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1803: Ohio declares itself as a non-slave state

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1803: Ohio declares itself as a non-slave state

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In a landmark 1997 case, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that the state's method of funding school districts violated the Ohio Constitution. The ruling fueled outrage at the time and remains controversial today.

The court said the funding system, which relies largely on property taxes, failed to provide education that was equal in quality in all school districts. In poorer rural and urban areas, property was valued less than in suburban districts, which meant less property tax dollars for students. State subsidies weren't enough to make up the deficit.

The justices, in a 4-3 vote, ordered the Ohio General Assembly to make the school funding system more equitable. Politicians and newspapers howled in protest, saying the court had crossed the line into legislating. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court issued the same ruling three more times over the past 20 years.

The legislature did little until Dec. 3, when the Ohio House of Representatives, in an 84-8 vote, passed House Bill 305. Supporters said the bill would ensure adequate funding for all students, regardless of where they lived. Among other things, it would end the overreliance on property taxes and consider median income, as well as property value, when calculating state funding to school districts. Thus districts with high property values but lower median incomes would receive more state money than under the current system, and they potentially wouldn't have to ask voters for property tax hikes as often.

However, the Ohio Senate was lukewarm toward the bill. Senators said the legislation needed more vetting and debating, so they would likely not act on it this year. If the Senate doesn't vote on the bill in 2020, it will die, and legislators will have to start over next year.

The sinking status of HB 305 is another disappointment for Ohio's Black citizens, many of whom live in struggling urban school districts. That's because education is tied to so many other issues, including employment, housing, and access to healthcare. Without a good education, it's harder to climb into the middle class.

"It's critically important to address the legacy and history of under-resourced schools in urban areas," says Ronnie Dunn, associate professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University and the college's interim chief diversity and inclusion officer. "Although many Blacks have moved out of the urban core and into suburban districts, you still have a concentration of minorities and Blacks in the inner city."

Students in the inner city don't have access to digital tools that have become especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic as children study at home. Dunn says 25% of Cleveland households aren't connected to the internet.

"It's been long enough," Dunn says of Ohio's school funding system and the lack of success in changing it. "How long do you keep delaying? Kids are suffering as a result."

Over the decades, Ohio has seen fits and starts in the drive for racial equality in education, housing, employment, and healthcare.

"We're getting better, but we still have a long way to go," says Tom Sutton, professor of political science at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea and director of the university's Community Research Institute.
The Black Code
Ohio declared itself a non-slave state when founded in 1803, although not entirely for charitable reasons.

"Ohio settlers didn't want an economy based on slavery because they thought it would cripple the economy and make people lazy," Sutton says. "They would be dependent on slave labor instead of their own initiative."

Still, the state established a Black Code, or series of laws that, for example, required Blacks moving into Ohio to post a $500 bond as an insurance policy. Black residents weren't allowed to vote, testify in court against whites, or serve in public office or the militia. They were banned from public schools until 1848.

An 1851 revision to the Ohio Constitution gave Blacks the vote and eliminated the bond requirement, and by then Ohioans were supporting the abolishment of slavery and setting up Underground Railroad stops.

After the Civil War - when Jim Crow laws that marginalized Blacks popped up all over the South and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated facilities and institutions were acceptable as long as they were "equal" - freed Blacks working as sharecroppers in the South started moving north in search of better jobs. Dunn says that 6 million Blacks migrated north between 1910-1970, settling in cities like Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus.

Black families had little when they arrived, so they lived in slums like Cleveland's Central neighborhood, just east of downtown. Immigrants from overseas also moved into poor neighborhoods but, because institutions like the Catholic Church provided them a decent education, immigrant families entered the middle class within one or two generations.

Black citizens had no such help, and it was hard for them to fit in, Sutton says, because they didn't look like everyone else.

"American society would not accept the assimilation of Blacks and we're still dealing with that today," Sutton says.
Housing traps
Some public policies meant to help American citizens ended up hurting Black families.

Public housing was introduced in the 1930s as part of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, a series of laws meant to lift the country out of the Great Depression. The idea was to clear out slums and build new, safer housing. At the time, private-sector home construction was lacking due to the economic downturn.

Cleveland was the first city to receive public housing, which the federal government intended to be desegregated. However, local officials had other ideas. Blacks were grouped into the new Outhwaite Estates in the Central district where they were already living. Whites were assigned to Cedar Apartments and Lakeview Terrace. Federal officials, anxious just to get the housing built, didn't fight the segregated arrangement.

Meanwhile, the Federal Housing Administration was created to help citizens afford homes by backing mortgages given by FHA-approved lenders. The problem was that between 1934-1968, 98% of all federally backed home loans, including those by the FHA and the newly created U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, went to whites.

The private sector also conspired against Blacks. Real estate agents and banks developed a scheme that became known as redlining, a term that referred to boundaries on a map within which Blacks were segregated. No loans were approved to whites wanting to buy homes in Black areas and Blacks were shown homes only in the slums. Banks charged higher interest rates to Blacks, believing they were a higher risk due to lack of work history and savings.

In addition, developers of suburban residential subdivisions built after World War II established restrictive covenants that banned Blacks, Jews, and Catholics. Their reasoning was that if Blacks moved into a development, whites would not.

Richard Rothstein - author of the book The Color of Law, which looks at how government policies encouraged racial segregation - said at a recent online panel discussion that military veterans of World War II, with government help, paid about $8,000 for these new suburban homes. That equals about $100,000 in today's dollars.

Nowadays, those same houses are worth up to $500,000. Increasing home values is typically how middle-class families accumulate wealth, but Blacks were left out of this equation.

Professor Tom Sutton at Baldwin Wallace University "When people mention institutional racism, this is what they're talking about," Sutton says. "It's so deeply embedded, people didn't realize it was happening, especially if they didn't live near Blacks. And it's been going on for generations."

Urban renewal, meant to address urban blight in the 1950s and 1960s, also backfired. More than 100,000 substandard living units were torn down across the country, but only 28,000 new units were built to replace them.

Dunn says that under urban renewal, more land was cleared in Cleveland - about 6,000 acres in seven neighborhoods - than in any other city. Displaced Blacks with nowhere else to go moved into the Central, Hough, and Fairfax neighborhoods, which became even more overcrowded.
Employment, education and health
Dunn says Blacks were confined to menial jobs when they first migrated north. Often, because they were the last hired, they were the first fired. The trades in general discriminated against them when it came to hiring.

Eventually Blacks landed jobs in factories and over time managed to join labor unions, Sutton says, which helped some climb into the middle class. But many of those jobs disappeared in the 1970s. Today's industrial jobs are in Cleveland's outer-ring suburbs, and many inner-city Blacks have no transportation to get them there.

So, families left behind in poor neighborhoods ended up in a cycle of unemployment over generations.

"You are concentrating impoverished people in housing developments and they aren't exposed to middle-class working people," Dunn says. "So you have internal culture where young people aren't seeing Mrs. Jones getting up and going to work."

There were occasional successes. In 1935, the Future Outlook League formed in the Central neighborhood to help Blacks obtain jobs. The group encouraged white business owners to hire Blacks and even boycotted businesses that didn't. Dunn said the group forced the old Ohio Bell telephone company to hire its first Black operator.

But lack of employment opportunities, poverty, and overcrowded living conditions have meant poor health for urban Black families. They eat what they can afford, which isn't always the healthiest foods, and that leads to chronic medical conditions like diabetes and hypertension.

Rothstein says Black children today suffer from asthma at four times the rate of other children due to their polluted environments. If they're sick, they can't learn well in school, and the cycle of poverty continues.
Searching for solutions
In some ways, Ohio has been progressive on civil rights issues. In 1959, the state passed its own civil rights act, which created the Ohio Civil Rights Commission to investigate discriminatory acts. In 1965, the legislature passed a fair housing act - three years before Congress did the same - that prohibits housing discrimination.

These laws helped some Black families relocate to the suburbs, and some communities, like Cleveland Heights, have embraced integration and diversity. In other suburbs, though, like East Cleveland, when Black started moving in, whites left. Dunn says East Cleveland today is one of the five poorest cities in the United States.

Meanwhile, redlining, although widely condemned publicly, is still taking place and helping to divide America in more ways than one.

"If so many Blacks and whites live so far away from each other, how can we understand each other?" Rothstein said at the panel discussion.

Dunn says new policies are needed to stop housing segregation once and for all. For example, landlords shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against lower-income families receiving government assistance for housing.

On the employment front, Sutton says more needs to be spent on public transportation so that urban Blacks can reach jobs in the suburbs. The number of workforce development and training programs also must increase to prepare them for those jobs.

Rothstein says that to increase wealth among Blacks, the federal government should buy quality homes at market rates and sell them to Black families at prices they can afford - like the $100,000 their grandparents would have paid, in today dollars, if they had been awarded federally backed mortgages like whites after World War II.

As for education, Dunn favors county-wide school systems where resources can be more equally distributed. Families would have more choice in schools.

Rothstein has called for a new civil rights movement to move things off square one. He's now working with civil rights leaders across the county to form a national committee that he hopes will launch early in 2021. The committee would help nurture local civil rights groups.

Dunn says that's fine but he's hesitant to call it a "new" civil rights movement. He said the fight for civil rights has never stopped, although there have been lulls.

"Blacks have always been engaged in the struggle for equal rights," Dunn says. "Throughout history there has been progress, then backlash, and the movement hasn't been sustained. We need a re-concerted effort."

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Systemic racism is embedded in our society due to past issues that led to present problems

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In a landmark 1997 case, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that the state's method of funding school districts violated the Ohio Constitution. The ruling fueled outrage at the time and remains controversial today. The court said the funding system, which relies largely on property taxes, failed to provide education that was equal in quality in all school districts.

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1910-1920: The African American population of Cleveland grows by more than 300%. Black Clevelanders looked to move into historically White neighborhoods. White Clevelanders preferred to maintain "Purity" in their neighborhoods. This led to increased violence. 

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1910-1920: The African American population of Cleveland grows by more than 300%. Black Clevelanders looked to move into historically White neighborhoods. White Clevelanders preferred to maintain "Purity" in their neighborhoods. This led to increased violence. 

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Black Clevelanders looked to move into historically White neighborhoods. White Clevelanders preferred to maintain "Purity" in their neighborhoods. This led to increased violence.

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Encyclopedia of Cleveland History | Case Western Reserve University

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ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS. In 1930 James C. Jones, the manager of a REAL ESTATE office in Cleveland, wrote to a representative of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., regarding the ALTA HOUSE property that Rockefeller owned in LITTLE ITALY. "The entire neighborhood is 100% Italian," he wrote, but he questioned how long it would remain so. "If there is ever a break in the population, I am inclined to believe it will be taken over by colored people," he concluded. That Little Italy remains a vibrant Italian neighborhood more than 6 decades later would surprise Jones, but it serves to illustrate the remarkable persistence of ethnic loyalties, the limited success and the nuances of ethnic assimilation, and the ability of the community to maintain its ethnic "purity" in the face of sometimes violent ethnic and racial competition for space and resources in a crowded urban environment.

The pattern of the settlement of Cleveland in its early years established the dominion of white, English-speaking, Protestant Anglo-Americans over the social, economic, political, and cultural life of Cleveland. By virtue of being the first to settle and develop the land and prosper from its resources, these migrants from New England and New York and the early immigrants from England, Scotland, the Isle of Man, and Wales were able to establish the social norms to which they thought all subsequent arrivals would have to relate. But later ethnic immigrants had their own ideas about what that relationship should be, and they insisted upon retaining as much as possible of their own language and culture. The early Irish, German, and Czech immigrants established a pattern that later ethnic arrivals would follow. They developed their own self-segregated nationality parishes, schools, neighborhoods, mutual benefit societies, fraternal clubs, cultural organizations, and social welfare institutions, such as orphanages and old age homes. For individual immigrants, these institutions constituted a comfortable network of familiar associations that helped ease the transition that the 1915 Immigration Bureau report described as "simple folks coming from their farming communities of Europe into the very vortex of our modern industrial life in a large city."

As the number of foreign-born immigrants in the FOREST CITY swelled, Cleveland's Anglo-Americans sought ways to exert their control over the assimilation and Americanization of an increasingly diverse foreign population, whose alien cultures and religions they feared would ruin their city in particular and their country in general. As tools of social control they turned first to the public schools and to a host of voluntary moral reform organizations and quasi-public social welfare institutions; but as needs increased, they supplemented these private agencies with municipally financed institutions, like the Immigration Bureau, to protect and assist new arrivals. They also turned to political reform as a means of centralizing municipal power and limiting the power of the ethnic vote.

Between the 1850s and 1930, a constant, shifting struggle emerged as the city's Anglo-American middle- and upper-classes struggled to enforce and maintain moral and social discipline in a city populated by growing numbers of European immigrants, many of whom were Catholics and Jews. Religion and ethnicity were thus tied together, and anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism were important aspects of nativism in Cleveland and the rest of America. For example, EDWIN W. COWLES, Cleveland's most notorious anti-Catholic during the last half of the 19th century, railed against both the church and the drunken Irish from his position as editor of the CLEVELAND LEADER. In addition to the external pressures brought to bear from Anglo-American assimilation efforts, tensions within and between ethnic groups intensified as communities developed and as older immigrants sought to influence the behavior and facilitate the assimilation of more recent arrivals.

Education was the first tool that Anglo-Americans used to try to inculcate the habits of "proper" behavior and good citizenship. In 1870, for example, bilingual education was adopted in the public schools in the hopes that offering some classes in German would attract into the schools the 2,000 German students who attended private schools. This policy, the superintendent explained, did "not tend to Germanize America as it [did] to Americanize the Germans." Within a decade, the number of German children attending private schools had dropped to 200. By 1887 the evening adult education program was attracting 2,000 immigrants to its classes in English and in civics in preparation for the naturalization exam. Public school programs for both immigrant children and adults were expanded repeatedly between 1870 and 1920, but the number of parochial schools also increased, making it possible for large numbers of ethnic students to escape the Americanizing influence of the public schools. The development of settlement houses such as HIRAM HOUSE provided new avenues for Americanization and educational efforts, as well as for other urban social reform work.

In addition to education, religion became another important tool in the Anglo-American Protestant campaign for social discipline. Protestant churches began to establish their own missions in ethnic neighborhoods, hiring a minister to conduct church services in the language familiar to the neighborhood's residents. By 1926 Cleveland was home to 19 such missions, 5 of which catered to Hungarian immigrants, 4 to ITALIANS, 2 for CZECHS, and individual missions serving POLES, RUMANIANS, Yugoslavs, and RUSSIANS. Other Protestants argued that ministering to the spiritual needs of immigrants was not enough and that the church should deal with secular needs as well. Full-service institutional churches, such as PILGRIM CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, which became an institutional church in 1894, and Broadway Methodist Episcopal Church, founded as a mission in 1872 and transformed into an institutional church in 1918, offered coeducational classes, sponsored social clubs, and provided facilities for a variety of recreational activities.

Even in the settlement houses and similar organizations where the desire to help immigrants adjust to their new environment, well-meaning social workers could not escape their own prejudices and cultural biases. The head worker at Alta House was dismissed in 1902, with much reluctance by members of the board, after some disparaging remarks she made in a letter to a colleague in Chicago were made public and offended many residents of the neighborhood. As late as Dec. 1941, a club worker's reports on meetings of one ethnic women's group at the YWCA's Intl. Institute contain pointed comments about the members' poor behavior: the "girls" (all of whom were older than 21) were "quite lacking" in "personal manners," which the club worker attributed "to the general behavior pattern of their own particular nationality group."

In addition to tensions with Anglo-American Protestant society, Cleveland's ethnic groups sometimes were at odds with one another. Old World political and cultural antagonisms sometimes flared up in the New World. For example, Old World tensions between Poles and Ukrainians from Galicia resurfaced in Cleveland when the latter, believing that the Poles had dominated the Galician government and had deprived Ukrainians of economic opportunities, refused to live in Polish neighborhoods. A plan by the Magyar community to erect a statue in PUBLIC SQUARE to honor the Hungarian patriot Louis Kossuth (see KOSSUTH MONUMENT and LOUIS KOSSUTH'S VISIT) was opposed by members of the Slovak community, who viewed the nationalist hero as insensitive toward other ethnic groups in Hungary; the statue was erected in 1902, not in the city's symbolic center, but at its outer edge in UNIV. CIRCLE. This was not the first sign of trouble between these two groups. In 1890 tensions between Magyars and Slovaks in ST. LADISLAUS CHURCH prompted the Magyars to withdraw and form their own church.

A recurring issue in the history of the Catholic church in Cleveland was the degree to which the church would accommodate its ethnic members by providing ethnic priests and offering services in their native languages. Cleveland's first bishop, LOUIS AMADEUS RAPPE, favored prompt Americanization of immigrants and refused to establish ethnic parishes. His refusal prompted first the Germans and then the Irish to complain to Rome, and Rappe was forced to acquiesce in the development of nationality parishes led by ethnic priests such as STEPHAN FURDEK, who served both Slovak and Czech parishes and established several important Slovak institutions in Cleveland. By 1908 34 of Cleveland's 65 Catholic parishes were considered nationality parishes rather than territorial ones. Infighting between Germans and the Irish continued to be a problem for the church, however, as did other ethnic tensions, such as the creation in 1913 of a Cleveland parish of the POLISH NATIONAL CATHOLIC CHURCH. The evolution of Judaism in Cleveland reflected a similar ethnic tension between established German Jews and later arrivals from Eastern Europe, who were more orthodox in their religious practices. The resulting debate between the adherents of reformed, orthodox, and conservative religious practices echoed the controversy in the Catholic Church about the preservation of a unique identity in a new land.

By 1920 the Americanization efforts of the public schools, settlement houses, and other agencies and institutions had the paradoxical effect of bringing a great many Anglo-Americans into closer contact with ethnic cultures. The result was a sharing of cultures that over the next several decades spawned efforts to promote cultural pluralism and to celebrate and preserve ethnic folk cultures. The leaders of these efforts sought to educate the public about Cleveland's various ethnic communities as a means of fostering greater tolerance and understanding. These pluralist educational efforts included ELEANOR LEDBETTER's publications on the Yugoslav, Slovak, and Czech communities in Cleveland (1918-19); the development of various ethnic cultural gardens by the CLEVELAND CULTURAL GARDEN FEDERATION, beginning with the Hebrew garden in 1926; the annual folk arts festival sponsored by the CLEVELAND FOLK ARTS ASSN., starting in 1950; and the initiation of the annual All Nations Festival in 1962 by the Nationalities Services Center (see INTL. SERVICES CENTER). Thus, after World War I the Anglo-American approach toward the various ethnic groups changed from one of suspicious attempts at control and assimilation to one of assistance, acknowledgement, and celebration. This shift reflected the growth and maturation of the ethnic communities, the relative success of assimilation efforts, the proven loyalty of the ethnics through their contribution to the war efforts, and the increasing political power of the ethnic communities.

For many of the Eastern European ethnic groups that had settled in Cleveland between 1880 and 1920, the period between 1920 and 1950 was a time of growth and stability for their communities. The pattern of ethnic community development and self-help that they had followed became the model through which most whites came to view the ethnic experience and, perhaps more significantly, the standard by which they measured and judged the development of the African American community (see AFRICAN AMERICANS) in Cleveland. But the white ethnic model failed to take into account significant differences between the white ethnic immigrant experience and the plight of African American newcomers from the South. Prejudice and discrimination toward blacks ran deeper and was more pervasive than anti-ethnic sentiment, adversely affecting the economic, housing, and educational opportunities available to blacks. The economic consequences of discrimination made it impossible for African Americans to accumulate the resources for community development on a par with the white ethnic communities.

Assimilation was a goal that Anglo-Americans desired for white ethnic immigrants, but it was not a goal that it pursued with African Americans. While relations between Anglo-Americans and white ethnic groups gradually improved, race relations between blacks and whites worsened considerably during the 20th century before they began to improve. Students of the African American experience in Cleveland note that throughout much of the city's history, Cleveland has offered its black residents as liberal an environment as could be found in America, but the comparative aspect of that assessment leaves room for many inequities. Kenneth Kusmer has noted the substantial economic opportunities available to blacks and the relative absence of racial segregation and discrimination in Cleveland during the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s. But between 1870 and 1915, increasing job discrimination meant that blacks could not advance up the economic ladder into the emerging middle class, while housing discrimination through "whites only" sellers' policies and restrictive covenants made it difficult to move out of the Central Ave. district. Black residential patterns were thus circumscribed in ways that those of whites were not. At the same time, Cleveland's racial egalitarianism was beginning to weaken with the rise of new scientific theories about racial differences; this scientific racism helped lead to heightened discrimination and increased segregation in theaters, restaurants, and recreational facilities. Race prejudice in Cleveland increased considerably after 1915, a trend evident in the tone of newspaper articles; in the rhetoric of white politicians who fanned the flames of hatred; in the showing of racist films such as Birth of a Nation; and in the hiring policies of the police department and in the administration of the public schools. By 1915, for example, both EUCLID BEACH PARK and LUNA PARK were open to blacks only on designated days.

Increased discrimination and segregation was partly an indication of the fear aroused among whites by the Great Migration of blacks from the South. Between 1910 and 1920, Cleveland's black population increased by more than 300%. This vast increase led to a housing crisis for Cleveland's blacks, who found available housing to be both scarce and expensive. The housing crisis strained race relations as blacks turned to white neighborhoods in search of housing; but whites sought to maintain the "purity" of their neighborhoods through mutual understandings, restrictive clauses, and, increasingly during the 1910s and 1920s, violence. As Kusmer notes, "the staunch resistance of certain urban ethnic groups" was an "important factor in containing and channeling the black population."

Both nationally and in Cleveland, African Americans disagreed over how to respond to these new circumstances. An older elite group of conservative blacks, who had both business and social ties to the white community, generally favored continuation of integrationist efforts; but a younger group of businessmen and politicians who drew their income and support from the black community tended to favor the self-help approach and eschewed activism on behalf of equal rights. JANE EDNA HUNTER's plan to develop the PHILLIS WHEATLEY ASSN. to serve as a black YWCA in Cleveland was the subject of a major struggle between those who favored pursuing integration and those who understood the benefits of self-segregated institutions when integration had been denied. A new era of black leadership by the "New Negroes" emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, composed of men and women who favored both racial pride and solidarity, while at the same time working on behalf of equal rights. Working largely through the NAACP (see NATIONAL ASSN. FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE), these leaders strengthened existing black organizations, worked behind the scenes and in the courts to end discriminatory policies and practices, and took a more active role in local politics. The growing power of blacks at the ballot box during the 1930s and 1940s transformed politics into a new battleground in race and ethnic relations. The continuing increase in the black population raised in the minds of some whites the specter of a black political takeover of the city; such fears provided some of the motivation for the regional government proposals put forward and defeated in the 1950s.

By the 1950s, a remarkably self-conscious racism had taken hold in Cleveland. Various white leaders acknowledged in private that they knew that race prejudice and discrimination were wrong and would have to change, but they attributed their own persistence in discriminatory practices to their own cultural upbringing, to personal preferences, and to the unproven "fact" that their customers or the general public would not stand for integration and social equality. Another common rationalization was that African Americans somehow were still undeserving of equal treatment, often bolstered with anecdotes intended to illustrate how the black community, in demanding equal treatment through the NAACP, the Urban League (see URBAN LEAGUE OF GREATER CLEVELAND), or the FUTURE OUTLOOK LEAGUE, had not yet measured up to the self-help standards established by white ethnic communities. Instead, such comments reflected the prejudices of the speakers and their lack of knowledge about individuals and institutions in the African American community, especially those which worked steadily and quietly behind the scenes, like the black churches. This lack of awareness and understanding of the black community had disastrous consequences during the 1960s when overcrowded schools, inequities in housing, and job discrimination became the major issues prompting the formation of a local civil rights organization, the UNITED FREEDOM MOVEMENT, and when riots rocked HOUGH in 1966 and GLENVILLE in 1968.

The election of Carl Stokes (see MAYORAL ADMINISTRATION OF CARL B. STOKES) in 1967 as Cleveland's first African American mayor was a major triumph for the black community, and, with 20% of the white voters willing to give him their endorsement, it marked a watershed in race relations as well. In some ways it was the culmination of the local white liberal response to the concerns expressed by the civil rights movement. A variety of organizations, including the LOMOND ASSN., the LUDLOW COMMUNITY ASSN., Fair Housing, Inc., and PATH were created mostly by liberal whites to work on housing issues; PACE coordinated efforts to improve the public schools. Improvements were painfully slow in housing, prompting the CUYAHOGA COUNTY REGIONAL PLANNING COMMISSION (RPC) of Ohio to label Cleveland "the second most segregated area in the nation" in the 1980s. The lack of progress in the schools prompted the NAACP to file suit in 1973 against the Cleveland Board of Education, which was convicted of segregating black students within the schools and ordered to use busing as a means toward integration.

The demands and protests of the civil rights movement, the HOUGH RIOTS, and the GLENVILLE SHOOTOUT, and many policies and actions of the Stokes administration angered many white Clevelanders, although others supported the movement for racial equality. Racial animosities ran high during this time, especially between blacks and white ethnics, many of whom viewed civil rights demands as direct threats to their neighborhoods and their well-being; some responded by joining the exodus to the suburbs, others by electing an ethnic mayor, Ralph Perk (see MAYORAL ADMINISTRATION OF RALPH J. PERK), to succeed Stokes in 1971. Paradoxically, the civil rights movement, by focusing on the issues of racial identity, cultural pride, and self-determination, helped to inspire and provoke the "new ethnicity" of the 1970s, in which white ethnics took a renewed interest in their backgrounds and neighborhoods. The attempt to renovate SLAVIC VILLAGE in the late 1970s and 1980s was one example of this new ethnic consciousness at work in Cleveland.

Ethnic and race relations in Cleveland over the last 200 years reflect both change and continuity. Over time, the major groups in Cleveland have become increasingly tolerant of one another, a result of the passage of time, of the work of activists since the 1910s to create a more tolerant, pluralistic atmosphere, and of the rise since 1945 of the black middle class. Cleveland now celebrates and markets its ethnic and racial diversity, yet ethnocentrism, traditional loyalties, and old antagonisms persist. New ethnic rivals (or scapegoats) are never difficult to find, it seems. Prejudice, suspicion, and fear remain powerful human emotions, and in ethnic and race relations these emotions ebb and flow with the arrival of substantial numbers of new immigrants; as changes in the economy give rise to concerns about employment opportunities and wage and income levels; and in response to particular local events, developments in the old homeland, and the perception of new foreign enemies.

Kenneth W. Rose

Rockefeller Archive Center

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ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS | Encyclopedia of Cleveland History | Case Western Reserve University

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ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS. In 1930 James C. Jones, the manager of a REAL ESTATE office in Cleveland, wrote to a representative of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., regarding the ALTA HOUSE property that Rockefeller owned in LITTLE ITALY. "The entire neighborhood is 100% Italian," he wrote, but he questioned how long it would remain so.

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1959: Ohio passes its own civil rights act, which created the Ohio Civil Rights Commission. Their role was to investigate discriminatory acts. 

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1959: Ohio passes its own civil rights act, which created the Ohio Civil Rights Commission. Their role was to investigate discriminatory acts. 

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Additional Info in Searching for Solutions section

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In a landmark 1997 case, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that the state's method of funding school districts violated the Ohio Constitution. The ruling fueled outrage at the time and remains controversial today.

The court said the funding system, which relies largely on property taxes, failed to provide education that was equal in quality in all school districts. In poorer rural and urban areas, property was valued less than in suburban districts, which meant less property tax dollars for students. State subsidies weren't enough to make up the deficit.

The justices, in a 4-3 vote, ordered the Ohio General Assembly to make the school funding system more equitable. Politicians and newspapers howled in protest, saying the court had crossed the line into legislating. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court issued the same ruling three more times over the past 20 years.

The legislature did little until Dec. 3, when the Ohio House of Representatives, in an 84-8 vote, passed House Bill 305. Supporters said the bill would ensure adequate funding for all students, regardless of where they lived. Among other things, it would end the overreliance on property taxes and consider median income, as well as property value, when calculating state funding to school districts. Thus districts with high property values but lower median incomes would receive more state money than under the current system, and they potentially wouldn't have to ask voters for property tax hikes as often.

However, the Ohio Senate was lukewarm toward the bill. Senators said the legislation needed more vetting and debating, so they would likely not act on it this year. If the Senate doesn't vote on the bill in 2020, it will die, and legislators will have to start over next year.

The sinking status of HB 305 is another disappointment for Ohio's Black citizens, many of whom live in struggling urban school districts. That's because education is tied to so many other issues, including employment, housing, and access to healthcare. Without a good education, it's harder to climb into the middle class.

"It's critically important to address the legacy and history of under-resourced schools in urban areas," says Ronnie Dunn, associate professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University and the college's interim chief diversity and inclusion officer. "Although many Blacks have moved out of the urban core and into suburban districts, you still have a concentration of minorities and Blacks in the inner city."

Students in the inner city don't have access to digital tools that have become especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic as children study at home. Dunn says 25% of Cleveland households aren't connected to the internet.

"It's been long enough," Dunn says of Ohio's school funding system and the lack of success in changing it. "How long do you keep delaying? Kids are suffering as a result."

Over the decades, Ohio has seen fits and starts in the drive for racial equality in education, housing, employment, and healthcare.

"We're getting better, but we still have a long way to go," says Tom Sutton, professor of political science at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea and director of the university's Community Research Institute.
The Black Code
Ohio declared itself a non-slave state when founded in 1803, although not entirely for charitable reasons.

"Ohio settlers didn't want an economy based on slavery because they thought it would cripple the economy and make people lazy," Sutton says. "They would be dependent on slave labor instead of their own initiative."

Still, the state established a Black Code, or series of laws that, for example, required Blacks moving into Ohio to post a $500 bond as an insurance policy. Black residents weren't allowed to vote, testify in court against whites, or serve in public office or the militia. They were banned from public schools until 1848.

An 1851 revision to the Ohio Constitution gave Blacks the vote and eliminated the bond requirement, and by then Ohioans were supporting the abolishment of slavery and setting up Underground Railroad stops.

After the Civil War - when Jim Crow laws that marginalized Blacks popped up all over the South and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated facilities and institutions were acceptable as long as they were "equal" - freed Blacks working as sharecroppers in the South started moving north in search of better jobs. Dunn says that 6 million Blacks migrated north between 1910-1970, settling in cities like Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus.

Black families had little when they arrived, so they lived in slums like Cleveland's Central neighborhood, just east of downtown. Immigrants from overseas also moved into poor neighborhoods but, because institutions like the Catholic Church provided them a decent education, immigrant families entered the middle class within one or two generations.

Black citizens had no such help, and it was hard for them to fit in, Sutton says, because they didn't look like everyone else.

"American society would not accept the assimilation of Blacks and we're still dealing with that today," Sutton says.
Housing traps
Some public policies meant to help American citizens ended up hurting Black families.

Public housing was introduced in the 1930s as part of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, a series of laws meant to lift the country out of the Great Depression. The idea was to clear out slums and build new, safer housing. At the time, private-sector home construction was lacking due to the economic downturn.

Cleveland was the first city to receive public housing, which the federal government intended to be desegregated. However, local officials had other ideas. Blacks were grouped into the new Outhwaite Estates in the Central district where they were already living. Whites were assigned to Cedar Apartments and Lakeview Terrace. Federal officials, anxious just to get the housing built, didn't fight the segregated arrangement.

Meanwhile, the Federal Housing Administration was created to help citizens afford homes by backing mortgages given by FHA-approved lenders. The problem was that between 1934-1968, 98% of all federally backed home loans, including those by the FHA and the newly created U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, went to whites.

The private sector also conspired against Blacks. Real estate agents and banks developed a scheme that became known as redlining, a term that referred to boundaries on a map within which Blacks were segregated. No loans were approved to whites wanting to buy homes in Black areas and Blacks were shown homes only in the slums. Banks charged higher interest rates to Blacks, believing they were a higher risk due to lack of work history and savings.

In addition, developers of suburban residential subdivisions built after World War II established restrictive covenants that banned Blacks, Jews, and Catholics. Their reasoning was that if Blacks moved into a development, whites would not.

Richard Rothstein - author of the book The Color of Law, which looks at how government policies encouraged racial segregation - said at a recent online panel discussion that military veterans of World War II, with government help, paid about $8,000 for these new suburban homes. That equals about $100,000 in today's dollars.

Nowadays, those same houses are worth up to $500,000. Increasing home values is typically how middle-class families accumulate wealth, but Blacks were left out of this equation.

Professor Tom Sutton at Baldwin Wallace University "When people mention institutional racism, this is what they're talking about," Sutton says. "It's so deeply embedded, people didn't realize it was happening, especially if they didn't live near Blacks. And it's been going on for generations."

Urban renewal, meant to address urban blight in the 1950s and 1960s, also backfired. More than 100,000 substandard living units were torn down across the country, but only 28,000 new units were built to replace them.

Dunn says that under urban renewal, more land was cleared in Cleveland - about 6,000 acres in seven neighborhoods - than in any other city. Displaced Blacks with nowhere else to go moved into the Central, Hough, and Fairfax neighborhoods, which became even more overcrowded.
Employment, education and health
Dunn says Blacks were confined to menial jobs when they first migrated north. Often, because they were the last hired, they were the first fired. The trades in general discriminated against them when it came to hiring.

Eventually Blacks landed jobs in factories and over time managed to join labor unions, Sutton says, which helped some climb into the middle class. But many of those jobs disappeared in the 1970s. Today's industrial jobs are in Cleveland's outer-ring suburbs, and many inner-city Blacks have no transportation to get them there.

So, families left behind in poor neighborhoods ended up in a cycle of unemployment over generations.

"You are concentrating impoverished people in housing developments and they aren't exposed to middle-class working people," Dunn says. "So you have internal culture where young people aren't seeing Mrs. Jones getting up and going to work."

There were occasional successes. In 1935, the Future Outlook League formed in the Central neighborhood to help Blacks obtain jobs. The group encouraged white business owners to hire Blacks and even boycotted businesses that didn't. Dunn said the group forced the old Ohio Bell telephone company to hire its first Black operator.

But lack of employment opportunities, poverty, and overcrowded living conditions have meant poor health for urban Black families. They eat what they can afford, which isn't always the healthiest foods, and that leads to chronic medical conditions like diabetes and hypertension.

Rothstein says Black children today suffer from asthma at four times the rate of other children due to their polluted environments. If they're sick, they can't learn well in school, and the cycle of poverty continues.
Searching for solutions
In some ways, Ohio has been progressive on civil rights issues. In 1959, the state passed its own civil rights act, which created the Ohio Civil Rights Commission to investigate discriminatory acts. In 1965, the legislature passed a fair housing act - three years before Congress did the same - that prohibits housing discrimination.

These laws helped some Black families relocate to the suburbs, and some communities, like Cleveland Heights, have embraced integration and diversity. In other suburbs, though, like East Cleveland, when Black started moving in, whites left. Dunn says East Cleveland today is one of the five poorest cities in the United States.

Meanwhile, redlining, although widely condemned publicly, is still taking place and helping to divide America in more ways than one.

"If so many Blacks and whites live so far away from each other, how can we understand each other?" Rothstein said at the panel discussion.

Dunn says new policies are needed to stop housing segregation once and for all. For example, landlords shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against lower-income families receiving government assistance for housing.

On the employment front, Sutton says more needs to be spent on public transportation so that urban Blacks can reach jobs in the suburbs. The number of workforce development and training programs also must increase to prepare them for those jobs.

Rothstein says that to increase wealth among Blacks, the federal government should buy quality homes at market rates and sell them to Black families at prices they can afford - like the $100,000 their grandparents would have paid, in today dollars, if they had been awarded federally backed mortgages like whites after World War II.

As for education, Dunn favors county-wide school systems where resources can be more equally distributed. Families would have more choice in schools.

Rothstein has called for a new civil rights movement to move things off square one. He's now working with civil rights leaders across the county to form a national committee that he hopes will launch early in 2021. The committee would help nurture local civil rights groups.

Dunn says that's fine but he's hesitant to call it a "new" civil rights movement. He said the fight for civil rights has never stopped, although there have been lulls.

"Blacks have always been engaged in the struggle for equal rights," Dunn says. "Throughout history there has been progress, then backlash, and the movement hasn't been sustained. We need a re-concerted effort."

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Systemic racism is embedded in our society due to past issues that led to present problems

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In a landmark 1997 case, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that the state's method of funding school districts violated the Ohio Constitution. The ruling fueled outrage at the time and remains controversial today. The court said the funding system, which relies largely on property taxes, failed to provide education that was equal in quality in all school districts.

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Overtly Racist actions by White Business owners led to 6 days of rioting in the predominantly African American community of Hough, in Cleveland.

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Hough riots

Part of Ghetto riots

Date

July 18-23, 1966

Location

41°30′33″N 81°38′05″W ﻿ / ﻿ 41.5092°N 81.6346°W

Caused by

Racial tension, poverty, racial segregation

Methods

Widespread gunfire, rioting, looting, assault, arson, protests, property damage, murder

Several hundred to more than a thousand

2,100 policemen
1,700 Ohio National Guardsmen

Death(s)

4

Injuries

50

Arrested

approx. 275

The Hough riots were riots in the predominantly African-American community of Hough (pronounced "Huff") in Cleveland, Ohio, United States which took place from July 18 to 23, 1966. During the riots, four African Americans were killed and 50 people were injured. There were 275 arrests and numerous incidents of arson and firebombings. City officials at first blamed black nationalist and communist organizations for the riots, but historians generally dismiss these claims today, arguing that the cause of the Hough Riots were primarily poverty and racism. The riots caused rapid population loss and economic decline in the area, which lasted at least five decades after the riots.

During the 1950s, middle-class whites largely left the neighborhood of Hough in Cleveland, Ohio, and working-class African Americans moved in. By 1966, more than 66,000 people, nearly 90 percent of them African American, lived in Hough. Most businesses in the area remained white-owned, however. Residents of the Hough neighborhood complained extensively of inferior and racially segregated public schools, poor delivery of welfare benefits, a lack of routine garbage collection, no street cleaning, and too few housing inspections. Recreational facilities in Hough were nonexistent except for minimal equipment at a few school playgrounds. Hough was a relatively small area, but the population density in the neighborhood was one of the highest in Cleveland. Housing was often substandard in Hough, with a fifth of all housing units considered dilapidated and absentee landlords (most of them white) were common. The deindustrialization of Cleveland hit the African American community hard, and unemployment was over 17 percent. Median income for black residents was just 65 percent the median income of whites. Although Hough contained just 7.3 percent of Cleveland's population, it had more than 19 percent of its welfare cases. Single mothers (half of them teenagers) bore one-third of the children in Hough in 1966, and infant mortality was twice as high as the rest of the city. High unemployment and the rapid deterioration of the neighborhood created extensive racial tension in Hough. Although the city had engaged in some urban renewal housing projects in Hough, these had displaced more people than they housed and those displaced had received little to no help in finding new housing. Moreover, failed urban renewal to the east of Hough had displaced several thousand poor families, most of whom moved into Hough.

A racially segregated Cleveland Division of Police also led to interracial tension in the city. Twenty percent of Cleveland's major crimes were committed in Hough, even though it had just 7 percent of the city's population. Only 165 of Cleveland's 2,100 police officers were African American, the city routinely declined to promote black patrolmen, and the police had a reputation for exhibiting "crude racism" and ignoring the needs of the black community. The police were perceived as unwilling to enforce the law and slow to respond in black communities, and police harassment of African Americans was the norm. Subsequently, African Americans in Cleveland tended to strongly distrust the police. There had also been several incidents of brutality committed by the police in Cleveland in the last few years, which worsened the tension between the police and the city's African American citizens.

In 1963 and 1964, the United Freedom Movement, a coalition of African American civil rights groups, led a nine-month protest campaign against poor-quality, racially segregated schools and racial discrimination against blacks by labor unions. Cleveland Mayor Ralph S. Locher, who was white, dismissed these concerns. This was not unusual: The political culture of Cleveland had long been dominated by the mayor, city council, big business, the larger newspapers, and a few powerful white ethnicities. The city had a long history of ignoring social ills, while favoring low taxes and small government. African American protests in the past had been small and died out swiftly, and progress (what little there was of it) was generally achieved through traditional behind-the-scenes deal-making. The school protests were Cleveland's first large, lengthy racial protests, and the failure to achieve significant progress taught the black community that negotiation and legal action produced only limited results. Although 10 of the city council's 22 members were African American, black council members were seen as too conservative and out of touch with the vast majority of Cleveland's African Americans.

Throughout the first half of 1966, there had been a large number of incidents (such as roving gangs of youth, and rock throwing) indicating unrest in the neighborhood. In April 1966, the United States Commission on Civil Rights held hearings in Cleveland, during which time it gathered extensive evidence about employment discrimination, police brutality, poor housing, ongoing school segregation, and racism in the community. Televised locally, "the hearings revealed that the city's racial powder keg was about to explode".

The Seventy-Niner's Café was a white-owned bar located on the southeast corner of E. 79th Street and Hough Avenue, and popular with African American residents of the community. Seventy-Niner's suffered from a number of problems, including drug dealing, the sale of stolen goods, and prostitution, and the owners had begun barring certain individuals from the establishment. Local sex workers Margaret Sullivan and her friend, Louise (an African American), were among those who had been banned. Sullivan died on July 16, leaving three young children. On July 17, Louise attempted to leave a box at the bar so patrons could donate money for the care of Sullivan's children. The owners refused to permit the collection. Louise returned about 5 PM on Monday, July 18. The owners argued with her, allegedly using defamatory and racist language, and she was thrown out. A short while later, another racially charged incident occurred, although the exact details are unclear. In one account, one of the bar owners denied water to an African American man who had entered the bar, and then posted a sign on the door which read "No Water for Niggers". In another account, an African American man purchased a bottle of liquor in the bar, and then requested a cup of ice. One of the owners denied his request, and then posted a sign on the door which read "No water for niggers". In a third account, an African American man entered the bar and asked for a glass of water. One of the owners denied his request and told a waitress that there was "no water for niggers". This co-owner then posted a sign on the door which read "No Ice Water". In an interview with The Plain Dealer newspaper, the Feigenbaums denied being present at the bar during the incident, and denied that one of their employees had denied a man water.

Allegedly, the Seventy-Niner's Café was robbed about an hour after the water incident. A crowd of angry African Americans, some bar patrons and some residents, gathered around the bar. The Feigenbaums said they received a report that their establishment had been robbed at about 8 PM, and arrived at the Seventy-Niner at 8:20 PM. They claimed that a crowd of about 300 people had already gathered outside the bar, and began throwing rocks at the windows once the owners had gone inside. Abe Feigenbaum then said he went outside with a .44 caliber Ruger Model 44 rifle in his hands, followed by his brother Dave armed with a pistol. The rock-throwing stopped, they said, but resumed when they went back inside. After four calls to the police for help went unanswered, the Feigenbaums called the fire department in desperation and fled the café. The crowd now attempted to burn down the bar, but the attempt failed. At 9:11 PM, the Cleveland Division of Fire arrived at the Seventy-Niner's Café. Worried fire officials notified the Cleveland police of the large crowd, and the police arrived at 9:30 PM.

About 8:30 PM, the crowd-which included youth, adults, and even senior citizens-began to move down Hough Avenue, looting stores and setting fires as it went. Firefighters responding to the Seventy-Niner's Café fire claimed they came under small arms fire. When the first contingent of 75 Cleveland Police finally arrived at 9:30 PM, the crowd began throwing rocks at them.

The Cleveland Division of Fire responded to the numerous small fires set by the rioters. Shots were fired at them, Molotov cocktails were tossed at them, and a mob of about 100 people seized control of a fire pumper, and the fire department withdrew its personnel from the area. Attacks on firefighters were so numerous, many considered resigning the next day. James Higginbotham, a lieutenant with the fire department, said "we're not hired to fight a guerrilla war and this is what this is".

During the day on July 19, Cleveland Mayor Locher and Police Chief Richard Wagner assured the public that they had the situation under control. Very early in the morning, Locher toured the area and then later conferred with white and black city leaders. Locher initially resisted pleas to send in the Ohio Army National Guard, but Cleveland City Council members John W. Kellogg and Edward F. Katalinas both pressured him to do so. At 3:30 PM, Locher asked Governor James A. Rhodes to send in 1,500 National Guardsmen. Governor Rhodes declared a state of emergency in Cleveland. At 5 PM, Locher announced the arrival of the National Guard was imminent, and ordered all bars and cafes in the Hough neighborhood closed. This marked the first time the Ohio National Guard had been mobilized to counter a racial incident.

Most African American residents of Cleveland believed Locher to be completely out of touch with the black community, and the rioting spread outside the Hough neighborhood on the night of July 19-20. Locher ordered the entire police force on duty for 12 hours, beginning at 7 PM. Violence began to erupt about 8:30 PM, when police arrested two men, a woman, and a child at E. 87th and Hough Avenue. A large crowd gathered and began jeering the police. Snipers on the rooftop of a nearby building exchanged fire with police, and the crowd dispersed. The National Guard, armed with M1 Garand rifles equipped with bayonets, did not arrive until nearly 11 PM. Only 275 Guardsmen made it to Cleveland on the evening of July 19, and 75 of these were stationed at the main point of violence at E. 79th and Hough Avenue, where a Cleveland Police mobile command post was once more established. Guardsmen began patrolling the neighborhood in Jeeps, with a Cleveland Police officer riding with them. In the early morning hours of July 20, more Guardsmen arrived in Cleveland and augmented these patrols. Gunfire directed at police was much less frequent than the night before, but bottle and rock throwing and looting was widespread and extensive. Most of the rioting ended about 1 AM again.

During the day on July 20, Mayor Locher spoke to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and asked for the federal government's assistance in rebuilding Hough after the riots. A group of African American clergy asked the President of the United States to declare Hough a disaster area, so that it would qualify for federal disaster relief personnel and funds.

In separate press conferences, both Locher and Cleveland Safety Director John N. McCormick said that "outsiders" were the cause of the riots. McCormick asserted that between 200 and 300 teenagers were being directed by adults, and he blamed black nationalist groups for the riots. Representatives of some of these groups, which were extensively active in Hough, denied encouraging the violence. United States Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach scoffed at McCormick's claims.

A group of local businessmen in the Central neighborhood of Cleveland, citing a few scattered incidents of vandalism, urgently pressed Mayor Locher to expand the National Guard's patrol area to include their neighborhood. Locher agreed, and expanded the patrol zone to 10 square miles (26 km ²) (centered on Hough). This expanded the patrol zone as far south as Woodland Avenue, with about 40 Guardsmen and police patrolling the Central neighborhood.

At dusk, Mayor Locher again ordered all bars in Hough to close.

By the morning of July 20, 1,700 National Guardsmen were in Cleveland, although only about 1,000 were actually on patrol duty. Rioting had continued during the day, with firebombing and vandalism occurring throughout Hough. Police uncovered a number of caches of Molotov cocktails, which were destroyed. Throughout the day and night, Cleveland firefighters continued to respond to blazes, although they moved in convoys and were protected by National Guardsmen armed with rifles and machine guns. Seven teenagers were arrested during daylight hours, six of them for looting.

Extensive rioting began again in Hough before dark. As night fell, a series of National Guard/police guardposts was established in Hough. When a large crowd gathered at Stephen E. Howe Elementary School (where clergyman Bruce Klunder had died in 1964 protesting against segregation in Cleveland schools), worried law enforcement officials stationed about 100 police and Guardsmen around the school and on its roof to prevent it from being burned down. Military vehicles were stationed at every other intersection along the entire 50-block length of Hough Avenue, and three Guardsmen were posted at every intersection on Hough Avenue between E. 55th and E. 105th Streets. Police and National Guard continued to patrol the riot zone on Jeeps on which .30 caliber machine guns were mounted. A police helicopter (which occasionally drew gunfire) was used to help identify where mobs formed and where extensive looting was occurring. Throughout the night, police and the firefighting personnel were harassed by hundreds of false alarms, which tended to disperse their forces and allow crowds to form and continue the rioting and looting. Police later said that most reports of gunfire were inaccurate, the result of people lighting firecrackers to distract police.

Rioting in Hough largely ended around midnight. By dawn on July 21, a total of 24 people had been injured in the Hough Riots. Police made a few more arrests during the night, primarily for looting, bringing the total number of arrestees to 150. Cleveland fire officials said they had responded to between 45 and 50 blazes during the two nights of rioting, which spread into the adjacent Glenville neighborhood, and a total of 10 buildings had been lost.

During the day on July 21, Hough was calm, with no incidents of gunfire, vandalism, or arson reported. Nine people arrested during the previous three days of rioting were charged with felonies, the first felony charges to be made during the event.

Many Cleveland-area officials and reporters spent much of July 21 blaming black nationalists and outsiders for fomenting and sustaining the riots. Doris O'Donnell, a reporter with The Plain Dealer, wrote that "A 'hate whitey' revolution, plotted and predicted for many months" by "a small band of extremists" was the real cause of the riots, and said the riots were implemented "as if by a diversionary enemy". She reported that the police, city hall, and unnamed federal agencies had extensive evidence that "points to certain groups and certain individuals as the suspected plotters" behind the riots. O'Donnell reported that black activists told her that certain businesses had been told to place a sign in the windows or on their front doors as a "signal not to fire bomb the place", and that agitators had worked up lists (one for businesses to be firebombed, one for business to be protected). Quoting unnamed black residents of Hough, she said that unnamed organizations had created a "ready-made army", which had drilled for months in use of firearms, burn-and-run tactics, and the manufacture and use of firebombs. O'Donnell placed the blame for the riots on welfare, which encouraged women to have large numbers of illegitimate children and allowed unemployed husbands to "sponge" off their welfare-supported wives. Police Chief Wagner declared that he saw a pattern in the making of false alarms which "indicate there was some form of organization behind them", and The Plain Dealer said unnamed police officers believed they saw a pattern in the false reports of arson or gunfire. Cleveland City Council President James V. Stanton said, "I definitely feel this was organized", and Bertram E. Gardner, executive director of the Cleveland Community Relations Board, claimed, "There's a fringe element in the streets, and they're fighting for control of the streets. They've got to be removed." Gardner demanded that the police significantly step up the numbers of arrests. Representative Michael A. Feighan, a Democrat who represented Cleveland's west side, said that he had evidence that the rioters "have had training in firearms and Molotov cocktails", and pledged to have the House Judiciary Committee hold hearings into the cause of the riots.

The shooting of citizens heightened racial tension in Hough on July 22. Cleveland City Councilman M. Morris Jackson, who represented Hough, had been pressing for the mayor to declare martial law in the area since the riots first began. In a front-page editorial on the morning of July 22, The Plain Dealer also demanded the imposition of martial law. Mayor Locher refused these requests. Mayor Locher also decided not to ask the governor for additional National Guard troops, saying that the riot situation had improved over the past two nights. He also declined to impose a curfew. During the afternoon of July 22, Major General Erwin C. Hostetler, Adjutant General of the Ohio Army National Guard, issued an order authorizing his troops to shoot looters and arsonists. Chief Wagner continued to claim that black nationalists were fomenting the riot, and specifically named the leaders of the JFK House, a privately run African American community center, for orchestrating the firebombing campaign. When pressed by the media, Wagner declined to say what evidence he had for the accusation. Wagner also claimed that firebombing "forays emanated" from JFK House, but declined to elaborate on his claim.

Racial tensions worsened on the night of July 22-23. Initially, the night was quieter than previous nights. The police and National Guard largely deployed toward the edge of the expanded patrol zone. Cleveland police made 72 arrests for public intoxication, which they said was about usual for a Friday night. There were far fewer fires set the night of July 22-23 (only 14), and only a few false alarms. Cleveland fire investigators determined that none of the fires had been caused by a firebomb, and no firefighters were harassed as they put out blazes.

The first trouble during the night began at 7:20 PM, when a jeering crowd of about 30 individuals gathered at E. 79th and Hough Avenue as the National Guard, bayonets fixed, told an African American man to move his car from the intersection. Another incident occurred at 10:30 PM, when Cleveland police arrested 15 juveniles and three adults in Glenville (on the border with the city of East Cleveland) for harassing a National Guard unit.

The situation deteriorated at about 3 AM, when 29-year-old African American Benoris Toney was shot in the head in the parking lot of the Dougherty Lumber Co. at 12100 Euclid Avenue. Toney had been traveling on Euclid when, according to police eyewitnesses, another vehicle began to parallel him. Toney pulled into the parking lot, where police had been stationed all night long, and the other vehicle followed him. The men in the second vehicle then shot Toney twice with a shotgun through the open window of Toney's automobile. The assailants' vehicle then sped away. The police gave chase and stopped it, arresting six white adults and teenagers. Another 100 Cleveland police and Guardsmen, as well as a Cleveland police helicopter, rushed to the scene. Police later released four of the suspects, but sought a third man who allegedly fled the vehicle. Toney died on the afternoon of July 23.

Shortly after the Toney killing, a crowd of about 125 white people gathered at the foot of Murray Hill in the Little Italy neighborhood on the far eastern border of Cleveland. This was the site of a riot in January 1964, and worried Cleveland police dispersed the crowd as swiftly as they could.

Another murder occurred at 4 AM, when 54-year-old African American Sam Winchester was shot corner of E. 116th and Regalia Avenue. As he lay dying in an ambulance, he claimed a white male shot at him from an automobile. Cleveland police, however, said they were unsure if Winchester's death was riot-related.

By dawn on July 23, a total of 10 people had been wounded by gunfire during the Hough Riots, bring to 40 the number of people injured by guns and hand-thrown missiles. Cleveland police made an additional 72 arrests during the night. The New York Times reported that "scores" of small fires had been set throughout the riot patrol zone area, but that only a handful of them had been large blazes. Contradicting the statement of The Plain Dealer, the Times reported that nearly all fires had been set by firebombs. Hysteria appeared to be driving the public perception of the riots, The New York Times said. It quoted unnamed National Guard sources who said that law enforcement had received hundreds of calls for help from individuals claiming to be besieged by mobs or firebombers. When the National Guard rushed to the scene, however, they found no arsonists, no crowds, no rioting, and no vandalism.

The New York Times claimed that the Cleveland Police Department appeared to be contributing to the riot. The National Guard was much more respectful toward citizens than the police, the newspaper claimed, noting that "police appeared to be adding to the problem by being chronic under-achievers in diplomacy".

The night of July 23-24 saw the rioting largely end. No roving gangs were seen in the expanded patrol zone area. The Cleveland Division of Fire responded to about five alarms an hour, and the number of fire alarms in the Hough area was actually below normal for an average night. Cleveland Safety Director McCormick announced on July 24 that he was surprised by the extent to which the rioting had died down overnight. Calm continued Sunday morning, and Cleveland was drenched with heavy rains on the afternoon of July 24 which kept most people indoors.

The total number of those killed in the riots was four, and the total number of injured was 50.

On July 26, the first 528 National Guard troops left Hough. The remainder withdrew to camps around the city. Withdrawals continued until the last 800 troops left on July 31.

Disputes over riot's causes

During the event as well as immediately after, some individuals asserted (in what one scholar has called the "official narrative") that the Hough Riots had been caused by black nationalists or communists. During the riots, Mayor Richard Locher, Police Chief Richard Wagner, Safety Director John N. McCormick, Cleveland City Council President James V. Stanton, and The Plain Dealer newspaper all claimed that, while the initial violence on the night of July 23 may have been spontaneous, the riot had long been planned by violent, black nationalist or communist organizations, and had been sustained by them for several days.

The "official narrative" was reinforced when Cleveland law enforcement officials formed a grand jury on July 25 to investigate the causes of the riot. The jury foreman was Louis B. Seltzer, an editor of the Cleveland Press who had retired early in 1966. On August 9, 1966, the grand jury issued its 17-page report, blaming the riots on black nationalists and communist organizations. The grand jury reported that "This jury finds that the outbreak of lawlessness and disorder was both organized, precipitated, and exploited by a relatively small group of trained and disciplined professionals of this business. They were aided and abetted willingly or otherwise by misguided people of all ages and colors, many of whom are avowed believers in violence and extremism, and some of whom are either members of, or officers in the Communist Party." At a press conference on July 26, Seltzer stated, "The grand jury saw enough to realize the violence was organized and planned because of specific targets singled out for burning and looting." The report strongly praised the Cleveland Police for their courage and restraint during the crisis. Although it issued no indictments, the grand jury specifically named Lewis G. Robinson, director of JFK House and organizer of the Medgar Evers Rifle Club; Harllel Jones, a city sewer department employee; and Albert D. Ware-Bey, a member of several clubs to which Robinson and Jones belonged. Chief Wagner said he was not surprised that no indictments were forthcoming, since Ohio lacked an anti-criminal syndicate law.

In addition to the focus on black nationalists and communist groups, the report listed a number of social ills which it said was the "uneasy backdrop" to the riots. The report also made several recommendations, including stronger enforcement of gambling, liquor, and prostitution laws; more frequent housing code inspections; improved garbage collection; and much greater and swifter efforts at urban renewal. The report also listed too-dense housing, substandard housing, overly high rents, a lack of neighborhood recreational facilities, excessive food prices, substandard educational facilities, a lack of jobs, welfare (which encouraged excessive pregnancies), and common-law marriage (which allowed men to escape their marital and child-rearing duties) as social evils which allowed frustration and bitterness to arise among African Americans. This, in turn (the report said), allowed communist and black nationalist groups to find support and foment riot. The grand jury report pointedly declined to discuss allegations of police brutality.

The grand jury report also called for new laws defining and providing for harsh penalties for incitement to riot, arson or attempted arson during a riot, and assault against a police officer or firefighter while engaged in official duties. The report also called for the state to redefine "riot" under the law, to make it easier for law enforcement to arrest rioters.

The grand jury report was embraced by city officials and local law enforcement. Mayor Locher praised the grand jury for "the guts to fix the approximate cause which has been hinted at for a long time, that subversive and Communist elements in our community were behind the rioting."

The "official narrative" also received support in other quarters. On June 22, during the riot, five members of a local W.E.B. Du Bois Club-including staff members Steve Shreefter and Mike Bayer-were riding in a car. Stopped by a National Guardsmen, posters were found in their vehicle which The Plain Dealer characterized as inflammatory. The United States Department of Justice had attempted to have the group declared a Communist front organization in March 1966 under the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950. In 1967, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a report characterizing the literature as "communist" In 1967, Phillip Abbott Luce, a former member of the Communist Party USA, asserted in his book Road to Revolution that the Communist Party played a significant role in causing and sustaining the Hough and other riots in the United States in the 1960s.

How could something like this happen here?

There was an obvious answer to this: Life in the ghetto seemed futile and hopeless. Couple that with the recently passed civil-rights legislation, which Washington heralded as historic, and the measure of expectation and frustration in America's black neighborhoods was at a peak. ... But the city's leadership was in denial. No one in the community could do this, they reasoned. There had to be outside conspirators or instigators. No group was more suspect than the Communists, and Cleveland, with its Middle European population for whom conspiracy was part of the culture, was easy to convince.

Surely, it was the work of the Red Menace or Black Nationalists, concluded City Hall and the police.

-Veteran reporter Michael D. Roberts discussing the cause of the Hough Riots

Arguments against the "official narrative" fell into two categories. The first was that there was no evidence for any black nationalist or communist involvement in the Hough Riots. For example, Maj. Gen. Erwin C. Hostetler, Ohio National Guard Adjutant General, criticized Seltzer's conclusions, saying, "There is absolutely nothing to substantiate his statement".

Another argument against the "official narrative" was that it was willfully blind to the problems which sparked the riots. Carl Stokes and many African American community leaders called the grand jury report a whitewash designed to insulate and absolve the Locher administration. In response to the 1966 grand jury report, leaders from the local chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National Association of Social Workers, National Council of Churches, Negro American Labor Council, and Urban League, in association with the Hough Area Council (a neighborhood improvement association), Hough Community Opportunity Board (the Hough neighborhood branch of the Council for Economic Opportunities in Greater Cleveland, a private nonprofit which served low-income people), the local Negro Pastors' Association, and the Wade Park Citizens' Association created the Citizens' Committee for Review of the Grand Jury Report. After holding several public hearings, during which extensive testimony about police brutality during the riot was heard, the panel released its own report on October 5, 1966. The citizens' committee report condemned the grand jury report as specious, and concluded that despair, police brutality, poverty, racism, and a city government heedless of the plight of African Americans caused the riots. The citizens' panel requested that the grand jury report be legally quashed; that fair housing legislation be adopted by the city; that the city immediately implement a 16-point urban renewal agreement previously negotiated with the federal government; that the mayor begin meeting regularly with representatives of the Hough neighborhood; that the city study the constitutionality of a law giving police immunity from false arrest; that the city call for a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the Cleveland police and their practice of holding people without charge; that the state pass a law giving citizens a mechanism to file grievances against government workers; that a grand jury investigate the shootings of Arnett, Giles, and the Townes family; and that the state of Ohio increase the level of welfare payments.

Contemporary historical analyses of the Hough Riots do not find evidence for claims of communist influence. As early as 1972, historians Estelle Zannes and Mary Jean Thomas pointed out that no evidence existed to implicate either black nationalists or communist organizations in the Hough Riots. Cleveland historian Leonard N. Moore notes that two undercover Cleveland police officers spent more than a year investigating the JFK House and black nationalist and communist groups in Hough, but found no evidence that these groups or individuals had planned or sustained the riots. In 2003, noted Ohio historian George W. Knepper called the grand jury report a "simplistic and comfortable conclusion" the nearly all-white city administration was more than willing to accept. Kyle Swenson, writing in Cleveland Scene in July 2016, called the grand jury report "almost laughable. Instead of scratching at the deep economic and political grievances that led to a mass group of people to express their frustrations through violence, the official Cuyahoga County explanation was that the commies did it. Seriously." The report, he said, helped reinforce racial tension in Cleveland for decades. In the 21st century, all scholars reject the "official narrative" and its assertion that the riots were fomented and sustained by radical groups, and instead point to social problems like racism and poverty as the riot's cause.

"Hough cast a pall of fear and resentment that took years to dissipate, if it ever truly passed", said Michael D. Roberts, who covered the Hough Riots as a reporter in 1966.

The Hough Riots caused $1 to $2 million in property damage ($8.4 million to $16.7 million in 2021 dollars), and destroyed the Hough Avenue commercial strip between E. 71st and E. 93rd Streets. Many merchants said they would never return to Hough. The riots depressed property values for decades below those found in surrounding black neighborhoods. Both black and white residents fled the area, causing population loss that lasted into 1990s before stabilizing. The attempts of residents who remained to redevelop their neighborhood were stymied by public and economic policies that led to further disinvestment.

Although Cleveland needed financial assistance from the federal government to both rebuild and address its extensive problems, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) cut off federal urban renewal funding to the city in the wake of the Hough Riots because the administrations of Mayor Locher and his predecessors had been so dilatory and incompetent in completing projects. HUD also cancelled an existing $10 million grant, and rejected Cleveland's Model Cities Program application for fear the city would misspend the funds.

The Hough Area Development Corporation was formed in 1967 to stimulate investment in the neighborhood, but it proved ineffective and was disbanded in 1983 when federal funding ran out. Not until the late 1990s did the Community Development Corporations (CDCs) begin to play an important role in redevelopment of the neighborhood.

Hough changed radically between 1966 and 2000. Whereas the neighborhood had nearly 23,000 housing units in 1966, by the turn of the century it had just 8,409. The population had dropped to just 16,409 in 2000, while median income in the area had slumped to just 45 percent of the median of whites in Cleveland.

Warren LaRiche was tried for the murder of Benoris Toney. LaRiche claimed self-defense, saying that Toney had pointed a gun at the car in which he was riding. An all-white jury deadlocked over his conviction in February 1967. LaRiche was acquitted of murder charges by a second all-white jury in December 1967.

Court of Common Pleas Judge John J. McMahon dismissed second-degree murder charges against Patsy C. Sabetta, driver of the car in which LaRiche rode, for lack of evidence.

Mayor Locher came under near-constant media attack in 1966 and 1967 for his failure to revitalize Cleveland and address the worsening racial tension in the city in the wake of the Hough Riots. He was perceived as an unsophisticated political populist whose administration lacked the modern bureaucratic and professional skills to effectively deal with the city's problems. The city's (mostly white) business establishment also withdrew its support for Locher.

Cleveland's African American community reacted very negatively to the "official narrative" of the Hough Riots. The city's black community was divided on how to solve issues like racism and poverty, and African American members of the Cleveland City Council focused more on patronage than meeting the needs of the communities they represented. Cleveland's African Americans were unified in condemning the "official narrative", however. Mayor Locher's refusal to acknowledge racism, poverty, and police brutality as causes of the Hough Riots united the black community so strongly that it propelled Carl Stokes to the mayor's office in 1967. Cleveland's business community rallied around Stokes largely because it had lost faith in Locher's analysis of the race problem in the city, and believed Stokes would implement policies which would prevent additional riots.

1. "'Tragic Day in Our City,' Locher Says". The Plain Dealer. July 20, 1966. p. 9.

2. ^ Federal Bureau of Investigation (February 1, 1967). Report: W.E.B. DuBois Clubs of America (Report). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

3. ^ Collins, William J. Collins; Smith, Fred H. (July 2007). "A Neighborhood-Level View of Riots, Property Values, and Population Loss: Cleveland 1950-1980". Explorations in Economic History. 44 (3): 365-386. doi:10.1016/j.eeh.2006.08.003. hdl:.

4. ^ Kerr, Daniel (Winter-Spring 2003). ""We Know What the Problem Is": : Using Oral History to Develop a Collaborative Analysis of Homelessness from the Bottom Up". Oral History Review. 30: 27-45. doi:10.1525/ohr.2003.30.1.27. S2CID 143726456.

Krumholz, Norman (1999). "Cleveland: The Hough and Central Neighborhoods-Empowerment Zones and Other Urban Policies". In Keating, William Dennis; Krumholz, Norman (eds.). Rebuilding Urban Neighborhoods: Achievements, Opportunities, and Limits. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications. ISBN 9780761906919.

Luce, Phillip Abbott (1967). Road to Revolution: Communist Guerrilla Warfare in the U.S.A. San Diego: Viewpoint Books.

Masotti, Louis H.; Corsi, Jerome R. (1969). Shoot-Out in Cleveland: Black Militants and the Police. A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Moore, Leonard N. (2001). "Carl Stokes: Mayor of Cleveland". In Colburn, David R.; Adler, Jeffrey S. (eds.). African-American Mayors: Race, Politics, and the American City. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 9780252026348.

Nelson, William E.; Meranto, Philip J. (1977). Electing Black Mayors: Political Action in the Black Community. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press. ISBN 9780814202708.

Parker, Thomas F. (1974). Violence in the U.S. New York: Facts On File. ISBN 9780871962294.

Sobel, Lester (1967). Civil Rights, 1960-66. New York: Facts On File.

Swiderski, David M. (September 2013). Approaches to Black Power: African American Grassroots Political Struggle in Cleveland, Ohio, 1960-1966 (Ph.D.). University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

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Hough riots Part of Ghetto riots Date July 18-23, 1966 Location 41°30′33″N 81°38′05″W ﻿ / ﻿ 41.5092°N 81.6346°W Caused by Racial tension, poverty, racial segregation Methods Widespread gunfire, rioting, looting, assault, arson, protests, property damage, murder Several hundred to more than a thousand 2,100 policemen1,700 Ohio National Guardsmen Death(s) 4 Injuries 50 Arrested approx.

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1967: Cleveland Elects city's first black mayor

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1967: Cleveland Elects city's first black mayor

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Carl Stokes is elected Mayor of Cleveland with 20% of white voters endorsing him. This is a pivotal moment for race relations in Cleveland.

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Encyclopedia of Cleveland History | Case Western Reserve University

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ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS. In 1930 James C. Jones, the manager of a REAL ESTATE office in Cleveland, wrote to a representative of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., regarding the ALTA HOUSE property that Rockefeller owned in LITTLE ITALY. "The entire neighborhood is 100% Italian," he wrote, but he questioned how long it would remain so. "If there is ever a break in the population, I am inclined to believe it will be taken over by colored people," he concluded. That Little Italy remains a vibrant Italian neighborhood more than 6 decades later would surprise Jones, but it serves to illustrate the remarkable persistence of ethnic loyalties, the limited success and the nuances of ethnic assimilation, and the ability of the community to maintain its ethnic "purity" in the face of sometimes violent ethnic and racial competition for space and resources in a crowded urban environment.

The pattern of the settlement of Cleveland in its early years established the dominion of white, English-speaking, Protestant Anglo-Americans over the social, economic, political, and cultural life of Cleveland. By virtue of being the first to settle and develop the land and prosper from its resources, these migrants from New England and New York and the early immigrants from England, Scotland, the Isle of Man, and Wales were able to establish the social norms to which they thought all subsequent arrivals would have to relate. But later ethnic immigrants had their own ideas about what that relationship should be, and they insisted upon retaining as much as possible of their own language and culture. The early Irish, German, and Czech immigrants established a pattern that later ethnic arrivals would follow. They developed their own self-segregated nationality parishes, schools, neighborhoods, mutual benefit societies, fraternal clubs, cultural organizations, and social welfare institutions, such as orphanages and old age homes. For individual immigrants, these institutions constituted a comfortable network of familiar associations that helped ease the transition that the 1915 Immigration Bureau report described as "simple folks coming from their farming communities of Europe into the very vortex of our modern industrial life in a large city."

As the number of foreign-born immigrants in the FOREST CITY swelled, Cleveland's Anglo-Americans sought ways to exert their control over the assimilation and Americanization of an increasingly diverse foreign population, whose alien cultures and religions they feared would ruin their city in particular and their country in general. As tools of social control they turned first to the public schools and to a host of voluntary moral reform organizations and quasi-public social welfare institutions; but as needs increased, they supplemented these private agencies with municipally financed institutions, like the Immigration Bureau, to protect and assist new arrivals. They also turned to political reform as a means of centralizing municipal power and limiting the power of the ethnic vote.

Between the 1850s and 1930, a constant, shifting struggle emerged as the city's Anglo-American middle- and upper-classes struggled to enforce and maintain moral and social discipline in a city populated by growing numbers of European immigrants, many of whom were Catholics and Jews. Religion and ethnicity were thus tied together, and anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism were important aspects of nativism in Cleveland and the rest of America. For example, EDWIN W. COWLES, Cleveland's most notorious anti-Catholic during the last half of the 19th century, railed against both the church and the drunken Irish from his position as editor of the CLEVELAND LEADER. In addition to the external pressures brought to bear from Anglo-American assimilation efforts, tensions within and between ethnic groups intensified as communities developed and as older immigrants sought to influence the behavior and facilitate the assimilation of more recent arrivals.

Education was the first tool that Anglo-Americans used to try to inculcate the habits of "proper" behavior and good citizenship. In 1870, for example, bilingual education was adopted in the public schools in the hopes that offering some classes in German would attract into the schools the 2,000 German students who attended private schools. This policy, the superintendent explained, did "not tend to Germanize America as it [did] to Americanize the Germans." Within a decade, the number of German children attending private schools had dropped to 200. By 1887 the evening adult education program was attracting 2,000 immigrants to its classes in English and in civics in preparation for the naturalization exam. Public school programs for both immigrant children and adults were expanded repeatedly between 1870 and 1920, but the number of parochial schools also increased, making it possible for large numbers of ethnic students to escape the Americanizing influence of the public schools. The development of settlement houses such as HIRAM HOUSE provided new avenues for Americanization and educational efforts, as well as for other urban social reform work.

In addition to education, religion became another important tool in the Anglo-American Protestant campaign for social discipline. Protestant churches began to establish their own missions in ethnic neighborhoods, hiring a minister to conduct church services in the language familiar to the neighborhood's residents. By 1926 Cleveland was home to 19 such missions, 5 of which catered to Hungarian immigrants, 4 to ITALIANS, 2 for CZECHS, and individual missions serving POLES, RUMANIANS, Yugoslavs, and RUSSIANS. Other Protestants argued that ministering to the spiritual needs of immigrants was not enough and that the church should deal with secular needs as well. Full-service institutional churches, such as PILGRIM CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, which became an institutional church in 1894, and Broadway Methodist Episcopal Church, founded as a mission in 1872 and transformed into an institutional church in 1918, offered coeducational classes, sponsored social clubs, and provided facilities for a variety of recreational activities.

Even in the settlement houses and similar organizations where the desire to help immigrants adjust to their new environment, well-meaning social workers could not escape their own prejudices and cultural biases. The head worker at Alta House was dismissed in 1902, with much reluctance by members of the board, after some disparaging remarks she made in a letter to a colleague in Chicago were made public and offended many residents of the neighborhood. As late as Dec. 1941, a club worker's reports on meetings of one ethnic women's group at the YWCA's Intl. Institute contain pointed comments about the members' poor behavior: the "girls" (all of whom were older than 21) were "quite lacking" in "personal manners," which the club worker attributed "to the general behavior pattern of their own particular nationality group."

In addition to tensions with Anglo-American Protestant society, Cleveland's ethnic groups sometimes were at odds with one another. Old World political and cultural antagonisms sometimes flared up in the New World. For example, Old World tensions between Poles and Ukrainians from Galicia resurfaced in Cleveland when the latter, believing that the Poles had dominated the Galician government and had deprived Ukrainians of economic opportunities, refused to live in Polish neighborhoods. A plan by the Magyar community to erect a statue in PUBLIC SQUARE to honor the Hungarian patriot Louis Kossuth (see KOSSUTH MONUMENT and LOUIS KOSSUTH'S VISIT) was opposed by members of the Slovak community, who viewed the nationalist hero as insensitive toward other ethnic groups in Hungary; the statue was erected in 1902, not in the city's symbolic center, but at its outer edge in UNIV. CIRCLE. This was not the first sign of trouble between these two groups. In 1890 tensions between Magyars and Slovaks in ST. LADISLAUS CHURCH prompted the Magyars to withdraw and form their own church.

A recurring issue in the history of the Catholic church in Cleveland was the degree to which the church would accommodate its ethnic members by providing ethnic priests and offering services in their native languages. Cleveland's first bishop, LOUIS AMADEUS RAPPE, favored prompt Americanization of immigrants and refused to establish ethnic parishes. His refusal prompted first the Germans and then the Irish to complain to Rome, and Rappe was forced to acquiesce in the development of nationality parishes led by ethnic priests such as STEPHAN FURDEK, who served both Slovak and Czech parishes and established several important Slovak institutions in Cleveland. By 1908 34 of Cleveland's 65 Catholic parishes were considered nationality parishes rather than territorial ones. Infighting between Germans and the Irish continued to be a problem for the church, however, as did other ethnic tensions, such as the creation in 1913 of a Cleveland parish of the POLISH NATIONAL CATHOLIC CHURCH. The evolution of Judaism in Cleveland reflected a similar ethnic tension between established German Jews and later arrivals from Eastern Europe, who were more orthodox in their religious practices. The resulting debate between the adherents of reformed, orthodox, and conservative religious practices echoed the controversy in the Catholic Church about the preservation of a unique identity in a new land.

By 1920 the Americanization efforts of the public schools, settlement houses, and other agencies and institutions had the paradoxical effect of bringing a great many Anglo-Americans into closer contact with ethnic cultures. The result was a sharing of cultures that over the next several decades spawned efforts to promote cultural pluralism and to celebrate and preserve ethnic folk cultures. The leaders of these efforts sought to educate the public about Cleveland's various ethnic communities as a means of fostering greater tolerance and understanding. These pluralist educational efforts included ELEANOR LEDBETTER's publications on the Yugoslav, Slovak, and Czech communities in Cleveland (1918-19); the development of various ethnic cultural gardens by the CLEVELAND CULTURAL GARDEN FEDERATION, beginning with the Hebrew garden in 1926; the annual folk arts festival sponsored by the CLEVELAND FOLK ARTS ASSN., starting in 1950; and the initiation of the annual All Nations Festival in 1962 by the Nationalities Services Center (see INTL. SERVICES CENTER). Thus, after World War I the Anglo-American approach toward the various ethnic groups changed from one of suspicious attempts at control and assimilation to one of assistance, acknowledgement, and celebration. This shift reflected the growth and maturation of the ethnic communities, the relative success of assimilation efforts, the proven loyalty of the ethnics through their contribution to the war efforts, and the increasing political power of the ethnic communities.

For many of the Eastern European ethnic groups that had settled in Cleveland between 1880 and 1920, the period between 1920 and 1950 was a time of growth and stability for their communities. The pattern of ethnic community development and self-help that they had followed became the model through which most whites came to view the ethnic experience and, perhaps more significantly, the standard by which they measured and judged the development of the African American community (see AFRICAN AMERICANS) in Cleveland. But the white ethnic model failed to take into account significant differences between the white ethnic immigrant experience and the plight of African American newcomers from the South. Prejudice and discrimination toward blacks ran deeper and was more pervasive than anti-ethnic sentiment, adversely affecting the economic, housing, and educational opportunities available to blacks. The economic consequences of discrimination made it impossible for African Americans to accumulate the resources for community development on a par with the white ethnic communities.

Assimilation was a goal that Anglo-Americans desired for white ethnic immigrants, but it was not a goal that it pursued with African Americans. While relations between Anglo-Americans and white ethnic groups gradually improved, race relations between blacks and whites worsened considerably during the 20th century before they began to improve. Students of the African American experience in Cleveland note that throughout much of the city's history, Cleveland has offered its black residents as liberal an environment as could be found in America, but the comparative aspect of that assessment leaves room for many inequities. Kenneth Kusmer has noted the substantial economic opportunities available to blacks and the relative absence of racial segregation and discrimination in Cleveland during the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s. But between 1870 and 1915, increasing job discrimination meant that blacks could not advance up the economic ladder into the emerging middle class, while housing discrimination through "whites only" sellers' policies and restrictive covenants made it difficult to move out of the Central Ave. district. Black residential patterns were thus circumscribed in ways that those of whites were not. At the same time, Cleveland's racial egalitarianism was beginning to weaken with the rise of new scientific theories about racial differences; this scientific racism helped lead to heightened discrimination and increased segregation in theaters, restaurants, and recreational facilities. Race prejudice in Cleveland increased considerably after 1915, a trend evident in the tone of newspaper articles; in the rhetoric of white politicians who fanned the flames of hatred; in the showing of racist films such as Birth of a Nation; and in the hiring policies of the police department and in the administration of the public schools. By 1915, for example, both EUCLID BEACH PARK and LUNA PARK were open to blacks only on designated days.

Increased discrimination and segregation was partly an indication of the fear aroused among whites by the Great Migration of blacks from the South. Between 1910 and 1920, Cleveland's black population increased by more than 300%. This vast increase led to a housing crisis for Cleveland's blacks, who found available housing to be both scarce and expensive. The housing crisis strained race relations as blacks turned to white neighborhoods in search of housing; but whites sought to maintain the "purity" of their neighborhoods through mutual understandings, restrictive clauses, and, increasingly during the 1910s and 1920s, violence. As Kusmer notes, "the staunch resistance of certain urban ethnic groups" was an "important factor in containing and channeling the black population."

Both nationally and in Cleveland, African Americans disagreed over how to respond to these new circumstances. An older elite group of conservative blacks, who had both business and social ties to the white community, generally favored continuation of integrationist efforts; but a younger group of businessmen and politicians who drew their income and support from the black community tended to favor the self-help approach and eschewed activism on behalf of equal rights. JANE EDNA HUNTER's plan to develop the PHILLIS WHEATLEY ASSN. to serve as a black YWCA in Cleveland was the subject of a major struggle between those who favored pursuing integration and those who understood the benefits of self-segregated institutions when integration had been denied. A new era of black leadership by the "New Negroes" emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, composed of men and women who favored both racial pride and solidarity, while at the same time working on behalf of equal rights. Working largely through the NAACP (see NATIONAL ASSN. FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE), these leaders strengthened existing black organizations, worked behind the scenes and in the courts to end discriminatory policies and practices, and took a more active role in local politics. The growing power of blacks at the ballot box during the 1930s and 1940s transformed politics into a new battleground in race and ethnic relations. The continuing increase in the black population raised in the minds of some whites the specter of a black political takeover of the city; such fears provided some of the motivation for the regional government proposals put forward and defeated in the 1950s.

By the 1950s, a remarkably self-conscious racism had taken hold in Cleveland. Various white leaders acknowledged in private that they knew that race prejudice and discrimination were wrong and would have to change, but they attributed their own persistence in discriminatory practices to their own cultural upbringing, to personal preferences, and to the unproven "fact" that their customers or the general public would not stand for integration and social equality. Another common rationalization was that African Americans somehow were still undeserving of equal treatment, often bolstered with anecdotes intended to illustrate how the black community, in demanding equal treatment through the NAACP, the Urban League (see URBAN LEAGUE OF GREATER CLEVELAND), or the FUTURE OUTLOOK LEAGUE, had not yet measured up to the self-help standards established by white ethnic communities. Instead, such comments reflected the prejudices of the speakers and their lack of knowledge about individuals and institutions in the African American community, especially those which worked steadily and quietly behind the scenes, like the black churches. This lack of awareness and understanding of the black community had disastrous consequences during the 1960s when overcrowded schools, inequities in housing, and job discrimination became the major issues prompting the formation of a local civil rights organization, the UNITED FREEDOM MOVEMENT, and when riots rocked HOUGH in 1966 and GLENVILLE in 1968.

The election of Carl Stokes (see MAYORAL ADMINISTRATION OF CARL B. STOKES) in 1967 as Cleveland's first African American mayor was a major triumph for the black community, and, with 20% of the white voters willing to give him their endorsement, it marked a watershed in race relations as well. In some ways it was the culmination of the local white liberal response to the concerns expressed by the civil rights movement. A variety of organizations, including the LOMOND ASSN., the LUDLOW COMMUNITY ASSN., Fair Housing, Inc., and PATH were created mostly by liberal whites to work on housing issues; PACE coordinated efforts to improve the public schools. Improvements were painfully slow in housing, prompting the CUYAHOGA COUNTY REGIONAL PLANNING COMMISSION (RPC) of Ohio to label Cleveland "the second most segregated area in the nation" in the 1980s. The lack of progress in the schools prompted the NAACP to file suit in 1973 against the Cleveland Board of Education, which was convicted of segregating black students within the schools and ordered to use busing as a means toward integration.

The demands and protests of the civil rights movement, the HOUGH RIOTS, and the GLENVILLE SHOOTOUT, and many policies and actions of the Stokes administration angered many white Clevelanders, although others supported the movement for racial equality. Racial animosities ran high during this time, especially between blacks and white ethnics, many of whom viewed civil rights demands as direct threats to their neighborhoods and their well-being; some responded by joining the exodus to the suburbs, others by electing an ethnic mayor, Ralph Perk (see MAYORAL ADMINISTRATION OF RALPH J. PERK), to succeed Stokes in 1971. Paradoxically, the civil rights movement, by focusing on the issues of racial identity, cultural pride, and self-determination, helped to inspire and provoke the "new ethnicity" of the 1970s, in which white ethnics took a renewed interest in their backgrounds and neighborhoods. The attempt to renovate SLAVIC VILLAGE in the late 1970s and 1980s was one example of this new ethnic consciousness at work in Cleveland.

Ethnic and race relations in Cleveland over the last 200 years reflect both change and continuity. Over time, the major groups in Cleveland have become increasingly tolerant of one another, a result of the passage of time, of the work of activists since the 1910s to create a more tolerant, pluralistic atmosphere, and of the rise since 1945 of the black middle class. Cleveland now celebrates and markets its ethnic and racial diversity, yet ethnocentrism, traditional loyalties, and old antagonisms persist. New ethnic rivals (or scapegoats) are never difficult to find, it seems. Prejudice, suspicion, and fear remain powerful human emotions, and in ethnic and race relations these emotions ebb and flow with the arrival of substantial numbers of new immigrants; as changes in the economy give rise to concerns about employment opportunities and wage and income levels; and in response to particular local events, developments in the old homeland, and the perception of new foreign enemies.

Kenneth W. Rose

Rockefeller Archive Center

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ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS | Encyclopedia of Cleveland History | Case Western Reserve University

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ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS. In 1930 James C. Jones, the manager of a REAL ESTATE office in Cleveland, wrote to a representative of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., regarding the ALTA HOUSE property that Rockefeller owned in LITTLE ITALY. "The entire neighborhood is 100% Italian," he wrote, but he questioned how long it would remain so.

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1970-1980's: Cleveland labeled "the second most segregated area in the nation"

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1970-1980's: Cleveland labeled "the second most segregated area in the nation"

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In 1973, NAACP filed a lawsuit against the Cleveland Board of Education. The Cleveland BoE was convicted of segregating Black students. In the 1980s, Cleveland was dragging its feet in making improvements to schools and housing in predominantly African American neighborhoods. The Cuyahoga Country Regional Planning Commission labels Cleveland as #2 most segregated city in the U.S.

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Encyclopedia of Cleveland History | Case Western Reserve University

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ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS. In 1930 James C. Jones, the manager of a REAL ESTATE office in Cleveland, wrote to a representative of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., regarding the ALTA HOUSE property that Rockefeller owned in LITTLE ITALY. "The entire neighborhood is 100% Italian," he wrote, but he questioned how long it would remain so. "If there is ever a break in the population, I am inclined to believe it will be taken over by colored people," he concluded. That Little Italy remains a vibrant Italian neighborhood more than 6 decades later would surprise Jones, but it serves to illustrate the remarkable persistence of ethnic loyalties, the limited success and the nuances of ethnic assimilation, and the ability of the community to maintain its ethnic "purity" in the face of sometimes violent ethnic and racial competition for space and resources in a crowded urban environment.

The pattern of the settlement of Cleveland in its early years established the dominion of white, English-speaking, Protestant Anglo-Americans over the social, economic, political, and cultural life of Cleveland. By virtue of being the first to settle and develop the land and prosper from its resources, these migrants from New England and New York and the early immigrants from England, Scotland, the Isle of Man, and Wales were able to establish the social norms to which they thought all subsequent arrivals would have to relate. But later ethnic immigrants had their own ideas about what that relationship should be, and they insisted upon retaining as much as possible of their own language and culture. The early Irish, German, and Czech immigrants established a pattern that later ethnic arrivals would follow. They developed their own self-segregated nationality parishes, schools, neighborhoods, mutual benefit societies, fraternal clubs, cultural organizations, and social welfare institutions, such as orphanages and old age homes. For individual immigrants, these institutions constituted a comfortable network of familiar associations that helped ease the transition that the 1915 Immigration Bureau report described as "simple folks coming from their farming communities of Europe into the very vortex of our modern industrial life in a large city."

As the number of foreign-born immigrants in the FOREST CITY swelled, Cleveland's Anglo-Americans sought ways to exert their control over the assimilation and Americanization of an increasingly diverse foreign population, whose alien cultures and religions they feared would ruin their city in particular and their country in general. As tools of social control they turned first to the public schools and to a host of voluntary moral reform organizations and quasi-public social welfare institutions; but as needs increased, they supplemented these private agencies with municipally financed institutions, like the Immigration Bureau, to protect and assist new arrivals. They also turned to political reform as a means of centralizing municipal power and limiting the power of the ethnic vote.

Between the 1850s and 1930, a constant, shifting struggle emerged as the city's Anglo-American middle- and upper-classes struggled to enforce and maintain moral and social discipline in a city populated by growing numbers of European immigrants, many of whom were Catholics and Jews. Religion and ethnicity were thus tied together, and anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism were important aspects of nativism in Cleveland and the rest of America. For example, EDWIN W. COWLES, Cleveland's most notorious anti-Catholic during the last half of the 19th century, railed against both the church and the drunken Irish from his position as editor of the CLEVELAND LEADER. In addition to the external pressures brought to bear from Anglo-American assimilation efforts, tensions within and between ethnic groups intensified as communities developed and as older immigrants sought to influence the behavior and facilitate the assimilation of more recent arrivals.

Education was the first tool that Anglo-Americans used to try to inculcate the habits of "proper" behavior and good citizenship. In 1870, for example, bilingual education was adopted in the public schools in the hopes that offering some classes in German would attract into the schools the 2,000 German students who attended private schools. This policy, the superintendent explained, did "not tend to Germanize America as it [did] to Americanize the Germans." Within a decade, the number of German children attending private schools had dropped to 200. By 1887 the evening adult education program was attracting 2,000 immigrants to its classes in English and in civics in preparation for the naturalization exam. Public school programs for both immigrant children and adults were expanded repeatedly between 1870 and 1920, but the number of parochial schools also increased, making it possible for large numbers of ethnic students to escape the Americanizing influence of the public schools. The development of settlement houses such as HIRAM HOUSE provided new avenues for Americanization and educational efforts, as well as for other urban social reform work.

In addition to education, religion became another important tool in the Anglo-American Protestant campaign for social discipline. Protestant churches began to establish their own missions in ethnic neighborhoods, hiring a minister to conduct church services in the language familiar to the neighborhood's residents. By 1926 Cleveland was home to 19 such missions, 5 of which catered to Hungarian immigrants, 4 to ITALIANS, 2 for CZECHS, and individual missions serving POLES, RUMANIANS, Yugoslavs, and RUSSIANS. Other Protestants argued that ministering to the spiritual needs of immigrants was not enough and that the church should deal with secular needs as well. Full-service institutional churches, such as PILGRIM CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, which became an institutional church in 1894, and Broadway Methodist Episcopal Church, founded as a mission in 1872 and transformed into an institutional church in 1918, offered coeducational classes, sponsored social clubs, and provided facilities for a variety of recreational activities.

Even in the settlement houses and similar organizations where the desire to help immigrants adjust to their new environment, well-meaning social workers could not escape their own prejudices and cultural biases. The head worker at Alta House was dismissed in 1902, with much reluctance by members of the board, after some disparaging remarks she made in a letter to a colleague in Chicago were made public and offended many residents of the neighborhood. As late as Dec. 1941, a club worker's reports on meetings of one ethnic women's group at the YWCA's Intl. Institute contain pointed comments about the members' poor behavior: the "girls" (all of whom were older than 21) were "quite lacking" in "personal manners," which the club worker attributed "to the general behavior pattern of their own particular nationality group."

In addition to tensions with Anglo-American Protestant society, Cleveland's ethnic groups sometimes were at odds with one another. Old World political and cultural antagonisms sometimes flared up in the New World. For example, Old World tensions between Poles and Ukrainians from Galicia resurfaced in Cleveland when the latter, believing that the Poles had dominated the Galician government and had deprived Ukrainians of economic opportunities, refused to live in Polish neighborhoods. A plan by the Magyar community to erect a statue in PUBLIC SQUARE to honor the Hungarian patriot Louis Kossuth (see KOSSUTH MONUMENT and LOUIS KOSSUTH'S VISIT) was opposed by members of the Slovak community, who viewed the nationalist hero as insensitive toward other ethnic groups in Hungary; the statue was erected in 1902, not in the city's symbolic center, but at its outer edge in UNIV. CIRCLE. This was not the first sign of trouble between these two groups. In 1890 tensions between Magyars and Slovaks in ST. LADISLAUS CHURCH prompted the Magyars to withdraw and form their own church.

A recurring issue in the history of the Catholic church in Cleveland was the degree to which the church would accommodate its ethnic members by providing ethnic priests and offering services in their native languages. Cleveland's first bishop, LOUIS AMADEUS RAPPE, favored prompt Americanization of immigrants and refused to establish ethnic parishes. His refusal prompted first the Germans and then the Irish to complain to Rome, and Rappe was forced to acquiesce in the development of nationality parishes led by ethnic priests such as STEPHAN FURDEK, who served both Slovak and Czech parishes and established several important Slovak institutions in Cleveland. By 1908 34 of Cleveland's 65 Catholic parishes were considered nationality parishes rather than territorial ones. Infighting between Germans and the Irish continued to be a problem for the church, however, as did other ethnic tensions, such as the creation in 1913 of a Cleveland parish of the POLISH NATIONAL CATHOLIC CHURCH. The evolution of Judaism in Cleveland reflected a similar ethnic tension between established German Jews and later arrivals from Eastern Europe, who were more orthodox in their religious practices. The resulting debate between the adherents of reformed, orthodox, and conservative religious practices echoed the controversy in the Catholic Church about the preservation of a unique identity in a new land.

By 1920 the Americanization efforts of the public schools, settlement houses, and other agencies and institutions had the paradoxical effect of bringing a great many Anglo-Americans into closer contact with ethnic cultures. The result was a sharing of cultures that over the next several decades spawned efforts to promote cultural pluralism and to celebrate and preserve ethnic folk cultures. The leaders of these efforts sought to educate the public about Cleveland's various ethnic communities as a means of fostering greater tolerance and understanding. These pluralist educational efforts included ELEANOR LEDBETTER's publications on the Yugoslav, Slovak, and Czech communities in Cleveland (1918-19); the development of various ethnic cultural gardens by the CLEVELAND CULTURAL GARDEN FEDERATION, beginning with the Hebrew garden in 1926; the annual folk arts festival sponsored by the CLEVELAND FOLK ARTS ASSN., starting in 1950; and the initiation of the annual All Nations Festival in 1962 by the Nationalities Services Center (see INTL. SERVICES CENTER). Thus, after World War I the Anglo-American approach toward the various ethnic groups changed from one of suspicious attempts at control and assimilation to one of assistance, acknowledgement, and celebration. This shift reflected the growth and maturation of the ethnic communities, the relative success of assimilation efforts, the proven loyalty of the ethnics through their contribution to the war efforts, and the increasing political power of the ethnic communities.

For many of the Eastern European ethnic groups that had settled in Cleveland between 1880 and 1920, the period between 1920 and 1950 was a time of growth and stability for their communities. The pattern of ethnic community development and self-help that they had followed became the model through which most whites came to view the ethnic experience and, perhaps more significantly, the standard by which they measured and judged the development of the African American community (see AFRICAN AMERICANS) in Cleveland. But the white ethnic model failed to take into account significant differences between the white ethnic immigrant experience and the plight of African American newcomers from the South. Prejudice and discrimination toward blacks ran deeper and was more pervasive than anti-ethnic sentiment, adversely affecting the economic, housing, and educational opportunities available to blacks. The economic consequences of discrimination made it impossible for African Americans to accumulate the resources for community development on a par with the white ethnic communities.

Assimilation was a goal that Anglo-Americans desired for white ethnic immigrants, but it was not a goal that it pursued with African Americans. While relations between Anglo-Americans and white ethnic groups gradually improved, race relations between blacks and whites worsened considerably during the 20th century before they began to improve. Students of the African American experience in Cleveland note that throughout much of the city's history, Cleveland has offered its black residents as liberal an environment as could be found in America, but the comparative aspect of that assessment leaves room for many inequities. Kenneth Kusmer has noted the substantial economic opportunities available to blacks and the relative absence of racial segregation and discrimination in Cleveland during the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s. But between 1870 and 1915, increasing job discrimination meant that blacks could not advance up the economic ladder into the emerging middle class, while housing discrimination through "whites only" sellers' policies and restrictive covenants made it difficult to move out of the Central Ave. district. Black residential patterns were thus circumscribed in ways that those of whites were not. At the same time, Cleveland's racial egalitarianism was beginning to weaken with the rise of new scientific theories about racial differences; this scientific racism helped lead to heightened discrimination and increased segregation in theaters, restaurants, and recreational facilities. Race prejudice in Cleveland increased considerably after 1915, a trend evident in the tone of newspaper articles; in the rhetoric of white politicians who fanned the flames of hatred; in the showing of racist films such as Birth of a Nation; and in the hiring policies of the police department and in the administration of the public schools. By 1915, for example, both EUCLID BEACH PARK and LUNA PARK were open to blacks only on designated days.

Increased discrimination and segregation was partly an indication of the fear aroused among whites by the Great Migration of blacks from the South. Between 1910 and 1920, Cleveland's black population increased by more than 300%. This vast increase led to a housing crisis for Cleveland's blacks, who found available housing to be both scarce and expensive. The housing crisis strained race relations as blacks turned to white neighborhoods in search of housing; but whites sought to maintain the "purity" of their neighborhoods through mutual understandings, restrictive clauses, and, increasingly during the 1910s and 1920s, violence. As Kusmer notes, "the staunch resistance of certain urban ethnic groups" was an "important factor in containing and channeling the black population."

Both nationally and in Cleveland, African Americans disagreed over how to respond to these new circumstances. An older elite group of conservative blacks, who had both business and social ties to the white community, generally favored continuation of integrationist efforts; but a younger group of businessmen and politicians who drew their income and support from the black community tended to favor the self-help approach and eschewed activism on behalf of equal rights. JANE EDNA HUNTER's plan to develop the PHILLIS WHEATLEY ASSN. to serve as a black YWCA in Cleveland was the subject of a major struggle between those who favored pursuing integration and those who understood the benefits of self-segregated institutions when integration had been denied. A new era of black leadership by the "New Negroes" emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, composed of men and women who favored both racial pride and solidarity, while at the same time working on behalf of equal rights. Working largely through the NAACP (see NATIONAL ASSN. FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE), these leaders strengthened existing black organizations, worked behind the scenes and in the courts to end discriminatory policies and practices, and took a more active role in local politics. The growing power of blacks at the ballot box during the 1930s and 1940s transformed politics into a new battleground in race and ethnic relations. The continuing increase in the black population raised in the minds of some whites the specter of a black political takeover of the city; such fears provided some of the motivation for the regional government proposals put forward and defeated in the 1950s.

By the 1950s, a remarkably self-conscious racism had taken hold in Cleveland. Various white leaders acknowledged in private that they knew that race prejudice and discrimination were wrong and would have to change, but they attributed their own persistence in discriminatory practices to their own cultural upbringing, to personal preferences, and to the unproven "fact" that their customers or the general public would not stand for integration and social equality. Another common rationalization was that African Americans somehow were still undeserving of equal treatment, often bolstered with anecdotes intended to illustrate how the black community, in demanding equal treatment through the NAACP, the Urban League (see URBAN LEAGUE OF GREATER CLEVELAND), or the FUTURE OUTLOOK LEAGUE, had not yet measured up to the self-help standards established by white ethnic communities. Instead, such comments reflected the prejudices of the speakers and their lack of knowledge about individuals and institutions in the African American community, especially those which worked steadily and quietly behind the scenes, like the black churches. This lack of awareness and understanding of the black community had disastrous consequences during the 1960s when overcrowded schools, inequities in housing, and job discrimination became the major issues prompting the formation of a local civil rights organization, the UNITED FREEDOM MOVEMENT, and when riots rocked HOUGH in 1966 and GLENVILLE in 1968.

The election of Carl Stokes (see MAYORAL ADMINISTRATION OF CARL B. STOKES) in 1967 as Cleveland's first African American mayor was a major triumph for the black community, and, with 20% of the white voters willing to give him their endorsement, it marked a watershed in race relations as well. In some ways it was the culmination of the local white liberal response to the concerns expressed by the civil rights movement. A variety of organizations, including the LOMOND ASSN., the LUDLOW COMMUNITY ASSN., Fair Housing, Inc., and PATH were created mostly by liberal whites to work on housing issues; PACE coordinated efforts to improve the public schools. Improvements were painfully slow in housing, prompting the CUYAHOGA COUNTY REGIONAL PLANNING COMMISSION (RPC) of Ohio to label Cleveland "the second most segregated area in the nation" in the 1980s. The lack of progress in the schools prompted the NAACP to file suit in 1973 against the Cleveland Board of Education, which was convicted of segregating black students within the schools and ordered to use busing as a means toward integration.

The demands and protests of the civil rights movement, the HOUGH RIOTS, and the GLENVILLE SHOOTOUT, and many policies and actions of the Stokes administration angered many white Clevelanders, although others supported the movement for racial equality. Racial animosities ran high during this time, especially between blacks and white ethnics, many of whom viewed civil rights demands as direct threats to their neighborhoods and their well-being; some responded by joining the exodus to the suburbs, others by electing an ethnic mayor, Ralph Perk (see MAYORAL ADMINISTRATION OF RALPH J. PERK), to succeed Stokes in 1971. Paradoxically, the civil rights movement, by focusing on the issues of racial identity, cultural pride, and self-determination, helped to inspire and provoke the "new ethnicity" of the 1970s, in which white ethnics took a renewed interest in their backgrounds and neighborhoods. The attempt to renovate SLAVIC VILLAGE in the late 1970s and 1980s was one example of this new ethnic consciousness at work in Cleveland.

Ethnic and race relations in Cleveland over the last 200 years reflect both change and continuity. Over time, the major groups in Cleveland have become increasingly tolerant of one another, a result of the passage of time, of the work of activists since the 1910s to create a more tolerant, pluralistic atmosphere, and of the rise since 1945 of the black middle class. Cleveland now celebrates and markets its ethnic and racial diversity, yet ethnocentrism, traditional loyalties, and old antagonisms persist. New ethnic rivals (or scapegoats) are never difficult to find, it seems. Prejudice, suspicion, and fear remain powerful human emotions, and in ethnic and race relations these emotions ebb and flow with the arrival of substantial numbers of new immigrants; as changes in the economy give rise to concerns about employment opportunities and wage and income levels; and in response to particular local events, developments in the old homeland, and the perception of new foreign enemies.

Kenneth W. Rose

Rockefeller Archive Center

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ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS | Encyclopedia of Cleveland History | Case Western Reserve University

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ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS. In 1930 James C. Jones, the manager of a REAL ESTATE office in Cleveland, wrote to a representative of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., regarding the ALTA HOUSE property that Rockefeller owned in LITTLE ITALY. "The entire neighborhood is 100% Italian," he wrote, but he questioned how long it would remain so.

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1999-2004: Black children 1.6 times more likely to test positive for lead than white children in the U.S.

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1999-2004: Black children 1.6 times more likely to test positive for lead than white children in the U.S.

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Due to the poor housing development in Cleveland, BIPOC children were 3 times more likely to have elevated levels in their blood.

Source: Race, racism and lead poisoning: Toxic Neglect - cleveland.com

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2012: Two unarmed civilians killed in police shootout. 

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2012: Two unarmed civilians killed in police shootout. 

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A police chase involving over 60 officers ended in a deadly shootout where six officers fired 137 shots into the vehicle killing Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams. No police officers were injured in the shooting. The chase started when the victim's vehicle backfired in front of the Justice Center in downtown Cleveland. Two officers in front of the Justice Center thought the backfiring car was a gunshot. The investigation of the incident led to charges being filed against one officer, and the firing of an additional five officers. The five officers not charged were able to appeal and were allowed to return to work. The charged officer charged was acquitted on all charges but was not able to return to the force.

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Date

November 29, 2012

Participants

Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams (fatalities)
Michael Brelo and 12 others (police officers)

Deaths

Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams (November 29, 2012)

Suspects

Michael Brelo

Charges

Two counts of voluntary manslaughter
Two counts of felonious assault

Litigation

Families of Russell and Williams filed a lawsuit against the city of Cleveland, received $3 million

The shooting deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, two Black American individuals, occurred in East Cleveland, Ohio on November 29, 2012, at the conclusion of a 22-minute police chase which started in downtown Cleveland. Police claimed shots were fired at them as Russell and Williams drove by a squad car; however, this was their vehicle backfiring. Over 60 officers participated in a 23-mile police chase that ended in Russell and Williams' vehicles being surrounded. The victims had no weapon on them and police claimed they fired due to being fired at. Thirteen police officers fired at Russell and Williams 137 times while they were in their car at a parking lot of a middle school, killing both. In May 2014, one of the officers involved, Michael Brelo, was charged with two counts of voluntary manslaughter, and was acquitted by a Cuyahoga County judge of the charges on May 23, 2015.

Five police supervisors were also charged with dereliction of duty, a misdemeanor. Their trial was set on July 27, 2015.

The families of Russell and Williams filed a lawsuit against the city of Cleveland, and received a settlement of $3 million in November 2014.

On January 26, 2016, it was reported that six Cleveland police officers were fired due to their connection with the car chase. They were identified as Michael Brelo, Wilfredo Diaz, Brian Sabolik, Erin O'Donnell, Michael Farley, and Chris Ereg.

Michael Brelo (born 1983-84) is an Iraq War veteran. When he returned home, he became a correctional officer in Bedford Heights, Ohio. He then joined the Cleveland Police Department in 2007.

Russell had met Williams at the Bishop Cosgrove Center, where they both received free meals. He was living at the Metropolitan Ministry Center prior to his death.

Malissa Williams lived at the Norma Herr's Women Center on Payne Avenue in Cleveland.

Russell was driving his 1979 light-blue Chevrolet Malibu and Williams was seated in the passenger seat. A plainclothes police officer spotted Russell's car in an area known for drug deals. The officer checked the license plate which uncovered nothing notable. He then pulled the car over for a turn signal violation. Russell pulled over but the car was not searched and the plain clothes officer realizing he did not have on a vest and the stop was unauthorized the officer let them go. There is camera footage showing both cars pull off. Russell proceeded to speed by two officers, they believed that they heard shots being fired. As no firearm was found in the vehicle, the sound was caused by the car backfiring.

According to The Plain Dealer, the chase went up to speeds of 100 mph and a total of 62 police cars were involved at one point. Officers from Cleveland, East Cleveland, Bratenahl, the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department, the Ohio State Highway Patrol, and the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority participated in the chase.

After a 22-mile chase, Russell turned into Heritage Middle School, located in East Cleveland. Police officers later said they believed they saw a firearm in the car and that Russell was planning on running them over. One officer subsequently opened fire, followed by others, killing both occupants. The amount of gunfire confused the officers into thinking they were being fired at from the vehicle[citation needed ]. In the end, thirteen officers fired a total of 137 bullets into the car, with Officer Michael Brelo firing 49 of those shots. Russell was struck 23 times, and Williams was struck 24 times. No weapons were recovered from the vehicle.

On May 30, 2014, only one officer of the thirteen who fired at the car, Michael Brelo, was indicted on two counts of voluntary manslaughter in connection with the shooting. He was the only officer who continued to shoot even after the others stopped firing, and was said to have actually moved forward and jumped onto the hood of Russel's car, after which he reportedly shot approximately fifteen rounds. The two counts of voluntary manslaughter carried a maximum penalty of 22 years of prison if convicted. Five police supervisors were also indicted for dereliction of duty. According to Cuyahoga County prosecutors, Brelo stood on the hood of Russell and Williams' car and fired straight down at them through their windshield after the twelve other officers stopped firing. Prosecutors said that the actions were unreasonable and went past his duties as a police officer.

On May 23, 2015, Cuyahoga Common Pleas Judge John P. O'Donnell found Brelo not guilty of the charges. O'Donnell stated that while Brelo fired lethal shots at Russell and Williams, other officers did as well. O'Donnell also found Brelo not guilty of a lesser included charge of felonious assault, asserting that Brelo was legally justified in his use of deadly force. O'Donnell read his 35-page verdict in court, and said there was "beyond reasonable doubt" that the prosecution had to meet to get Brelo convicted.

On June 3, 2015, it was announced that an arrest warrant was filed against Brelo for an alleged assault on his twin brother, Mark R. Brelo, on May 27, in Bay Village, Ohio. The brothers turned themselves in on June 3, after Brelo's intoxicated brother had run to a neighbor's home to ask them to call 911 on his brother, Michael Brelo, by whom he was being chased and allegedly assaulted. They were released on their own recognizance.

On January 26, 2016 the six officers (Wilfredo Diaz, Brian Sabolik, Erin O'Donnell, Michael Farley, Chris Ereg and Michael Brelo) were fired from their jobs at the Cleveland Police. The Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association said that they would work to get the six reinstated to their positions. Five of the six officers were reinstated in October 2017 as required by the ruling of an arbitrator.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced on May 24, 2015, that they would open an investigation in the deaths of Russell and Williams, and would review the testimony and evidence presented at Brelo's trial. This investigation was closed in January 2017.

Trial for the five police officers that Cuyahoga County charged with misdemeanor dereliction of duty was set for July 27, 2015. On July 2, 2015, the East Cleveland prosecutor filed its own dereliction of duty charges against the same five officers, and the County dismissed its charges on July 24, 2015. The officers objected to moving the trial to East Cleveland, and appealed the dismissal. In May 2016 an Ohio appeals court held that the dismissal was improper, but in April 2017 the Ohio Supreme Court reversed and left it up to the trial court judge, William Dawson, to decide where the trial would go forward. By October 2017, Judge Dawson had not yet put the case on the docket.

In March 2018, two defense attorneys reported that prosecutors had offered to drop all charges against the officers if they paid fines of $5,000 each. They declined the offer. On March 22, 2018, prosecutors filed a formal motion asking the court to set a trial date. All five officers pleaded not guilty. In July 2018, the defendants asked the court to dismiss the charges, arguing that the more than 5½ years that had passed since the 2012 shooting violated their constitutional right to a speedy trial. The court denied the motion on September 20; the defense attorneys announced their intent to appeal this ruling.

In January 2019, the prosecutors dismissed all charges against three of the five supervising officers.

In July 2019, the case concluded with the police supervisor in charge of the officers involved in the '137 shots' case not guilty. East Cleveland Municipal Court confirmed Sgt. Patricia Coleman not guilty after a 3-day long trial, ending a year-long battle. The Cleveland Division of Police continues to receive criticism from the public about the misdemeanor, claiming the actions were due to racism, as both fatalities were African-American. Only one member of the division, Officer Michael Brelo, was charged after the incident. Brelo fired 49 of the shots but was not found guilty of voluntary manslaughter. Brelo was the only officer to lose his job following the shooting.

After Brelo was acquitted, violent-followed by peaceful protests and unrest ensued in downtown Cleveland, which led to the arrests of at least 71 people as of May 25. Among those arrested were charged with felonious assault, rioting, and failure to disperse. At least 15 people were apprehended by riot police officers. The deaths of Russell and Williams were two of several killings of unarmed African Americans protested by the Black Lives Matter movement.

The families of Russell and Williams filed a lawsuit against the city of Cleveland, claiming they were liable for the wrongful deaths of the two. In November 2014, Cleveland paid $3 million to the two families, which was split evenly.

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Killing of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams - Wikipedia

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Date November 29, 2012 Participants Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams (fatalities)Michael Brelo and 12 others (police officers) Deaths Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams (November 29, 2012) Suspects Michael Brelo Charges Two counts of voluntary manslaughter Two counts of felonious assault Litigation Families of Russell and Williams filed a lawsuit against the city of Cleveland, received $3 million The shooting deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, two Black American individuals, occurred in East Cleveland, Ohio on November 29, 2012, at the conclusion of a 22-minute police chase which started in downtown Cleveland.

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2014: 12-year old Tamir Rice is killed by Police

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2014: 12-year old Tamir Rice is killed by Police

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Police were called to a park in Cleveland on a possible "Active Shooter" situation. The individual that called in the activity stated that a young man was pointing a gun at pedestrians but he was sure it was a fake gun". When police arrived on the scene, the police vehicle pulled up directly to Tamir Rice, and the police officer in the passenger seat exited the vehicle and immediately shot Tamir Rice. The officer was not charged. It was later discovered the officer was let go from a previous police department as he was found to be not stable enough for active duty.

Killing of Tamir Rice - Wikipedia

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Date

November 22, 2014

Time

c. 3:30 p.m.

Location

Cudell Recreation Center, Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, United States

Coordinates

41°28′45″N 81°45′09″W ﻿ / ﻿ 41.479083°N 81.752365°W

Type

Child homicide by shooting, police killing

Filmed by

Surveillance video

Participants

Timothy Loehmann (police officer who fired fatal shot)

Frank Garmback (police officer)

Outcome

Loehmann fired in 2017

Deaths

Tamir Rice

Inquiries

Closed investigation

Charges

None

Litigation

Lawsuit filed by Rice's family against the two officers and the City of Cleveland settled for $6 million[1]

Claim filed by the City of Cleveland for cost of Rice's ambulance ride (later withdrawn)[2]

On November 22, 2014, Tamir E. Rice, a 12-year-old African American boy, was killed in Cleveland, Ohio, by Timothy Loehmann, a 26-year-old white police officer. Rice was carrying a replica toy gun; Loehmann shot him almost immediately upon arriving on the scene. Two officers, Loehmann and 46-year-old Frank Garmback, were responding to a police dispatch call regarding a male who had a gun. A caller reported that a male was pointing "a pistol" at random people at the Cudell Recreation Center, a park in the City of Cleveland's Public Works Department. At the beginning of the call and again in the middle, he says of the pistol "it's probably fake." Toward the end of the two-minute call the caller states that "he is probably a juvenile", but the dispatcher did not relay either of these statements to Loehmann and Garmback.

The officers reported that when they arrived at the scene, they both continuously yelled "show me your hands" through the open patrol car window. Loehmann further stated that instead of showing his hands, it appeared as if Rice was trying to draw: "I knew it was a gun and I knew it was coming out." The officer shot twice, hitting Rice once in the torso. According to Judge Ronald B. Adrine, "...On the video the zone[clarification needed ] car containing Patrol Officers Loehmann and Garmback is still in the process of stopping when Rice is shot." Rice died the following day.

Rice's gun was found to be an airsoft replica; it lacked the orange-tipped barrel that would have indicated it was a toy gun. A surveillance video of the incident was released by the police four days after the shooting, on 26 November. On 3 June 2015, the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Office declared that their investigation had been completed and that they had turned their findings over to the county prosecutor. Several months later the prosecution presented evidence to a grand jury, which declined to indict, primarily on the basis that Rice was drawing what appears to be an actual firearm from his waist as the police arrived. A lawsuit brought against the city of Cleveland by Rice's family was subsequently settled for $6 million.

In the aftermath of the shooting it was revealed that Loehmann, in his previous job as a police officer in the Cleveland suburb of Independence, Ohio, had been deemed an emotionally unstable recruit and unfit for duty. Loehmann did not disclose this fact on his application to join the Cleveland police, and the Cleveland Police Department did not review his previous personnel file before hiring him. In 2017, following an investigation, Loehmann was fired for withholding this information on his application. A review by retired FBI agent Kimberly Crawford found that Rice's death was justified and Loehmann's "response was a reasonable one". The incident received both national and international coverage. It occurred on the heels of several other high-profile shootings of African-American males by police officers.

Tamir Elijah Rice (June 25, 2002 - November 23, 2014) was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on June 25, 2002, to Samaria Rice and Leonard Warner. His family described him as athletic, excelling at various sports-including football, basketball, swimming, and soccer-and often competing with kids older than him. As a 12-year-old, he stood 5'7" and weighed 195 lbs. He was involved in arts programs at his community recreation center, sculpting pottery and crocheting embroidery for his mother. At the time of his death, Rice attended Marion-Seltzer Elementary School in Cleveland, where he was described as a "pleasant young man". He had an older sister, Tajai, and an older brother.

Surveillance screenshot of Rice shot by the police; this screenshot is of an enhanced video released for the grand jury.

A 9-1-1 caller, who was sitting in a nearby gazebo, reported that someone, possibly a juvenile, was pointing "a pistol" at random people at the Cudell Recreation Center. The caller twice said that the gun was "probably fake". According to police spokesmen, it was initially unclear whether or not that information had been relayed to the dispatched officers, Loehmann and Garmback; it was later revealed that the dispatcher had not elaborated beyond referencing "a gun". According to one report, the 9-1-1 responder twice asked whether the boy was black or white before dispatching officers to the park at around 3:30 p.m. The actual recording of the phone call reveals that the 9-1-1 responder asked whether the boy was black or white three times. The question was repeated after the caller continued describing the color of Rice's clothing. The caller then left the gazebo, and Rice sat down in it sometime later.

According to information reported to the press on the day of the shooting by Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association President Jeffrey Follmer, "[Loehmann and Garmback] pulled into the parking lot and saw a few people sitting underneath a pavilion next to the center. [Loehmann] saw a black gun sitting on the table, and he saw the boy pick up the gun and put it in his waistband." Also on that date, Cleveland Deputy Chief Tomba stated, "The officer got out of the car and told the boy to put his hands up. The boy reached into his waistband, pulled out the gun and [Loehmann] fired two shots." According to Chief Tomba, "the child did not threaten the officer verbally or physically." On November 26, the day a video of the shooting was released, Chief Tomba is quoted as saying, "Loehmann shouted from the car three times at Tamir to show his hands as he approached the car." A Justice Department investigation concluded officer Loehmann exited the vehicle while it was still coming to a stop and fired two shots less than two seconds after opening the passenger door.

Rice died the following day at MetroHealth Medical Center. The medical examiner stated that the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the torso, with injuries to major vessels, the intestines, and the pelvis.

A surveillance video without audio of the shooting was released by police on November 26 after pressure from the public and Rice's family. It showed Rice pacing around the park, occasionally extending his right arm. The video briefly shows Rice talking on a cellphone, and sitting at a picnic table in a gazebo. A patrol car moves at high speed across the park lawn and then stops abruptly by the gazebo. Rice appears to move his hand, an action police experts concluded was Rice reaching for his waist band but disputed by expert reports released by Rice family attorneys, before Loehmann jumps out of the car and immediately shoots Rice from a distance of less than 10 feet (3.0 m). The entire incident happened within a span of two seconds. According to Judge Ronald B. Adrine, in a judgement entry on the case, "this court is still thunderstruck by how quickly this event turned deadly.... On the video the zone car containing Patrol Officers Loehmann and Garmback is still in the process of stopping when Rice is shot."

Almost four minutes later, a police detective and an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation who had been working a bank robbery detail nearby arrived on the scene and treated the boy. Three minutes after that, paramedics arrived and took him to MetroHealth Medical Center.

Rice's mother said that the toy gun had been given to him by a friend minutes before the police arrived, that police tackled and put her 14-year-old daughter in handcuffs after the incident, and that police threatened her with arrest if she did not calm down after being told about her son's shooting.

A second video obtained by the Northeast Ohio Media Group and released on January 7, 2015, shows Rice's 14-year-old sister being forced to the ground, handcuffed and placed in a patrol car after she ran toward her brother about two minutes after the shooting. Furthermore, no aid was administered to Rice for four minutes until an FBI agent arrived, which the agent later attributed to how the Cleveland Police officers "didn't know what to do" as Rice's wound required a more advanced level of first aid in which the officers were not trained.

Police officers involved

In the aftermath of the shooting, media outlets reported on the background of the police officers involved. Both officers were placed on paid administrative leave.

On December 28, 2015, the grand jury returned its decision declining to indict the police officers.

Timothy Loehmann

Loehmann, the officer who killed Rice, joined Cleveland's police force in March 2013. From July to December 2012, he worked with the police department in Independence, about 13 miles (21 km) south of Cleveland, with four of those months spent in the police academy.

In a memo to Independence's human resources manager, released by the city in the aftermath of the shooting, Independence deputy police chief Jim Polak wrote that Loehmann had resigned rather than face certain termination due to the concern that he lacked the emotional stability to be a police officer. Polak said that Loehmann was unable to follow "basic functions as instructed" and specifically cited a "dangerous loss of composure" that occurred in a weapons training exercise. Polak said that Loehmann's weapons handling was "dismal" and he became visibly "distracted and weepy" as a result of relationship problems. The memo concluded, "Individually, these events would not be considered major situations, but when taken together they show a pattern of a lack of maturity, indiscretion and not following instructions, I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct these deficiencies." It was subsequently revealed that Cleveland police officials never reviewed Loehmann's personnel file from Independence prior to hiring him. He had been hired in Cleveland despite listing his primary source of income for the prior six months having been derived from " under-the-table jobs".

On May 30, 2017, the mayor of Cleveland announced that Loehmann had been fired for concealing details about his past employment in his job application. On his application, Loehmann said that he had left the Independence Police Department for "personal reasons" and did not reveal the Independence police's determination that he had "an inability to emotionally function" as an officer.

Frank Garmback

Garmback, who was driving the police cruiser, has been a police officer in Cleveland since 2008. In 2014, the City of Cleveland paid US$100,000 to settle an excessive force lawsuit brought against him by a local woman; according to her lawsuit, Garmback "rushed and placed her in a chokehold, tackled her to the ground, twisted her wrist and began hitting her body" and "such reckless, wanton and willful excessive use of force proximately caused bodily injury." The woman had called the police to report a car blocking her driveway. The settlement does not appear in Garmback's personnel file.

Investigation

The Cleveland Police Department received statements from both Loehmann and Garmback. They announced they were looking for additional witnesses to the shooting, including a man who was recorded walking with Rice in the park before the shooting. Their results would be presented to a grand jury for possible charges.

On January 1, 2015, the Associated Press reported that Cleveland police department officials were looking for an outside agency to investigate the Rice shooting, as well as handle all future investigations related to deadly use-of-force incidents.

On May 15, Mother Jones magazine reported that, six months after the shooting, while the sheriff's department announced that it had almost concluded its investigation of the shooting, neither of the two officers involved had yet been interviewed by investigators from the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Office. It also reported that as of that time Frank Garmback, the officer who drove the police car, was not under criminal investigation.

On June 3, the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Office released a statement in which they declared their investigation to be completed and that they turned their findings over to prosecutor Tim McGinty, who was expected to review the report and decide whether to present evidence to a grand jury. In response to a petition from citizens, on June 11 Municipal Court Judge Ronald Adrine agreed that "Officer Timothy Loehmann should be charged with several crimes, the most serious of them being murder but also including involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, negligent homicide and dereliction of duty." Judge Adrine also found probable cause to charge Officer Frank Garmback with negligent homicide and dereliction of duty. Because Ohio judges lack the legal authority to issue arrest warrants in such cases, his opinion was forwarded to city prosecutors and Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty who, as of that date, had not yet come to a decision on whether to present the evidence to a grand jury.

On June 13, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty released a redacted 224-page report of the investigation. The report included interviews with at least 27 people, including teachers, friends, and the person that called 911. Loehmann and Garmback declined to be interviewed. Contradicting statements made by police that Loehmann shouted "show your hands" three times before firing, the report included accounts from several witnesses who claimed to have not heard officers issue any verbal warning to Rice.

Grand jury investigation and decision

On October 10, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office released two reports that McGinty had sought from outside experts about the use of force, one by retired FBI agent Kimberly Crawford, a second by Colorado prosecutor S. Lamar Sims; both reports concluded that the shooting of Tamir Rice was reasonable under the circumstances. However, amid accusations from lawyers representing the Rice family that McGinty had deliberately chosen Crawford and Sims because of their "pro-police bias" in order to cover for Loehmann and Garmback, McGinty convened a grand jury to consider whether or not criminal charges should be brought against the officers.

On December 28, McGinty reported that the grand jury had declined to indict Loehmann or Garmback, saying, "Given this perfect storm of human error, mistakes, and communications by all involved that day, the evidence did not indicate criminal conduct by police." The announcement prompted Rice's mother to release a statement accusing McGinty of mishandling the investigation, stating in part, "Prosecutor McGinty deliberately sabotaged the case, never advocating for my son, and acting instead like the police officers' defense attorney."

Three expert witnesses who testified before the grand jury criticized the prosecutors' behavior during the grand jury. Roger Clark, a retired LASD officer with expertise in police shootings, said that prosecutors at the hearing treated him with hostility and "disdain" for concluding that Loehmann and Garmback had acted recklessly; he also described the prosecutors as using theatrics, like none he'd ever seen in previous grand jury proceedings, which he believed were intended to lead the grand jurors to the conclusion that the prosecutors wanted them to reach. Jeffrey Noble, another retired police officer and expert in use-of-force cases (who had himself used deadly force on the job), said he was attacked by prosecutors for saying that the officers never should have escalated the situation by rushing Rice, adding, "I've definitely never seen two prosecutors play defense attorney so well." And Jesse Wobrock, a biomechanics expert hired by the Rice family's lawyers, also described the prosecutors as "acting in a way like they were defense attorneys for the cops". and as having attacked him professionally for his testimony regarding the timing and significance of body movements by Loehmann and Rice, as seen on video footage of the shooting. (A spokesman for McGinty's office said the three experts were only presenting "one side" of the story, but he could not elaborate because prosecutors are bound by grand jury secrecy laws.)

In the next Democratic primary for Cuyahoga County district attorney, in March 2016, McGinty lost to challenger Michael O'Malley, who received 55.8 percent of the vote. An analysis by cleveland.com claimed that McGinty won none of 282 majority African-American precincts.

Department of Justice

The United States Department of Justice decided on December 29, 2020, that it would not bring criminal charges against the two officers involved in the shooting. The Department said it did not condone the officers' actions, but there was not enough evidence to charge them with a crime. In particular, they pointed to the poor quality of the grainy video, which has no audio and is partially obstructed by a police car, as a reason for the decision not to prosecute.

Death suit and settlement

On December 5, 2014, Rice's family filed a wrongful death suit against Loehmann, Garmback, and the City of Cleveland in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio. The eight-page complaint accused Loehmann and Garmback of acting "unreasonably, negligently [and] recklessly" and that "[h]ad the defendant officers properly approached Tamir and properly investigated his possession of the replica gun they would undoubtedly have determined ... that the gun was fake and that the subject was a juvenile." It also accused the City of Cleveland for failing to properly train both officers, as well as failing to learn about the Independence police department's internal memo about Loehmann.

On April 25, 2016, the lawsuit was settled in an effort to reduce taxpayer liabilities, with the City of Cleveland agreeing to pay Tamir Rice's family $6 million ($5.5 million to Tamir Rice's estate, $250,000 to Rice's mother, and $250,000 to Rice's sister).

In the wake of the shooting, protests and public outcry broke out in Cleveland, although they were relatively minor. However, on November 25, 2014, a day after a grand jury decision not to indict the police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, the Cleveland protests became more prominent. That day, about 200 protesters marched from Public Square to the Cleveland Memorial Shoreway, causing the latter to be shut down temporarily. Rice's family pleaded with the protesters to remain peaceful in their activities, saying, "Again, we ask for the community to remain calm. Please protest peacefully and responsibly."[citation needed ]

On December 5, Ohio Governor John Kasich established a task force to address community-police relations in response to Rice's shooting and other similar incidents.

Rice's death has been cited as one of several police killings which sparked the nationwide Black Lives Matter movement.

Media coverage

The incident received national and international coverage, in part due to the time of its occurrence, coming shortly after the recent police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York; the police shooting of Akai Gurley in Brooklyn, New York just two days before; the shooting of John Crawford III in Dayton, Ohio; and the subsequent unrest following these incidents had attracted worldwide attention.

The Northeast Ohio Media Group was criticized for publishing a news story on Rice's parents' criminal records.

Funeral service

A funeral service for Rice was held at the Mount Sinai Baptist Church on December 3, 2014, with about 250 people in attendance. He was remembered "for his budding talents and described as a popular child who liked to draw, play basketball and perform in the school's drum line". Family members criticized Loehmann for acting too quickly in Rice's shooting.

Suspension of 911 dispatcher

On March 15, 2017, 911 dispatcher Constance Hollinger was suspended for eight days for failing to inform the responding officers that Rice was "probably a juvenile" and that the gun he had was "probably fake".

Timothy Loehmann

On October 5, 2018, the city of Bellaire, Ohio, hired Loehmann as a part-time officer. Five days later, Loehmann withdrew his application to the Bellaire police department, and his training ceased.

In July 2022, Loehmann became the only policeman in the small department of Tioga Borough, Pennsylvania. He resigned after less than a week.

References

1. Tom McCarthy in New York, ^ Tamir Rice: video shows boy, 12, shot 'seconds' after police confronted child Archived November 27, 2014, at the Wayback Machine The Guardian. Retrieved November 26, 2014.

2. BBC News, 11 October 2015, ^ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34499044 Archived February 10, 2021, at the Wayback Machine

3. ^ "911 caller: 12-year-old boy shot by US police probably had a 'fake' gun". YouTube.

4. ^ "Video: Cop shot boy seconds after encountering him". Yahoo News. November 26, 2014. Archived from the original on November 26, 2014.

5. ^ Heisig, Eric (June 13, 2015). "FBI agent who gave first aid to Tamir Rice said Cleveland officers on scene 'didn't know what to do'". Cleveland.com. Archived from the original on February 10, 2021.

6. ^ "Officers involved in Tamir Rice shooting remain on the job, away from public". Fox 8 Cleveland. A Tribune Broadcasting Station. June 5, 2015. The chief's office confirms both officers are still on the job and working in units that do not involve any contact with the public.

7. ^ Erica Hellerstein (December 12, 2014). "On Job Application, Cop Who Killed 12-Year-Old Listed 'Under-The-Table Jobs' As Prior Employment". ThinkProgress. Archived from the original on February 10, 2021.

8. ^ Graham, David A. (June 11, 2015). "'Probable Cause' in the Killing of Tamir Rice". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on February 10, 2021.

9. ^ "Tamir Rice shooting: No charges for officers". CNN. December 28, 2015. Archived from the original on February 10, 2021.

10. ^ Sean Flynn (July 14, 2016). "The Tamir Rice Story: How to Make a Police Shooting Disappear". GQ. Archived from the original on February 10, 2021.

11. ^ "Tamir Rice's family files wrongful death suit against Cleveland police officers". fox8.com. December 5, 2014.

12. ^ Nicole Hensley, "Tamir Rice's family blasts police at boy's Cleveland funeral", Daily News (New York), December 3, 2014.

External links

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2017: The city of Cleveland was issued a Consent Decree, an agreement that the police would make changes to their practices.

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2017: The city of Cleveland was issued a Consent Decree, an agreement that the police would make changes to their practices.

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2020: Cleveland Declares Racism a Public Health Crisis

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2020: Cleveland Declares Racism a Public Health Crisis

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2021: Issue 24 voted to amend Cleveland's City Charter

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2021: Issue 24 voted to amend Cleveland's City Charter

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Cleveland's city charter was amended to allow for citizen oversight of police misconduct. Since then Cleveland has created several committees and new positions to address the issue, however, the citizens of Cleveland are waiting to see noticeable change.

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How Is Cleveland City Council Addressing Racism As A Public Health Crisis?

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Council members unanimously passed a declaration last year and created a task force of community groups.