Chapter III: The Grand Jury vs. the Black Community

Will this crisis bring forth conventional wisdom that seeks out scapegoats and attempts to show that Cleveland was victim of a sinister master plan?^[1]

In an effort to uncover the real underlying causes of the Hough disorders, Judge Thomas Parrino announced on July 2nd that a special session of the Cuyahoga County Grand Jury had been called for the next day. The Grand Jury’s task would be to ferret out the real sources of unrest and trouble. Specifically, the purposes of the investigation included assistance in the restoration of order, suggestions of “meaningful remedies to existing community problems,” and taking “appropriate action where evidence of unlawful acts” was discovered.^[2]

The jury convened the next day to begin its study of the disorders. Its first act of business was to take a fifty minute bus ride through the riot-torn area of Hough to provide background information of the physical realities and problems of the area. The trip was made for educational purposes only, because none of the Grand Jury members resided in the Hough area. However, at the end of the trip some indication of the investigations’ future course was given by the jury’s foreman, Louis Seltzer, the former editor of the Cleveland Press. Seltzer, regarded by many people as a very powerful man and as a firmly entrenched member of the Cleveland “establishment,” had become a controversial personality in the city because of his newspaper’s account of a Cleveland murder and its subsequent trial twelve years earlier.^[3] He was soon to become even further embroiled in controversy of a different nature, for he remarked at the conclusion of the fifty minute bus tour that:

The Grand Jury saw enough to realize the violence was organized and planned because of specific targets singled out for looting and burning.^[4]

His conclusions passed largely unnoticed the next day in the newspaper, but other sources also revealed that Seltzer was being sued for libel by Lewis G. Robinson at the time of the investigation. Robinson was suing Seltzer personally for the Press’s account of the announcement that Robinson was forming a gun club in the Hough area a year earlier.^[5] Some persons called for Seltzer to disqualify himself as a prospective juror because Robinson had been mentioned during the disturbance as a possible instigator of the trouble, and his J.F.K. House had been identified as a training ground for fire-bombing. In addition, Robinson was scheduled to testify before the jury as a subpoenaed witness. However, Seltzer remained as foreman of the jury, and, despite a rather rocky beginning, the investigation into the riots proceeded with the testimony of subpoenaed witnesses for the next several days.

Civic leaders, government officials, residents of Hough, law enforcement men, and community leaders all testified before the jury. The proceedings were marked by surprise witnesses and by surprise performances by the witnesses who testified. On the second day of the hearings, a seventeen-year-old resident of Hough was reported to have given the jury the names of “leaders and plotters” of the disturbances, along with dates when meetings had been held to discuss violence. He ostensibly testified that the Black Panthers, a gang of more than two hundred youths in the Hough area, had caused more damage and terror than any other gang during the riots. Later the same day, Lewis G. Robinson appeared to testify before the jury wearing a button that read, “The Viet Cong never called me NIGGER.” He denied that his J.F.K. House was involved in the manufacturing of firebombs or instruction in their use.^[6] His testimony was followed by the appearance of the Reverend Charles Rawlings, executive director of the commission on metropolitan affairs of the Greater Cleveland Council of Churches, and the hearings returned to a more sedate pace. The Grand Jury applauded two witnesses, M. Morris Jackson and Ralph Findley, head of the Greater Cleveland Council of Economic Opportunities, at the end of their testimonies. Neither man attacked the city administration as a primary cause of the riots.^[7]

Four young members of the W.E.B. DuBois Club testified before the jury in the following day’s session. It was reported that two of the members resorted to the Fifth Amendment, and therefore, refused to answer any questions. After testifying, one member of the group read a prepared statement outside the room in which the hearings were being held that accused the Mayor, the Safety Director, and Police Chief of being “criminally responsible” for the conditions and violence in Hough. Upon finishing, an unidentified Negro woman approached him, and immediately began berating the individual for the trouble that he and his friends had supposedly helped to foment. She yelled adamantly, “I want you to know we didn’t ask for you in the Hough area. We don’t need you in the Hough area. We don’t want you in the Hough area. You and your group do nothing but arouse people.”^[8] The woman then scurried off quickly, before shocked reporters could establish who she was or why she had cried out so vehemently. Police reports had indicated that some members of the DuBois Club had come to Cleveland about two weeks before the violence, and that they had settled near the center of the riot-torn area. It was still unclear as to the role, if any, that they had played in the disorders. The hearings moved on, and testimony was heard in the next few days from public servants who were involved in various activities relating to the disturbances.

On August 2, the last day of the hearings, the jury heard testimony from two witnesses who were believed to be police undercover agents.^[9] The two witnesses were shielded from contact with the press or photographers, and after the testimony, the formal hearings ended. The jury then went into closed session to draw up the document that hopefully would provide the answers to many questions that had been raised by the trouble in Hough. The community anxiously awaited the report of the Grand Jury, and so the group was under some pressure to produce its conclusions as quickly as possible.

The Grand Jury’s answers were presented to the community in the form of a report that was issued on August 9 by its foreman, Louis Seltzer. The statement was divided into three parts: a preface outlining some general observation of the members of the jury; one section that sought to “establish the immediate cause of the fire-bombing, shooting (sic), pillaging, general lawlessness and disorder”; and a section that de-scribed some of the basic conditions under which the residents of Hough lived.^[10] A brief recapitulation of the jury’s findings is necessary to understand the broader implications of the report.

The preface of the document dealt largely with the general attitudes of the members of the jury. They stated their firm belief that America needed a “renewal of good citizenship‚” by everyone and went on to deplore the apparent decay and erosion “of ideals and principles of God and Country and their persistent replacement by the deification of material idols and material ‘principals.’” They stated their conviction that law and order were the prerequisites of civilized society and that there “should be a restoration of the qualities of good faith, of honesty, and a willingness to hear out the other person or side without resort to violence and disorder. . .” The preface ended by calling for “not so much a bloodbath but a good cleansing spiritual bath.”^[11]

The first section was centered around the conclusion that, in the words of the jury itself:

. . . the outbreak of disorder was both organized, precipitated, and exploited by a relatively small group of trained and disciplined professionals at this business.^[12]

The “agitators” were avowed believers in violence and extremism, the report said, and they had some affiliation with the Communist party. The section also concluded that the majority of the residents of Hough had neither participated in nor benefited from the outbreaks of disorder, and it lamented the fact that the laws of both Cuyahoga County and the State of Ohio prohibited them from indicting any “responsible irresponsibles” for their parts in the disorders. Both the Police Department and the National Guard were commended for their effective work in the “aggravated situation.” The jury expressed its beliefs that the potential still existed for “repetition of these disorders” and that the results of any new action would be “equally disastrous.” Then, before referring to specific individuals and organizations that the jury felt were major contributors to the disorder, the report warned of the Communist threat and its dangers, such as “the effective uses made of impressionable, emotionally immature and susceptible young minds by those who for one reason or another have set out to accomplish their designs and objectives in Europe, Asia, South America and elsewhere.”^[13]

The Grand Jury report then went into specifics and named individuals who were responsible for the disorder without issuing any indictments. It claimed that the young people who were engaged in the acts of lawlessness had obviously been “assigned, trained and disciplined” in their specified roles because of the selective pattern of destruction and the fact that “the targets were plainly agreed upon.” It also suggested that both the Superior Avenue disturbances in late June and the Hough area disorders were planned and fomented by the same individuals.^[14]

The J.F.K. House (called only by the name Jomo Freedom Kenyatta) and its leaders received the brunt of the Grand Jury’s accusations. Lewis G. Robinson and his wife, and three other associates of Robinson who were also advocates of black nationalism were named as responsible for aiding and abetting the disorders. The jury claimed to have been shown “irrefutable evidence” that Robinson had “pledged reciprocal support to and with the Communist party of Ohio.” The four members of the Du Bois Club who testified before the jury were also charged with responsibility for the riots, although the only points that were made against them were that they had arrived in town two weeks before the trouble, lived near the center at the ghetto, “were seen constantly together,” and had contacted the Communist party.^[15]

The report shifted gears again by commending the police and firemen for their efforts to maintain law and order in the face of great personal danger and their general conduct during the trouble. At this point in the report, the jury suggested a number of changes in the law to strengthen the severity of the law for acts inciting to riot or actions that occurred in the course of a riot (e.g., attempted arson during a riot). These suggested legal changes ended part one of the report.

The second and last section dealt specifically with the “conditions of life prevailing in the Hough area,” and the jury discovered many inequities and adverse conditions which characterized the ghetto. The prevalent sentiment of the black community was enunciated once again, but with an additional interpretation, when the report stated, “Poverty and frustration, crowded by organized agitators, served as the uneasy backdrop for the Cleveland riots.” The basic conditions they found included inadequate and substandard housing, exorbitant rents charged by absentee landlords, and non-enforcement of the housing code. They also discovered “woefully inadequate recreational facilities,” “substandard educational facilities,” and excessive food prices for inferior quality food stuffs. The denial of equal economic opportunities, the program of Aid to Dependent Children, and the density of the population were also cited as conditions which led to the feelings of frustrations so often expressed in the black ghetto. Another cause cited in the report was that the black community was attempting to gain “too much too fast for the community to bear within an arbitrarily fixed time limit.” From this set of conditions, the jury was able to conclude that

. . . all these complex social evils are used as subtle and inflammatory provocations by resident and non-resident organizers who exploit riots . . .^[16]

To meet the pressing problems that were now faced by the city, the jury proposed that all of the city’s resources should be directed toward solutions, and specifically recommended four short-range measures that it felt would improve the conditions. These proposals included improved enforcement of the housing code, strengthened law enforcement in the ghetto, better rubbish collection in the ghetto, and a refurbished program of urban renewal that would have the full cooperation of the Federal Government. The report further stated that neither the community nor the leaders of Hough and other areas of the community had adequately measured up to their responsibilities and called upon the political, economic, and civic leaders of the city to “put Cleveland in the forefront in meeting the sociological and moral challenges of our time.” After paying tribute to the “wise leaders” who had foreseen the situation and worked “selflessly” to improve it, the report closed with the declaration that the “time for total community action is now.”^[17]

The Grand Jury had spoken. Reaction to the report was somewhat varied, according to skin color, but most of the community still did not seem satisfied that the report was an accurate assessment of the trouble that had occurred. Most controversy centered around the jury’s allegations that the rioting was organized and precipitated by agitators with Communist Party affiliations. Many people felt that the report had simplified the entire situation, and had not given enough consideration to the very fundamental causes which had caused the disorder. Preoccupation of the jury with the highly questionable immediate causes of the disorders left many people feeling that the jury had not adequately fulfilled its duty to the city.

City officials were not, however, among the detractors of the report. Almost all of the top echelon of the city’s government were overflowing in their praise of the document and the great civic effort that had been performed by the jury’s members. Mayor Locher quickly reacted to the report by lauding it as “a notable public service.” Locher said that he agreed fully with the jury’s findings, and added, “This Grand Jury had the guts to fix the approximate cause — which had been hinted at for a long time — that subversive and Communist elements in our community were behind the rioting.”^[18] City Council President Stanton and Safety Director John McCormick fully agreed with the mayor, as did Police Chief Richard Wagner, who had previously pointed out that the organizers and agitators had “studied the laws very carefully and then just as carefully evaded the scope of their coverage.” Wagner also boasted, “If the Supreme Court had not tied our hands by preempting the criminal syndicalism laws for federal jurisdiction, we would have put those responsible away long ago.”^[19] Later in the month, Mayor Locher fully defended and agreed with the Grand Jury in his testimony before a Senate Subcommittee on urban problems. There he stated that he assumed that the Jury had reached “reasonable conclusions,” and added that the turmoil in Cleveland would not have occurred without Communist instigation.^[20]

However, the rest of the community was not quite so ready to accept the conclusions of the report. An editorial in the Cleveland Press, whose former editor had served as the foreman of the jury, summed up many feelings when it stated that it was “hard to believe that so few people wreaked so much havoc.” The editorial closed on a rather pessimistic note, as it claimed:

Furthermore, it might be dangerous to believe. Because once the community assigns the Hough looting, shooting, burning and general hell-raising to a traveling band from Havana or Peking, the door will be open for another riot.^[21]

Carl Stokes labeled the report a “whitewash,” and Bertram Gardner called the effort an attempt by the white community to escape responsibility for the conditions which caused the riots. Stokes charged that the jury had exercised a great deal of “diligence in removing the liability of the city administration as the immediate precipitating cause of the riot.” They had performed, he said, “in the grand old Cleveland style of sweeping the city’s mistakes under the rug.”^[22]

Federal officials did not agree that subversives and Communists had organized the rioting. In Cleveland, U.S. Attorney Merle M. McCurdy declared that Communists and other agitators had not instigated the disorder. His conclusions, he said, were based on an “intensive investigation” by the FBI, and personal observations that he had made.^[23] Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach also disagreed with the conclusions of the Grand Jury. He concurred that the riots were indeed fomented by agitators — “agitators named disease and despair, joblessness and hopelessness, rat-infested housing and long impacted cynicism” — but said that the sources of agitation were not products of “Communists, Black nationalists, or terrorists.” They were instead the products of “generations of indifference by all the American people to the rot and rust and mold which we have allowed to reach in to the core of our cities.”^[24] Katzenbach asserted that subversive elements did not plan or control the riots in Cleveland, but had apparently attempted to “exploit” some of the unrest. He stated that there was no Communist Party involvement but added that some of the people identified with the J.F.K. House had “made some efforts to keep the rioting going.” Apparently, reports from both the FBI and the Community Relations Service, both arms of the Justice Department, had enabled the Attorney General to reach his conclusions.^[25]

On August 11, two days after the report had been made public, it was also revealed that the majority of the evidence that the jury had used to conclude that the riots had been organized by agitators came from two undercover police detectives who had infiltrated many of the organizations of the area. The two men, one white and one black, had infiltrated the DuBois Club, the J.F.K. House, and the Communist Party as a team, and both men had risen to positions of power in the various organizations. Jessie Thomas, the black undercover detective, had been elected Chairman of the local DuBois Club in January of 1966, and he claimed that financing for recruiting new members came from the Communist Party of New York. He stated that he had heard the individuals who had been implicated in the Grand Jury report make speeches at the J.F.K. House that incited youths with such statements as “you’ve got to take what you want,” and also claimed to have heard talks at the J.F.K. House about organizing rifle clubs, making firebombs, and distributing militant literature. The other undercover agent, Fred Giardini, a white, had been made the “Peace Chairman” of the DuBois Club in late 1965. He was also a member of the Communist Party. However, when asked if he had any personal knowledge of DuBois Club members actually planning or leading the Hough disorders, Giardini’s reply was, “To my personal knowledge, no.”^[26]

Thus, the controversy over whether or not the violence had been organized and precipitated by “a small band of agitators” raged on. In Hough, the sentiment was nearly unanimous that the riots had occurred rather spontaneously, and that no organization was needed. One reporter observed, “In the streets of Hough, where the only constants are poverty and the sidewalks, they are sure of one thing — no outside groups initiated the rioting.”^[27]

The option was open for the black community to stage a hearing of its own, patterned similarly to the Grand Jury hearings, to present their own conclusions about the disorders. Therefore, a citizens’ review panel was constituted, and hearings on the Hough disturbances were scheduled to begin on Tuesday, August 22. The board was a biracial one, composed of nine leaders of various civic organizations, such as the Hough Community Council and the National Association of Social Workers, all of whom had worked and had contact in the Hough area. By means of the mass media, a public invitation was issued to all individuals who wished to testify, and special invitations were extended to Mayor Locher, Council President Stanton, Safety Director John McCormick, and Assistant Safety Director Richard McKean.

The hearings lasted for three days, and twenty-six witnesses (none of them recipients of special invitations) volunteered to testify. Questioning of the witnesses was conducted by five lawyers of the community as well as by members of the panel. From the evidence and testimony presented at the sessions, the panel compiled a full report of its findings and conclusions and presented the information to the entire community.

The report was basically structured as a reply to the findings of the Grand Jury. Its nature was indicated on the first page of the document, where it was clearly stated that the purpose of presenting the report to the community was “the belief that the Grand Jury Report fails to substantially give adequate emphasis to the underlying causes of the riot.” The report went on to say that the emphasis of the Grand Jury on subversives and outside agitators was a disservice to the community and that news media during the disturbances did not give adequate coverage to acts of injustice and police brutality. Many of the witnesses who volunteered to testify before the panel had not been called upon to testify before the Grand Jury, and so the Citizens Panel Report concludes that “had these residents been invited to make statements to the Grand Jury, the report would have been of a different nature.”^[28]

The report was presented in four distinct parts. The first part discussed the implications of the Grand Jury Report, the second section dealt with the underlying causes of the riots, the third traced the events of both the Hough disturbances and the Superior Avenue trouble in June, and the fourth part listed a set of recommend actions which the panel felt to be necessary and desirable for the entire community.

The first section of the report proceeded on the assumption that if the community were “to allow the Grand Jury report to go unquestioned and unchallenged (would be) to give tacit approval to injustice.” As a result, the Citizens’ Report lashed out at the various points made by the Grand Jury. It castigated the Jury for violating the Ohio Code which specifically stated that “the names of people suspected of subversive activity cannot be made public unless there is sufficient evidence for indictment,” and the report expressed amazement that the Grand Jury thought the black community was moving too fast, implying that “Cleveland has repudiated the carefully documented report of the United States Civil Rights Commission and rejects the underlying spirit of the Great Society programs of President Johnson.” The report then questioned the Grand Jury’s assessment of the Aid to Dependent Children program by explaining that an incremental seventy-three cents a day was hardly the motivation for bringing a child into the world, as the Grand Jury had implied. The conclusion of the Grand Jury that outside agitators caused the riots could only have been founded upon ignorance of the civil rights movement and the black community of Cleveland, the report went onto say, because any individual living in the squalor and poverty of Hough needed “no one to tell him just how deplorable his living conditions” were. After charging that the Jury’s report did not give adequate prominence to the social conditions that were the main causative factors of the riots, the section ended with a condemnation of the Jury for praising every member of the police department when evidence indicated that there were often instances of poor handling of incidents by the police.^[29]

The next portion of the document was concerned with “the social conditions that exist in the ghetto areas of Cleveland,” — the underlying causes of the rioting. Specifically cited by the panel as these causes were the housing problem and inept program of urban renewal, poor police relations, the high unemployment rate in the ghettos, subsistence welfare levels and high prices for inferior merchandise, lack of recreational facilities, and failure by the city government administration to act on or even acknowledge suggestions made by the Hough leadership to improve that area of the city. This frustration of the black community was the reason, the report said, why the majority of the people in Hough “stood by and let the small minority try violence and property destruction as a new method (to gain black objectives).” Thus, while only a small portion of the community had actually engaged in the violence and destruction, “the sentiments of many were with the rioters.”^[30]

The actual events of both the Hough and Superior disturbances were then discussed in the report. The background of the disorders was briefly sketched as a setting for the trouble which occurred, but the report focused more on instances of abusive practices of police which were either missed or omitted in the reporting by the local news media. The last portion of the section refuted the Grand Jury’s conclusion that the J.F.K. House leadership had helped to organize and plan the violence. The panel emphasized that even though individual members of the House had participated in the disturbances, “all evidence leads to the conclusion that their behavior was a rejection of the thinking and problem-solving philosophy expressed by the J.F.K. leadership.”^[31]

Ten recommendations were made in the final section, all of which were based on the evidence presented in the three-day hearings. The recommendations centered primarily around measures to alter police procedures and establish better police-community relationships. The panel proposed an investigation of the “waiver” method of release from police custody, investigations by the Justice Department of both the prac-tice of detaining persons without charging them with an offense and the relationship between the police and the citizens of Cleveland, and the development of a new mechanism to adequately respond to grievances of local citizens against specific police actions.^[32] Other recommendations called for increased welfare levels, fair housing legislation for the city and suburbs, improved administration of the urban renewal program, and investigation of the shootings that had occurred during the disturbances. The report advocated that the Grand Jury Report be legally “quashed” because it violated the Ohio Code, and finally, recognizing the deeply ingrained feeling of impotence and frustration prevalent in the black community, the panel called on the mayor to establish the means by which to maintain continued contact with the black community and its leaders. The stated reason for the last proposal was that “if these grievances (of the black community) cannot be given expression through normal channels, they will be expressed destructively.”^[33]

The black community had responded to the Grand Jury Report. Clearly, there were great differences in the two interpretations of the riots, and the implications of the disorders varied on the basis of skin color. Polarization of the two races of the community had been heightened and certainly not lessened by the differences in the two reports. Furthermore, prospects for the near future appeared grim for the black ghetto, for power was not in their hands, but instead in the hands of leadership that fully agreed with a report that had been declared inadequate and mistaken by the black community. Fortunately, however, the long hot summer was rapidly drawing to a close in Cleveland. As the summer gradually disappeared, the problems appeared to expand while the prospects for solving them seemed to decrease.

Unfortunately, problems of a lifetime and longer are not solved between September and June. Very few people expected them to be solved that quickly, and for that reason, the summer ended on twin notes of relief and pessimism — relief that the violence was over, at least for the next nine months, and pessimism that it would return again next summer in more violent form and with more destructive effects. But communities don’t live in terms of long range goals or attitudes; they rather plod along from day to day, worrying only about tomorrow, and not about yesterday or next month. Next summer was a long time away for Cleveland, and so were solutions to Cleveland’s deep-rooted problems.