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 50th 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/
