A RACE ANTHOLOGY The City Club of Cleveland is one of the nation’s great free speech forums. A product of the Progressive Era, we were founded in 1912 and are one of the nation’s oldest continuous independent free speech forums, renowned for our tradition of debate and discussion. For more than a hundred years, all of our speakers—from sitting presidents to community activists—have answered unfiltered, unrehearsed questions directly from the audience. We firmly believe in the free expression of all ideas and the benefits of an open exchange. We are non-partisan—we do not take positions on issues—and we are fierce advocates of engagement. In our second century of service, we produce more than a hundred programs every year for the benefit of the community. www.cityclub.org GTK / PRESS Working in the tradition of independent presses since its inception, GTK Press publishes works of theory, fiction, poetry, madness, economics, satire, sexuality, science fiction, activism and confession through several print projects. GTK Press is a cooperative print workshop interested in melding high and low forms of cultural expression into a nuanced and polemical vision of the present. For more information about our operations, programs and book projects visit: www.guidetokulchur.com A RACE ANTHOLOGY: DISPATCHES AND ARTIFACTS FROM A SEGREGATED CITY EDITED BY DAN MOULTHROP + RA WASHINGTON GTK PRESS Cleveland, OH 2016 A Race Anthology: Dispatches and Artifacts from a Segregated City Edited by Dan Moulthrop and RA Washington 2016 ISBN: 978-0-9981104-1-7 Cover design by Maggie Halm Back cover and internal design by Ryan Walker GUIDE TO KULCHUR 5900 Detroit Avenue Cleveland, OH 44102 guidetokulchur.com Printed in the USA on recycled paper by the Guide to Kulchur Print Cooperative Workshop Contents Introduction ............................................................................... 11 Today Is it Dark Over There? ................................................................ 25 Lawrence Daniel Caswell and John G. A Conversation on Race Excerpts from a City Club Youth Forum .................................... 28 Facebook Post ................................................................................. 42 Michael J. Houser Just Do It ..................................................................................... 45 Eric Coble One Plus One Equals Too Little ................................................. 47 Ajah Hales Healing Racial Injustices Using Restorative Practices: An Oral History ......................................................................... 57 Morris Ervin, as told to Diana Sette If It Takes a Village… ................................................................. 62 Darius Stubbs Personal Dispatch ....................................................................... 64 Julia Murphy Every Single Cop in Cleveland is Here ...................................... 68 Arthur Chu Kinsman ..................................................................................... 82 Ali McClain After School ............................................................................... 84 Ali McClain Were You Scared? ....................................................................... 85 Sarah Marcus A Secret Home ........................................................................... 92 Melissa Kullman I’m Yellow. I’m in Cleveland: What Now? .................................. 94 Jeanne Li Staying Human .......................................................................... 98 Student Group on Race Relations, Shaker Heights High School This is What a Cleveland Story Sounds Like in 2015 ............... 103 Kyle Swenson Stop Killing Black People .......................................................... 112 Mary E. Weems, Ph.D. Head Trip .................................................................................. 113 Mary E. Weems, Ph.D. A Cane and a Book ................................................................... 115 Mary E. Weems, Ph.D. Yesterday The World According to Stokes: The City Club of Cleveland, January 14, 2015 .......................... 121 Skin ........................................................................................... 128 Ali Znaidi Colour is One ............................................................................ 129 Ali Znaidi The Revolutionary Reverend Klunder: How One Man’s Death Made Cleveland Question its Reputation as the Best Location in the Nation .................... 130 Dana Aritonovich Spitting ...................................................................................... 139 Dianne Borsenik How Not to Help the Black Underclass: Excerpts from Jason Riley’s address to the City Club of Cleveland, March 29, 2015 ................................... 142 The Most Segregated Hour ....................................................... 155 Peg Weissbrod with Susan Kaesar and Ajah Hales (re) Union .................................................................................. 164 Milenko Budimir Roxboro ..................................................................................... 167 Lee Chilcote History Matters: How Policy and Practice Shaped Cuyahoga ........................................................ 170 Jason Reece Carl Stokes and the Cleveland Freeway Fights ......................... 183 Brad Masi The Unfinished Business of Race Excerpts from a City Club forum, December 12, 2014 .................................................................... 192 Rev. Otis Moss II, in conversation with Rev. Joan Brown Campbell Tomorrow Life & Literature of Marlon James: Excerpt from Marlon James at the City Club of Cleveland, September 11, 2015 .................................... 205 The History in Our Wallets ....................................................... 210 Amy Hanauer I’m Guilty .................................................................................. 219 Akram Boutros What Diversity Can’t Do .......................................................... 226 Sharon Holbrook Where I End and Where You Begin ......................................... 229 Andrew Higgins Learning Cleveland, Teaching Cleveland .................................. 237 Charles Ellenbogen See Me Fully ............................................................................. 243 P. Nasib Whitt Epilogue Fire This Time ........................................................................... 249 RA Washington Contributor Bios ....................................................................... 266 This book was produced with generous support from The editors would like to thank: The City Club staff for their production of City Club programs, especially the ones included in the volume. In particular, Wesley Allen and Yvana Petros provided crucial assistance on the project. Anne Trubek who made this collaboration possible. Jewel Moulthrop for her editorial acumen. Mary Galeti and the board of the Tecovas Foundation, for their support of the project, and the staff and board of the St. Luke’s Foundation. Sandhya Gupta, Erin McIntyre, Sheila Wright, Teleange Thomas, Adele DiMarco Kious, Peter Whitt, Marcy Levy Shankman, Dr. Rhonda Williams, for provoking thought and action. Ryan Walker and Maggie Halm for designing the book and the GTK cooperative print workshop for producing it. Introduction Louis Stokes first addressed the City Club of Cleveland on September 16, 1966. He would go on to become a congressman, Ohio’s first Af- rican-American U.S. Representative. In 1966, he was a well-respected civil rights lawyer, often working on behalf of the Cleveland chapter of the NAACP. He was not the only speaker that September day. He was one of four on a panel that had been billed as “The Negro Looks at Cleveland.” The impetus for this particular event was to provide a forum for leaders in the black community to respond to a grand jury investigation into the causes of that summer’s notorious race riots in the Hough neighborhood. That investigation was led byCleveland Press ed- itor Louis Seltzer, and the grand jury had pinned blame for the riots on the Communist Party of Ohio and a local criminal element. Stokes and the others on the panel, most notably Baxter Hill who led the Congress on Racial Equality, had another point of view to present. In the form of Stokes and Hill, the “Negro” looked at Cleveland and Cleveland’s power structure, and eviscerated them. Stokes reminded City Club members that the grand jury had been given two charges—to find the cause of the riots and to articulate why the 60,000 residents of Hough were living in such abject poverty and isolation. It completed neither of those charges adequately or accurately, he said. The resulting report, however, ignored the specific charge of the courts, and utilized the occasion to give a clean bill of health to an inept, lead- erless, and indifferent city administration. It chose instead as a scapegoat members of the Negro community and the Communist Party. By as- signing the cause of Cleveland’s rioting to a small group of outside agi- tators and communists, a real disservice was rendered to this community. Of 38 cities throughout the United States which have had riots this year, only Cleveland’s Negroes have been subjected to the charge of lacking sufficient education and intelligence to know when to protest 11 12 A RACE ANTHOLOGY slum existence. Only Cleveland’s Negroes needed communists to come here to inform them that it was their time to riot. To add injury to insult, the report contains