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Cincinnati 1967: Riots devastate a poor, mostly African-American neighborhood, leading to a curfew and hundreds of arrests. Some black leaders disdain the term “riot,” saying a rebellion is underway. Among the solutions proposed by an interracial panel of business and civic leaders are 3,000 summer jobs for inner-city youth.
Cincinnati 2001: Riots devastate a poor, mostly African-American neighborhood, leading to a curfew and hundreds of arrests. Some black leaders disdain the term “riot,” saying a rebellion is underway. Among the solutions proposed by an interracial panel of business and civic leaders are 3,000 summer jobs for inner-city youth.
Cincinnati has changed in many ways since the 1960s, but efforts by commissions and other groups to tackle race relations left enough unresolved problems to foster a repeat of the unrest that swept across the country 34 years ago.
So say religious and political leaders and others who have lived through both riots in Cincinnati. They acknowledge the city’s police division has made needed reforms over the years, but point out police-community relations are just one of the racial and economic issues at play.
Progress in racial relations is easy to see.
Diversity is more valued by employers now than 30 years ago, and most of the discriminatory barriers to black employment and opportunity are gone. Class-action lawsuits by minority workers at Denny’s and Texaco successfully tested federal anti-discrimination laws. Colleges recruit minority students with scholarships and other aid.
But that doesn’t mean everyone has been able to climb the social ladder — or even reach the bottom rung.
Most schools and neighborhoods are still fairly segregated, especially in Cincinnati — the nation’s eighth-most segregated city, according to a Mumford Center analysis of the 2000 U.S. Census.
Greater Cincinnati is also one of the most unequal regions in the United States, according to the non-profit Metropolitan Area Research Corporation of Minnesota (MARC). Thanks in part to affluent Indian Hill, the region’s richest 5 percent is 32 times as wealthy as its poorest 5 percent — a ratio greater than every other U.S. region except Tampa Bay.
Growing up in these extremes can produce very different perspectives on other races and classes and on how the world works.
While Cincinnati slept
In the mid-1960s, a group of powerful business and community leaders got together to talk about race relations in Cincinnati. Led by Joseph Hall of the Urban League, they founded the Committee of 28, a private group of 14 white and 14 black civic and business leaders. The committee included the heads of Kroger, Procter & Gamble and Shillito’s, as well as a leader of the Cincinnati chapter of the NAACP.
The committee met monthly and in secret for a few years, talking about race in sometimes emotional meetings. But even this powerful group of leaders produced only incremental change, according to one of its members and a July 1967 article in The Wall Street Journal. Other race and police panels since then might have accomplished even less.
The Committee of 28’s efforts eerily presaged some of the discussion that followed last month’s Cincinnati riots. For example, the Committee of 28 talked about providing 3,000 jobs for young blacks — the very number proposed last month by some business and community leaders after the riots following the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man.
What was missing in 1967 was large-scale, meaningful action by the white business leaders, whom The Wall Street Journal characterized as more interested in talking about race than changing anything.
“It was not an adversarial group,” says Lawrence C. Hawkins, 82, a black member of the Committee of 28. “We were all trying to work for what was best for Cincinnati.”
The committee did change the way police use lethal force, according to Hawkins, who was the first black assistant superintendent of Cincinnati Public Schools and was vice president of the University of Cincinnati for eight years.
In the 1960s, officers shot at people driving away in stolen cars or breaking into buildings, Hawkins says. In one high-profile incident, officers repeatedly shot at an unarmed young black man chased onto the roof of a one-story building in Walnut Hills.
Hawkins says one committee member — the head of a large local corporation — asked another executive to take care of the problem. The next week, city council revised the policy, which still stands today: Officers can use deadly force only when they believe lives are threatened.
Eventually, however, the riots and protests ended, the committee stopped meeting and race relations moved to the back burner.
“Cincinnati kind of went to sleep,” Hawkins says.
Others had hazy recollections of any significant response to the 1960s riots.
“I don’t recall a systematic response to (the riots), which is scary,” says Gene Beaupre, then a Xavier University student. He later worked for various council members and now teaches political science at Xavier.
Beaupre says city council was more concerned about community input in the 1970s and 1980s. The city’s budget used to have a column for neighborhood requests and one for city manager requests. That concern seemed to end in the 1990s, as riverfront development took center stage.
In the 1970s, the city increased recreation funding and expanded hours for the city’s health clinics, according to Bobbie Sterne, a 25-year city councilmember who retired in 1998. In 1973, the city bought a declining transit company and formed Queen City Metro.
There are more black leaders now in local politics, but they’re still dependent on party support, says Douglas Springs, a 21-year city employee who works in the city’s health department.
But the prisons are thriving
In certain respects, Cincinnati now isn’t much different from the late 1960s, according to some who lived through both riots. In some ways, conditions are worse.
Sterne says whites are more isolated than they were 30 years ago. From 1970 to 1990, Greater Cincinnati developed land at five times the pace of its population growth, according to MARC President Myron Orfield, who says people in the Tristate spend a lot of effort trying to get away from each other.
Suburban migration removed most of the wealthier and middle class students from Cincinnati Public Schools, leaving behind those who couldn’t move — often poor or members of racial minorities.
In 1975, 99,000 students attended the city’s public schools; 75 percent were white and 80 percent were working class or above, according to former Gov. John Gilligan, now a member of the Cincinnati School Board. Today the city’s public schools have 43,000 students — 72 percent of them black and 66 percent eligible for reduced-cost lunches.
Most middle class whites “aren’t in the public schools and they don’t give a damn about the public schools,” Gilligan says. Some state legislators who support spending millions on prisons and police wouldn’t invest in public schools, he says.
When Gilligan was elected governor in 1970, Ohio prisons held 10,000 people. Now 44,000 are incarcerated in the state, at an annual cost of $25,000 each.
“What does it do?” Gilligan says. “What does it accomplish for anyone?”
Are conditions in Cincinnati the same as in 1967?
“Not far from it,” says Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, pastor of New Greater Life Baptist Church, in Avondale. “I feel bad in saying it.”
“The main thing that hasn’t changed is that blacks don’t have any economic power,” Hawkins says.
On average, blacks don’t understand the country’s political and financial systems as well as whites, according to Hawkins.
“They need some hope,” he says.
Some blacks who have grown up seeing white wealth and black poverty believe someone behind the scenes pulls strings for whites, Hawkins says.
Many blacks are better off than they were decades ago, according to Tim Burke, co-chair of the Hamilton County Democratic Party.
“But you go down to Over-the-Rhine and you certainly don’t get that feeling,” Burke says.
The city’s police division is much more diverse than in the 1960s, but the racial makeup hasn’t kept pace with the city’s. Twenty-eight percent of the city’s 1,038 officers are black, compared to 43 percent of city residents, according to data from the police division and the census.
A continuing problem, Sterne and Hawkins say, is that the police division still has a lot of white officers from the West Side who grew up without much contact with blacks. A white officer with that background can get jaded after working in a high-crime neighborhood such as Over-the-Rhine.
“You get to believe that everybody’s a criminal,” Sterne says. “You know better, but that’s what you’re immersed in day in and day out.”
On the other hand, Burke, who attended recent gatherings where young blacks spoke, doesn’t remember so many in the 1960s saying they feared police.
The key problem is that people are not talking and trying to understand one another, Springs says.
“Until that happens, I think we’re just spinning our wheels,” he says.
“Virtually everybody has to change to some degree,” Gilligan says. “We have just not been willing to do that, so sooner or later the same old tensions increase.” ©
This article appears in May 16-22, 2001.