Good Kids, Bad City Read online

  But when canal and lake traffic gave Ohio and other lakeside settlements a straight shot to the East Coast, Cleveland’s significance as a trade port greatly increased. The swamps were cleared, waterways improved. In 1840, the town tallied six thousand residents; a decade later seventeen thousand people called Cleveland home.

  Most of these new arrivals were from New England—early-model WASPs. They set the social tone. Still fevered by the religious and social energies behind the abolitionist movement, the expat East Coasters remade Cleveland as a progressive place on the question of race. With Canada across the lake, the city was a natural stop for the Underground Railroad. But the city’s moral stance was consistent aboveground as well. As Kenneth L. Kusmer noted in his book A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–1930, southerners seeking fugitive slaves in Cleveland were arrested, tried, and convicted of kidnapping as early as 1819.6 The Cuyahoga County Anti-Slavery Society pressured local public officials to come out against the practice throughout the 1830s. In 1859, an effort to build an all-black school was drowned out in public outcry over segregation. The local courts were also exceptionally favorable to early civil rights actions. A lawsuit in 1864 triggered by an effort to segregate streetcars led to court-ordered integration. Four years later, when a black Clevelander was turned away from a skating rink, he successfully sued for three hundred dollars in damages.

  This moral high ground set Cleveland apart from the rest of the Buckeye State. “Whites in southern and central Ohio, where hostility to blacks was widespread and growing during the 1850s, often expressed incredulity over the egalitarian or antislavery sentiments of many Clevelanders,” Kusmer wrote.7 Clevelanders, however, seemed to embrace that distinction. “An indication of the civilized spirit of the city of Cleveland,” one newspaper editorial boasted in the 1860s, “is found in the fact that colored children attend our schools, colored people are permitted to attend all public lectures and public affairs where the fashion and culture of the city congregates, and nobody is offended.”8

  But some tectonic shifts were coming. Post–Civil War, southern blacks, pulled in by reports of the city’s equality, arrived at a steady clip. In 1870, thirteen hundred African Americans lived in Cleveland.9 Two decades later, the number was three thousand, and that figure doubled over the next ten years. This pipeline ran parallel to another: European immigrants. Beginning in the 1870s, Cleveland received a steady flow of German and Irish arrivals, followed by Hungarians, Russians, Romanians, Poles, and Slavs. Each group bedded down in a distinct part of the city, pockets that became synonymous with specific ethnicities. Slavic Village. Little Italy. Little Bohemia. These encampments created a city that was less a civic whole than “essentially a group of juxtaposed tribes more or less at war with one another,” a contributor to Forum Magazine wrote in the 1920s. “She is a melting pot that never melted but continues to boil.”10

  Cleveland’s blacks also followed the demographic realignment, mostly collecting along Central Avenue, just southeast of downtown. After enjoying an integrated city for so long, local blacks weren’t prepared for this new social isolation: thanks to the liberal spirit of the city before the Civil War, Cleveland had no tradition of all-black schools or businesses or hospitals. Kusmer also pointed out that as the century slid toward its close, the upper-class WASPs, traditionally in the corner for blacks, moved out to the new suburbs carved out of the land east of the city. This sliced the “paternalistic” cord that had connected the two groups for so long.

  It may have been that new isolation. Or the lack of all-black institutions. Or the new ethnic arrivals—many crossing the Atlantic to escape political chaos—bent on grabbing their own prosperity and holding tight. But chasing close behind the geographic segregation were systemic, policy-bound stabs at discrimination—the kind that would have shocked Cleveland’s proud progressives of the 1850s.

  In 1910, Luna Park, a popular amusement park, began allowing blacks in only on special “Jim Crow Days.” Five years later, the Women’s Hospital implemented a new policy of taking black patients only on Saturday. White-linen restaurants and hotels downtown stopped hiring black waiters. The most significant exclusion, however, was the ban on blacks in unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. This block kept Cleveland’s African Americans out of factory work, the route many whites and immigrants were taking to the new middle class across the Midwest.

  As the other ethnic groups spread from their original neighborhoods to new parts of the city, Cleveland’s blacks stayed put. By the 1920s, 90 percent of local African Americans lived in a single patch of the East Side, bounded by Euclid Avenue on the north, East 105th Street on the east, and Woodland Avenue to the south. This was living “down the way.” And these demarcations would largely pen in black Cleveland for the rest of the century.

  This isolation was, in Kusmer’s analysis, partly due to a tension hardening between black Clevelanders and European arrivals. “It seems likely that these [European] ethnic communities were composed of individuals highly prone to what social scientists have called ‘status anxieties,’” he wrote. “Having raised themselves above poverty, acquired a small home … and attained a modest level of income, they were fearful of association with any group bearing the stigma of low status. They naturally resisted the encroachment of a racial group that American society had designated as inferior. In so doing, they unthinkingly helped create a black ghetto.”

  Yet Cleveland’s black neighborhoods continued to bulge to capacity as more black southerners fled Jim Crow during the Great Migration. Between 1910 and 1920, Cleveland’s black population jumped 308 percent; by 1930, the population would again double, to seventy-two thousand. Confined to a small space, Cleveland’s blacks were subject to the classic slate of American slum troubles: high rent, terrible living conditions, flaring racial tensions, and police harassment. “The majority live in drab, middle or low class houses, none too well kept up,” one contemporary wrote in 1930. “While the poor live in dilapidated, rack-rented shacks, sometimes a whole family in one or two rooms, as a rule paying higher rents than white tenants for the same space.” Another black newspaperman at the time noted, “There has been a growing tendency upon the part of the police, both public and private, to kill members of the race sought for committing crimes and misdemeanors.”

  Meanwhile, Cleveland’s own place in the national economy was on a rocket trajectory. By the end of the Second World War, the region’s choice rail and port position made the city an industrial powerhouse. In 1945, Cleveland ranked fifth in the country in industrial-output dollars, and in 1949 Cleveland was one of the largest cities in the nation, with a population of 914,800. Still, the city center was leaking population—and tax base—to the new suburbs cupping Cleveland on all sides like a human palm. Of the 170,000 jobs created in the region after the war, 100,000 were outside Cleveland in the greater county.11

  Black demographics also grew. Between 1940 and 1960, Cleveland’s black share of the population jumped to 251,000—more than 30 percent. However, in 1960 blacks were only 10 percent of the workforce, and in the same year reviewers found that 28.2 percent of black-occupied housing was dilapidated.

  City hall was not providing any solutions. At the time, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had earmarked significant funds for Cleveland to redevelop the blasted areas. Cleveland in turn offered six thousand acres for new housing, a whole one-eighth of the city and twice as much as any other municipality in the country. When the bulldozers went into action, the federal projects uprooted many residents in the older Central Avenue ghetto. But Cleveland then failed to move ahead with planned construction, forcing the residents to cram into Hough and Glenville. Between 1957 and 1962, the city destroyed 460 residences along Woodland and East Fifty-fifth, home to nine hundred families—yet no new housing was ever constructed for the displaced. Ninety percent of these demolished homes were in good condition. In 1966, Cleveland’s head of urban renewal admitted before a congressiona
l committee that the department’s policy was to allow property marked for urban renewal—property inhabited by black families—to deteriorate as much as possible so the city could pick it up on the cheap. HUD eventually cut all funding to the city. One federal official at the time referred to Cleveland as “this office’s Vietnam.”12

  The city’s thin infrastructure couldn’t field the demands of the growing population. The issues flared first with schooling. The school board didn’t have enough elementary schools to handle the East Side. Teachers were placing children in libraries and storerooms to accommodate the numbers. Throughout the 1950s, thousands of East Side children couldn’t enter kindergarten for lack of space. On the whitewashed West Side, schools were half-empty.

  By the early 1960s, local black activists had begun tuning into the social frequencies beaming out of the southern civil rights protests. Recognizing the education situation in Cleveland as wink-wink segregation, and that the school board’s unwillingness to bus black students west was tied to fears of outraging working-class whites, black activists launched a campaign of protests and sit-ins in 1963. They organized under the banner of the United Freedom Movement (UFM), and the early action seemed to get results—the board agreed to bus. But reports came back to parents that the transplanted East Siders were locked down in all-black classrooms. The UFM decided to take the fight directly to the white neighborhoods digging in against integration.

  On January 26, 1964, the UFM marched in Collinwood, an East Side neighborhood filled with working-class Italians. White hecklers showed up. Slurs—“dirty niggers!”—were reportedly tossed at picketers. Four days later, the group planned a similar demonstration in Murray Hill. A tight web of streets crawling up a hill on the city’s eastern line, the neighborhood—known as Little Italy—was the heartbeat of white Cleveland, not to mention the local Mafia. As such, it was a no-go zone for blacks. But on a Thursday morning, UFM marchers showed—to find fourteen hundred whites standing outside Memorial Elementary School. They were clutching clubs, baseball bats, guns. A brutal riot ensued. Bullets hit the cars of fleeing blacks. The Cleveland police just watched. A black reporter on the scene begged an officer to do something. “You went in there and started something,” the cop replied. “You incited a riot.” No one was arrested. Cleveland’s mayor, Ralph Locher, refused the UFM’s request to step into the situation.

  The school desegregation crisis continued to careen on a violent course. In April, as the UFM demonstrated outside the construction site of a new East Side elementary school, a twenty-seven-year-old white minister and activist named Bruce Klunder was accidentally killed by a bulldozer. That night, angry young blacks took to the street, wearing their arms out throwing rocks at police and smashing up stores.

  Whether the words were rolling through the looters’ heads or not, Cleveland’s larger black community was suddenly weighing the real-world value of what Malcolm X had said at a Cleveland rally only days earlier, words that would pin themselves to the next decade of conflict: the ballot or the bullet.

  For the next year, racial skirmishes broke out regularly in the city, mostly along Superior Avenue, the northern border between black and white enclaves. Black youths assaulted a white man and his son. A white man shot a ten-year-old black boy. White motorists had their cars pelted with rocks. From porches, white adults lobbed words like “savages” and other slurs at black children heading to school. Black and white gangs routinely battled in local parks. “If you are going to beat up those niggers,” a police officer is reported to have told white teens, “take them down to the park where we can’t see it.”13

  The city’s blood pressure climbed. On July 18, 1966, in Hough—sagging, overcrowded houses; boarded storefronts; food stores that jacked up their prices on days when the welfare checks came in—a white bar owner hung a sign on his door at Seventy-ninth and Hough: NO WATER FOR NIGGERS. The angry crowd that circled the bar only grew as the white owner and his son paraded before the door with guns. They grew louder and angrier when the police arrived to disperse them. By dusk, glass showered the pavement from shop windows and streetlamps, and fires ate through abandoned houses. The National Guard and Cleveland police stormed the area. Crowds fled on foot in packs. Cops busted into houses, dragging out everyone they found inside—teenagers and old folks included—and holding them overnight. More than 275 people were arrested. Police opened fire on one black couple as they were driving on their street; the sixteen-year-old young woman lost an eye.

  Six nights later, Cleveland’s first major race riot was over—four dead, 240 fires, and two million dollars in damage. A grand jury, headed by prominent local businessmen and newspaper publishers, was tasked with sniffing out the origins of the violence. The group claimed a small number of communist agitators had incited the black community to revolt. The report—a tone-deaf Eisenhower-era antique piece in the post-Selma world—so angered the black community that they held their own hearings on the riots; the event became a public grievance forum for a part of Cleveland that felt it had been ignored and abused for far too long.

  “You don’t need anything to incite people when they know they’re being mistreated,” one witness told the packed audience. “I have seen police brutality,” another reported. “This was outrageous.”

  “A spark was all you need and then you had your riot,” a third witness told the committee.14 “A spark plus a spark plus a spark, what you get? You have a war.”

  * * *

  Any mother would squeeze her children close while gunfire screamed outside her home. But Bessie Bridgeman was a step ahead. While Glenville became a combat zone in July 1968, she put Ronnie and his sister in the bathtub, placing a few inches of porcelain between the children and the bullets winging around outside.15

  Her own people were originally from South Carolina. Although the family didn’t regularly share the details, the legend was that Bessie’s grandfather had been a sharecropper who fled north to escape a murder charge. When he and his wife, who everyone called Smoke, settled in Cleveland, they opened up a laundry. It was still in business as Bessie grew up, Smoke doing the linens in the way her own mother had learned on the plantation down south.

  Bessie graduated from John Marshall High School on the East Side. Her children would never know for sure, but it seemed like she had even taken some college classes. It was clear she was a thinker; when a problem got before her, she’d burn down the candle, as they liked to say, working out a solution. She was also a killer on the chessboard. And she was always trying to pad the schooling her children were receiving. Classrooms might teach education, Bessie felt, but they didn’t teach knowledge. So she would press her kids with big words—anti-establishment, materialism—and address them in the stiff elocution of an English gentry grande dame—excuse me, sir. Pardon me. Ronnie would sometimes put a hand under his pillow to find a letter his mother had written to him. It was Bessie’s way of encouraging her youngest to read.

  They all had nicknames. The oldest was Hawiatha, born in 1950. Everyone called him Kitch. Beatrice came eighteen months later; she went by Bebe, but by the time Ronnie came around he couldn’t pronounce his Bs, instead mangling the name into Gege. It stuck. Wiley, arriving in 1954, was called Buddy. And Ronnie, three years later, because he was so small, was Bitzie, as in itsy-bitsy. Bessie had her own names for the kids as well. Her own thoughtfulness showed up in Wiley, so she dubbed him the Professor. She called Ronnie Skipper, which seemed to match his easygoing attitude. Ronnie, by some random calculus of the little boy’s mind, always called his mother Dot.

  As warm and close as the Bridgeman kids were with their mother, their father was a different story. Hawiatha Bridgeman Sr. was a towering slab of a man, a doorway-filling six-foot-six with a voice as deep and rolling as a plucked upright bass, just like Melvin Franklin from the Temptations. A few syllables alone were enough to freeze his kids still as statuary.

  But you wouldn’t catch that voice in the house now, and that was the family’s trouble. B
ack in 1961, Hawiatha Sr. had been in a car accident he didn’t walk away from. A neck injury left him paralyzed. By ’68 he was living in a treatment facility two hours outside Cleveland. That left all the parenting and bill paying on Bessie. She juggled shifts at the phone company with time at the family laundry, all the while raising four children on her own. The pressure wore her own health down. Not that she showed it. After long days pulling two jobs to keep her family fed, Bessie was still home every night to put her youngest children to bed, her sweet voice lullabying “Silent Night” as Ronnie, her little Skipper, closed his eyelids.

  And now, like every other parent across Cleveland as the night of July 23 ended, the gunshots gone but the fires still going, Bessie Bridgeman had to tuck her kids in bed wondering what was coming with the next morning.

  * * *

  You could have hung a sign on the door: NO WHITES ALLOWED.

  Cleveland’s city hall is an imposing copper-topped four stories of marble and stone squatting near the edge of Lake Erie. As a rain-splattered dawn broke on Wednesday after the first night of gunfire and sirens in Glenville, an unlikely meeting was underway inside. Cleveland’s seat of power had likely hosted many sit-downs where the only faces at the table were white. Not this time. More than one hundred black leaders packed a chamber, from young Black Power militants to pulpit-pounding heavies from the largest churches in town. They were all waiting to hear what Mayor Carl Stokes wanted to do next.