The Jungle & the City

The summer of 1966 threatens to yield one of the ugliest harvests of racial violence in memory. Partly because of the desperate new militance symbolized by the rallying cry of black power, partly because of the white man's ineptitude and uncertainty in meeting the Negro's legitimate needs, there is hardly a major city in the U.S. that does not live with the fear of turmoil in the streets. Last week the train of death and destruction slashed deep scars in Cleveland, where Mayor Ralph Locher had ignored persistent warnings of Negro unrest, and scratched New York City, where Mayor John Lindsay had set a notable pattern of personal concern for ghetto residents.

The savagery that gripped Hough, a garbage-strewn, rat-infested Negro section of Cleveland that is known as "Rough Hough" or simply "The Jungle," was a flagrant example of irresponsibility on the part of both Negroes and white officialdom. If ever a slum was predictably ripe for riot, it was Hough. Some 60,000 Negroes are jammed into a two-square-mile warren of squat apartment houses and decaying mansions carved up into flats; the area's crime rate is the highest in the city; flocks of prostitutes hustle passers-by at every chance; and hatred for the city's cops runs deep--the more so because the 2,140-man force has only 130 Negro members and only two above the rank of patrolman. The urban-renewal program in Hough has been labeled one of the nation's worst.

Though Mayor Locher (rhymes with poker) announced last year that he saw "no impending furor" in his city, a U.S. Civil Rights Commission investigation there last April convinced at least one commissioner, the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame, that conditions in Hough were "the worst I have seen." After the commission urged city officials to show "a more positive attitude" toward Cleveland's Negroes, Mayor Locher's response was to appoint a committee to report on the commission's report.

Goodwill Arson. It took only a small spark to ignite Hough. Early one evening, the bartender in a sleazy, white-operated tavern called The 79ers refused to give a glass of ice water to a Negro, who then ran angrily into the street shouting the news to his street-corner cronies. A muttering crowd gathered outside the bar, stormed the place, and wrecked it. The rampage was on. Chanting "Black power! Black power!", hundreds of Negro hoodlums charged up and down the streets, smashing and looting white-owned shops at will.

Police Chief Richard Wagner ordered a force of 400 cops into the area. They were outnumbered and all but engulfed. Dozens of fires flickered eerily over the sweating mob. Soon parts of Hough were plunged into darkness as electric power lines and street lights were shorted by flames. Negro snipers manned the rooftops and began shooting at random in the dark. Police tried desperately to herd people off the streets to protect them from crossfire between snipers and police. One young Negro woman, Mrs. Joyce Arnett, was searching frantically for her children when policemen pushed her into an apartment building. Hysterical, she ran to a window and screamed into the chaos below: "My God, I want to go home to my kids!" A bullet smashed into her head, killing her.

The plundering and burning continued after daylight and throughout the week. Under a greasy pall of smoke, fire trucks shuttled furiously through the streets, as often as not in response to false alarms. Several apartment buildings were burned. A store run by Goodwill Industries, a charitable organization chartered to help the handicapped, was ransacked and burned. The 79ers Bar, where it all began, was destroyed by a fire bomb. To no one's surprise, the regional urban-renewal office was wrecked and looted. Indeed, as one observer put it, Hough's busy arsonists were pursuing their own program of "instant urban renewal."

Odd Enforcement. Mayor Locher decried the Hough upheaval as "shameful and irresponsible," then vacillated until late in the second day before he requested 1,500 National Guardsmen to patrol the district. By the time they arrived, about midnight, the mobs had spectacularly refuted Chief Wagner's ebullient assurance: "This situation will not get out of hand because I've got my men there to see that it won't."

Wagner's men were there all right--and they were so conscious of the possibility that they might be accused of riot-incited brutality that they maintained a general attitude of scrupulous courtesy--at times almost to the point of being ineffectual. In the daylight hours following the first upheaval, officers rubbed their shotguns and watched placidly while leisurely looters emptied the shelves of riot-smashed stores. When one tearful shopkeeper begged the cops to stop the thieves from walking away with his livelihood, they shrugged and repeated what Chief Wagner himself had told reporters: "We don't want to increase the tension by making arrests in the middle of a riot." During the arrests that were made, at least one cop seized the opportunity to line his pockets. He cornered a Negro woman suspected of looting, frisked her until she was all but bare from the waist up, found some money and took it, with the explanation: "That's stolen property, you know."

J.F.K. House. In another ugly confrontation, at a police and National Guard roadblock, 21 bullets were sprayed into a car driven by a Negro named Henry Townes, 22. Townes's 16-year-old wife, their seven-month-old baby and her four-year-old son by a previous marriage were all wounded, and a National Guard captain was hit by a ricocheting bullet.

As the week went by, the toll of destruction reached millions; four lives had been lost, 46 people injured, and 187 arrested. The cause, Locher and Wagner hinted persistently, lay in an organized conspiracy. Cleveland does have its Black Muslim Temple of Islam (No. 18). There was at least one representative of the pro-Castro Revolutionary Action Movement in town. A group called the J.F.K. House--for Jomo Freedom Kenyatta and John F. Kennedy--is suspected of running a Hough-headquartered training school in street warfare.

Carl Stokes, a Negro state legislator who last November came within 2,000 votes of unseating Locher, had an entirely different insight. "Ralph can't comprehend the problem," Stokes said. "He thinks that because he doesn't have his hand in the cash box he's doing a good job. My campaign was for the people in Hough a symbol of hope, a chance to get at least a fair shake. Now they riot because they have no hope and nothing to lose."

SPONGE & Jacks. To some extent, the same futility underlay a racial outburst in the East New York section of Brooklyn last week. The catalyst was a menacing group of white men called the Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything (SPONGE). Their goading picket line, set up in a neighborhood that has been traditionally explosive because of racial street-gang rivalries, was an irresistible target for Negro bystanders. Fighting broke out and scattered gunshots crackled through the area, killing an 11-year-old Negro boy as he crouched in terror on a street corner. Rooftop commandos hurled everything from garbage to tire jacks at police and passersby. In all, 22 people were hurt and 29 arrested before 1,500 riot-ready cops managed to calm things down.

The turmoil was not nearly so bad as it might have been; and for once New York--long considered one of the U.S.'s most problem-plagued cities--could attribute the trouble's swift suppression to some foresighted if only partly proved civic remedies. The frenzied Harlem riots of 1964 taught officials a frightening lesson. Negroes on the police force have been given better assignments. Mayor Lindsay recently appointed a seven-man review board--including two Negroes, a Puerto Rican, and two men active in civil rights groups--to handle the predominantly Negro complaints of police brutality. Beyond that, a costly poverty program, run by Negroes for Negroes, has offered a measure of hope to thousands of restive slum dwellers.

Mayor Lindsay himself, displaying the alertness and concern that brought him a victory over a tired Democratic machine last fall, was on the scene during much of the worst of the rioting. He took time to call on the grieving family of the boy who was killed, talked coolly with street-gang leaders and SPONGE officials. Unknown to most New Yorkers was the fact that the mayor has been making tours of the ghetto areas ever since his inauguration last January. Before last week's violence, he strode one evening among the crowds of East Harlem, played the bongo drums with a pickup front-stoop combo, was bear-hugged by a blind Negro, tried with unquenchable determination to tidy up the streets. Another day the mayor went into the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, plowed into an angry crowd that was clamoring menacingly for more schools, and wound up bobbing on men's shoulders above a cheering throng. Lindsay's tactics struck cynics as canny politicking. Undeniably, though, the mayor and top city officials were visible to their lowliest constituents and in touch with them.

While being in touch would not assure New York or any city of trouble-free weeks ahead, it was a psychologically important part of the battle. Said Martin Luther King last week: "In Watts last year, I asked a rioter what he had gained from his smashing and looting and killing. He told me, 'We made them pay attention to us.' " Really paying attention means, as John Lindsay has shown, trying to do something about housing, sanitation, schools and jobs. Only through responsible and responsive public action to meet the Negroes' needs can white officialdom effectively inspire greater respect for law and order and lead the way to integrated power.

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