2 Hough and the Urban Crisis

On June 2, 1969, Carl Stokes joined Frank Ellis, director of the Health Department, and his recently hired deputy commissioner for environmental health, Bailus Walker, on a residential street in Hough, the densely populated and long-deteriorating East Side neighborhood. At the north end of Holyrood Road, part of a tangle of odd-angle streets of clapboard houses, town homes, and low-rise apartment buildings, Stokes, Ellis, and Walker announced a new program to control rats, funded by the federal government. Stokes knew that the $381,000 from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare wouldn’t accomplish much without neighborhood involvement—hence the public kickoff. Stokes thrived in these kinds of situations; he was at his best as a politician out on the streets, shaking hands, smiling, and selling himself and his policies.

Holyrood Road may have been at the center of Cleveland’s East Side slum, but it wasn’t terribly dissimilar from lots of streets in the area. In fact, Stokes had grown up on such a street, just two miles away in Central. Stokes was raised by his mother, a domestic worker, in what he remembered as a “rickety old two-family house.” His father had died when Stokes was just two, and his knowledge about the struggles of the poor came from watching his mother raise her two boys alone; his understanding of the problems of living in substandard housing came from that rickety house at 2234 East 69th Street. “We covered the rat holes with the tops of tin cans,” he remembered in his autobiography. “The front steps always needed fixing, one of them always seemed to be missing.” The family—Carl, his mother, and his older brother Louis—shared one bed in their one cold and drafty bedroom. Moving out of that home at age eleven and into the “dependable warmth” of Cleveland’s first public housing complex—Outhwaite Homes, also in Central—“was pure wonder” for Carl. In their new home they found “a sink with hot and cold running water, a place where you could wash clothes with a washing machine, an actual refrigerator.” Stokes felt, and never forgot, the real physical differences that came with his new, modern home.1

From that critical transition in his life, Stokes learned that government can make a very positive impact on the lives of citizens, a lesson that helped guide his political career. Standing on Holyrood Road that morning, Stokes could not make grand claims about the transformative potential of the new rat control program, but the federal money could make a difference through little steps: by helping train city workers, paying for rodenticide (“that’s a fancy word for rat poison,” Stokes told the gathering), and funding a community education effort to encourage residents to improve their homes and their behavior so as to make Hough and other rat-infested parts of the city less accommodating to the pests. For this reason, the city “will need the cooperation and the involvement of citizens if the program is to achieve its potential,” Stokes announced to the small crowd.2

Figure 3. At the “Rat Control Kick-off,” Mayor Stokes stood with Director of Health Frank Ellis and his new deputy Bailus Walker, surrounded by a small crowd of press and Hough residents. Ellis and Walker wore coveralls, contributing to the imagery of taking some visible action—a central theme in the Stokes administration. Carl Stokes Photographs, 1968–1971, container 2, folder 101, Western Reserve Historical Society. Used with permission.

The main event of the kickoff wasn’t a lecture on proper garbage storage or “environmental hygiene.” Rather, it was a demonstration with the poison, which city workers placed in rat burrows around nearby homes. This, too, fit with a fundamental Stokes administration strategy: do something visible. Rats and the burrows they made around buildings and in vacant lots were obvious signs of a neighborhood’s failure and of government’s failures, too. Rats scared children and sometimes bit them. They spread disease, and they gave neighborhoods an unhealthful, even chaotic feel. Still, everyone knew—Stokes, Ellis, and Walker included—that rats didn’t produce Cleveland’s problems, not even the problems in Hough. The rats were symptoms rather than root causes. Stokes, like other politicians before him, understood that treating symptoms was easier than identifying and removing the causes. Symptoms were visible, tangible, and perhaps even manageable. Root causes were just the opposite. Perhaps the pressing question that morning should not have been could the city control the rats, but rather when would the city stop fighting symptoms rather than trying to cure the disease?3

In his four years as Cleveland’s mayor, Stokes pressed liberal solutions to inner-city problems, re-created local government so that it might better respond to the urban crisis, and participated fully in federal programs designed to improve conditions in troubled neighborhoods. And through it all, the programs and the reports, the activism and press conferences, Hough took on special meaning. Observers could begin to believe that Hough was the urban crisis. The obvious problems of racism and segregation, unemployment and the concentration of poverty in the ghetto, helped Hough, and neighborhoods like it around the country, define the urban problem. Containing and curing the crisis in the ghetto became the primary strategies for reformers, both in and out of government. Public and private activism made a difference in individual lives and particular places, but the trajectory of Hough—and Cleveland as a whole—remained unchanged. Liberal policies simply could not stop the deterioration of Hough’s residential environment.

90 PERCENT OF CLEVELAND’S POPULATION DO NOT KNOW

Just about the time Stokes and Walker announced the rat control program, city employee Gary Bound began reading meters in Hough. A resident of Old Brooklyn, a white working-class neighborhood on the southwest side of Cleveland, Bound might as well have been traveling to a different world as he crossed the Cuyahoga River and entered the basements of the rapidly deteriorating ghetto homes and unkempt apartment buildings. Bound was so moved that he typed up a lengthy letter to the mayor, eloquently expressing his shock at what he saw in those basements. “They’re so rotten and foul that it’s like being swept into an abyss of rotting grime, germs and garbage. The dampness, the decay—and I am not over-emphasizing—the stench is beyond proper description. You simply ‘must’ see it to actually believe it, and still it all strikes as like a horrid nightmare, an unreal horror story.” After describing this situation, “the horrible basements and wretched backyards,” Bound proposed that the city use some of its Cleveland: Now! money to buy some “outside help” to aid these residents, giving them instructions and encouragement “to teach them how to clean-up, how to improve their lawns, how to reconstruct and save their homes and basements.” Bound’s visits to Hough had convinced him that the neighborhood’s direst problems were physical. He described an environmental crisis that city residents faced every day.4

Bound was clearly a sympathetic observer, but his proposed solutions suggest how little he could actually see, even as he toured the darkest corners of what psychologist Kenneth Clark had called the Dark Ghetto in an influential book published four years earlier. Such deterioration could not be explained merely by the lack of interest or ability of the current Hough residents to improve their environment. Bound saw Hough’s physical problems, but he could not clearly discern their causes, a nearly universal failure, especially for those who lived outside the ghetto. Bound could not appreciate the powerlessness of residents who for the most part did not own the buildings in which they lived, who could not gain the type of employment that could help them purchase better housing, and who found it difficult to escape a deteriorating neighborhood because of racism among landlords, real estate agents, bankers, and many residents of white communities that resisted integration.

By the mid-1960s, neighborhoods like Hough—increasingly referred to simply as “the ghetto,” regardless of the city in which they appeared—had become a primary domestic concern in the United States. The riots of the Long Hot Summers, which began in earnest in 1964 in Harlem, North Philadelphia, and several other inner-city neighborhoods, spread alarm among Americans as they watched their cities burn on the nightly news. Increasing media attention was matched by increasing scholarly attention. Kenneth Clark’s 1965 book bridged those worlds because he was a scholar and an insider, and he wrote in the sharp prose of a journalist. Clark’s emphasis on the distinctiveness of ghetto life, its “all-encompassing” nature and the pathology that affects all its residents, even those who escaped, influenced contemporary discussion about failed urban neighborhoods. A forty-year resident of Harlem, Clark described ghetto residents as prisoners, trapped physically and, more problematically, psychologically. According to Clark, all the ghetto’s problems—indeed all of urban America’s problems—stemmed from this reality. High rates of delinquency, homicide, drug abuse, and school dropouts all derived from the central fact of forced segregation. The poverty and powerlessness of the ghetto was self-perpetuating so long as the damaging forces of segregation buffeted African Americans. Clark described for a newly attentive audience the “normal chaos of ghetto communities” and the colonial relationship ghettos and their residents had with the city beyond the “invisible wall.”5 Despite the wide readership of Dark Ghetto and the power of its descriptions and explanations, most Americans, even those who had seen failing urban neighborhoods firsthand, never fully integrated the consequences of systemic racism into their understanding of the ghetto. Even Gary Bound, who deeply felt the plight of the poor, failed to appreciate the power of that invisible wall.

Bound may not have fully recognized the causes of decay, but at least he had been in the bowels of the ghetto, and he used this experience to help him understand the troubles of the people stuck there. “I, in my many hours of silent meditation,” he wrote to the mayor, “have often wondered why these negroes were really bitter and angry, why they rioted and revolted. NOW I KNOW!!!” Bound knew these people needed help, were demanding help, but still were not getting it. Like the residents of Hough, he wondered why help was not forthcoming. Bound believed that if everyone could see what he had seen, things would change. “I think I can safely estimate that ‘at least’ 90% of Cleveland’s population do not know, do not realize even, what this tragic situation is over in this negro area,” he wrote, adding, “It certainly does make my heart weep to realize this myself.” Really seeing Hough, as Bound had, might be a step in the right direction, but merely witnessing was not enough.6

Stokes wrote a brief and polite response to Bound’s three-page letter. He praised Bound for his “concern about the future of Cleveland” and said he had referred Bound’s “interesting thoughts” to several staff members “for review.” As the Stokes administration knew well, however, the city had been struggling to solve the problems of Hough for more than a decade—Bound’s “interesting thoughts” had been thought before by many in government and in the church organizations, nonprofit agencies, and charitable foundations that had been at work in the neighborhood. That spring Stokes himself had stood on East 81st Street just south of Hough Avenue, with representatives of Inner City Housing Inc., a joint effort by the large local banks, including Central National Bank, to announce the rehabilitation of forty-two apartments in three buildings. Neither that small endeavor, nor the investments of time, energy, and capital of all the other involved organizations, could stop the rot.7

THE CRISIS GHETTO

Bound discovered Hough’s problems in 1969, but other Clevelanders had begun investigating the growing troubles in the 1950s, as the neighborhood entered a rapid demographic transition. In 1950, Hough had nearly 66,000 residents, 95 percent of whom were white. Just five years later, the population had grown to over 82,000 and it was over 50 percent black. By the end of the decade, the neighborhood had already begun its population decline, and three quarters of its 71,000 residents were black. This demographic change reflected Cleveland’s attempt to accommodate more than 165,000 additional African Americans in the two decades after 1940. Many of the blacks moving to Hough came from the South, but others came from the adjoining Central neighborhood, which had become home to Cleveland’s black population during the first Great Migration of the 1910s. As white ethnics, including Jews and Italians, moved out of Central, the physical condition of the neighborhood deteriorated. This decay helped make it the focus of public housing efforts in the 1930s, as the city demolished hundreds of buildings to make way for the Outhwaite Homes and Cedar Apartments projects, both of which replaced old clapboard homes with midrise brick apartment buildings. By the 1950s, demolition well outpaced rehabilitation, and Central began a dramatic population decline, losing 7,000 residents in that decade and another 25,000 during the 1960s, most of them moving farther east, especially into Hough, Glenville, and Mt. Pleasant.8

Hough’s white residents read the racial transition and physical deterioration of Central as foreshadowing. The same changes would reach their streets—it was just a matter of time. In a pattern that played out across the urban North, whites fled as blacks arrived; more than half the people who lived in Hough in 1950 had left by 1960. In addition, the whites who left Hough in the early years of transition were disproportionately white-collar, meaning that the neighborhood’s income composition was changing as rapidly as its racial demographics. The transition was so rapid and obvious that the Cleveland Foundation, a venerable organization dedicated to the region’s success, initiated and funded a study by social scientists at Western Reserve University, an eminent institution that sat just east of Hough. That work, published in 1959 by Marvin Sussman, a sociologist, and R. Clyde White, a professor of social work, described a neighborhood under considerable stress. Sussman and White hoped to provide an “exact description of the facts about Hough, its people, their hopes, wishes, needs, and living conditions as these were in October–December 1957.” To do this, they combined a demographic analysis with interviews of residents in the two-square-mile neighborhood. Their data quantified the racial turnover and revealed other trends, including a rise in the number of children and a gradual increase in crime. But the most significant problems were physical and subjective. Recreational facilities, including parks, were increasingly overcrowded and worn out, according to residents. More important, the growing population was packed into existing structures. Only sixty-five housing units had been built in Hough in the 1940s, when the population was overwhelmingly white and fairly stable. As the population grew in the 1950s, construction added essentially no new residential space. Instead, according to Sussman and White, the division of single-family homes into apartments had led to “dilapidation.”9

Excluded from most areas in metropolitan Cleveland and forced to compete for units in constricted space, blacks paid premiums on real estate, and the extreme population pressure and high rents discouraged many types of investments. Upgrades to kitchens and bathrooms, new windows, doors, porches, and even new roofs became unnecessary to attract tenants. Apartments in dirty and unkempt buildings rented anyway. Worse, property owners with large mortgages, many of them absentee landlords, subdivided single-family homes and made extant apartments even smaller. Some began renting out previously unused spaces in basements and attics. Much of this conversion work was shoddy, and even newly created spaces deteriorated quickly. Real improvements rarely came because property owners could charge high rents for even degraded units. Tenants held little sway over landlords, who sometimes remained unknown to them or shifted frequently as investment properties changed hands.10

Despite the stress from population growth, Sussman and White didn’t describe a neighborhood in crisis, and for good reason. While the arrival of blacks signaled the arrival of blight for some Clevelanders—including the white families who quickly moved out—Hough remained a lively community in the late 1950s. Although 90 percent of blacks in Hough had lived in their homes less than five years, the high mobility had not prevented the creation of strong social ties. Most black residents had family connections in the neighborhood, and even more told Sussman and White that they had made good friends with neighbors since their arrival. Hough gained a reputation for extreme poverty, but most families earned paychecks, and they built—or brought with them—the types of institutions that strengthened communities, especially churches. For instance, in 1956 Liberty Hill Baptist Church moved out of its handsome brick building on Kinsman Road in Central and into a much grander structure on Euclid Avenue in Hough, where a beautiful sanctuary welcomed worshipers under a great dome, illuminated in part by large Tiffany stained-glass windows facing the side streets—four in each direction. The Star of David adorned nearly every surface in the church, and Hebrew phrases were scattered about, including on the windows.

The Liberty Hill congregation had moved into what had been the Euclid Avenue Temple, completed in 1912, when Hough was a much wealthier neighborhood with homes that nearly matched the grandeur of the temple. The Baptist congregation retained the Jewish symbols, accepting both the building’s history and the Jewish history played out in the stained glass that adorned the room. Those unfamiliar with Jewish symbols and Hebrew might miss the references to Abraham or Jehovah and wouldn’t be able to translate “Hallelujah,” but to those who knew the Bible the two stone tablets were unmistakably the Ten Commandments. Here and in other temples that became churches, the continuities of the two faith traditions lived on in the sanctuaries they shared.

The Liberty Hill building well represented the demographic transition, but casual observers might miss the broader continuities. Just fifty years earlier, immigrant Jews had occupied a neighborhood in distress—Central—where the city had initiated efforts to improve housing conditions. A 1914 report by Cleveland’s Department of Public Welfare called the Jewish and Italian neighborhood “some of the worst conceivable housing conditions” with “extreme and hodge-podge overcrowding.” Indeed, population density along Scovill and Central Avenues, 208 people per acre, was well above the “overcrowded” densities that would plague Hough in the 1950s. The study also found a majority of the buildings, most of them wood frame, in a “poor or only fair state of repair.” The author, Mildred Chadsey, chief inspector of the city’s Bureau of Sanitation, expressed concern about the cleanliness of yards and the homes themselves. All this would sound familiar to observers of Hough as it transitioned into an African American neighborhood. There was something very recognizable about the arrival in poverty, the struggle to move out of squalid housing, and the movement to better neighborhoods. This wasn’t a black story; it was an urban American story. It was a story well known to the Jews who moved their temple from Scovill Avenue in Central, to Euclid Avenue in Hough, and finally to an even larger facility in suburban Beachwood.11

In the 1950s, Hough grew in population but not in prosperity. Money flowed in, but too much money flowed out. All the necessities of life were expensive, especially rent. Worse, rent and mortgage money mostly left the neighborhood, as landlords tended not to live in Hough, and banks essentially ceased making new loans in the area, assuming that the racial transition made investment there a poor risk. In addition, residents found themselves paying too much for groceries, as too few stores catered to a largely captive population. Storekeepers, like landlords, didn’t reinvest in the area—stores didn’t expand, didn’t gain new refrigeration units or new displays, just as homes didn’t gain new plumbing and appliances. In short order, this crowded community looked sick, as building owners neglected painting, failed to replace the rotting piers under listing porches, failed to pick up garbage that accumulated along fences and in overgrown lawns. Capital flowed from Hough, and the neighborhood deteriorated under the weight of population pressure and Cleveland’s harsh weather.12

If Hough looked sick by 1960, by 1965 it was sick. A special mid-decade census found just 59,000 people, meaning the neighborhood had lost more than 20,000 residents in a decade. The population decline reflected a deterioration of conditions, including the abandonment of housing units no longer habitable or worthy of repair. It also represented a continued desire of many residents to find better housing elsewhere. Despite the population loss, Hough still had almost 46 people per acre, or more than four times the density of some white working-class neighborhoods, such as Tremont on the near West Side. And Hough was now nearly 90 percent black, an indication of the completeness of the racial transition and the uniqueness of the black experience in postwar urban America.13

Using the 1965 special census data, Walter Williams, a researcher for the Johnson administration’s Office of Economic Opportunity, determined that Hough was part of a new kind of place: a “Crisis Ghetto.” Data showed that over the previous five years poverty had declined nearly everywhere in the city, even among blacks—not surprising, given the strong economic growth at the time. Still, the census found that real income had actually declined in Hough, Central, and Kinsman, down 2 percent in male-headed families and a remarkable 15 percent in female-headed households. Unemployment rates also rose, but only among blacks living in the Crisis Ghetto, where poverty rates had increased more than 10 percent. What’s more, the deleterious effects of the ghetto had “spread beyond the economy to the total environment—to schools, to street associations, to the preservation of life itself.” In sum, Williams concluded, “in 1965 the average Crisis Ghetto inhabitant was worse off than he had been in 1960, both absolutely and relative to others in the city.”14

Williams used data to describe growing despair in the Crisis Ghetto, but the national media were just as likely to use physical descriptions to convey the depths of social decay. This was not mere shorthand or symbolism. The physical deterioration was real. John Skow, writing in the Saturday Evening Post in 1967, described Cleveland as “worn out and feeble.” Problems were most evident in Hough, where large wooden homes with “front-porch columns that upheld the Sunday-pot-roast respectability of the McKinley Administration” were now “split and peeling.”15 A month earlier, in an article under the headline “Cleveland’s Ghetto,” New York Times reporter Paul Hofmann described Hough as “one of the sickest and most sinister neighborhoods in the nation.” Hofmann quoted disaffected residents and described recent troubling events, but the article’s most powerful paragraph described the scene.

Hough lives in a mood of suspended rage. Shattered windows, garbage heaps, loitering men and mousy prostitutes outside the few saloons still in business, youth gangs ensconced in vacant homes, older people too afraid to go out and dejectedly staring out of windows, groceries sold at marked-up prices behind half-closed grilles in a handful of stores just a few hours a day, burglaries, muggings and arson as a way of life, shots in the night, and rats—this is Hough today.16

“And rats”—the crescendo that drove home the chaos. Of the many physical markers of the urban crisis, rat infestations became perhaps the most sensational.

The danger posed by rats to human health was nothing new in the 1960s, of course. In 1909, the U.S. Department of Agriculture referred to the brown rat as “the worst mammalian pest known to man.” Once primarily a rural nuisance responsible for substantial crop damage, rats also spread deadly diseases for centuries before scientists uncovered their role. Especially as the carriers of the fleas that spread bubonic plague and the lice that spread typhus, rats have been complicit in the deaths of hundreds of millions of human beings across the globe. What was new in the 1960s, however, was the connection of rats to a specific kind of place, as symbolic of urban decay. Just fifty years earlier, when rats lived in a wide variety of places in dense American cities—along wharves, in public markets, warehouses, and stables—no urban neighborhood could banish the pests. As the century progressed and the middle class moved out of the crowded central city and into modern homes, built with concrete basements and without privy vaults or stables, broad swaths of suburban, auto-dependent America made for poor rat habitat. At the same time, the densest urban neighborhoods, with overflowing garbage cans, poorly constructed and maintained plumbing, and porous outbuildings and basements, still supported large rodent populations, allowing rats to evolve into the quintessential marker of urban despair, of the failure of certain places to progress.17

Politicians responded to the growing connection between slums and rats, and perhaps thinking it easier to eradicate the pests than diminish their habitat, they created programs to control rats. Even the lackadaisical Locher administration, which controlled Cleveland’s city hall from 1962 to 1967, felt obligated to engage in rat control, initiating a pilot eradication project in Hough in the fall of 1966. Later the city expanded the program to include all the city’s infested neighborhoods. In 1967, the city surveyed 20,000 residential properties, and its Bureau of Neighborhood Conservation, which had been created just two years earlier, “baited and gassed infestations on over 7,000” of them. That year more than half the complaints to Division of Health sanitarians involved rats; one in every four Cleveland families lived in a rat-infested dwelling, and forty-eight Clevelanders were bitten by rats.18

Cleveland wasn’t the only city to recognize the seriousness of rat infestations, and national politicians began to envision a federal role. In the spring of 1967, Lyndon Johnson delivered a special message to Congress concerning his priorities in the ongoing War on Poverty, which began with the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Although the War on Poverty addressed both urban and rural problems, such as through job training programs and Head Start education support, many of the new federal programs focused on the problems of the slums. Johnson’s 1967 legislative agenda was typically far-reaching, with the expansion and creation of programs such as “Operation Green Thumb” and the Jobs Corps. Among the new programs was federal rat control, introduced with the goal of “Protecting the Slum Child.” Johnson noted, “The knowledge that many children in the world’s most affluent nation are attacked, maimed and even killed by rats should fill every American with shame. Yet, this is an everyday occurrence in the slums of our cities.” Congress at first balked at further expanding federal involvement in municipal affairs, but in the fall it passed a bill allotting $40 million over two years to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare’s “partnership for health” grant program, which would allow cities to apply for matching funds to support rat control efforts.19

TOTAL RESTORATION OF THE LOCAL ENVIRONMENT

By the time Stokes, Ellis, and Walker stood on Holyrood Road in 1969, the city had been engaged in a long battle with rats, one that predated Mayor Locher’s tentative efforts. Eight years before Stokes announced his new control program, Cleveland asked the U.S. Public Health Service to study the rat problem in preparation, theoretically, for a coordinated attack. The 1961 City Council resolution asking for federal help described a health and safety hazard caused by increasingly poor sanitation and growing rat populations, and it noted that the city did not have the proper administrative structure or expertise to tackle the problem. The council resolution explained the problem’s spread by claiming that “the continuous movement of people from one neighborhood to another and from other cities to Cleveland results in a lowering of sanitation standards of everyday life due to a lack of knowledge and the habits of the people resulting in the continued deterioration of some neighborhoods in the city.” In other words, through ignorance of the customs of urban living or simply low standards of cleanliness, migrants arriving in Cleveland’s crowded inner-city neighborhoods caused a spike in the rat population. The resolution left unstated that these new arrivals, and those moving from one neighborhood to another, were black.20

The resolution reflected a revolution in thinking about the relationship between slums and the people who lived in them. Some fifty years earlier, Progressive Era reformers had expressed an environmentalist understanding of poverty and impoverished places, arguing that degraded places created degraded people. Progressives feared that the children of the slums would be demoralized by their surroundings, learning poor work and hygiene habits. By the 1960s, the causal arrows had shifted for many observers, who, like the City Council, were now more likely to blame the bad behavior of residents for the quality of the environment. This understanding informed Mayor Locher’s approach to Hough and other degraded neighborhoods. In describing the role of his recently created Neighborhood Bureau of Conservation, Locher claimed, “It will help to educate and guide the new migrant in adapting to the cultural patterns of big city living.” The bureau also dispensed expert advice on home maintenance, by sponsoring workshops and distributing pamphlets, mirroring the efforts of natural resource management, which relied on the wisdom of experts to help people make better choices. Locher, a Democrat with support among Cleveland’s still powerful white ethnic communities, wasn’t unsympathetic to ghetto residents, but he understood why so many Clevelanders blamed slum residents for slum conditions. “Life in a shack, harsh surroundings, and an inferior education often make it difficult for the newcomer to conform to the rules and the customs of city living,” Locher said in 1966. “The non-conformity stirs prejudice against him. There is great need for a program that acculturizes the newcomer to his new surroundings.”21

This way of thinking wasn’t entirely new, of course. Urban residents had expressed concern about immigrant behavior since the mid-nineteenth century, and teaching newcomers how to live in the city had been a core mission of the Settlement House movement in the Progressive Era. As the Great Migration dramatically increased the African American population of northern cities, especially Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago, the famed University of Chicago sociologist Robert Park linked deteriorating social conditions with the unpreparedness of southern arrivals. “The enormous amount of delinquency, juvenile and adult, that exists today in the Negro communities in northern cities is due in part, though not entirely, to the fact that migrants are not able to accommodate themselves at once to a new and relatively strange environment,” Park wrote in 1925.22 Through the twentieth century, policy makers’ assumptions about the inability of blacks to accommodate to urban living, through lack of experience or knowledge, or simply cultural inclination, prevented officials from seeing the more complex relationship between poverty, race, and urban decay.

Not everyone was so certain about how the arrows of causation lined up. Morris Thorington, who lived in the southeast neighborhood of Lee-Harvard and commuted into Hough, where he owned a beverage store and delicatessen, had drawn his own conclusions about the people he served every day, some of whom he clearly admired. “The moral character of the family don’t change as much as you might think by the home they are living in,” he said in 1966. “It is not that Hough is a morally decayed neighborhood. It is rather because Hough is decayed that it is drawing these morally-decayed people into it because people come from all over the city to do their dirt down there at Hough.” In this way, Thorington’s conception of the inner city thoroughly mixed people and place. Indeed, although the lines of causation varied, Americans continued to link degraded places to degraded people. The ghetto bound people and place—and rats—together in decay.23

After the city’s 1961 request, the federal government conducted a study of the rat problem, surveying 10 percent of Cleveland’s blocks and giving policy makers excellent data. The study, led by Clyde Fehn, a sanitary engineer with the Communicable Disease Center, determined that 28 percent of the city’s properties showed signs of rat infestation, with the problem most severe in the areas surrounding downtown, especially African American neighborhoods. Forty percent of Hough’s properties showed signs of rats, but other East Side neighborhoods were even worse, including Central. Fehn’s report, completed by the summer of 1962, made clear what any interested party already knew: “Rat infestations, rat bites, and transmission of rat-borne diseases have long been associated with substandard housing areas. This association is evident in Cleveland.” The immediate causes of rat infestations were also well known. As Fehn summarized, “Inadequate storage of refuse, extensive use of illegal refuse containers, and excessive amounts of stored refuse are the principal causative factors in the rat problem.” Fehn placed a high value on educating residents and adjusting their behavior, but he had a broader vision. His report cast a wide net in assigning blame, and he suggested several avenues for improvement. Citizens would have to be educated on how to prevent infestations, by storing garbage correctly and not leaving pet food out in yards, for instance, but the city had responsibilities, too, including increasing garbage pickups to twice weekly and creating a new Bureau of Environmental Health, “devoted to all phases of environmental sanitation.” Many city services would have to improve, including building inspections, street cleaning, and the use of rodenticides in the most troublesome locations. The city also had responsibilities to make physical changes in infested neighborhoods, including removing vacant buildings and adding garbage cans to street corners in crowded neighborhoods.24

In 1966, four years after the initial report, Fehn produced a follow-up, in which he described no progress. The city had taken some relatively easy steps, such as distributing educational pamphlets and passing an anti-littering ordinance, but other, more costly recommendations led to nothing, not even the addition of garbage cans to street corners. Most striking, however, Fehn expressed an obvious disappointment in the behavior of slum residents, noting that “deficiencies in refuse storage” reflected “primarily the failure of citizens to place refuse in available containers and the failure to keep covers on the containers.” Indeed, Fehn blamed a “deterioration of citizen behavior,” including littering and stealing garbage cans, for the ongoing rat infestation. He was more forgiving of the city’s behavior.25

Not all observers were so forgiving of the city. Kenneth Clark, writing about ghettos generally, saw the gathering trash as evidence of the city government’s failure to provide equal services to all residents. “To lecture the miserable inhabitants of the ghetto to sweep their own streets,” Clark wrote in Dark Ghetto, “is to urge them to accept the fact that the government is not expected to serve them.”26 Like Clark, Stokes was unlikely to blame the poor for the trash and rats in their neighborhoods. He took a comprehensive approach, one that reflected Fehn’s long list of recommendations in 1962 and not the follow-up report’s focus on resident behavior. In January 1968, just two months after he entered office, Stokes thanked Dr. Joanne E. Finley, the acting health commissioner, for taking the initiative in applying for a Department of Health, Education and Welfare grant to take on the rat problem. The proposed program was just the kind of visible action Stokes desired. Significantly, Findley’s extensive grant request, titled “Establishment of an Environmental Improvement and Rat Control Program,” placed the onus on government—not the residents.27

Finley, who held a master’s degree in public health from Yale and an M.D. from Western Reserve University, described a grand expectation for the program: the overall improvement of environmental health. She hoped the program would “restore the total environment to a more desirable condition,” while eliminating the rats, which were “symptomatic of the present state of environmental deterioration.” Finley’s application revealed a broad understanding of Cleveland’s predicament. She knew that the city had been built “by individuals who regard the resources of their environment to be boundless in quantity and justifiably exploitable.” Because of this, she asserted that the municipal government had a moral obligation to save the city’s environment from “debasement by its citizens”—by which she meant the exploiters, not the exploited. Finley’s application reflected a new tone coming from Cleveland’s City Hall. It was time to stop blaming the poor for the physical conditions of the ghetto.

According to Finley, although the city had a legal and moral obligation to act, it didn’t have an effective bureaucratic structure or the resources needed to succeed. The city’s bureaucracy fragmented responsibility for the environment. Eight different city departments had a stake. Health and Welfare handled air pollution and public health; Public Utilities handled water pollution and garbage collection. Public Properties managed recreational spaces; Public Service managed the streets. Community Development contained the housing and building divisions; Public Safety was responsible for the dog pound. All this meant that the urban environment could not be regulated holistically. And environmental health, Finley noted, suffered. Finley called the rat control program “a logical and feasible first step toward total restoration of the local environment.” It would feature community education and involvement, a revised sanitary code, better laboratory facilities, and a new home improvement and rat-proofing program. Much of the outreach would operate through Neighborhood Opportunity Centers, created and funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity to help wage the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty. The opportunity centers were staffed by local residents, who would help teach their neighbors how to take simple steps to make their community less attractive to rats. The outreach staff would also report infestations, helping city employees identify where eradication should take place.28

The federal grant allowed the city to hire Bailus Walker, who joined the Department of Health in part to manage the rat program. Thirty-six years old at the time, Walker held a master’s in public health from the University of Michigan and was working toward his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. He arrived from Dayton, where he had briefly worked on that city’s rat control program. He came with a good understanding of Cleveland’s problems, having spent a summer in Central working at his uncle’s grocery store on Scovill Avenue, where many of the customers came from Outhwaite Homes. More than family ties and a personal connection drew him to Cleveland, however. Like many African Americans around the country, Walker was emotionally invested in the Stokes administration. In a recent interview, Walker described “an air of excitement among many of us and across the country about Carl being the first black mayor of Cleveland.” Stokes “brought a lot of energy to the city; a lot of enthusiasm.” That enthusiasm, and a wave of new hires in the city administration, Walker included, led to late hours, brainstorming, and innovation.29

After working in Cleveland for a year, Walker understood the special environmental pressures on inner-city residents. He noted in a journal article that “the health needs of inner-city residents are acute.” Using language that would come to be associated with the environmental justice movement, he described the connection between an “impoverished neighborhood” and “the pall of smoke and odors emanating from a nearby industrial operation, dump, sanitary landfill or incinerator.” The environmental hazards were myriad. “Vacant lots, vacant and vandalized structures, abandoned automobiles and discarded appliances add a new dimension to health and safety hazards in inner city neighborhoods.” The inner-city environment, with its rat bites and high carbon monoxide exposure, required health professionals to develop new strategies to protect children, who had a significantly lower life expectancy than other Americans. “The overriding need for this strategy is brought into full view when we recognize that the environment of the urban ghetto child does more than depress him, injure him or otherwise overwhelm him; it kills him as well.” Echoing Kenneth Clark, Walker concluded that he could not believe that in the ghetto “the mind and the emotions or the physical health go unscathed.” Here all the failings of the city came together. The total environment failed. And still, Walker had faith in government and faith in Stokes to make a difference—to do something visible and meaningful.30

A SENSE OF PLACE AND PURPOSE

In March 1968, Carl Stokes sat in the U.S. Capitol before the Senate Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Affairs, surrounded by fourteen other Clevelanders—city officials, leaders of the business community, and prominent citizens engaged in the housing issue. Stokes hoped this extraordinary turnout would help convince senators that Cleveland was serious about solving its housing problems and that the city needed federal support. Among those in attendance were George Grabner, chairman of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association, which had replaced the Chamber of Commerce; Paul Unger, chairman of the mayor’s Urban Renewal Task Force; and Jim Huston, president of PATH (Plan of Action for Tomorrow’s Housing). Despite the broad showing, the presence of Stokes clearly mattered most. A transformative figure, Stokes sat before the panel considering public housing legislation and testified through experience—not just as the chief executive of the nation’s tenth-largest city but as a former resident of public housing. Stokes spoke eloquently from a position of power for a constituency that rarely found a voice in Congress.

Stokes was blunt, as he always was, about having lived in one of Cleveland’s projects, but what impressed the senators most was his command of the bill then under consideration and his point-by-point explanation of how Cleveland would benefit by its passage. “We can do things on our own in our city,” Stokes said. “But the fact is that we are going to need additional technical and financial assistance from the Federal Government.” Here in a nutshell was the issue. Like all big-city mayors, Stokes wanted control over reforms within his city, but he also wanted the additional resources that could come only through federal programs. Specifically, Stokes supported the doubling of money for the Model Cities program, a dramatic increase in the funding for homeowner rehabilitation in renewal areas, and the establishment of a reinsurance program that would help property owners in riot-prone neighborhoods acquire fire insurance—the disappearance of which in places like Hough had caused further capital flight as business owners closed up shops for which they could not secure insurance.31

Just a month before, President Johnson had described “the crisis of the cities” and the moral imperative for national action in a special message to Congress. Johnson had asked for full funding of the War on Poverty and for expanding federal involvement in public housing and neighborhood redevelopment with a new appropriation of $2.34 billion. Johnson also revisited his Model Cities program, initiated in 1966, which he hoped would “encourage the city to develop and carry out a total strategy to meet the human and physical problems left in the rubble of a neighborhood’s decay.” Outlining the provisions of the housing legislation before the subcommittee, Stokes repeated Johnson’s phrase concerning the human need for a “sense of place and purpose,” which reminded the mayor of one area of conspicuous failure in housing policy—“what to do about people’s lives within the inner city.”32

Both Stokes’s appearance in Congress and Johnson’s message the month before spoke to the great entanglement of federal policy in urban issues. The federal government’s involvement in housing dated to the early 1930s, when the Public Works Administration funded the building of several large projects, including Outhwaite Homes. This involvement expanded significantly with the Housing Act of 1937 and then again after World War II, when the public housing program that once aimed to merely provide adequate housing morphed into slum clearance and urban renewal. Federal intervention in the housing market provided some clean and suitable homes, but altogether it did little to improve housing quality in central cities or reduce the great number of Americans who lived in substandard housing.

Depression-era policy responded to the growing problem of dilapidated housing in urban cores, where older tenements had been built without electric wiring and little or no indoor plumbing, and for the first time federal initiatives addressed the working poor’s inability to afford suitable housing. But federal policy was informed by more than the need to bring housing up to modern standards. Sociological theory, first articulated at the University of Chicago in the late 1910s, compared urban growth and decay to ecological processes. By the 1920s, planners and policy makers commonly thought of the city in biological terms. Neighborhoods had life cycles—they got old and diseased. The concept of “urban blight” gained broad currency in the 1930s, just as governments began to root out slums through demolition. “Dry rot,” Business Week called it in 1940; the Saturday Evening Post called it “an anemia” four years later.33

Theorists might disagree about the causes of blight, but they agreed it was contagious, just as the strengthening analogy would suggest. Because urban blight spread like a disease, the concept reinforced the idea that the problems of slums were containable, and therefore localized. This way of thinking—nearly universal in the early postwar era—hid a significant assumption: that the causes of slum conditions actually lay in the neighborhoods themselves, in their poorly kept and outdated buildings or their uneducated and unemployable residents. Theorists, planners, and policy makers essentially ignored the larger metropolis in which the slum grew. In other words, pathologizing slums hid the fundamental flaws of metropolitan growth, flaws that ensured inequalities of investment across space and inequalities of power and wealth across populations. Structural issues that encouraged the outward movement of people, employment, and capital went unaddressed.

Johnson’s approach to the urban crisis improved on these older theories of blight, emphasizing involvement of residents in articulating and solving neighborhood problems, taking a comprehensive approach—addressing both physical and social issues simultaneously—and, of course, spending a considerable amount of money in the process. The Cleveland representatives testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Affairs in the spring of 1968 praised this approach, especially the increased spending. Among them was James Huston, a lawyer by trade and the president of PATH, who commended federal involvement in housing, even quoting the goals of the 1949 Housing Act: “A decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.” Huston also described the work of PATH, created in 1966 by the Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation. In early 1967, it issued a report on housing conditions in the region and made a series of recommendations to the city, the state, and the business community. PATH found sixty thousand substandard dwellings in metropolitan Cleveland, nearly 90 percent of which were in the city itself, and noted that a quarter of Cleveland residents lived in “rat-infested” dwellings. No solution was in sight. The vast majority of new housing was being built outside the city, and promises by government to supply public housing had gone unfulfilled. Although the report described a crisis in housing that seemed to affect the city much more than its suburbs, PATH declared, again echoing the 1949 legislation: “We have one housing problem in Greater Cleveland—how to provide decent homes for all our citizens in a suitable environment.”34

The PATH plan of action made forty-five recommendations to improve housing and the residential environment. Noting that federal policies had heretofore encouraged suburban development, largely through tax incentives and mortgage insurance, PATH recommended that Cleveland apply for a Model Cities grant, which would help fund comprehensive community planning and implementation in the city’s worst neighborhoods. Now, a year after noting the many failures in Cleveland and describing the dire housing situation, Huston testified before Congress that a “new spirit” had developed and “forward movement” had begun—this due to Stokes, who undoubtedly flashed his famous smile as he listened. Neither of them would have anticipated the tone of PATH’s follow-up document, published in March 1969, which found that despite some progress, “the housing crisis is even more critical.” Thus far, the PATH study, like so many that came before, had not become the watershed document that reformers hoped it would.

EVERYTHING OF ANY VALUE WAS STRIPPED OFF AND TAKEN AWAY

As residents of ghettos around the nation gathered in protests and riots in the mid-1960s, the national press stepped up coverage of the nation’s inner-city troubles. The struggle to understand what was happening, to discern root causes of the physical deterioration and the social disaffection, led to even more studies conducted by all types of analysts inside and outside government. Among the organizations that turned its gaze to the city was the Civil Rights Commission (CRC), created by Congress in 1957 “to provide means of further securing and protecting the civil rights” of citizens. The CRC’s primary means of action was to conduct and publicize investigations into critical issues, including voting rights and the desegregation of schools and housing.35 By the spring of 1966, Cleveland’s inner city had garnered enough attention that the CRC began planning a week of hearings there in April. CRC staff made contacts in Cleveland, arranged for the appearance of prominent officials, including Governor Jim Rhodes and Mayor Locher, and gathered a list of other speakers who might provide insight into housing, welfare and education, employment, and police-community relations—four topics each afforded a full day of attention. The CRC selected two sites for its Cleveland hearings: the federal building downtown and the Liberty Hill Baptist Church in Hough. At the latter site, the hearings would take place in the auditorium, at the rear of the building. As the six commission members took the broad stage and the witnesses appeared one by one, no doubt this felt like civic space rather than a religious venue. Most important, given the location, the witness list, and the testimony about housing, Liberty Hill’s auditorium felt like Hough.

Reverend Paul Younger sat in the large, plain hall, notebook in hand. Younger was a white minister whose calling brought him to inner-city Cleveland from his childhood home in Mt. Kisko, New York. Younger and his wife, Betty, also an activist for the poor, had moved to Hough in the late 1950s, while they were in their twenties, and they lived on 86th Street, just a few blocks from Liberty Hill. By 1964, Younger was working for Protestant Ministry to Poverty, focusing his efforts on Cleveland’s East Side ghetto. In the summer of 1965, he had marched with members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Students for a Democratic Society, along with residents of Hough, to protest the lack of citizen involvement in the Council for Economic Opportunity, the War on Poverty program that promised “maximum feasible participation.” The protest culminated in the parading of a rat-infested couch through the city, carried by children at first and then by activists. When the protesters reached City Hall, several of the marchers took dead rats from the couch and laid them on the steps. Among them was Grady Robinson, chairman of the Cleveland branch of CORE, a national civil rights organization that had been especially active in the movement to integrate Cleveland’s schools, and Hattie Mae Dugan, a young mother who had recently moved back to Cleveland to be near family. Robinson, Dugan, and two others who carried the rats were cited for breaking public health codes. Younger, who apparently didn’t touch the rats, was spared a citation, as were about twenty-five other protesters there to argue that “only the poverty-stricken could understand the problems of the poor,” as the Plain Dealer summarized.36

By the time he arrived at Liberty Hill for the CRC hearings, Younger had become an important member of Cleveland’s large civil rights community, and he saw in the crowd many familiar faces. Indeed, Younger may have been disappointed that he didn’t see more unfamiliar faces, for only one hundred people assembled in the spacious auditorium—clearly a gathering of the faithful. One of the largest headlines related to the week-long event summarized the Saturday afternoon gathering accordingly: “Crowd Is Thin at Rights Public Housing Hearings.” Despite the headline, newspaper coverage of the hearings was respectful. It was also thin; little of the testimony made its way into the papers. Perhaps the Plain Dealer and the Cleveland Press assumed the public had heard it all before, especially since many of those who spoke had long been in the press.37

After statements by Governor Rhodes, Mayor Locher, and state and local officials from the CRC, the first witness was Hattie Mae Dugan. Expanded by dozens of questions from the panel, Dugan’s testimony was wide-ranging, addressing inadequate police protection and segregated schools. She also retold the story of her arrest for placing rats on the City Hall steps. But the soft-spoken Dugan was most effective when describing her apartment, in a poorly kept building on East 93rd Street. Photographs illustrated her points—a slow-draining tub that was impossible to clean, light fixtures hanging by their wires, and a garbage-strewn hallway. There were no photos of rats, but Dugan declared, “The kids they play with rats like a child would play with a dog or something. They chase them around the house and things like this.”38 Reporters were so touched that many of them featured Dugan’s testimony in their stories, including one in the New York Times. Some of the commissioners, among them Notre Dame president Theodore Hesburgh, had already been moved by Dugan’s story, having visited her building earlier in the day and given witness to the conditions in the heart of Hough.

Although housing was the general topic of the first two full days of testimony, the commissioners asked several witnesses about rats in particular. Among those who took the stage was fifty-two-year-old Velma Jean Woods, who had come to Cleveland at about the same time as Rev. Younger, moving with her husband, who was transferred by Chrysler from Detroit. They had moved to an apartment building on East 93rd Street which, according to Woods, “they just began to zone” for African Americans. Her use of the term “zone” suggests how systematic the transition process could appear, even though racial segregation had no legal sanction. Her building, the Clevelander, had seventy-two apartments, and hers was just the second black family to move in. Woods noted that only some of the whites moved out right away, while others were content to live in the building, which was still in good shape. Two custodians worked full time, and, Woods noted, “they really kept it up.” What drove the remaining white occupants away were significant increases in the rent. According to Woods, landlords could expect blacks to pay nearly twice the rent. Despite the higher income, landlords let the building deteriorate as the black population increased. Woods described some efforts to organize the tenants, who knew they overpaid for their apartments and could see the worsening conditions around them. Woods talked matter-of-factly about rats and roaches, but powerlessness clearly fed her anger.39

Clyde Fehn also testified, introducing his rat reports into the record, summarizing his findings for the panel, and narrating a slide show that mostly revealed poorly stored and scattered garbage. A few images of dead rats illustrated Fehn’s objective conclusion: “There are lots of rats.” Although brought in to introduce scientific evidence of the rat problem, which Fehn agreed was a serious health concern, he was more interested in augmenting his reports with observations about behavior on Cleveland’s East Side. Fehn had recanvassed the city in February and was disappointed with what he saw. “I would say that there has been a very serious deterioration in human behavioral patterns and attitudes,” he said. Further, “I noticed from 1962 to 1966, that there has been a very serious deterioration in the attitudes and behavior of people in Cleveland, especially with regard to empty houses.” He showed a home that had been abandoned just a month or two earlier but had already been stripped of its toilets, tubs, and aluminum siding. “Everything of any value at all that could be stripped off was stripped off and taken away.”40

The last person to offer testimony regarding Cleveland’s housing situation was Dr. Joanne Finley, who was then working for the Cleveland Welfare Federation on a U.S. Public Health Service grant designed to improve public health planning. Finley had also recently agreed to join the city’s Department of Health and Welfare and would in a month become its acting commissioner. At first, Finley answered questions about the relationship between prenatal care and poor birth outcomes in the ghetto, and the high incidence of tuberculosis in poor, crowded neighborhoods. Perhaps inevitably, the questions eventually turned to rats. Finley listed some diseases linked to rats, but she quickly drew the conversation back toward broader health concerns, mentioning for the first time the high incidence of hypertensive heart disease among blacks. After she described her goal of creating a proactive health department dedicated to improving residents’ health, especially through disease prevention, and made clear her emphasis on sound science and health planning, the last question came from Commissioner Erwin Griswold, an East Cleveland native and the long-time dean of Harvard Law School: “Do you hope to be able to make some progress on rats after July 1?” when Findley would become Cleveland’s acting Health Commissioner.41

On its last day in Cleveland, the CRC heard testimony from a variety of community figures, including Ruth Turner, of CORE, and Reverend Donald Jacobs, president of the local NAACP. Carl Stokes, who was then a member of the Ohio legislature and had unsuccessfully run for mayor the year before, also took the stage. Stokes spoke briefly but passionately on a wide range of issues, including the discriminatory practices of labor unions and the Locher administration’s many failures. He was blunt and aggressive and concluded with a jab at the broader community.

Metropolitan Cleveland’s citizens must be awake to the facts that unchecked and uncontrolled disease does not stop at the city boundary; nor do the rats that often carry the diseases know they are to stop there; water and air pollution affects all of the county; all Cuyahogans bear the cost of welfare; and an unemployed person who takes recourse in crime will go wherever he thinks his efforts will be most fruitful.

Here Stokes deftly combined old conceptions of creeping blight with white fears of the failure of race containment. Urban problems will leak to the suburbs, Stokes promised—pollution and crime and even the rats. As Stokes reminded his audience, all boundaries, even municipal lines, are porous.

Participating largely as an intent observer for most of the CRC hearings, Younger also joined the last group of witnesses, taking the stage to a round of applause. Younger emphasized the need for jobs—good jobs—and the need for employers to train inner-city workers. He also made clear the powerlessness felt by Cleveland’s poor. In public housing they were subject to managers entering their apartments with passkeys; those on welfare could expect midnight inspections from caseworkers in search of violations. Altogether this “managed life” disempowered the poor, who were already so obviously constrained by their economic plight. Younger ended with a plea for maximum feasible participation, noting that he and other Hough residents had seen “federal program after federal program come into Cleveland with high promises, but come in with a plan that is administered to us, done for us and which over and over again ends in nothing because the money is taken, but the work is not done.” Resident participation would end this, Younger said. “Neighborhood people are committed to their neighborhood.”42

Younger’s work for the commission didn’t end that afternoon. Along with several prominent Clevelanders, Younger was a member of the subcommittee formed to continue investigating civil rights in the city. Over the subsequent months, he headed a group addressing “municipal services.” The preliminary report he crafted just three weeks after the hearings focused primarily on rodent control. Noting that Cleveland ranked with Chicago and Boston as one of the “most heavily rodent infested large urban communities in the nation,” Younger argued that the city needed more frequent garbage pickups—the same recommendation Clyde Fehn had made four years earlier. He also noted that “inadequate street cleaning, repair and lighting contribute to the decline of crowded neighborhoods’ self image and desirability for residence.” He recommended better litter ordinance enforcement, the placement of litter baskets on street corners in crowded parts of the city, and the development of “tot lots” to improve recreation opportunities, especially in neighborhoods where demolished buildings provided unused space.43

In early 1967, Younger helped the subcommittee write a follow-up report in which he noted some improvements, including movement toward better containers for garbage, especially for large apartment buildings. The Rotary Club had given $4,300 for a four-block demonstration rat-kill program, which encouraged the city to expand rat control. But the city had not yet placed garbage cans on street corners, nor had it converted demolition sites into tot lots or vest-pocket parks. Here was yet another report that said essentially the same thing as many that had come before and many more that would follow. Even the little things that might have signaled a slowing of Hough’s decline had not been achieved or attempted. Younger, an optimist, may have had great hope for the future, but unfortunately he died in a car accident in 1969.44

TO SAVE HOUGH

The Civil Rights Commission came to Hough because press attention already had. Part of the barrage of coverage came from Press reporter Paul Lilley, who had written a series of articles in February 1965, the last appearing under the headline “Crisis in Hough.” After his extended reporting in the neighborhood, Lilley recommended a number of immediate steps, many of them directed toward improving the environment. “City health officials should start an immediate sanitation campaign against rats, vermin, filth, garbage and rubbish that plague and overflow congested backyards,” he declared. Further, “street sweepers and flushers of the service department should visit the area regularly. Retail store owners should be made to sweep sidewalks in front of their establishments.”45 After a year with no improvement, another Lilley article ran under the headline, “Coming Year Will Tell Whether Hough Dies.” Now Lilley called Hough “a powder keg as explosive as that which touched off the Watts disaster last summer in Los Angeles.”46 The presence of the CRC that spring didn’t reduce tensions, nor did it pressure the city to act. The powder keg sat as the summer heated up.

On the evening of July 18, 1966, the owner of a bar at 79th and Hough Avenue denied a black man a drink of water. After some shouting and flared tempers, the owner posted a sign on the door, “No water for Niggers,” which greatly inflamed the situation. A slow police response allowed a large crowd to gather, and overly aggressive police tactics in subsequent hours fueled the rage, as officers broke down doors and rampaged through apartments seeking snipers who had apparently fired from buildings along Hough Avenue. That night police and firemen dodged all varieties of missiles thrown by the crowds, including gasoline fire bombs. Arson and looting damaged or destroyed many of the neighborhood’s largest stores, especially along Hough Avenue’s commercial strip between East 71st and East 93rd. Three Sav-Mor Supermarkets were hit, as was Al’s Cut-Rate Drugstore and King Kole Clothing Company. The second day of rioting saw sixty-seven more fires, mostly in abandoned houses and commercial buildings. The Press later reported that after twelve years on Hough Avenue, Starlite Delicatessen owner Joe Berman would have to call it quits. “There’s nothing for me here anymore,” he said. The arrival of the National Guard didn’t immediately stem the violence, but once it subsided, the neighborhood tallied the damage from the worst rioting in Cleveland’s history. Four people had been killed, most dramatically Joyce Arnett, shot once in the head through a window. She was twenty-six years old, a mother of three young girls, including seven-year-old twins Lynette and Jynette.47

On the evening of July 21, a number of Hough residents gathered to discuss the disorder. Among them were Daisy Craggett, DeForest Brown, and Fannie Lewis, leading figures in Community Action for Youth (CAY), a demonstration project funded largely by the federal government to combat juvenile delinquency in the neighborhood. They drew up a lengthy statement and submitted it to Mayor Locher the next day. “Our neighborhood—Hough—is in trouble,” it began. “Our real troubles go far beyond the troubles of the last few days.” They categorized the roots of the riots: unemployment among the neighborhood’s men; the physical deterioration of the community, which has made it “a symbol of despair and degradation”; and the failure of welfare to allow the poor to live “decent dignified” lives. “As citizens of Cleveland, we ask other Clevelanders to acknowledge that to save Hough is truly to save our entire city.” Surely more Clevelanders would now agree that Hough required attention. The CAY statement was straightforward and clear, perhaps even indisputable.48 Four days later, as peace was returning to Hough, the Press editorialized about the talk that was sure to follow the riots. “Absolutely nothing new will be said,” the Press assured its readers. “It has all been said a thousand times.” This seems clear enough. The neighborhood needed better housing, better recreational facilities; the people needed jobs. “Everybody knows the recipe for lifting up the area,” the Press continued. The real problem was that nobody was willing to cook.49

A month after the Hough riots, Mayor Locher found himself in Washington sitting before a Senate subcommittee concerned with the federal role in solving the urban crisis. Chaired by Abraham Ribicoff, a Connecticut Democrat, the subcommittee was a largely sympathetic group. Locher was a Democrat, too, after all, even if he was an ineffective one. His task wasn’t easy, however, as he defended the policies of a city just a few weeks removed from serious civil disobedience. Locher might have been a well-meaning man, but he found it hard to accept blame for Cleveland’s problems, placing it first on the people of Hough. “We must not forget—nor sweep under the rug—the problems of the individual unaccustomed to urban life,” he said, “‘air mail garbage’ [trash thrown out apartment windows], discrimination, breakdown of the family structure, three generations on welfare, and a growing disrespect for law and order. And poverty—at the root of it all—poverty.” Locher repeated the arguments he had made just months earlier before the Civil Rights Commission: many of the residents of Hough, accustomed to rural poverty, had yet to learn how to live in urban poverty.50

Figure 4. Riots in 1966 caused extensive damage, especially in the deteriorating business district along Hough Avenue, but even before the violence and arson that July, Hough had become a “Crisis Ghetto.” Photo by Jerry Horton. Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland State University.

Locher couldn’t hide his disappointment in the people of Hough, but he appreciated the depths of the problems facing urban America as a whole. “We have other problems in our cities,” he said, “which have an indirect but nonetheless real bearing on our least advantaged citizens: air and water pollution, economic development, the need for better transportation facilities—both highway and transit—and the continuing erosion of our tax base with an accompanying lack of access to adequate supplemental financial resources to provide the municipal facilities and services which our citizens need, expect and demand.” In the face of “the extensive catalog of urban ailments,” the details surrounding the Hough disturbances might seem rather insignificant, or at least Locher might have hoped.51

Locher wanted to draw attention to the broader urban crisis in part because he had been called to Washington to explain what happened after the riots as much as what had caused them. A Cuyahoga County grand jury investigating the disturbance had just released an alarmingly unrealistic report on the rioting. Senator Ribicoff opened the questioning by reading from the report, dated August 9: “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 wittingly or otherwise by misguided people of all ages and colors, many of whom are avowed believers in violence and extremism, and some of whom also are either members of, or officers in the Communist Party.”52 Extrapolating from the vague testimony of two undercover cops who had infiltrated the Communist Party in Cleveland, the jury had allowed Cold War concerns about communism—undoubtedly mixed with racist assumptions about the gullibility and immorality of ghetto dwellers—to blind them to the very real concerns of Hough residents. Part of the jury’s thinking came from the fact that the violence had not been random. Some buildings escaped harm, most likely those owned or operated by people who treated residents fairly, such as those who didn’t overcharge for poor-quality merchandise. According to the jury, this meant that “the targets were plainly agreed upon,” and therefore planning must have taken place. But the jury may have had broader concerns in mind. “What this country and this community need,” the report concluded, “is not so much a blood bath but a good cleansing spiritual bath.”53

Even beyond its preposterous conclusions, the grand jury report seemed to have been written to heighten tensions purposefully. For instance, the report asked that “all decent law-abiding citizens proclaim their support of law and order and their support of policemen and firemen in carrying out their duties toward that end.” The report at least recognized that poverty “served as the uneasy backdrop for the Cleveland riots,” allowing that population density, exorbitant food prices, poor housing, high rents, and unenforced building codes all combined to make Hough “a feeding ground for disorder.” But the report noted of Hough residents: “Frequently they find themselves bewildered and unable quickly to adjust themselves to the demands of their new surroundings and thus find themselves frequently at cross purposes with the authorities and the older residents of the area in which they find themselves currently.”54 In other words, the poor surroundings didn’t demand too much of residents; rather, the residents failed to adjust to the environment.55

Incredulous at the tone and conclusions of the report, Ribicoff let Locher have it, adding a moving description of the real crisis at hand: “In city after city across this great land of ours, people are aware. The problem is there for people to see if they will only look. They would see seething masses living in poverty and unhappiness and frustration—living in conditions that you would not even house cattle in.” Locher attempted to defend himself by listing the many meetings he’d had in Hough concerning ghetto conditions, to which an unswayed Ribicoff noted that there is nothing more frustrating than having to go to meeting after meeting and getting no results. After Ribicoff made clear that he thought Locher had failed Hough and Cleveland, Senator Robert Kennedy attempted to move the conversation forward, asking Locher how much federal funding he would need to fix the problems of Cleveland. Locher, who had been asking for block grants throughout the questioning, knew that there had been a substantial underinvestment in the city in recent decades. Instead of describing the costs of repairing the ghetto, however, he took up the issue of water pollution, and the specific problem of separating the city’s combined sewers and treating phosphates at sewage treatment plants to save Lake Erie. “It would come in the neighborhood of 1 billion dollars if we are to do the job right.” And, he concluded, “that is just one thing.”56

Even as Locher traveled to Washington to explain Cleveland’s failings, citizens of Hough gathered to create their own narrative of the disturbances. Five noted lawyers, including Louis Stokes, Jean Capers (the first African American woman on the City Council), Stanley Tolliver (a prominent civil rights lawyer), and Carl Rachlin (a CORE lawyer from New York City), conducted open hearings on three evenings at Liberty Hill Baptist Church. The public was invited to testify, and twenty-six people did. The first was Earl Rowe, an Office of Economic Opportunity social worker who had a law degree and lived at 3439 E. 145th Street in Mount Pleasant, a working-class neighborhood southeast of Hough. He described the conditions that led to the riots, emphasizing overcrowding:

You find, well, I know of one family which always comes out in my mind, a husband, wife, four children sleeping in one bed with rats and mice regularly crossing the children’s faces at night. This is overcrowded conditions. Other conditions with housing seem to be the lethargy or the missing garbage collectors in the Hough area, consequently many of the homes are covered with filth and debris and it is a very great sore spot to try to get regular collection. The debris is not only in exterior apartment dwellings, but in the interior also. There are abandoned dwellings which have become accident traps, broken windows and the dwellings have been standing for years and the city of course has promised that once the protocol is completed and once the tear-down orders given, these buildings will come down. So the overcrowded conditions of blight and filth and deterioration and the abandoned dwellings seem to be the main core of housing complaints.

The people of Hough, Rowe made clear, had not caused the problems of Hough.57

Most of the testimony that followed Rowe’s rich description of the physical environment concerned police misconduct, especially during the disturbances themselves. Some witnesses told stories of police officers bursting into homes, forcing families out into the rain, and ransacking their apartments. Few of the witnesses made connections between the injustices during the disturbances and the broader injustices described by Rowe, but Dennis Hilliary, who had lived in Cleveland all of his twenty-two years and had been at the 79er’s Club the first night of the riot, expressed his thoughts rather succinctly: “People are not dumb to the fact that these people are living off us niggers.” He left somewhat vague who “these people” were, but everyone in the room surely understood.58

The Cleveland Citizens Committee on Hough Disturbances wrote a lengthy statement after the testimony concluded. Not surprisingly, the committee attacked the official explanation of the riots as determined by the grand jury, finding fault with both its details and its conclusions. Hough’s citizens, and those who came to represent them, were especially concerned about certain passages in the report. For instance: “The Grand Jury’s statement concerning the welfare department’s ‘paying mothers to have babies’ conveys a gross ignorance about the facts of public welfare. Anyone knowledgeable about public assistance payments to welfare clients would know that seventy-three cents a day could hardly be the motivation for bringing a child into the world.” But the broader concern had to do with the grand jury’s failure to identify the real causes of the disturbances. “Despite the numerous studies, reports, and investigations of overcrowding and code violation in Hough, no meaningful remedial action has resulted,” the statement read. “The residents of inner-city areas such as Hough have become cynical and angry over the repeated failure of city officials to keep their promises. They are asked to live in dilapidated housing with rats and roaches while the city expends all its resources on high rise apartments and innerbelt highways.” The last comment connected policy failure in Hough to real changes taking place just three miles away—downtown.59

PRAY FOR CLEVELAND

In the spring of 1967, as the nation girded for another round of inner-city violence, Jet magazine ran a short piece under the hopeful title “How Cities Can Avoid Another Long Hot Summer.” An accompanying map identified fifteen trouble spots around the nation, including Detroit, Baltimore, and Los Angeles. Despite the release of energy in the riots of 1966, Cleveland made the map. Jet called for better police-community relations and jobs programs for young black men. Unfortunately, the picture looked bleak in Cleveland, “which is expected to be one of the first cities to explode,” largely because “the summer job outlook is depressing.” Several small incidents of “window breaking and looting” seemed like foreshadowing, and more ominously, “reports have circulated that this year’s disturbances will not be confined to the Negro areas.” Suggesting that racial conflict might evolve into street warfare, Jet reported, “White motorcycle gangs are armed and ready to shoot it out with black nationalists, who also have a supply of weapons and ammunition. No one is sure what will happen there this summer. Bumper stickers read ‘Pray for Cleveland.’”60

Several of the nation’s inner cities indeed exploded that July—most destructively in Newark, where twenty-three people died in six days of violence, and Detroit, where forty people died over five days. A major incident never developed in Cleveland, but tensions remained high. Reporting from “rat-gnawed Hough” that summer, journalist John Skow described a community on the edge, where nothing had been resolved as a result of the violence the year before. “Hough, a 50-block-by-10-block infection of crumbling three-story apartment buildings and huge, rotted frame houses dating from a time when summer meant sweet corn and Citronella, is still owned by rats that can’t be frightened and landlords who can’t be found,” Skow wrote. “Its backyards are still splattered with rain-soaked garbage and burst mattresses. Derelict buildings stand empty and gutted as before.”61

Hough escaped a major disturbance in 1967, but Cleveland’s fortunes changed the following year, when Stokes was in office. In mid-July, a group of Black Nationalists living in Glenville, by then a predominantly black neighborhood well on its way toward the decay that had laid low Central and Hough before it, engaged in a shootout with police officers. Four hours of firing from inside and around what Skow called the “shabbily respectable” clapboard homes and small brick apartment buildings of Glenville left seven men dead. The gunfire and swarming police touched off looting and arson in the neighborhood. Hardly just another urban disturbance in a long string of them, the Glenville Shootout suggested a deepening conflict. Reporting from the mayor’s side as he patrolled Hough and Glenville, Skow concluded, “The illness had reached a new phase.” For his part, Stokes couldn’t hide his disgust and disappointment. Elected just six months earlier, in part with the expectation that the mere presence of a black man in City Hall would end rioting, Stokes had in fact helped prevent disorder earlier that year after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. As cities around the nation burned, Cleveland remained calm. Stokes and other black leaders walked the streets and helped talk through the anger. Now Stokes was on the streets again, approaching young black men out after curfew and giving them rides home.62

As the Glenville crisis deepened, Stokes made a bold and unprecedented decision. On the second day, he removed white police officers from the affected neighborhoods and set up a perimeter with the help of the National Guard. Inside the cordoned area, a volunteer patrol of citizens and the few black Cleveland police officers tried to keep the peace. White police took their exclusion as a professional affront, and white business owners accused Stokes of abandoning them and putting their property at greater risk. More broadly, the removal of white officers and guardsmen from Hough and Glenville served as an object lesson in the creation of two Americas, “one black, one white—separate and unequal,” in the words of the Kerner Commission, which had been created by President Johnson to investigate the causes of the 1967 riots and had issued its report that February. The violence, including arson, lasted for five days, and the damage to businesses was extensive, but the cordoning off of Hough and Glenville may have saved lives, although it did nothing to salvage a sense of progress in race relations in Cleveland. A year later, Ahmed Evans was convicted by an all-white jury of murdering the police officers and sentenced to die in the electric chair. (He died of cancer while in prison in 1978.) Views on the verdict ran along the city’s racial divide. Of all the boundaries that ran through metropolitan Cleveland in 1968, the race line may have been the most impenetrable.

On June 3, 1969, the day after Stokes and Walker stood in Hough introducing the rat control program and less than three weeks before the Cuyahoga caught fire, the mayor held a news conference at City Hall on the problem of “law and order.” A room full of reporters and cameramen listened to an unusually dour Stokes talk about “crime on the streets.” Stokes had good reason to be frustrated. Cleveland was experiencing a spate of violence—an average of one murder a day in May—during which a Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s investigation of the Civil Service Commission had prevented Stokes from hiring new police officers. Stokes felt hamstrung by petty politics, and the violence showed no signs of letting up. Although the crime wave reached a variety of neighborhoods, Hough was at the center of the city’s social disorder.63

Not surprisingly, the press conference didn’t slow the violence. Racial conflict plagued the far East Side, where a long series of incidents kept Collinwood High School in the news. On June 6, vandalism, menacing, and fighting led to arrests—mostly among young whites marching to protest attempts to integrate the student body. So much violence racked other parts of the city that the Press reported the latest three homicides in a single article on June 9. All three deaths occurred on the East Side, including one at the Diamond Market on St. Clair Avenue, where Murray Diamond killed a Black Nationalist, Daniel Carter, after he had broken into and looted the store. Later that day, a clash between whites and blacks in Woodland, south of Hough, led to the stabbing death of Donald Waight, a young white man. That murder brought people out onto the streets, where the next day Stokes was joined by his rival, Anthony Garofoli, a councilman who represented the Little Italy neighborhood, notorious for defending its borders and schools from the intrusion of blacks. The two walked together and begged for calm. That afternoon the Press reported another four homicides—the 124th, 125th, 126th, and 127th in the city that year. The police, already stretched thin and unable to keep a lid on all the simmering conflicts, were able to prevent a march of a hundred whites up Woodland Avenue to the mayor’s home, just over a mile away. Unsatisfied, a large group of angry white “youth” broke windows and battered cars “with concrete chunks,” the hard bits of a city rapidly falling apart. Several blacks accidentally strayed into harm’s way and were harassed, beaten, and repelled.64

A month later, Stokes sat in Washington, testifying before Congress yet again, this time before the House Select Committee on Crime. Stokes spoke about the need for gun control and the political impossibility of getting a bill passed at the state or local level, given the strength of the gun lobby. At the same time, Stokes made it clear that while he supported “law and order,” that very phrase had become politicized and some Americans took it to suggest suppression of dissent, if not the suppression of those who were struggling for equality. Stokes then broadened the conversation because, he said, “crime is part of the urban crisis, along with deteriorated housing, unemployment, inadequate health care, air and water pollution, inadequate public transportation and education.” Stokes understood that solving the crime problem would require tackling the crisis of the urban environment.65

A COMPARATIVELY LIVABLE NEIGHBORHOOD

Cleveland’s rat control program was subject to annual reviews. The 1970 report, written in part by Clyde Fehn, walked that fine line between praising progress and reporting a continuing problem that was worthy of continued funding. The report commended Walker’s leadership and noted the reduction of reported rat bites and signs of infestation. Indeed, confirmed and reported rat bites had dropped from an average of seventy per year in the early 1960s to thirty in 1969. The authors seemed especially optimistic about the city’s housing stock, even in the target areas, the most degraded of the city’s neighborhoods: Near West, Central East, Hough, and Glenville. Relative to other large cities, the evaluators found, these neighborhoods were “comparatively livable,” a phrase that may suggest more about how dire the urban crisis had become across the nation than about the quality of life in Cleveland’s ghetto. Still, the review determined that “prospects are good for the future betterment of residential environment and living conditions,” and it recommended an acceleration of conservation efforts rather than the slum clearance approach of an earlier generation—an indicator of the evolving nature of urban policy.66

Despite the generally positive tone of the report, for Hough there was bad news. Altogether, rat infestation rates for the city’s target neighborhoods had fallen from 41 percent of properties in 1969 to just 19 percent in 1970, a good sign that the nearly $400,000 federal investment had paid off. But in Hough, unlike the other three neighborhoods, active rat infestation increased from 20 percent of the properties to 30 percent. Several other environmental factors also failed to improve—there was no budge in the number of abandoned vehicles, the number of abandoned appliances grew significantly, and refuse storage remained problematic. Notwithstanding the two areas of improvement, in numbers of abandoned homes and incidents of high weeds on empty lots, the data showed that Hough’s physical decline continued unabated. Despite demands for help, the riots, the public scrutiny—even national scrutiny—the years of federal involvement, the extensive community organization, and the appearance of Stokes, Ellis, and Walker on Holyrood Road in June 1969, the neighborhood had not improved. Hough was still a crisis ghetto.

The decline persisted well past the end of the Stokes administration in 1971. Hough’s population fell to just over 45,000 in 1970, and a decade later it dropped to 25,000, meaning the neighborhood lost 65 percent of its population in just twenty years. Cleveland as a whole, dragged down by the collapse of East Side neighborhoods, continued suburban development, and industrial decline, lost 35 percent of its population over the same period. In his 1975 dissertation, Bailus Walker maintained his faith in the ability of municipal governments to adjust to the urban crisis and provide basic environmental health services. But the numbers for Hough, where a Cleveland Department of Public Health study located 75 percent of the city’s substandard housing in 1971, suggested that not all places would survive.67

In May 1972, just as Carl Stokes was beginning his career as a television news anchorman at NBC in New York City (part of what was marketed as a “news team that cuts through the garbage”), the Cleveland City Planning Commission began a study called “Housing Abandonment in Cleveland,” a sign that the city’s problem had shifted. No longer did Cleveland struggle to build housing for the poor—it worked to demolish unoccupied units. Arson raged on the East Side in the 1970s, as owners used insurance policies to wring all the capital they could from otherwise unprofitable properties. In Hough, following the trajectory of Central, blight increasingly gave way to empty lots.68

Local and federal policy failed Hough, just as it did ghettos around the nation. Crime persisted, the “normal chaos of the ghetto” continued, but fears of rioting and broader racial tensions eased as populations declined and blacks made their way into housing markets through much of the East Side, including the middle-class suburbs of Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights. Open space increased in Hough, some of it created purposefully to provide recreational opportunities, but most of it created unintentionally as vacant lots accumulated. The federal rat control program persisted through the Nixon administration and beyond, outlasting many of Hough’s homes and residents. And as the neighborhood lost its people, and the press stopped reporting on the rats, the landscape gradually lost its meaning. The urban crisis had spread.