which Locher tried to correct more than a year before. Commented the Plain Dealer for May 5, 1965, on that earlier rebuff, “Some observers saw in the Negroes’ rejection of the issue a measure of disenchantment with the Locher administration.” It was an understatement.* Negro Wards Go Own Way That fall, the Mayor was administered his most severe slap in the face when the Negro wards which traditionally voted for the candidate of the Democratic machine delivered better than 90 per cent of their vote to a virtual unknown, Carl Stokes. A Negro attorney, onetime probation officer, and a neophyte state representative, Stokes had not a single distinctive measure credited to him in the legislature. In fact, he was absent from the chamber on the occasion of a vote on an important welfare measure. And though efforts were made to create a forceful, progressive image about him, the fact remained that his support was almost totally racist. Individual Negroes openly admitted that the sole reason for voting for Stokes was his race. Despite this, Locher continued his attempts to reconcile the Negro community with City Hall. He appointed a Negro, Ralph Findley, to head the Greater Cleveland Council on Economic Opportunity. While provocateurs might rant that the main cause of the riots was unemployment, Findley, testifying before the Cuyahoga County Grand Jury which had been summoned to investigate the disorders, stated, ‘More money is spent and more programs carried on in the , Hough area than in any other area in Cleveland.” Findley could point with pride to a host of job opportunity programs in full operation before the riots took place. MDTA (Manpower Development and Training Act) provided training to more than 3,000 Cleveland residents at a cost of $1,500 per trainee. OJT (On the Job Training, run in conjunction with BAT, Bureau of Apprenticeship and, Training of the Department of Labor) was in the process of providing 200 persons with upgraded skills. NYC (Neighborhood Youth Corps) provided work for 1,000 individuals through the City of Cleveland, the Public Library system, County Welfare, the Hospital Council, or one of several federal agencies. MAP (Greater Cleveland Manpower Advancement Program), developed through the Urban League and the Office of Manpower, Planning, Evaluation and Research of the U.S. Department of Labor (OMPER), was training 1,250 men. The Urban League with the cooperation of the NAACP had undertaken the job training of 500 more men. The Cleveland Adult Education Center of the Cleveland Board of Education was supplying tuition-free instruction to 1,500 persons. The Board, through its Work-Study Program for Drop-Outs, was spending $170,000 more to help 500 youths. SNYC (Schools’ Neighborhood Youth Corps) was supplying 1,- 500 more youths with part-time jobs while continuing their education. The Vocational Education Work Study Program trained 200 more. Project PEACE Skill Center, underwritten by the Catholic Board of Education and Catholic Charities Bureau, was trying to assist 300 persons with job training. The Work Experience Program (Title V of the Economic Opportunity Act) was to spend almost $6 million in supplying job training to 1,200 ADCU cases, 600 ADC cases and 240 “other needy persons” in the Cleveland area. Project for Fifties, supported by the Cleveland Welfare Federation, was spending another $250,000 to help 200 persons. The Job Corps of the Poverty Program had an indefinite number of openings available. And the granddaddy of all acronyms, CSBODC (Cleveland Small Business Opportunity and Development Corporation), promised low-interest, long-term loans to persons from the inner city areas who wished to start businesses for themselves and provide jobs for others from. the inner city. Commented a Negro social worker in Hough itself, “I can get a job for any person over sixteen who wants one.” Start at the Top? The complaint then was not so much “lack of jobs,” as the inability of some to rationalize taking “flunky” jobs. Many unskilled Negroes, lacking high school educations, apparently resented the fact that once channeled through MAP or PACE or YOC they would not find themselves behind sleek mahogany desks with the grand-sounding title, Digital-Computer Programmer. Though the avenue to self-improvement through continued education and work experience had been epened, myopic vision and the glittering appeal of such slogans as “Freedom Now!” and “Black Power!” prevented them from seeing that today’s historian was yesterday’s gluer in a fishing tackle shop, that today’s professor of sociology at Harvard University was yesterday’s pants presser in a dry-cleaning plant in Atlanta, that tomorrow’s physician might be today’s gardener or street cleaner. _ Another canard levied against City Hall at the height of the riots was that Hough possessed inadequate recreation facilities. In fact, as Recreation Director John Nagy subsequently pointed out to a reporter, the region had four city pools, fifteen supervised playgrounds, a city recreation center, and six centers operated by voluntary agencies. “It has more recreation services than any other area of comparable size in the city,” he said. Those familiar with Cleveland might have hastened to add that not more than fifteen minutes’ walking distance from the heart of Hough were the finest parks in Metropolitan Cleveland. The Art Museum, Rose Gardens, Museum of Natural History, and the Thompson Automotive Museum all lie directly to the east of Hough and Wade, Rockefeller and Gordon Parks, in which individuals may fish, boat, play baseball or tennis. Nearby also was the favorite roller rink of Hough’s teen set, the Playmor Auditorium, which was ravaged in an insensible act of arson during the riots. “I don’t know how we could give them any more recreation,’ said Nagy, whose sandlot baseball, basketball and football leagues are renowned throughout the nation. “We formed Mademoiselle Clubs for the girls and Little Indians for the boys and what happened? We gave six baseball bats to one group that said they wanted scmething for the kids to do. During the riot, the police chief called me and said, ‘What are you trying to do —get my men killed?’” Police had confiscated two of the bats in the hands of rioters. In like manner almost every attempt by the administration to increase recreation facilities was frustrated. When the city constructed special playgyms at various empty lots in Hough for children, these were despoiled within the week by teen-age vandals who had no use for such apparatus. Once they were past the age of twelve, it seemed, a totally negativistic psychosis took hold of the youth and they lost interest in all recreation programs. Police Applicants Dwindling When Negro militants complained that the police force did not include a sufficient number of Negroes, Safety Director John McCormick lamented, “Tf you gave me a million dollars more today, I still don’t know where I would get the men.” Though the cadet program has always been open to all races, unfavorable publicity and cries of “police brutality” and “Uncle Tom” have accounted for a fall-off in applicants of all races. When the city administration first concentrated Negro policemen in Negro neighborkoods, Negro militants complained that efforts were being made to segregate the Negroes, to keep them out of white communities. When the city administration bent over backwards in an effort to amalgamate the two races on the force and placed white officers in Hough once more, the same militants chanted that these men didn’t understand the Negroes’ problems, that black neighborhoods should have black policemen. In short, then, City Hall was damned if it did and damned if it didn’t. The same Mad Hatter absence of logic lay behind the simultaneous complaint by militants that the riots were caused by lack of law enforcement on the one hand, and police brutality on the other. The police who weren’t there were being brutal. Small wonder, then, that Ralph Locher, a man who lives on East Boulevard in a thoroughly integrated section of Cleveland (approximately one-half of his neighbors are Negroes) can be castigated by these same cretins and their compatriots of the press as a bigot. Youth Program Fizzles If one seeks evidence of incompetence, insincerity, stupidity and failure, the place to look is not City Hall, but the Hotel Cambridge, located some three doors down from the bar on the corner of E. 79th and Hough where the riots of 1966 began. This grotesque old structure, once home of the unmarried members of the Cleveland Indians baseball club when the team played at nearby League Park, later the largest whorehouse in Hough, served as home for Community Action for Youth (CAY), a creation of the Poverty Program, between 1965 and 1967. It was hoped that the presence of CAY would rehabilitate the image of the Cambridge. In this, as in most of its ventures, CAY, chartered in the spring of 1962 at a proposed cost to the taxpayers of $12 million over the next five years, proved a failure. The goals of CAY were “to decrease juvenile delinquency, to build youth aspirations, to stimulate educational and occupational achievement on the part of youth, and to strengthen the father’s role in family life.’ Designed “to guide Cleveland and other U.S. cities in future youth planning,” CAY turned cut to be the biggest bust since the Edsel. ; CAY’s Court and Corrections program was to give intensive treatment to Juvenile Court parolees and probationers, to prevent repeat delinquency, and to operate a residential work camp in Cleveland’s metropolitan parks. In fact, no cases were distributed to CAY officers till the summer of 1964, and then with the greatest of reluctance. Throughout the remainder of the program several judges expressed dissatisfaction with satellite operations which bogged down in insipid sociological tests which proved that a child whose parents did not own a washing machine was more delinquent-prone than one whose parents did. The parole unit died within six months of its formation as a result of lack of funds, but its director was continued on the payroll with the astonishing title of Coordinator of Coordinators. No residential work camp in the parks was ever founded, but a residential treatment center for Hough itself was proposed in a patchwork treatise which was lacerated by social workers and directors of the CAY program for its obvious weaknesses (no provision for health care, no provision for trained personnel on the grounds throughout the week, no provision for chiidren returning to the center after weekend furloughs). The author of that plan was rewarded with full salary compensation and promotion to rank of supervisor for the remaining year of the program’s existence. The malfunctions of the courts program were not unique. In the original dossier for CAY it was proposed that school programs at nine area schools would develop new curriculum materials, emphasize teaching of communication skills, increase guidance, extend after-school educational opportunities, develop school-work cooperative programs, and give intensive treatment to delinquents and emotionally disturbed children. In fact, because of the incorrigible attitude of most students in Hough schools, an attitude reflecting the general contempt for educational processes of their parents, most schools were compelled to function as quasi-concentration camps. Chain-link gates between sections of schools, and guards at various doors to keep students in the buildings were not uncommon. At Addison Junior High, for example, one principal decorated his walls with an illustrated verse extolling the virtues of corporal punishment for discipline aboard nineteenth-century sailing vessels. CAY’s welfare adjunct was to lighten caseloads and reorganize services to give top priority to child neglect situations and family problems. Few if any of the county welfare workers were given the chance to operate on an intensive basis with families because of the lack of personnel, low wages, and press of intake cases in Hough. CAY was “to provide services to unmarried teen-age mothers, youth camp experiences to pre-adolescent boys and girls with behavior and learning difficulties, after-school programs for particularly aggressive beys, group work services to young unmarried fathers in a pilot program.” It is true that efforts were made to teach unwed mothers to care for their infants, to train them in the basic techniques of child care, sewing, cooking, etc., but generally these efforts were inadequate. After a few weeks of such sessions, the girls were liable to drop out of such programs altogether, and in their short time in the program they certainly did not acquire sufficient training to become proper mothers. Incidentally, no effort was made to supply birth control information to these individuals. Shortly after the riots, the Department of Health announced that birth control information would be available free of charge to the poor, but only to married couples and only upon their request. As for the other grandiose proposals about youth camps, after-school programs, and pilot programs for unwed fathers, none of these ever achieved reality. Crucial to the program was the so-called Community Support Division which was “to coordinate the work of existing community agencies, establish a community information center, publish a community newspaper, develop a youth recognition program, encourage formation of street clubs.” It did establish a community information center in a storefront decorated with illustrations left over from an abortive “Hough Beautiful” campaign and staffed by several vacantstaring secretaries. The community newspaper died after a few issues for lack of direction and lack of public interest. The one Boy Scout unit which was formed collapsed when few of the boys could afford uniforms and their adviser was involved in a. minor political scandal. Despite the Hough Beautiful campaign, Hough remained garbage-sirewn and bottlesearred in contrast to the neat Caucasian neighborhoods directly across Superior Road. “Street clubs” were hardly known. Though Community Support could have marshalled the decent citizens of Hough to take pride in their community, it failed miserably, and its failure was indicative of the expensive failure of CAY. It is ironic that on the eve of the Hough riots, this inept division sponsored a Hough folk festival at old League Park. It was hoped, apparently, that such a diversion would pacify the youth of the district. Rapid Personnel Turnover From top to bottom CAY was riddled with people whose competence and loyalty was constantly called into question. In a memorandum addressed to the agency’s board of directors issued in September 1966, the Director of the Research Division openly accused CAY’s Executive Director of “exeessive incompetence’ manded that he be removed. In reply, the Executive Director branded the Research Director “insubordinate” and asked for his resignation. Such personality conflicts were not unusual, as from its inception CAY had been burdened with staff turnover for that very reason. White workers resigned ang de- = because of what some intimated was inverse racism on the part of Negro supervisory personnel. Many high- ‘ranking positions were outright political gifts, but frequently the absenteeism and wrongdoings of some bigh-ranking personnel became _ so flagrant that they were asked to resign. The fiscal policies of the agency became a_ laughingstock to those charged with the duty of keeping records, and employees were charged to accept on faith that their retirement funds were secure. Many of the staff had not the vaguest notions of the complexities of Cleveland’s problems. Unfamiliar with the ethnic makeup of the city, these plastic surgeons of life flocked to Cleveland from Columbus, New York, Seattle, Atlanta, St. Louis or Charleston, with a view that Cleveland was simply a city of Negro problems. Left to themselves west of the High Level Bridge, they would have wandered about aimlessly asifinanother world. They came simply for “experience, for status, for the use of data to be applied toward vapid doctoral dissertations in social work which no intellectual would read, and for rather substantial wages. And when the contract for CAY ran out, most of them slipped away to other jobs elsewhere in the U.S.—in West Virginia, Massachusetts or the District of Columbia—at higher salaries —with higher titles—because of their “contributions” to the Hough community.
But if City Hall, “Whitey,” social workers, and the Federal Government wilfully or inadvertently have been the enemies of the Negro, the worst enemy that the Negro has had in Cleveland, as in every other American city, has been the Negro himself. The destruction of the Playmor Auditorium removed a facility for wholesome recreation from the Negro community. Dry-cleaning stores in Hough that were looted, wrecked and closed were stocked full of clothing from the Negro community. When a supermarket located at East 89th and – Superior was burned out in June 1966, as a prelude to the major riot, Negro employees were put out of work and Negro residents were forced to walk extra blocks for food, as it was the only market between East 71st and East 105th Streets on Superior. Similarly, the burning out of the lone pharmacy on Hough Avenue between East 55th and 105th, merely because it was operated by Jewish brothers (who, incidentally, had been in the area for more than twenty years), also created a hardship for the Negro sick in the district. The gutting of a Goodwill Store at the corner of Crawford Road and Hough put additional people out of work. The firing of small grocery stores, despite unproven charges of poor quality meat and high prices, again hurt the Negro, for often as not these same shops were the only ones to extend credit to Negroes between employment or relief checks. As Negro Councilman Leo Jackson indicated in the Plain Dealer for July 26, 1966: “This in my cpinion is not an attempt to get ‘Whitey.’ You don’t get Whitey in a predominantly Negro area. It is not Whitey who is being killed. It’s the Negro who’s being killed.” Misery Loves Company The Negro youth of the inner city, lacking in education and work-skills, hearing his parents complain of high prices of food, poor quality food, excessive rents, and police brutality, envious of the material comforts enjoyed by the white bourgeois community, hearing just enough of legal decisions to give him the impression that he can sit-in, beg-in, or steal-in with little risk of legal repercussions, saturated with press and television reports which seem to glorify the exploits of the looter, and bombarded by demagogues who excoriate_ his masculinity if he does not take what was rightfully his four hundred years ago, has taken it upon himself to reform his society—by force. Dissatisfied with the place he occupies in society, he attempts to reform it by transmitting fear to all elements of society. There is perverse satisfaction in knowing that one is not alone in one’s doubts, that when all people walk down the street they also shudder from insecurity, that brute strength, not wisdom, not color, determines a man’s place in society. ‘Tell It Like It Is’ More than anyone else the responsible Negro can prevent urban society from degenerating into a phantasmagoria of fear, where equality simply means the equal necessity for all people to be afraid. Negro hipsters have a phrase—“Tell it like it is’—which should be utilized to help clear the atmosphere of hate enveloping ghettos in all cities, not just Cleveland. 1. Negroes should tell it like it is and disassociate civil rights from civil wrongs. When the slick bigots from RAM or SNCC or SIMBA attempt to blame the riots on abuses dating back four centuries and the racist policies of a loutish incumbent mayor, or even when pinstriped Caucasians sitting in. air-conditioned Grand Jury Chambers holler “Bolshevism!”, the responsible Negro in Hough, Watts, Tampa, Boston, Newark or Detroit should stand up and affirm that his town is not a racist town, that the riots were primarily caused by creeping hoodlumism. 2. Negroes should be the first to demand stringent law enforcement. It is their streets which have been made unsafe for the most part. They are the ones victimized by slumlords, rats and petty thieves. But this requires that Negroes should themselves assist in the elimination of house bars and other insidious dens of crime where teen-agers can avail themselves of home brew, sex or numbers gambling. Until now, however, the honor of the easbah has made such informing unethical. : 3. Negroes should silence the rumor-mongers who prey on _ the frustrations of the inner city. All it takes to spark a revolt in Houston or Cincinnati is for word to spread that a Negro child has been shot, that police used brutal methods in arresting a Negro drunk, or that a white grocer has been selling rotten cherries. Little is done at present in the Negro community to check the spread of these rumors, and nothing is done subsequently to prove that they were without foundation. As a result, the next time word spreads – of an alleged atrocity, the unemployed youth are all the more prone to lash cut against society. Responsible leaders must attempt to check the emotions of the community until thorough investigations have been made. 4. Negroes should take the initiative in demanding well-planned, dedicated Community Action Programs to assist them with homemaking, recreation, education and cultural activities. This does not mean, however, that the Negro community should sit back and wait for a well-scrubbed college graduate to lead them out of the wilderness. Negroes should form and supervise their own street clubs, block parties, cleanup brigades, scout units, athletic leagues, teen canteens, folk festivals, and they should bestow community awards for excellence. The primary sense of achievement must come from the Negro community itself. 5. Negroes should demand equitable implementation of welfare assistance lows. This means that assistance should be at least at a subsistence level, as determined by the state’s — minimum estimated standards _ to maintain life and limb, and not at some percentage, generally between 60 and 80 per cent, thereof. But along — with this, the Negro should demand that all recipients fulfill the requirements of the law, that no “uncles” be present in ADC homes nine months before another name appears -on the welfare rolls, that mothers not feign illness and inability to account for their children’s excessive absenteeism from school. 6. Negroes who have no religious objection should demand extension and promotion of planned parenthood clinics. The maniacal ravings of certain leaders who claim that birth control is a Hitlerian device to exterminate their people notwithstanding, Negroes should cooperate with planned parenthood clinics which would be open to unmarried teenagers as well as married couples. In Cleveland such clinics have faced opposition from religious leaders as well as Negro militants. 7. Negroes should champion the neighborhood school. In Hough, as in many Negro communities about the country, new elementary and junior high schools have been constructed, complete with: modern equipment and integrated staffs. Negroes should be the first to argue that their schools are not inferior simply because they are staffed and attended by Negroes. The difference in esprit among students at the new, small Harry Davis Junior High on the outskirts of Hough and the hoary, penitential Addison Junior High within the district is remarkable. Though both student bodies come from roughly the same economic background, the students at Harry Davis present tidier appearances, offer fewer disciplinary problems, maintain their school in a better condition. The lesson that should be learned is that given new, small schools, it is possible to upgrade the level of education in the ghetto while still preserving the integrity of the neighborhood school, which, incidentally, most children still cherish. All of this entails maturity and honesty on the part of the Negro community. The damage in Hough may be dwarfed by the proportions of the earlier riot in Watts or the recent, multimillion-dollar atrocities in Newark and Detroit but the symptoms of such riots are prevalent in any city which has a center of Negro population, whether it be Waterloo, Minneapolis or Columbus. No chants _ of “Power!” or “Now!” or mass votes for a Negro candidate, whether he be a Democrat, Republican or Vegetarian, will lead to the amelioration of conditions which exist in the black ghettoes. There exists no mathematical equation to solve the problem of summer heat, unemployment and demagoguery. But unfounded rumors, confounding resistance to all police activity, “Pie-in-the-Sky” preachments of OKO incompetents and provocateurs, and riots, are not the answers. Only through responsible action will the Negro gain the respect and admiration which he so eagerly desires.
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