Can Cleveland Escape Burning

The questioo I alts blew two summers ago. and U.S. householders, fast learners in the geogra- phy of disaster, marked it down with Haiphong and Checkpoint Charlie on their lists of distant places Lo worry about They marked wrong, and last summer the proud and placid city of Cleveland. Ohio, proved it. The rest of the country learned that Watts is not in Los Angeles; il's right down the street, bahy. In Cleveland's rat-gnawed Hough section last July an inept and undermanned police force was unable to prevent a barroom squabble from be- coming live nights of sniping, burning and looting, in which four Negroes were killed, blocks of stores and apartment buildings were gutted and damage ran to name-your-ligure. The riots, or "demon- strations," as even moderate, middle-class Negroes in Cleveland pointedly call them, were the worst m the nation during 1966. They settled nothing. Shooting, lire bombing, dynamiting and denunciation since then have sputtered at sub-not level. Hough, a 50-block-by- 10-block infection of crumbling three-story apartment buildings and huge, rotted frame houses dat- ing from a time when summer meant sweet corn and Citronella. is still owned by rats that can't be frightened and landlords who can't be found, ft* backyards are still splattered with rain-soaked gar- bage and burst mattresses. Derelict building; stand empty and gutted, as before. Streets are stiil scavenged by prostitutes, numbers runners, hos- tile coiK. fatherless 14-year-old dropouts high on pills, five-year-old children dull from not eating enough, muttering winos and social workers with hopeless case loads. Of the area's 89.000 people, 78.000 are Negro (Cleveland, with 810.000 people, is 35 percaiit Negro, and the percentage is rising fast). Perhaps 25 percent of its men are unemployed: no one re- ally knows. One third of its families live on less than $3,000 a year, A few thin^ are better now: The city has built a large playground tinirisei years ago and paved a few streets. A new feJer;l job-training program has begun, and although ev- ery job program tried so far m Cleveland li.".; flopped, this one should work. Church groups, businesses and a union are rehabilitating housing. But bombed-out, riot-wrecked build ings still stand:the streets have graduated more professional muggers: a while patrolman was shot and killed by a snipfr; stores and an elementary scluxil have been burned; businesses have packed up because they can t get insurance: a traditional City Hall indifference has hardened into stubborn contempt. Hough has been Hough for one more year. During the relative safety of the winter, white Clevt'landers irritably asked, "Why us?" No« thi- question is, "When?" U is hard to find a city resi- dent who believes Cleveland will go bl through the summer. "Oh. ves." admits By John Skow he ghetto; CAN ClfVELAND ESCAPE BURNING? Safety Director John McCormick. "a lot of people haved, spread-eagling the young men against cars, fair. To members ofa grand jury that investigated have t)een buying guns, out of fear." cracking them with sticks if they moved." the riot, tbis selectivity showed that the whole For whatever consolation it brings to Cleveland, The Hough war ended, appropriately, in a final thint; had been planned, and the jury concluded the city bas plenty- of compan\'. One by one. in this grotesque act of violence. The Rev. Willie Wright, solemnly that the devastation had been brought second summer After Watts, the cities of the U.S. a 33-year-old Negro pastor in the Church of God, down on the city by Communists, Cleveland's are exploding hke so many jars of spoiled pre- was patrolling with his wife in a church station mayor, an amiable and ineffective time-server serves^Tampa. Dayton. Cincinnati—and a pru- wagon, trying to help calm things down. It was named Ralph S, Loeber, solemnly agreed. dent guess IS that the whole batch is tainted: hot, and he had taken off his suit coat and clerical Communist fire bombers, even imaginary ones, ever\' city in the nation with enough Negroes to collar. He noticed a National Guardsman arguing would be a salvation to Ralph Locher if he could get make a ghetto. "Why us?" makes less and less with two angry Negroes. "It was payday." Wright the city to believe in them. (Nicholas Katzenbach, sense. But Cleveland is an excellent place to ask, recalls, "and those two were going to have a fight, then U.S. Attorney General, dismissed the grand simply, •"\Miy?" In the words of Dr. Kenneth riot or not. I told them we had enough trouble, and jury's red scare impatiently, and two Cleveland Clark, a Negro psychologist who convened the they said, 'Yeah. Rev.' About that time tbe ixilice patrolmen who had inliltrated the threadbare Ohio nation's top civil-rights leaders last montb to plan roared up in four or five paddy wagons and tbree Communist party said that its members were not an approach to Cleveland's problems. "Causes station wagons. They didn't ask any questions. I active in the Hough riots.) A lanky rube of a man, of unrest and despair among urban-ghetto Negroes, got knocked down with a gun butt between the Locher is widely blamed in Cleveland for blunder- as well as their grim, sobering and costly conse- shoulders, and then kicked. They fractured two ing tbe city into its present race mess, and he lacks quences, are found in classic form in Cleveland." ribs. Later I called tbe station, and tiiey said.' Rev- the [K)htical agility to get out from under the charge. The consequences began on a hot Monday night erend, you must be drunk.' I went down to show Recently, hearing that tbe Rev. Martin Luther last July, In the 79'ers Club, a bar at 79th Street them I w asn't, Tbey apologized then, but tbey said King was in town and planned to make Cleveland and Hough Avenue, where relations had turned the>' didn't want to make a report because it would a summer project of his Southern Christian Lead- sour between the white owners and Negro patrons, get in the papers and stir things up again." ership Conference, Locher announced, " 1 w ill not a white manager told a Negro barmaid to "serve The riots burned through the ghetto, but the meet w'ith extremists." iMuch later, with no better no niggers no damn water." A sign went uj) out- destruction was selective. Tbe Hough Opixirtunity grace, he said he might see King, i The mayor side the bar: Xo WATER FOR NIGGERS. The man- Center was not touched. Neither were the houses grumbles about tbe "bum raps" Cleveland has ager and another white man strutted in front of the of wbite slum families, nor, for the most part, been getting from the national press, but for the bar with shotguns. In five minutes a crowd ol 300 stores whose owners had a reputation for being last few weeks he has refused sulkily to talk with people was milling about. Several wagonloads of out-of-town reixirters. police arrived- The crowd yelled, in anger or lor Photographs by Frank Dandrldge The mayor's position is that Cleveland's prob- exercise. Scared, sweating cops pushed the Negroes back. There was a sharp, cracking explosion—a sniper's bullet or. as some say now, a thrown cherry bomb. Police tired into tbe air and began to back the Negroes down Hough Avenue. The crowd threw bottles and bricks, and now there was no question about it; snipers were shooting trom windows along Hough Avenue. Cops shot back where\'er a head showed at a window, and a woman looking out to call her children was killed. Gunfiff was now genera!; jxilice were shooting out all the streetlights along a four-block section to make themselves less visible to snipers. Police- men chased Negroes into houses along the avenue. "They came into the houses Hke Gestapo," says one witness. As the retreating mob of rioters began to disperse, tbe police raged through the buildings along Hough. The fire sirens had alread\' begun, and the>' did not stop for five days. Fred Barclay, a Negro who 13 the neighborhood poverty-program director. kept the Opportunity Center open 24 hours a day during the riots. The National Guard, called in early on the third day, used the center as a haven. So did young Negro looters, their hands cut and sniellingof gasoline, who came in to talk out their grievances, "They kept talking about rats, and crowding, and filth and high rent," recalls Bar- clay. "And they kept coming back to broken prom- ises—job-training programs whose graduates couldn't get jobs-and the way the police be- Hough'^\-opn, who patrol wilh riot guns, are hah-d by most Negwee, who accuse Iheyn of braUility and indiSfererwe. 39 SERPENT 5NAKE CLEVELAND GHETTO. Association for the Advancement of Colored clear that City Hall under Locher was not going to People, says this of Mayor Locher: "The distin- touch it- Yet the business community and both iems are no worse than those of other large cities. guishing factor about Cleveland is that it is the newspapers supported Locher. i It seems clear thai His critics acknowledge that he is no racist. But only major city we know in which the mayor has they could not face the prospect of a Negro mayor; he is sensitive to the prejudices of white voters who rebuffed a committee of downtown, white busi- as things turnedout, with the white votesplit among are racists, and he speaks frequently about the nessmen who were trying to suggest ways of easing three candidates, a young Negro lawyer and civil- need for "law ami order"—a truism that can't be tension, and in effect told them to go to hell." rights activist.

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