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Forget the riot. This isn't the fifth anniversary of the Cincinnati riot. It wasn't much of a riot, OK? Nobody got killed.
That's no small thing. In the past five years we've seen that Cincinnati criminals have plenty of guns. But during the week of April 7-14, 2001, when crowds erupted in fury against the police department, no police officers died. Nor did anyone else.
Politicians and church groups prefer to speak of "civil unrest," but that term is too bland to convey the intensity or the significance of what happened. Rioting occurred, but so did a lot of savvy street-level political organizing.
At various points between the night police killed Timothy Thomas and the day of his funeral a week later, thousands of protesters converged on a few blocks near downtown, commanding the attention of news media from around the world.
Much of the city's current political and economic life is a reaction to what happened that week.
But the violence has been exaggerated. When it was over, the fire department estimated arson damage at less than $300,000 — a regrettable amount, to be sure, but hardly an urban conflagration. Nearly 75 percent of the arrests were for curfew violations, something that wouldn't even be a crime under normal circumstances.
Only 28 people were indicted for aggravated rioting. The most serious charge levied after the "riot" was carrying a concealed weapon — and only one person was charged with that.
The worst violence against persons consisted of two highly publicized incidents. In one, a white driver was dragged from his truck and beaten up by black youths. In the other, someone shot at a police officer; the bullet hit his belt buckle, leaving him unharmed. Some stores were looted. A lot of windows were broken.
Violence was a part of the events following Thomas' death, but it was a small part. The defining characteristic of that week was political, according to Tom Dutton, a Miami University professor who's volunteered in Over-the-Rhine for more than 20 years.
" 'Uprising' is a much better name for it than what the media call 'the riots,' " he says. "The common discourse is that, if you're black and you're young, you're a criminal, and that's what comes with the word 'riot.' The term 'riot' allows white people to wash their hands of what happened. If we call it an insurrection or a rebellion, the connotation is that people aren't going to take it anymore."
No one abhors violence more than Angela Leisure. It was the police shooting of her son, Thomas, that launched the week that changed Cincinnati.
Her appeals for calm helped keep the violence from growing worse. She doesn't remember the events following her son's death as a riot.
"I've always called it a rebellion," Leisure says. "People were rebelling against injustice. They demanded to be heard, and from that a lot of people started to listen."
Cincinnati hasn't been the same ever since.
Underestimating the anger
Timothy Thomas had no weapon when Cincinnati Police Officer Stephen Roach shot and killed him. That's one reason his death caused such anger.
Thomas wasn't wanted for anything serious — the 14 warrants that led police to chase him were all for traffic-related misdemeanors. That's another reason his death caused such anger — it was as though he'd been executed for driving without a license.
Thomas wasn't the first unarmed African-American man killed by Cincinnati Police. That's another reason his death caused such anger.
In the Fall 2002 edition of the New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy, Professor Michael J. Pastor argued for the need for more assertive federal civil rights prosecutions in cases of misuse of force by police.
"For an example of a city that has been unable to deal with police violence, one need look no further than the recent case of the police shooting in Cincinnati," Pastor wrote. "Many members of the minority community were outraged when unarmed suspect Timothy Thomas was shot to death fleeing from police. The killing and the urban upheaval that followed prompted the DOJ to open an investigation concerning the treatment of minorities.
"But, if the shooting itself was troubling, a more disturbing fact was that federal reports detailing both the police's and the city's intransigence in the face of unrest stretched back to 1968. Since 1995, in Cincinnati, there have been 15 fatal shootings of black suspects but no white ones. Despite report upon report, no major changes have been made to prevent unnecessary violence."
Five months before police killed Thomas, Roger Owensby Jr. died in a confrontation with police. He had no weapon. He wasn't even wanted on traffic charges.
"You have to look at it as an accumulation of events, including what happened to Roger Owensby and what happened after that," says Linda Newman of Cincinnati Progressive Action (CPA).
The most important part of what happened was that there was no change in police policies or procedures, even after two officers involved in Owensby's death were indicted. The city's failure to take seriously the complaints of African-Americans about police conduct made the uprising all but inevitable, according to Suhith Wickrema of CPA.
"I don't agree with the violence," he says. "But I can easily see how people became frustrated by the police violence and said the system wasn't working. City leaders completely underestimated the anger on the street and how politically sophisticated the people were. They knew what they were doing: Unless some windows were broken and some garbage cans set on fire, they wouldn't get any attention."
The uproar started Monday, April 9, two days after Thomas' death. His mother, joined by attorney Kenneth Lawson, the Rev. Damon Lynch III, civil rights activists and more than 100 youths on spring break stormed a meeting of city council's Law and Public Safety Committee, demanding answers.
This was the first chance city officials had to prevent anger from building, and they blew it.
"I remember being struck by footage on TV of Angela Leisure addressing members of council — how dignified she was and how rudely she was treated," says Lon Coleman of CPA.
Councilman John Cranley, the committee chair, was clearly out of his depth; he'd been appointed to council only a few months earlier. He was unable to restore order or calm the crowd.
Mayor Charlie Luken, who wasn't a member of the committee, attended part of the meeting anyway. But then he quietly slipped out of the room as tensions mounted.
After several hours of shouting questions to and accusations against council members and police officials, the crowd left City Hall and headed for District 1, the station that houses Cincinnati Police headquarters. As midnight approached the crowd grew to an estimated 1,000.
At some point a rock shattered glass in the police station. At some point police dispersed the crowd with rubber bullets. At some point people began damaging property downtown and in Over-the-Rhine.
The next day, Tuesday, April 10, property crimes dotted downtown businesses. A small group busted windows on Vine Street between Sixth and Seventh streets. Impromptu demonstrations led to marches through Over-the-Rhine. Police in riot gear responded forcefully.
A pattern emerged: noisy but mostly peaceful protests during daylight hours, fires and looting at night. It continued into Wednesday, April 11. Finally on Thursday, April 12, Luken called a curfew. More than 100 state troopers arrived to help the beleaguered Cincinnati Police.
When the day of Thomas' funeral arrived, Saturday, April 14, the world was watching to see if Cincinnati would explode in violence. It didn't. Hundreds attended the funeral, and even more participated in a demonstration and march afterward. But the peace held. Nobody got killed.
The next day, Easter Sunday, Luken gushed about the rain, as though it were some miraculous intervention to dowse the city's anger. On Monday he canceled the curfew.
'Morally bankrupt'
The events of April 2001 have led to the creation of the following: a nonfiction book, a novel, a documentary film, at least one master's thesis, many poems, a citation in a law journal, endless Internet dissertations, numerous articles and essays in newspapers and magazines, countless forums and discussions organized by civic and religious groups — but no analysis or report by city council, which never held hearings to determine what actually happened on the streets.
Left unanswered, therefore, is a question that's commonly considered impolite in Cincinnati: How much of the rioting was the police department's fault?
Many police officers performed their jobs well and protected citizens. But at key moments after the uprising began, police conduct arguably made the situation more volatile.
During the Law and Public Safety Committee meeting — before violence of any kind had occurred — protesters encountered a show of force.
"While we were in the city council meeting, mounted police surrounded City Hall," Wickrema says.
People inside council chambers noticed the cops gathering outside. In less than delicate language, Lynch warned that the heavy police presence was unwelcome.
"Mayor Luken," Lynch said, "call off your dogs."
At District 1 later that night, police could have tried dialogue with the crowd but used force instead, according to Brian Garry, a community organizer and later a candidate for city council.
"The police started the 'riot,' " he says. "It wasn't until after the police attacked an unarmed, peaceful and grieving gathering of citizens of Cincinnati that any violence occurred. This is not secondhand. I was there."
When spontaneous demonstrations formed April 10, police broke them up. A march from New Prospect Baptist Church to Washington Park ended in a hail of beanbag missiles and tear gas. TV footage showed cops yelling war whoops as they fired on the crowd. Smaller groups ran into police opposition every time they tried to head downtown with their handmade signs.
"The 'rioters' were sometimes people protesting peacefully," says Dan La Botz, a historian and member of CPA. "They were sometimes angry young men. They were sometimes religious people trying to channel people into a better form of protest. Some people went marching through the neighborhood.
"I remember seeing a sign. It was on a piece of cardboard they must have gotten from a dumpster. It said, 'Stop killing our people.' The police treated a group of peaceful protesters as criminals because they were young black men — shooting tear gas, driving them back."
CityBeat reporter Maria Rogers was following a small group of demonstrators near Vine Street and Central Parkway when police stopped them. She phoned to report she was in danger, but not at the hands of any "rioters."
"Get me out of here!" Rogers yelled. "They're shooting at me!"
"Who's shooting at you?" I asked.
"The fucking cops!"
The most shocking police conduct came as mourners were leaving Thomas' funeral. A small group of people were holding signs and chanting at Liberty and Elm streets when a squad car pulled up. Police jumped out and fired beanbags. One struck a schoolteacher from Louisville, another struck a 7-year-old girl.
The FBI investigated that outrage, but the U.S. Attorney refused to file charges, saying the "political climate" in Cincinnati precluded convictions against any police officer.
Amazingly, the incident didn't provoke a violent reaction — which many believed it was deliberately staged to produce. The "police drive-by," as it has come to be known, showed what the uprising was all about, according to La Botz.
"All of us found the shooting after Timothy Thomas' funeral very horrifying," he says. "To think that we live in a city where, when peaceful mourners leave a funeral, the police will whip out their shotguns and open fire — it made clear how morally bankrupt the city administration was."
The city eventually paid $4.5 million to settle lawsuits by the schoolteacher, the little girl, Angela Leisure and a handful of protesters injured during the uprising. Even then, after approving the payouts, council never bothered to discuss what role the police had played.
Gathering the troops
Many factors contributed to the uproar of April 2001. Some point to the exceptionally warm weather and the fact that spring break had thousands of high school students available for action.
One essential element was the political organizing that had preceded Thomas' death. Sam Robinson — a member of the March for Justice Committee, one of many grassroots groups that sprang from the uprising — reminds that the 2000 presidential election controversy had only recently passed; it had mobilized a local contingent of pro-democracy activists who were primed to join the protests against police.
"The killing of Timothy Thomas and the rebellion it sparked seemed to have become a kind of magnet," Robinson says. "Existing energy flowed toward it, like feeder marches."
The Cincinnati Black United Front (BUF) had formed less than a year earlier, after downtown businesses closed their doors during an African-American cultural celebration. The BUF had honed the practice of small, spirited protests before the uprising.
A boisterous anti-globalization protest had shaken downtown Cincinnati just five months earlier. That event not only generated a network of mostly white, mostly young activists who participated in the uprising, but it also served as a kind of warm-up for the street confrontations that followed Thomas' death.
The three-day protests against the TransAtlantic Business Dialogue (TABD) came one week after Owensby's death in November 2000. During their largest march — greeted by cordons of helmeted riot police — the anti-globalization activists passed Police Chief Tom Streicher and started chanting, "Stop killing black men!"
The intensity of the response by Cincinnati Police served to radicalize many participants, who complained of excessive force and spurious arrests — of 52 protesters arrested during TABD, nearly all who contested the charges were acquitted or saw their cases dismissed. But, as later happened after Thomas' death, city council never bothered to investigate what happened on the streets.
The chemistry of repression is sometimes counterintuitive, with harsh police measures actually increasing, rather than snuffing out, angry protests. The main body of anti-globalization activists, the Coalition for a Humane Economy (CHE), had planned another round of protests for April 2001. But when Thomas was killed, CHE dropped its plans and encouraged members to focus on the emergency in Over-the-Rhine.
If viewed as a sustained political phenomenon, rather than as a spate of crimes, the uprising of 2001 continued long past Thomas' funeral. Once engaged, many activists resolved to continue the momentum begun during the week of street protests.
Araby Carlier, 23, grew up in Price Hill and now lives in New York. In 2001 she was a student at Antioch College, active in Refuse & Resist, a national organization opposing police brutality.
"When the Cincinnati Police Department killed (Thomas), I grabbed a ride home to Cincinnati in the first car I could get to take me and didn't leave for weeks," she says.
'Hearts were changed'
In the aftermath of the uprising, Cincinnati experienced a kind of Prague Spring, with ad hoc political groups organizing to keep pressure on the police department and city council and forums and dialogues throughout the city aiming to put together divergent segments of the city — black and white in particular.
"There was very high energy," Dutton says. "There were a lot of good groups that were energized and formed."
To La Botz, some of the panels and discussions served to diffuse the energy of the uprising, perhaps glossing over the urgency of the city's problems. Even so, having people talk about race was an improvement.
"Part of that was the strategy of the elites in the city, including the religious elites, to give people a chance to blow off some steam," La Botz says. "But thousands of people were meeting and talking about police-community relations. That forced the media to pay attention."
One result of the uprising was that noisy protest — once considered a rarity, even an oddity in Cincinnati — became part of the ordinary political fabric of a large city. In the five years since Thomas' funeral, people holding signs and chanting slogans about racism and police violence have become almost commonplace.
Most of the gatherings number a few to a few dozen. But at least one of the demonstrations attracted national attention. The March for Justice, held June 2, 2001, about two months after Thomas' death, attracted several thousand people.
"The March for Justice was the biggest civil rights march in this city in 40 years," La Botz says. "That was a tremendous thing, even if we failed to capitalize on all that energy in the long term."
While questioning how much substantial change has resulted in the police department, Newman says the uprising had a definite impact.
"It initiated an unprecedented period of community activism and political pressure, despite what I think is a nationwide period of recession of this activity after 9/11," she says. "Ordinary citizens' minds and hearts were changed. The power structure was nudged ever so slightly. The police department changed its PR tactics and some policies as a result of the subsequent collaborative agreement, especially after that agreement became an order of the court."
Signed a year after the uprising, the collaborative agreement on police reform incorporated the settlement of a lawsuit alleging racial profiling by the police department and a memorandum of agreement with the U.S. Justice Department. Together the two agreements mandated changes in the use of force by police, collection of demographic data about police interaction with citizens, the creation of the Citizens Complaint Authority and adoption of community problem-oriented policing in Cincinnati.
The official response to the uprising proved to be as forgettable as all the commissions and task forces formed to combat racism in prior decades, despite Luken's assurances that this one, Community Action Now (CAN), would be different. Launched April 16, two days after Thomas' funeral, CAN held brief promise, in large part because Luken appointed Lynch one of three co-chairs.
While Lynch had worked hard to keep protests nonviolent, his fiery oratory about problems with the police gave CAN a credibility that was short-lived. After Lynch penned a letter decrying police violence and abuse, Luken canned him from CAN.
Five years later, the group's Web site is still operating, though long outdated (visit www.cincinnatican.org). CAN helped arrange expungements for about 80 people arrested on misdemeanors during the uprising and lobbied for passage of civil service reform by voters. But otherwise the organization's most lasting legacy is an unattractive button with what was meant to be a catchy slogan: "Cincinnati CAN. You can, too."
The most dynamic and divisive outcome of the rebellion was the civil rights boycott of Cincinnati. For a brief time, the boycott was a point of unity among a broad spectrum of activist groups: the Coalition for a Just Cincinnati, the Black United Front, Citizens Concerned for Justice, Stonewall Cincinnati. It had early and impressive successes, leading Bill Cosby, Whoopi Goldberg, Wynton Marsalis, Smokey Robinson and other entertainers to cancel performances in Cincinnati and leading church-based and other groups to cancel conventions.
But the entertainment boycott was only part of the program. More polarizing was a call for residents to shun downtown businesses between the Ohio River and Central Parkway, namely the area that had been sealed off from protests during the uprising.
At one point Luken referred to the boycotters as "economic terrorists," for which he later apologized. But he refused to negotiate the demands of the boycott, which included changes in how the police department operated as well as steps to end what organizers called "economic apartheid" in Cincinnati.
Some of the boycott's demands ended up being adopted — for example, voters repealed the anti-gay Article 12 in the city charter and city council passed a living-wage ordinance. But the boycott collapsed on itself as the result of bitter infighting within and among the various groups that waged it.
Mayor Mark Mallory, who was a state senator in 2001, says he sees real change in policing in Cincinnati since then. But the real payoff will be in future years as new officers are recruited and trained under changes initiated by the collaborative agreement and other initiatives, he says.
"Can the department improve in terms of dealing with issues in the community that have to do with race and perceptions around race? Yes," Mallory says. "Has the department made improvements? I think so. This is a continuous process and, as new officers come onto the force and as we introduce new training methods and equipment, all of those things have to be factored in, in terms of how the police department interacts with members of the community."
Mallory has had no criticism of the police department since taking office in December. In fact, last month he told a group associated with the Cincinnati Bar Association that he and Police Chief Streicher "will never disagree in public."
That feel-good commitment might be — should be — unsettling. But then Mallory's very election might be the best proof that the uprising made a difference. He is, as Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Desmond Tutu pointed out, an African-American elected mayor in a city roiled by racial conflict just five years ago.
That's no coincidence, according to La Botz.
"Perhaps we have a black mayor today because of that energy," he says. ©
