The mid- to late 1960s were a very turbulent time of demonstrations and uprisings in scores of major American cities. One such riot erupted in July 1966 in Hough, a troubled inner-city neighborhood on Cleveland’s East Side. In the year before the riot, Hough seemed to be mostly forgotten and feelings of helplessness were on the rise. The University-Euclid Urban Renewal Project, announced at the start of the decade, was supposed to leverage spending on campus improvements by University Circle institutions to trigger federal funds for redevelopment and rehabilitation in adjacent Hough, but the program was poorly administered and, if anything, worsened the plight of the neighborhood. Although most observers tend to fixate on the loss of hope, several grassroots groups decided to take matters into their own hands. One such group was created in June 1965 from a plan by Rev. Walter E. Grevatt Jr. and Fr. Albert A. Koklowsky to fix up dilapidated houses in Hough and then sell them to poor families in need. This organization was called Housing Our People Economically, or HOPE Inc. Despite their good intentions, this isn’t a story with a happy ending.
HOPE Inc.’s first rehabilitation, an apartment house at 6516 Hough Avenue, went successfully. However, when attempting to restore two more buildings on nearby Belvidere Avenue, their funds began to run dry and they had effectively stalled by January 1966. HOPE Inc. appeared unable to do even on a small scale what the larger urban renewal campaign was failing to do on a grand scale. The growing tension and lack of aid would mount until they boiled over, leading to the Hough riots. Things finally began looking up as HOPE Inc. became the first organization in the nation to receive federal rent subsidies. However, the election of Carl B. Stokes as mayor in November 1967 could be seen as the biggest turning point. Stokes wanted to improve race relations and revive inner-city Cleveland, ambitions that he packaged in his Cleveland: NOW! program starting in May 1968.
HOPE Inc. was able to finish the restoration of the Belvidere apartments and keep on going to other projects. The organization was even able to expand beyond house restoration, teaching classes and donating food and clothing to those in need. Other similar organizations also benefitted from Stokes’ success in lifting the federal government’s freeze on funding to Cleveland community development, as well as from the aid of some businesses like the Forest City Materials Company, which placed a prefabricated home on HOPE-owned property. With money coming from both local and governmental levels, projects began to be finished. Neighborhood revitalization finally seemed to be getting off the ground.
Unfortunately this wasn’t to last. Even at its best, the amount of restoration was nowhere near enough. While organizations like HOPE Inc., Better Homes for Cleveland Foundation, and Hough Development Corporation were moving, they were still somewhat underfunded and, admirable as their efforts were, it would likely have taken well over a decade fix up all of Cleveland’s inner-city neighborhoods even if they had proper funding. There was a growing impatience and general loss of faith not only in Cleveland but also for other similar programs across the nation thanks to the federal government’s retreat from President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The event that killed Cleveland’s progress was the Glenville Shootout, which started July 23, 1968, and continued for five days. After the disorder, it came to light that the group that instigated the violence, headed by Fred “Ahmed” Evans, had bought weapons using funds gained from the Cleveland: NOW! and everything fell apart. Although Stokes won reelection in 1969, his political capital was so depleted that he didn’t run in 1971. Funding quickly began drying up along with faith in these programs in general. Government aid stopped not long after as Johnson’s War on Poverty was gradually dismantled in the years after Richard Nixon took office in 1969.
Unfortunately, this is where the story ends, with inner cities far from restored and many of the organizations devoted towards helping revitalize them either closing down or being radically changed. HOPE Inc. would continue to cling to life throughout the 1970s, only to fade into obscurity in the early 1980s.
]]>Cleveland at the end of the 1960s saw entire neighborhoods change radically in only a few years. Collinwood is a neighborhood that went through such a transition. Collinwood, like much of Cleveland, as ethnic communities and whites left for the suburbs, African Americans and white Appalachians arrived to fill industrial positions. Racial tension and race-based violence became a major concern in Collinwood. In 1966, the Hough riots erupted in Cleveland demonstrating conclusively that race relations were at a low point.
The year 1967, which was a year after the Hough Riots, brought a great success for black Americans: Carl Stokes became the first black mayor of a major city. Stokes strove to improve the living conditions of Clevelanders through the use of his flagship program, Cleveland: NOW!. The Stokes administration applied the Cleveland: NOW! brand to a variety of initiatives related to community development. Stokes planned to use $177 million in funds to redevelop Cleveland and planned for the program to use over $1 billion during a ten-year period. Many of these programs from Cleveland: NOW! worked from neighborhood multi-service centers.
However, the Cleveland: NOW! program hit a snag early in development. The Glenville Shootout, a battle between black nationalists and the police, occurred on July 23, 1968. This battle and subsequent riots severely hampered the Cleveland Now! project and dashed the public’s enthusiasm for Stokes. The situation became even worse when it was discovered that Fred Ahmed Evans, the leader of the group that fought the police in Glenville, had purchased the weapons using money from the Cleveland: NOW! program. Most examinations of the Cleveland: NOW! program end here. Some works on the topic argue that the Glenville Shootout "killed prospects for the success of Cleveland: NOW!” However, the program did not officially end until after 1971 and continued to work successfully towards rebuilding Cleveland even after the riots. An example Cleveland: NOW!’s programming success is the Collinwood Community Services Center (Collinwood CSC).
The Collinwood neighborhood had many of the same issues on a smaller scale as the city. Collinwood experienced extreme demographic changes that led to racial conflicts at the time. The Collinwood CSC’s report shows 90% of the population of South Collinwood was ethnic Europeans and 5-10% was black in 1965. By 1968, they estimated that the black population had grown to 30%, the ethnic population had fallen to 40% and Appalachian whites had established themselves with 30% of the population. The area also saw a dramatic rise in crime rate. The Center associated the rise with violent conflicts between young Appalachian and African American men.
In this volatile scenario, the Collinwood CSC was established. Initially a project of the Alta House, it quickly signed up for the Cleveland: NOW! program. This pairing of settlement house and city government to establish a multi-service center was common. These multi-service centers all provided a variety of general social service functions. These functions ranged from job counseling, juvenile court office, city health offices, officials from county welfare, legal aid, and classes in health and safety. Many others included health care services and daycare. They drafted specific proposals for programs directed towards their community.
One of the first multi-service centers was in the Collinwood. The direct predecessor to the Collinwood CSC was the Collinwood Youth Association which began in 1967. The Center started operating in January 1968. It stood initially at 742 East 152nd Street. The multi-service center operated multiple locations in the area other than the main office. These were two drop-in centers on East 140th St and two other centers at Five Points (the intersection of St. Clair and 152nd St.). They proposed to move their main center to the Five Points area, and, in the end, it was moved to 813 East 152nd St. The community center became the Five Points Community Center sometime after 1989 and exists there to this day.
The Collinwood CSC was oriented to combatting the rising crime rate in the area through social programing and helping Appalachian migrants find employment. To accomplish this, the Collinwood CSC designed programs to engage young people and to provide job assistance and training. They developed programs specifically targeting job training, community programing, and drop-in centers for youths. These programs had good participation and a high success rate. The drop-in centers were places to gather for young blacks and Appalachian whites.
The Collinwood CSC, like many of Cleveland: NOW!’s programs, has been written off as a failure. The writers who declare this are usually only examining Cleveland: NOW! via the effects of Carl Stokes political career, or its ability to prevent race-based conflict, or the popularity of the program. Examining the Collinwood CSC by looking at the successes of its programs and the number of people affected by it tells a different story. The Collinwood CSC is representative of the whole of Cleveland: NOW! in that it is pronounced dead with the Glenville Shootout, but is only getting started serving the community.
]]>The vacant lot at 8127 Superior Avenue N.E. sits quietly in the midst of an East Side neighborhood that has seen a great deal of upheaval and civic unrest. In the late sixties, the lot was the home of the Afro Set Black Nationalist Party for Self Defense storefront as well as the headquarters of the group of the same name. Founded by Harllel Jones (later Harllel X) in late 1968, the Afro Set was largely a response to the rise of Black Nationalist sentiment due to escalating racial and socio-economic tensions that were prevalent not only in Cleveland but across the country. Jones had grown up in the East Side neighborhood of Hough, and his experiences there helped shape the Afro Set’s Nationalist core.
Cleveland’s East Side was a victim of the migration to the suburbs that most urban centers suffered in the post-World War II era, and more critically, of the economic policies of the 1950s and 1960s that caused the rapid dereliction of what had become a series of predominantly black neighborhoods, with Glenville and Hough (the neighborhood where the Afro Set was located) suffering some of the worst decay and lack of governmental aid. Administrations prior to the election of Mayor Carl Stokes were marred by a racially conservative tendency to ignore urban neighborhoods, often tying up (or underfunding) desperately needed resources as well as ignoring the overpopulation, poor sanitation, and high unemployment rates in such areas. While Mayor Stokes’ programs such as Cleveland: NOW! were intended to address these issues, tensions in neighborhoods like Hough produced increasing levels of hostility towards even their own residents, with riots breaking out in the late 1960s following racial confrontations. Black Nationalists like those of the Afro Set would argue that such instances were almost inevitable given the charged atmosphere of the era.
Black Nationalism began as a movement predominantly among urban African Americans who focused on the belief in self-regulated black agency within the larger nation. As with the Civil Rights movement of the same era, Black Nationalists were concerned with the rights and discrimination that dominated postwar America, but the Nationalists were generally convinced that a nonviolent approach to the tensions between black communities and the establishment was ineffectual at best. Therefore Nationalist groups such as the Afro Set, while promoting black community values and a return to African culture, were more militarily inclined and also included a focus not just on black agency but also on separation of black society from the national whole.
The Afro Set was a beneficiary of the Cleveland: NOW! program, which represented Mayor Carl Stokes’ attempt to help blighted communities through a series of grants that were used in hopes of promoting a more positive urban experience. Jones’ Afro Set was not only a storefront that sold African cultural items and gave urban black youths a place to work, it was also meant to be a community and cultural institution where area people could come and hear lectures on prominent blacks such as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, as well as receive lectures on black culture in general. However, the message of black cultural identity tended to get lost in the coverage that men such as Jones received in the press: Black Nationalists were generally seen as overtly violent and communistic militants who threatened the status quo, and interviews from Jones and his compatriots tended to verbally confront the press and authority figures such as the police with thinly veiled threats and rhetoric. That is not to say that all Nationalists were focused on violent revolution, and even Jones did eventually move his focus to helping men reintegrate into the society that he had vehemently opposed; but the legacy of violence, and the bias shown towards groups like the Afro Set means that today’s urban blacks have little to show from an era that caused so much upheaval and social change; there are far too many vacant lots that are fading back into the landscape with their stories fading from memory.
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