Last year was the 50th anniversary of the Hough Uprising (known to some as the Hough Riots) and this year is the 50th anniversary of the Glenville Uprising, more commonly known as the Glenville Shootout, which led to the Glenville Riots — again, a pejorative term.
And similar to last year, when attention was focused on my community of Hough, the attention and conversation now is focused on Glenville — at least for a week or so. Maybe now that these 50-year milestones have been met, both communities will begin to be thought of in a more positive light, something that will allow for redevelopment to occur at a faster pace.
But in order to pursue such future renewal, it’s probably helpful to have a better understanding of the past. It’s a commonly held belief that the uprisings, with their attendant fires, looting and gunfire, caused both of the communities to deteriorate, but this is not quite accurate. Certainly, the disturbances didn’t help these communities, but they were already headed into a downward spiral when violence broke out.
A lingering question in the minds of many whites (and some blacks as well) was, “Why are you burning your own community down?” Comedian Dick Gregory once answered, “So that we can then move into your community — and burn it down too!” What Gregory was saying, in his own way, was that, in most instances, the only way the majority culture listens to minorities is when they rise up violently.
Social scientists, starting with W.E.B. Dubois in the early 1900s, had been consistently warning politicians and planners the ghettos that were being created would one day explode, and those same political leaders acted as if they were completely surprised when the uprisings occurred.
Other whites have argued that urban renewal efforts were already underway to fix black communities when the uprisings occurred, and they were right — and wrong. True, renewal programs were started at the end of the term of President Eisenhower, but they were primarily designed to build more public housing, which planners thought would keep blacks bottled up in their ghettos.
New housing tracts were going up all over the country to accommodate the families of returning veterans, and the government wanted to keep those enclaves as white as possible.
So when the 1964 civil rights bill was signed by President Johnson, there was great hope (due in large part to the efforts Dr. Martin Luther King) that things would change in America. But it didn’t take but a few years for conservatives to gut virtually every Great Society program Johnson put in place. Blacks became greatly disillusioned, and with good reason. We were again being lied to.
But back to my point, which is this: The uprisings didn’t lead to the disinvestment in Hough and Glenville. The simple fact is that disinvestment was already occurring due to government-led redlining and realtor-encouraged white flight.
Here’s the proof: If the uprisings were the cause, then why did neighborhoods like Mt Pleasant, Union-Miles and Slavic Village, (where no uprisings occurred) also suffer disinvestment? The answer is (and always has been) government-sponsored institutionalized racism is the cause, pure and simple. But it’s always a neat trick if you can blame the victim, isn’t it?
From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.