BALLOTS AND BULLETS: BLACK POWER POLITICS -- part 5 -- full review

AND URBAN GUERILLA WARFARE IN 1968 CLEVELAND

We were back in our hometown Northeast Ohio in July.

We visited the Cleveland Police Museum.

It has displays and artifacts from the Torso murders/Kingsbury Run deaths and Elliot Ness' over reaction to shanty towns.

The most moving display, by far, is on the deadly Glenville Riots/Uprising in 1968. 

It turned out the exact day we were visiting marked the 50^th anniversary of Glenville.

As a child growing up in the Rust Belt, all I heard was how stupid black people were.

Because “the white people gave them money and built them projects to live in and all they do is tear up the projects and burn down the stores in their own neighborhood.”

This rather racist view meant Hough and Glenville were black people doing bad to each other – because they didn’t know any better.

Apparently, off in the white flight-created suburbs and exurbs, picket fence folks preferred not to think of substandard housing, absentee landlords, stores that price gouged, schools that were substandard compared to “white” neighborhoods, lower city spending in black vs. white neighborhoods, lack of jobs and a general closing of opportunities give to whites.

Not only did those conditions not exist, but if they did, it was no way linked to racist policies of those in power.

Though it is a police museum, and multiple Cleveland Police officers died in the streets of Glenville in 1968, and many more were severely wounded and permanently injured – the little museum does a fair job of not demonizing the Black Nationalists involved in the bloody events of July 23, 1978.

Rather than sticking only with the pejorative “riot,” the displays in the free museum I call it riot/uprising.

Through the lens of a racist president of the United States who calls virtual KKK members and white supremacists “fine people,” I’m on the side of calling it an uprising.

Because Cleveland police were so brutal to African Americans, activists began to arm themselves.

Of course shooting down cops is wrong.

But when you look at all of the oppression, it’s not such a shock the frustration boiled over in many American cities in the mid- to late 1960s.

Even the unthinkable act of burning local businesses is understandable, if not justifiable.

Commissions that studied things found that black-owned and black-friendly businesses were spared from looting and worse. Stores well-known for discriminating and worse, did not survive the nights of violence.

I was incredibly young, but I remember my folks, in the exurbs of Medina County, fearing that “race riots” would destroy downtown Akron, where my dad worked.

After Glenville, my folks pretty much stopped going to the great museums, the zoo, West Side Market, lakefront, ethnic villages, playhouse row and other cultural amenities of what once was the prosperous sixth largest city in America.

Infrequent trips to see the Indians or Browns – in a cavernous old stadium cut off from the rest of town by a lakefront freeway – were judged safe because you didn’t have to drive through a (black) East Side neighborhood, nor did you have to walk through downtown.

Still, the journey from freeway to the big surface lot next to the stadium on Lake Erie were met with much fear.

Doors on the family Chevy were locked tight.

My brother and I were give the head's up that dad might drive through a red light -- even in daylight, if he saw a menacing (black) person approaching. 

Of course, my stiff, bigoted parents’ aversion to the “Mistake on the Lake” made me love Cleveland, warts and all.

The second I got my driver license learner permit and my own car, I was off to explore and photograph every crevice of the city in the summer.

I remember my folks viewing Carl Stokes (first African American elected as mayor of a major city in America) and his brother Louis Stokes (a longtime congress person) as incompetent crooks, if not the devil.

George Forbes, a flawed individual who represented Glenville on the Cleveland City Council and spent more than a decade presiding over the Council, was Satan incarnate.

All of these dims views of diversity were was mixed in with a dose of urban legends of teenage white boys on field trips to Cleveland cultural institutions being stabbed in the gut by "black monster hoodlums" who would slash a belly open to steal a good suburban kid’s lunch money.

Long before the internet, it was impossible to do research to disprove these outlandish tales told to make blacks something less than human.

Certainly, events in Watts, Detroit, Chicago and perhaps even Harlem will always take a higher place in the history of the 1960s in racially divided America.

But the Glenville uprising is today, maybe even more than it was exactly a half century ago, a pivotal event in American history.

Robenalt, a Thompson Hine attorney, progressive thinker and author of other historical books, delivers an unflinching, backed by facts, compelling account of what went wrong in Cleveland and why – all things considered – an outbreak of urban guerrilla warfare should have surprised no one.

The engaging book has much about the campaign of Carl Stokes plus pivotal Cleveland visits by Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali.

Beyond the loss of life, both police and black nationalists, the biggest tragedy is the collapse of the Cleveland Now program that promised more than one billion dollars of federal and local money to address issues in Glenville and many other neighborhoods on the city’s predominantly black east side.

Fifty years later, with the GOP controlling the White House, Senate, House and strong majority of governor offices in the U.S., the oppressors continue to pretend that the oppressed will do fine and dandy on their own.

Rather than spending billions -- to not only right wrongs of the past, but to also level the playing field so folks in broken neighborhoods can pursue a bright future – the opposite is happening.

Most of those silver spoon “leaders,” born into immense wealth, act like cutting already thread bare programs will some you kindle, not starve out hope that social equity will ever be a reality in America.

Robenalt explores the racial and funding divide in his brilliant book.

For many reasons, including vivid storytelling, Ballots and Bullets: Black Power Politics and Urban Guerrilla Warfare in 1968 Cleveland, is an essential read -- one of the most important books published this year.

https://www.ballotsandbullets.com/home/