As a journalist I always have to remember that—as Ta-Nehisi Coates said so well—our job is not to provide hope nor to provide positive messages. I mention this because a lot of Roldo Bartimole’s readers, at least those who write him letters, take him to task for being so negative. Journalists must afflict the comfortable and by doing so, comfort the afflicted.

In his 5 April 1971 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 19), Roldo, writing in LETTERS AND ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW (OR IS IT?) ledes:

Some time ago we asked readers for some feedback. All the letters are being printed herein except for the short notes. The rest of the issue is another’s viewpoint of the Plain Dealer by Terry Sheridan, formerly of the PD, now doing freelance writing.

Sheridan begins:

Now comes the rites of Spring—the hustling after journalism awards. This tragicomedy began in the pit of winter with busy promotion people snuffling about, scraping together the reportorial lees of the year—anything that can be passed off as prize-winning efforts. The Plain Dealer, Ohio’s largest newspaper, entered 25 contests. God knows where they find them.

But Tom Vail, dashing editor and publisher of the PD, covets the big one—the Pulitzer. Stumbling along to his own drummer, Vail figures this can be done two ways: The PD does investigative reporting his way and the PD prints an awful lot of pictures of Vail.

Splenetic paranoiacs insist on seeing Vail as a devious Calvinist—a man dedicated to the proposition that the Establishment’s hand belongs in the working man’s pocket. This is as unfair as it is untrue; it is a common mistake made by those who confuse dullardism with deviousness. The main problem with Vail is that it is virtually impossible to open up his mind and sneak in a new idea.

Sheridan goes on to describe a number of Pulitzer-worthy stories that Vail squelched because either advertisers or his Hunting Valley neighbors complained. He writes:

The PD‘s penchant for sweeping unpleasant facts under an editorial carpet is a disservice to taxpayers in Ohio, the world’s largest producer of hothouse tomatoes but a parsimonious state when it comes to aid to school children, the impoverished and the mentally ill.

A sampling of just three of Sheridan’s examples include:

An undercover report of Ohio’s mental health system was suppressed after Martin Janis, director of mental hygiene and correction in Ohio, promised “to make immediate improvements.”

A series on fast-sell, high-risk credit retailers who bilk the poor was cut short when the scheme was revealed to be backed by reputable Cleveland banks.

Reporting on the Glenville Shoot-Out was dropped when reporters found that police, who claimed an ambush, might be wrong.

Sheridan’s concludes:

It’s easier to dream of prizes, dancing like sugar plum fairies in a publisher’s mind while, sorry to say, there are radical types in our town who march to a different drummer and plot mischief to a Baptist tune:

The Lord gave Noah the rainbow sign: No more water; the fire next time.

Sheridan also sent a letter to Roldo to be included in the issue. He wrote:

As a renegade journalist, a poor man’s Tom Paine, you bought the ticket and you take the ride. You have been on it about three years now. You bushwhacked the political pony express—the guys who change faith like fast horses. You sniped at editors, the intellectual basket cases and called fellow journalists, those who give failure a bad name, moral cripples.

Roldo, baby, you are OK. Not too bright, but you got balls.

Don’t let the Yahoos get you.

On the back page of this Point Of Viəw, Roldo followed up on Mayor Stokes’ letter to the Smokescreen Commission. He writes:

“To be effective, there must be consumer representation at all levels of decision-making, from planning to actual funding,” wrote Stokes in his letter.

But a week ago Mayor Stokes named a Manpower Planning and Development Task Force. The members, says the Mayor, are people “with knowledge, experience and expertise in this area” who are to “reduce hard-core unemployment…” and take on other tasks to aid the unemployed.

The Mayor named no one who could fit the description of one who suffers any of the problems supposed to be solved, except, that is, with one possibility. Dick Peters, former Cleveland Now aide, who is unemployed, leisurely to be sure.

The Mayor’s excuse: consumers are to be represented at the second stage. The Mayor did “change” the committee at its first meeting to involve consumers.

Can’t let the moralistic, demagogic, irrational, bigoted and futile speak too soon.

In his 19 April 1971 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 20), Roldo, in CARL’S COP-OUT—THINKING OF ONE’S SELF, ledes:

“My goals have been to demonstrate that the democratic processes are viable, that government can be responsive to human needs and that the problems which make up the urban crisis, while difficult, can indeed be solved.”

Carl Stokes so wrote of his goals and aspirations in Who’s Who in America a year ago.

This weekend when he announced that he would not seek re-election Stokes said: “I want now to expand my efforts beyond the Cleveland area to assist others, particularly locked-in minority groups, to better understand their role in politics and government.”

For some reason Carl Stokes wants to transplant as a model his lack of success in Cleveland.

By his own description of goals, quoted above, he has failed.

The last three-and-a-half years certainly give more proof than not that the democratic process is not viable, that government is unresponsive to the most basic of human needs, that the urban crisis, rather than being solvable, can be used to the political benefit of racists and reactionaries.

And, I mighty add, change is nearly impossible for any politician who is elected as the first anything. Just ask former president Barack Hussein Obama. May those who would follow Stokes would have better luck after he knocked down the wall, but we’ll have to wait and see what Roldo will have to say on that topic. He continues:

Stokes, in the end, gives in to the bigots and the reactionaries. We sympathize with the Mayor for the abuse he has had to take.

But he left too soon. It was just at a time when events were pushing him into a position of having to run as a Black Mayor. Maybe that’s why he left. It would have been tough on both him and the community.

Instead he has chosen to peddle an old liberal line when he must see it doesn’t work anymore. Or he has become a victim of his own charisma and the sycophants he draws in visits around the nation.
…
Stokes says he wants to share his experience of how the American political system can work. He seems more equipped now to do the opposite, how it doesn’t work.

But Stokes has no viable ideas to sell, or for that matter, to give away. He can peddle charm and mimic the ideas of other liberal mimics. His idea of a People’s Lobby sounds all too Ford Foundationish in its propaganda about re-ordering priorities, reforming the system and the like, exemplified by the comment that “there is nothing fundamentally wrong with America’s cities that money won’t cure….”

If that’s what he has learned in the past four years, he has been miseducated.

Roldo concludes:

Stokes was much better than average in PR, as his handling of his exit shows.

If there is one big regret that Carl Stokes has left it is that he let the community off the hook in the end. The lines were being drawn. He could have had his win this election with the Black community. His victory would have been in losing on principles and forcing the community to see itself.

[I imagine that this is a bit of what has kept Roldo going all this time. JH]

But we expect too much of leaders. In the end we help them to be leaders or martyrs.

But there is a lesson in Stokes not wanting to run again and that is that the “locked-in minority groups” will have to build a movement, not depend upon charismatic individuals.

This was the message of Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, but that message was squelched by the elites, the professionals, who (think they) know better. But as Thomas Frank writes:

The demand for economic democracy is how you build a mass movement of ordinary people. And a mass movement of ordinary people, in turn, is how you achieve economic democracy. Which is to say that the answer both to Trumpist fraud and to liberal elitism must come from us—from the democratic public itself. p. 247

All movements must, necessarily, grow from the soil up.

Next, Roldo brings Terry Sheridan back to reprise his appearance in Point Of Viəw with Kent State University—A Year Later Sheridan ledes:

To the temperate delight of some and the outraged indignity of others, perverse notoriety persists at Kent State University, a dull and mediocre place that spent a lifetime ducking reality until fate and history found a home there on 4 May 1970.

With forsythias in bloom, it appears to be a pretty routine place, as campuses go. At a downtown movie house the military is alternately mocked and glorified in Academy Award winners “M*A*S*H” and Patton. The new grass on blanket hill cushions supine bodies of couples romancing between classes. But there is a difference. A diligent photographer works hard to focus his camera. He wants the bullet hole in the metal structure in his picture of the lovers on Blanket Hill grass, a few yards away outside Taylor Hall.

Sheridan does his best to not look back too much, but to write about what has happened since and what may be coming. He writes:

So, where are we as the media moves to do its anniversary stories

—Four students were killed, perhaps murdered.

—None of the Guardsmen was indicted.

—The government announced that it was not interested in pursuing the case against Guardsmen.

—The Portage County Grand Jury prosecutors were not interested in hearing testimony from National Guard Capt. Raymond Srp of Troop G, who had information that Guardsmen, according to a Justice Dept. summary, “were not in danger and that it was not a shooting situation.”

—Twenty-five were indicted, including Dr. Thomas Lough, KSU sociologist and a known “dissenter.”

In preparing charges against Lough and the others, the grand jury loftily noted that its finding were established “beyond any doubt” and finally go around to what was really bothering them:

We receive the impression that there are some persons connected with the university who believe and openly advocate that one has a duty rather than a right to dissent from traditionally accepted behavior and institutions of government.”

[I might have reminded the members of the Grand Jury of this: I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Wise words from our third president, Thomas Jefferson. JH]

So Lough is charged with inciting to riot. According to testimony in federal court it was done after the shooting.

Sheridan concludes with a quotation of his own:

In 1943 [Supreme Court of The United State Associate]Justice [Robert Houghwout] Jackson wrote: Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating the dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard….

On the topic of supporting buying your local politician, Roldo suggest:

COUNCIL CAPERS: When City Council’s Safety has a meeting with members of the Safety Department, [Police and Fire, JH] a good time is had by all.

Or at least it would seem that way by the look of the bill the city pays.

The taxpayers picked up a tab of $128.52 [In 2020 dollars that would be $821.29 JH] for the meeting, held usually at the Sheraton-Hilton Hotel.

The bill includes some of the following items:

—12 steaks at $60.
—A bottle of Cutty Sark for $14.75.
—A bottle of Grand Dad for $15.50. And,
—A bottle of gin for $14.

And,

INTEREST CONFLICT: In the coming Mondays you may notice the City Council meetings end earlier than usual.

The reason is not because Councilmembers are getting less talkative.

It does have something to do with Spring and the fact that all Councilmembers get four free tickets to every Cleveland Indian game courtesy of the Cleveland Indians management and Vern Stouffer.

Of course, Cleveland City Council has to pass on legislation from time to time that affects the Indians.

But one wouldn’t expect the 324 tickets Councilmembers get a year to have any influence upon them when it comes to legislation.

I love that they were able to order bottles of booze for the table. Were there cigars afterward do you suppose?

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Of late I’ve been reading, and annotating, my copy of Thomas Frank’s The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism. I see a lot of Roldo in Frank’s book, particularly in Roldo Bartimole’s trope emphasizing the importance of bottom-up versus top-down politics. At his core Roldo is a populist fighting against the anti-populists that Frank describes.

To the anti-populists—make no mistake about this, of both wings of the Pro-War Pro-Business party, Republicans and Democrats—the people are incapable of Funderstanding the depth of the problems faced by our nation. Only the experts can find a way through. Frank describes the situation this way:

When reform came from the bottom up, in other words, it was moralistic, demagogic, irrational, bigoted and futile. When reform was made by practical business-minded professionals—meaning lobbyists and experts who were comfortable in the company of lobbyists and experts from other groups—prosperity was the result. p.157-8

In his 8 March 1971 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 17), Roldo nails one of the key tools of the anti-populists in SMOKESCREEN COMMISSION TRIES TO POLISH US, MANAGES ONLY TO TARNISH ITSELF. He ledes:

The mask is slipping fast—even among those who are supposed to pretend belief.

The Commission on Health and Social Service, between known and described as the Smokescreen Commission, was created by elites who are trying desperately to save the United Appeal hoax by giving it a new image and a new name. It hasn’t been very convincing.

A $60,000 Cleveland foundation-funded cosmetic job, the Smokescreen Commission now finds that IT needs a cosmetologist. [Emphasis, unless otherwise noted, is in original. JH]

Mayor Carl Stokes last week fired off a letter to “Deal Del”—Smokescreen chairman E. Mandell deWindt, board chairman of Eaton, Yale & Towne. (deWindt owns some $450,000 in stock in Eaton-Yale and Diamond Shamrock of which he is a director, but he’s interested in poor people.)

The letter strongly criticizes the first phony report of the Smokescreen Commission.

“…I find it lacking in several important respects,” wrote the Mayor.

The first report—The Task Force on Needs—was written primarily by Welfare Federation functionaries who have the most to lose if even moderate changes are made in the present system. The report is a couple of hundred pages of soft pap. It could be called, “Preserving the Status Quo.”

Mayor Stokes writes to deWindt:

The task force report does not contain any clear delineation of priorities among the various needs which are discussed. Nor is there any mechanism suggested for determining those priorities. This would seem to justify the continued existence of many programs which answer SOME of the needs of the community, but not necessarily the GREATEST needs.

Justifying the continued existence of programs not meeting crucial needs is part of the reason for the Commission’s existence, Mayor.

Stokes goes on: “If we are to allocate scarce financial resources to provide services for those whose needs are greatest, priorities must be set and followed in allocations of funds and resources.

The function of the Smokescreen Commission at present is to keep the 100-member advisory committee… turning out hundreds of pages of subcommittee reports and attending dozens of subcommittee meetings to bring forth garbage.

This is an example of the bureaucrat’s: If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, bury them in bullshit. Roldo continues:

Mayor Stokes recognized the hypocrisy:

A second point that was mentioned, but never clearly stated, is that of community participation. To be effective, there must be consumer representation at all levels of decision-making, from planning to actual funding. The poor and the disadvantaged must help decide whether programs are meeting their needs or not and must have some participation in the review and funding of those programs.

But the Smokescreen Commission obviously doesn’t take itself seriously. Despite the talk of participation, the Smokescreen Commission won’t let the public near its true deliberations, which are private. The few active members who are running the affair are frightened that they will have to open themselves to public hearings. It would be embarrassing.

Those-who-know-better can have those “moralistic, demagogic, irrational, bigoted and futile” views of the people getting in the way. Roldo continues:

Indeed, a meeting of the Smokescreen Commission, at which the public hearing idea was to be pushed, was for some reason cancelled. But following the cancellation, five of the 27 elite members [and two staffers, JH] privately met and decided—despite the sentiment among the community people and the words about the necessity for participation flowing from subcommittees—to rule out any public hearings. There will be no public input in this private game.

So, who got to be in the real meeting? The five at the private hearing, Roldo tells us were: deWindt; E.W. Sloan, a United Appeal sycophant and retired president of Oglebay Norton; Jim Carney, Democratic string-puller and downtown land manipulator; Bill Gin, a Welfare Federation protector and lawyer with Thompson, Hine & Flory; and Morton Mandel, another United Appeal devotee and president of Premier Industrial Corp. [The staffers were Bill Silverman and Dick Stoddart, JH]

Roldo writes that an addendum to a Needs Task Force report—written at the urging of two aides to Mayor Stokes—went missing at the next Smokescreen Commission meeting. Roldo, of course, obtained a copy. He writes:

In any case, here are the high points of [Needs subcommittee chair Victor] Gelb’s additions which go a bit further than the needs report:

There was unanimity among the committee that there needs to be a complete and thorough examination of the priorities on which voluntary and public dollars are spent; …voluntary dollars must be given to those agencies serving individuals with the greatest need, which, in most cases, would mean the inner-city poor; no program should be continued ‘just because’ it exists…; there should be more consumer participation in planning services and programming for agencies…; the report stated and the request was made that we further emphasize… that youth play a more important and integral role in determining the type and structure of programs that will be affecting them.

No wonder the addendum was tossed.

[Gelb is the first figure written about by Roldo that I have actually met. As an editor on the business magazine Aftermarket Business in the late ‘80s I would have several opportunities to speak with Gelb in his capacity as a manufacturer’s representative in the Automotive Aftermarket and as an officer for the Automotive Parts and Accessories Association. JH ]

As an example of commission members attitudes, Roldo cites the reaction of George Willis, a member of the Health committee and executive vice president of Lincoln Electric:

I have some trouble with the concept in its totality that Health is a right.’ [Presumably, Willis would have also had a problem with FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. JH] This is probably because the backlash of our general populace, through their disinterest in supporting the Welfare Rights Organization, and through their reluctance to permit tax increases, underscores the basic American thesis that the government cannot and should not, do everything—that it is through private initiative that virtually all things are deserved or earned and done most efficiently.

Roldo continues:

But just how vicious this kind of pretense problem-solving becomes can be realized by a combination of actions. For as the Smokescreen elites are presenting the community with a Health Task Force report some of the same people are quietly making just the opposite decision at University Hospitals. Unfortunately, although the words of the Health Report are meaningless, the actions of elites at University Hospital are not. University Hospitals and other private hospitals are sharply cutting back outpatient services thus rejecting the poor who need health care the most.

This shows clearly how the fraud works. [Emphasis mine, JH] The Smokescreen Commission gave the appearance of a forward step but beneath the smoke there is a running retreat from the problems of the poor. It’s a camouflage job.

Throwing, and blowing, smoke is how elites advance under cover of obfuscation.

In his 22 March 1971 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 18), Roldo tackles, for the first time, Cleveland’s hospitals. Writing in MONEYED BOSSES OF UNIVERSITY HOSPITALS TO SLASH BUDGET, PUSH ASIDE THE POOR, he ledes:

University Hospitals likes to brag that it is the place “where science and mercy meet,” but one could quickly add, “AND WHERE MONEY TRIUMPHS.”

In January, University Hospitals quietly cut 15 percent of its outpatient- clinic budget, slicing staff in nursing, social services and housekeeping sections and transferring some administrative people.

Hospital outpatient officials are NOW in the process of planning for more severe cutbacks of 33-1/3 percent—to take place 1 July in the outpatient service. [The two cuts are cumulative, adding up to a 48-1/3 percent budget cut. JH]

Much has been written—and discussed locally as it was yesterday on WCPN’s Sound Of Ideas—about how the present COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affects minority populations. Roldo was on the story 50 years ago. He continues:

The cutbacks in outpatient service will hit, as might be expected, the lowest income people the hardest. And because of its location, blacks will be hit most.
…
A University Hospital publication in February headlined the issue under the following: Unpaid Indigent Care Causes Dollar Crisis for Hospitals. Beneath it is a black silhouette photograph of a long line of clinic patients, supposed to fill the image of indigents waiting in line to be processed.

The photo, of course, was a subtle reminder that the poor come in droves.

“Something must be done to meet the needs of the ever increasing number of indigent [Why avoid “poor” so much. JH] patients. The losses we are sustaining make it impossible for the hospital to meet these needs,” Stanly Ferguson is quoted as saying in the Archway article.

No talk about the high cost of doctor’s care or the cost of exotic machinery used by the hospital, nor the high profits of the drug industry, nor the profits of the hospital supply companies (now growing at a rate of more than 20 percent a year), especially since the entire cost can be passed on to the consumer.

No, the publicity onslaught is reserved for only the poor.

Roldo continues:

Thus, the crisis. Or is it a crisis?

The present deficit could be absorbed easily and completely without any cutbacks in service through the endowments University Hospitals already has.

The trustees have told hospital administrators that they have to cutback the outpatient service until the deficit comes within the $1.2 million income available from present endowments. If you use a moderate 6 percent income, that suggests $20 million in endowments. Endowments at University Hospitals, however, are said to be in the range of $50 million but most of the money is limited to prescribed uses by elites—and they don’t prescribe their funds for the poor.
…
Further, it’s questionable whether the deficit, as stated by University Hospitals, is real or imaginary.

Bernie Sanders could have used this in his Medicare-For-All funding argument. The funds are there—as Roldo and Bernie tell us—we just need to speak honestly about where the money goes. Roldo continues:

Whether this is true or not there is a need for a complete audit of the books if any further cuts are to be made in the vital outpatient service of the hospital.

University Hospital staff has asked for a meeting with the trustees. If the trustees are adamant in their desire to cut outpatient services to the community because of costs, a private audit of the hospital books shouldn’t be threatening.

Finally, one wonders if the clinic is credited with ‘income’ since its patients are being used in the educational process of future private doctors who are learning while they treat the clinic patients.

This is the first time we’ve done anything with hospitals and we find, as we have in every other aspect of this community’s life, that the decisions are being made by an incestuous few ‘civic leaders.’ It wasn’t surprising.

[You know, Frank’s practical business-minded professionals. JH]

Who are these civic leaders? Well, Roldo names names and then writes:

One should get the idea that it’s the same bunch running the hospitals as with every other part of the community where special benefits can be had under the guise of civic betterment.

University Hospitals advertises itself as a voluntary hospital operated as a non-profit organization and that “all income is used to operate the hospital.”

But it’s clear that the hospital trustees want the income used for only certain functions and certain people.

The squeeze to push the poor out of the private hospitals of Cleveland is on. It’s appropriate that it’s being led by University Hospitals. That’s where medical students learn to be doctors and prepare to treat those who have the money to pay.

Roldo’s, along with Frank’s and my own, solution is for the People to make the elites pay.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: Trump’s Finale from Impeachment to Conviction.

Any one with a phone has had the experience of the annoying telemarketer. Yeah, I know, that’s redundant. All telemarketers, by definition, are annoying. In the last few years telemarketers have added a potent weapon to their arsenal: the spoofer. The electronic device allows them to put any phone number they want on your caller identification.

The spoofer, however, has been benign. Annoying all get out, but still, other than some elevated blood pressure, no one was in danger. Until now. From my home town newspaper, The Marietta Times, this morning 21 January 2021 on page A4.

Faked 911 call under investigation

A faked 911 call is still under investigation by the Washington County Sheriff’s Office.

Washington County resident John Karas received several telemarketer calls Monday and “told one to go to hell or something,” said Sheriff Larry Mincks.

It wasn’t long before the Marietta Police Department 911 got a call from Karas’ number. The caller said he just killed his wife. The 911 dispatcher kept the caller on the line while the sheriff’s office handled the call.

After taking a handcuffed Karas out of the house at gunpoint, they realized Karas’ wife was uninjured.

The investigation will be difficult because the caller spoofed Karas’ number, deliberately masking their number with his.

“This was a telemarketer who had called Mr. Karas and Mr. Karas said he wasn’t interested,” Mincks said. “This was a retaliation, I think. I think wherever they were calling from, they didn’t have anything else to do.”

Shit just got real.

Roldo’s business elites (my 1 percent) are all about running government like a business and ensuring that the wrong people don’t get to suck at the public teat—that’s a perquisite for the right kind of people. Roldo goes back to public housing to detail how pushing out those not like them means more money for the insiders.

In his 8 February 1971 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 15), Roldo, in NEGLIGENCE OF OHIO BELL’S FRED ECKLEY NETS FAILURE FOR STOKES HOUSING PROGRAM, ledes:

The Community Housing Corp., founded and fed by Cleveland Now and over-stocked with downtown elites, despite its name, has badly bungled its job of producing low income housing for Cleveland’s poor.

An accounting of the failures has been made by consultants for the Plan of Action for Tomorrow’s Housing committee [Created in September 1966 by the Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation. JH]. The critical report was made for the eyes of insiders only and was not to be shared with the community, a typical method of elites doing public business privately. The document is marked “Confidential—For Discussion Purposes Only.”

[President of Ohio Bell and chairman of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association Fred] Eckley, who donates his time, gets socked for by charges of negligence, lack of any “real concern and incompetent management.”

The consultants say: “The chairman did not really take his role with CHC seriously. Whatever the reasons are, the facts appear to sustain the contention that the leadership of the chairman and board was lax.”

Clearly, Eckley put into his chairmanship what he thought it was worth. Roldo continues:

Mayor Stokes at the outset said CHC would produce 4,600 units of new and rehabilitated housing in 1969. As of 30 September 1970, the report shows only 254 units of housing created with the help of CHC. However, even in those cases other groups claim major credit for producing the same housing.
…
Before going further it might be well to give a quick assessment of the major CHC programs, as seen by the consultants after study:

Roldo goes on to hit a few of the high points of the massive failure the PATH report attributed to Eckley and his committee:

SHAKER HOUSE MOVING PROJECT—$250,000 loss;
LOANS AND GRANTS—$45,400 loss;
LANDBANKING—Lacks any overall strategy;
TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE—No systematic program; and
PROJECT REHAB—In serious jeopardy and might be dropped.

So, what did the consultants find to be the CHC’s stumbling blocks? Roldo continues:

The interview of several members of the executive committee left the consultants with the question: How could it be possible that the executive committee or chairman failed to initiate action to clarify CHC’s predicament given the facts that its members including the chairman, were men of position in business, finance and government.

Roldo responded: Dear Consultants: Ever think they just didn’t give much of a damn?

The report says of the business elites on the board, they “merely let things go along until the issues were virtually out of hand.” The board, it says, “exercised very little leadership over the CHC’s operations.”

Roldo asks: Who are these board members? You can read his list of who’s who among Cleveland’s business elites in the issue.

What comes next would be hilarious if it were not so Cleveland. Roldo writes:

[The CHC staff] has a peculiar attitude toward community groups which want part of the action. Community groups are looked upon as greedy, undeserving seekers of the fast buck.

The staff describes the community groups as “malcontents chiefly because some of their representatives want to get their hands on money. Because of this the CHC staff claim that they have to be cautious in dealing with these groups.

Of course, the business elites on Eckley’s committee were every bit as interested in fast bucks as the horrible community groups.

Because the CHC has history tied directly to Mayor Stokes, Roldo provided a separate section under the head BACKGROUND to provide perspective. He writes:

The CHC was established in February, 1969, with funds collected by Mayor Stokes’ Cleveland Now program, [1.1] a program under control of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association and the Cleveland foundation gangs.

The CHC was to be a replacement for another hoax, the Cleveland Development Foundation, [1.21] another private mechanism that was supposed to be a business-backed, non-profit organization to benefit low income people needing housing. It spent most of its time aiding business schemers.

Somehow I think that, at least when it comes to Roldo, those last two words might be a tad bit redundant.

In his 22 February 1971 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 16), Roldo goes after the Plain Dealer again, but also touches on a topic I know a little bit about: nuclear power. In, PD’S Princiotto Attacks Own Reporter To Protect CEI’s Nuclear Power Project, Roldo ledes:

Tom Vail wants a Pulitzer bad but he doesn’t want to step on sensitive toes. He has informed his executive editor William Ware that the Plain Dealer‘s efforts should be focused on stories “most likely to win” a Pulitzer Prize, the Oscar of journalism. He even advised Ware to “exercise political pressure” to get one.

But it’s unlikely that any newspaper need worry about it because every time Vail gets a reporter who confronts sacred cows, the reporter gets undercut by Vail or his editors. You don’t get Pulitzers writing puff pieces about people who run department stores.

The latest casualty is Bill McCann who covers the pollution beat. Ted Princiotto, managing editor and the man who runs the PD in his bully fashion, has been sabotaging his reporter.

Princiotto gets upset about McCann’s objectivity in his coverage of the Cleveland Electric Illuminating company’s push to build its Besse-Davis nuclear power plant whether it is safe or not. Princiotto wants the PD to treat CEI more kindly. He has always been awed by power people.

Back when Dan Moulthrop was hosting WCPN’s Sound of Ideas I called into a discussion of local nuclear power to offer my two bits. I served for four years on board the Navy’s first nuclear powered frigate and lived and worked within feet of both reactors. One man ruled the Navy’s nuclear power force and, because he was a fanatic about safety, I never had a qualm during those four years.

I don’t, however, trust the civilian nuclear power industry for a second because when push comes to shove, safety takes a back seat to profits, and I said so to the panel. One of the representatives scoffed asking, “What? You want the Government to run nuclear power?” With someone like Admiral Hyman Rickover in charge? Any sane (non-businessman) would.

Journalism isn’t all bad at the PD. Under the head Some Praise for PD Reporters, Roldo writes:

The PD deserves credit for running Tom Andrzejewski’s column of 20 February which is a clear statement of the extent of racism and its uses against a black mayor by Cleveland’s political degenerates.

Matters aren’t so generative at Cleveland schools either. Roldo, in Rotary Quality Makes Paul Briggs Big Hit With Businessmen. But Something Stinks, ledes:

Superintendent of Schools Paul Briggs runs the Cleveland schools like a corporation—a private corporation.

Information about the schools is released by public relations techniques. Briggs annually makes his ‘community’ report to his bosses at the Greater Cleveland Growth Association. This year the report was a slick movie presentation. He even must realize his verbal report, nearly the same for the past four years, was getting a bit stale.

The theme of the movie: Promises Made, Promises Kept.

[Now we know from where former President Donald John Trump might have found one of his refrains. JH]

Roldo, however, ain’t having it.

Six years ago, Briggs’ movie said, children didn’t come to school because they were “too hungry.

Yet, less than one-third of Cleveland schools have lunch programs and only 7.9 percent of the children in poverty areas get school lunches, according to a recent study quoted by the newsletter of the Public Information Center of Washington, D.C.

And while Briggs was flapping his mouth about feeding children meager cold breakfasts, he wasn’t saying a word about the continual failure to provide hot lunches.

Though the Cleveland schools got $400,000 for equipment to provide school lunches in 17 schools, only six were operational two years after the program was to start.

With his usual aplomb, Roldo lays out a few of the relevant figures that Briggs doesn’t mention in his movie.

—$120,000 to fund an eight-week program for 1,500 educationally deprived children gets spent on 600 children, only 200 of whom fit the targeted population.

—$100,000 returned to the state for equipment delivered after a program had ended.

—$79,482 was expended for equipment needed for programs after the programs had ended.

Finally, Roldo takes a moment to pen a note to a reader who took exception to his reporting on Cleveland’s public housing crisis. In Can’t Agree, he writes:

Lawrence Evert, executive director of the Businessmen’s Interracial Committee, took offense that we condemned all business elites for running away from the public housing fight.

So, Roldo sent a letter:

Thanks for your note.

I would say, however, that the passage you marked from the report seems to be a point in my favor.

In the article I said that the business elite have run for cover and the passage you indicate is a statement made on 14 July 1970. A lot has happened between that date and 11 January 1971, the date of the Point Of Viəw
article.

Where has the BIC been?

In any case, we both know the statements in annual reports, not backed by muscle, aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. That seems to be the case with your statement.

I would suggest to you that if the BIC were seriously interested in the issue of public housing that your chairman, Jack Reavis of Jones, Day, Cockley and Reavis, donate the use of his law firm in the service of public housing tenants and use its vast legal expertise to pursue an attack on the ills of public housing locally and nationally.

In other words, let the resources of Jones, Day, Cockley and Reavis be used to aid public housing tenants in the manner it has been used for Jones & Laughlin to subvert the pollution law of the city of Cleveland.

Until such time, I will have to consider the BIC a phony front group for the very business elites who profit from the system that they have rigged and in which public housing tenants and most other people are the victims.

We’ll have to wait until the next installment to discover if Evert came back for more.

Bonus No. 1: But Donny drained the swamp with $2 million pardons!
See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Happy 1971! This was the year that the microprocessor was invented, starting what we would come to call the Digital Age. Journalism explodes with the publication of The Pentagon Papers and Disney World opens. Republic of China (Taiwan) is booted from the United Nations and The People’s Republic of China begins shipping cheap plastic crap to the U.S.

And Roldo Bartimole swings back into the saddle with his 18 January 1971 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 13), Under the headline, BACK TO 1940 POLICIES IN PUBLIC HOUSING, Roldo ledes:

Three years ago when Carl Stokes was first elected mayor he promised to get rid of Police Chief Richard Wagner and public housing boss Ernie Bohn. He dumped both.

With the police department Wagner’s departure has meant little. But in public housing, under a new director, there has been progress in providing new housing and other changes.

Last week Ernie Bohn—long bitter about his removal—walked back into his old office. Not as a public official but as a private unofficial advisor.

The firing of Irv Kreigsfeld and the reappearance of Bohn—though the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority board promoted engineer Robert Fitzgerald to the directorship—means a return to Bohn’s 1940 policies.

Bohn can be remembered for segregated housing (predominantly white projects and only 1 percent black; three others were nearly totally black) and for a strict adherence to the unwritten rule to not build against the wishes of councilmen who object to public housing in their ward, despite the fact the practice was and is against city law.

Bohn can be remembered also for a cocktail party deal with a Case Western Reserve University official to house ineligible students (some from well-off Shaker Heights families) in public housing while eligible low income families were placed on a waiting list and living in slum housing. As might be expected, Bohn is on the CWRU faculty now.

Briefly, the firing of Kreigsfeld has promoted a rent strike by tenants, a walkout of workers, particularly blacks who felt they had equal opportunities for the first time under Kreigsfeld; and permanent walkouts by several officials attracted by Kreigsfeld’s reforms. Although the acts support the fired director, the protesters recognize too that public housing has been returned to the Neanderthals.

The firing climaxes a nearly three-year attempt to make public housing more available with new and faster methods of producing housing; to locate housing in less crowded conditions; and to give tenants some forms of representation.

Roldo gets very specific about what actions the people most affected—those living in public housing could take. He writes:

The tenants should counter-attack against the City Council, County Commission and the CMHA board for violating the law. City Council in 1949 adopted an ordinance (2139-49) prohibiting segregation in the “selection of tenants, the CONSTRUCTION, the maintenance and operation of public housing.”
…
Underlying the entire issue is the battle between the predominantly White Catholic Democratic Party and the predominantly Black District 21 Caucus [over] who will derive the economic benefits of public construction and jobs.

Public housing tenants and low income families requiring housing become pawns.

However, neutrality puts one on the side of the racists.

Yet it’s unlikely that the presently planned protests will do much to reverse the CMHA policy.

The rent strikes will be broken by the court; evictions and harassment will take care of leaders within the projects; maintenance men walkouts and heating facility destruction hurt tenants more than anyone else; and fed-up officials who leave satisfy the bigots who don’t want progress anyway.

Public housing should be made an issue that can attract a movement coalition aimed at racists, especially those in the Democratic Party.

But the present targets seem wrong. Fighting the CMHA board is to battle the lower echelon stooges.

The protesters had to go after the people writing the checks, not to them, but to those fronting the operation. Roldo continues:

Public housing is as bad as it is and as limited as it is because it’s subsidized, thus undesirable to real estate interests, from slum landlords and to bankers.

Thus the proper place for protest would seem not to be at the CMHA offices or meetings but downtown Cleveland where those who benefit from the crisis of poor people make their profits.

Further, it’s clear that almost every frontline figure fighting public housing is a Catholic politician. Therefore a proper place for protests is St. John’s Cathedral at Superior and E. 9th to call attention to the church hierarchy’s unwillingness to deal with its bigots.

From there protests could be shifted to Cleveland Trust or other downtown banks until downtown becomes a place for non-protesters to avoid.

In other words, a return to the tactics of the 1960s but a shift of the action site to downtown private targets.

Roldo concludes: “Maybe it’s time to take an issue out of the hands of the politicians.”

When the politicians are just the puppets, you have to go to the puppet masters.

In his 25 January 1971 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 14), Roldo, in A SAMPLE OF IGNORANCE, ledes:

Case-Western Reserve University students got a sample of elite ignorance in an informal talk with some trustees of the Cleveland university.

Many students were apparently expecting leaders, not social deviants.

Marvin Bower, chairman of the board of trustees, was the best show.

Here’s an exchange between Bower and students who wanted to know why students couldn’t be trustees.

Bower: We don’t think so (that students should be trustees) because we feel that the board of trustees ought to be representative of the university as a whole but not have representatives on the board who are trying to represent constituencies, but, in principle, the board ought to represent the whole university, not simply constituencies. (Bower, of course, fills the requirements as a New York management consultant. He is a former member of the law firm of Jones, Day Cockley and Reavis.)
…
Says Bower, “Allowing students into the board meeting would inhibit Free discussion by the trustees in the interest of the university.”

This was typical of Bower’s ‘mind your own business’ language.

He didn’t mean FREE discussion, but private discussion.

In another exchange, a student asked Bower if he wouldn’t use the 36 percent of CWRU’s $80 million in endowments that are in common stocks to lobby against pollution and for auto safety.

Bower finally gave a straight answer. “No.” Adding, “because we have stock for investment to produce the greatest return for the university.” And how does one define ‘return?’ Why in dollars of course.

This one apparently shocked some students.

“I’m not saying we should sell certain stock. I’m saying you should lobby for social improvements at stockholder’s meetings.

“Never Considered It,” says Bower, “Why should we?”

At the end of the meeting, Roldo got an unexpected bonus:

Another fun elite was on hand. Fred C. Crawford, former chairman of TRW, Inc., and an honorary trustee of CWRU. He was as obnoxious as one might expect.

I asked him why he had told racial jokes aimed at Mayor Stokes and blacks.

Crawford claimed that my information came erroneously from “SOME GUY WHO OPERATES OUT OF HIS BASEMENT,” It was, he said, an example of the sad state of journalism.

To prove how wrong I was (though I told him my name he didn’t know that I was the basement enemy) he repeated his joke about the white General and a black underling. The joke didn’t even require any racial tint. He wouldn’t repeat the joke until a tape recorder on the scene was turned off.

[When I started blogging back in 2004, part of me wanted to model Have Coffee Will Write on Point Of Viəw because I thought of Roldo as the Proto-Blogger. Crawford’s quote just seals the deal. JH]

Roldo returns to censorship and the Plain Dealer in C’mon Bill Treon Roldo writes:

The Plain Dealer is censoring itself again. Or should we say that the Plain Dealer advertising department is censoring the editorial department again.

This time a completed series of articles showing that Cleveland drug chains are fleecing the public has been withheld from the public. The stories were written by former consumer reporter Doug Bloomfield who has left the PD temporarily.

When the series was completed the editorial department, in an unusual move for a newspaper, sent the whole series to the advertising department to be read by William Lostoski, advertising manager.

This rather damages the claim that advertisers don’t have any control over the editorial material going into the Plain Dealer.
…
Asked what he thought of the articles and what decision he gave the editors, Lostoski responded as a seasoned politician, “I have no comment.”

Consumer reporting—after a brief series of well-done jobs of consumer reporting—is quickly retreating to safe little stories that will hurt no one and help no one.

Tom Vail [Who lives in Hunting Valley and doesn’t want to lower his standing among the neighbors, JH] has signaled the retreat with a memo that calls for more self-censorship of both consumer reporting pollution [stories].

[As an undergraduate journalism student at Ohio University, one of my professors whom I greatly esteemed, once told me that while the wall between editorial and advertising in magazines (I was in the magazine sequence) was porous, in newspapers the same wall was “high, thick and well defended.” So much for that lesson. JH]

Finally, Roldo asks of Arnold Pinkney, president of the Cleveland School Board:

What Are You Hiding? Pinkney, one of the forces behind the 21st District Congressional Caucus’ fight with the County White Democratic Party which is called undemocratic—has a weird sense of what democracy means when it comes close to home.

Pinkney has adopted (by himself) new rules on how people might be allowed to speak at a meeting of the board of education. They might be entitled “How to Frustrate Community Groups” or “Silencing the Public.”

The rules are not only undemocratic but insulting and stupid.

Pinkney, who is an aide to Mayor Stokes, says:

The petitioner (one who merely wants to speak at a board meeting) will first inform me, in writing, what his specific concerns or those of his group are. I will then refer the matter to the appropriate committee and instruct its chairman to grant the petitioner an early hearing and prompt notification of the schedule time and date.

If the matter is not resolved to the satisfaction of the petitioner at the committee hearing, he may advise me indicating the unresolved points, and stating his reason for disagreement (sounds like either a third or fourth grade teacher). At that time, I will entertain a request for an appeal to the board at one of its regular meetings.

You must be kidding. Who the hell made you dictator, Pinkney?

I’ve never known a politician at any level who liked answering questions on the fly. The British, because, well, they’re British, take the exercise to the heights of theatre with Question Time.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: This morning in the oval office…
Point Of Viəw

Roldo Bartimole had a busy time at the end of the year, publishing no less than six issues—three in November and three more in December—of Point Of Viəw. Fortunately, he got help from reporters Mary Swindell and Ellis Rogers who contributed pieces to numbers 10 and 11. Of course, this being December, Roldo awards the Second Annual Scrooges.

In his 7 December 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 10), Mary Swindell writes:

Federal law requires that corporations compile data on its employees, breaking the figures into male and female and minority categories. These are the same statistics that both papers haven’t exactly gone overboard in hiring minority group people.

Women are 13 percent, or 215 out of 1,558 employees at the Press and 18 percent, or 417 out of 2,252 of the PD‘s employees are women.

Of the 215 women at the Press, 154, the majority, are office or clerical help.

The other 61 are distributed as follows: 29 are professionals; two sales workers; 14 skilled craftsmen and 16 are service workers.

There are 82 persons described as officers, managers or supervisors at the Press. None is a woman. And only 13 of the women workers are black.

At the PD, the majority of women, 237 of the 417, are office or clerical help. The rest of the breakdown shows eight as officials or managers; 54 professionals; six technicians; 71 sales workers; 21 skilled crafts workers; and 20 service workers.

There are 35 black women [8.4 percent of all women employed. JH] at the PD, better than the Press [6 percent of all women employed. JH], though the PD employs more people.

The glass ceiling, particularly on the business side of the Press, was a problem. Swindell continues:

A sore point among women in the Press‘ commercial department (The PD is not guild organized [I’m not clear what Swindell meant here since the PD was certainly a guild paper in 1970. Roldo still has his membership card. JH]), is the apparent reluctance of management to promote inside ad takers, called solicitors, to the higher-paid outside ad sales staff. This was one of the points covered in a report, submitted in August to the Guild’s general membership, by the Guild’s women’s rights committee.

“In retail advertising at the Press, only one out of 32 salesmen is a woman; in classified advertising, only one out of 28 outside salesmen is a woman; of the 46 Press office employees, only one woman, the credit union manager, enjoys a position of any responsibility,” the report said.

“All of the inside ad takers are women. With rare exception, ad solicitors are never promoted to outside ad sales. Furthermore, our contract specifies that office boys or clerks may be assigned to duties in the classified ad department for a period of one year to train as classified outside salesmen. Women have never been in this program.
…
One woman at the Press remarked that she had asked several years ago for an outside ad salesman’s job only to be told, “You gals get sick every month and besides, when it rains you don’t like to get your shoes wet.”
…
An area where management, at least at the PD, strives to protect women from the harsh realities is the police beat. PD reporters say that women are never assigned to the police beat for fear they’d have to run around at night covering accidents, shoot-outs or the like.

“Women don’t understand, It’s in your interest that you’re protected from these things,” a PD reporter solemnly intoned.

Male bosses and male colleagues (some, not all) seem to have difficulty : A) that women reporters don’t want to be protected, thank you; and B) that such paternalism is insulting to an adult old enough to vote, drive a car, drink and, presumably, to stand on her own two feet and take chances like anyone else.

In closing, Swindell included a short list of periodicals that were probably much less known than Gloria Steinem’s Ms., which had launched the previous year. She writes:

Women’s Lib Periodicals: The following is a list of periodicals for those who might want to send for samples:

—Bread and Roses Newsletter
—It Ain’t Me Babe
—No More Fun and Games
—Off Our Backs
—Off the Pedestal
—Rat
—Tooth And Nail
—Up From Under
—Women’s Monthly

In his 21 December 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 11), Roldo turns the lion’s share of the issue over to Ellis Rogers, who, in HILL-RAPLIN TRIAL—IN THE GUTTER AGAIN WITH COUNTY PROSECUTOR JOHN T. CORRIGAN, ledes:

There was no room for subtleties in the three-week trial of Rabbi David Hill and James Raplin. John T. Corrigan, County Prosecutor, protector and self-styled champion of the white race, scored a predictable victory with another all-white jury conviction of Hill and Raplin in Canton.

William J. Coyne, Corrigan’s top trial assistant, won not only a racist-soaked guilty verdict but also a consecutive sentence for Hill and Raplin from a politically motivated judge who allowed the jury to make the decision he should have made by dismissing the ludicrous, unproven charges.

The trial was held in Canton because of a change in venue, the first ever in Cuyahoga County granted by Cuyahoga County Judge John T. Patton, first cousin of the race-conscious County Prosecutor.

Coyne, as a witness testified, felt: “Someone would have to be punished “ for the boycott. After all, the boycott of the four hamburger stands in the black community did result in the first black McDonald’s owners in Ohio. Hell, first they want to eat in restaurants, then work in them, and now own them!

Ownership in McDonald’s isn’t merely a takeover of a corner mama-papa store; it’s corporate capitalism. The boycott method could be a bit sticky if blacks apply it to say, Ford dealership, etc. McDonald’s was particularly crucial since the franchises were among the most profitable in the nation. The store at 8230 Euclid had been the best money maker in the nation for months. Black money was good enough for buying hamburgers but not to buy the business.

So, asks Rogers:

Why were Rabbi [David] Hill and [James] Raplin convicted?

The reasons are all interrelated. Both were easy targets of Corrigan. They weren’t prominent leaders of the black community though the jury obviously thought Hill and Raplin engineered the entire boycott and now secretly own some McD’s. Corrigan won’t launch an attack upon any ‘respectable’ blacks since he still has some mayoral aspirations.
…
Coyne and [his partner Edward J] Sullivan not only made it subversive to be black, but black uniforms were portrayed as corrupt as the prosecution spent inordinate time explaining to the jury that the pickets were dressed in black. The words ‘black nationalists’ were made to mean violent, revolutionary. Coyne made it appear that truckloads of blacks, all clutching firebombs, came to picket.

He put thoughts of terror and anarchism in the minds of the white jurors, when in fact there was not a single incident of damage or violence during the entire two-month boycott. All the prosecution witnesses admitted that.
…
Much of the trial time was spent on Coyne about a $150,000 ‘donation’ that McD’s was supposed to make to Operation Black Unity. Coyne accused [Defense attorney Stanley] Tolliver of attempting to extort the sum from McD’s.

However, after testimony was delivered, it was discovered by all—except, apparently the jury—that the $150,000 was the figure suggested to Toliver by a McD’s official. In fact, the official even suggested the very idea of a contribution by McD’s to the black community before any picketing had begun.

On 30 September 1996, Ken Myers, writing for Crain’s Cleveland Business in FIGHTING THE GOLDEN ARCHES: A SUCCESSFUL OPERATION revisited the story and concluded:

Mr. Raplin believes the boycott was successful.

By attacking the largest fast-food chain, when they let blacks in, other companies followed suit. McDonald’s was the leader in the field. They became aggressive more so than any other company in finding blacks to own their franchises. Now (race) is not a factor.

Mr. Raplin also sees a big change in race relations in Cleveland in general since 1969.

It’s adversarial in some areas, but it’s adversarial with some respect. It’s a different mentality. The younger people are, the more accustomed they are, to seeing blacks in positions of power.

Taking over from Rogers, Roldo adds to back-of-the-book pieces that grabbed my attention. First, he writes in Thanks For The Censor:

The week after we were censored by Ch. 3’s Scenes On Sunday, the crew went to CWRU’s campus to film. Included was a discussion on campus morality with three clergymen. The discussion ended abruptly when Rev. Ray Miklethun questioned the morality of NBC, asking why Point Of Viəw had been censored from the previous and all future shows. NBC officials quickly stopped the minister, saying that they couldn’t allow that part. The clergymen then allowed that they couldn’t continue the discussion, revealing a more sensitive understanding of censorship and press freedom than NBC journalists.

In his last issue 24 December 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw for the year (volume 3, number 12), Roldo dishes out some deserving Scrooge Awards. There are many more than I list here, I’ve just chosen to highlight those specific to media. In POINT OF VƏW’S SCROOGE AWARDS, Roldo writes:

We present our Second Annual List of awards and gifts to many of Cleveland’s notables and some institutions deserving of the honors rendered them in this season of mostly manufactured “Good Will.”

Again, no returns, please:

To the Cleveland Press: The Sam Sheppard Good Taste Award for Front Page ‘Scandals.’

To the Plain Dealer: The Vivid Writing Award for reporting on page one that a woman was “sexually attacked and beaten to death… her face bruised and her underclothing had been distrubed…” only to find she had had a heart attack.

To Carl Stokes A third brother in the newspaper publishing business.

To Channel 25: The Cleveland Banker’s Award for Creative Censorship.

To Tom Vail: A new TERRIFIC toy to replace the Plain Dealer.

To Ted Princiotto: A 10 percent increase in stories he can censor and a 20 percent increase in meaningless ‘exposés’ he can headline for winning the Terry Sheridan Courageous Editor of the Year Award.

To the Cleveland Plain Dealer: A large dose of benign neglect.

To Dorothy Fuldheim: A mouth-shaped cork.

And,

To Point Of Viəw: The Gen. Ben Davis annual Enemy of Law Enforcement Award and another year.

On to 1971!

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: 2 National Guard members removed from inauguration security…

Growing up ignorant and white in Washington County, Ohio, my personal experiences of anyone of color were zero. What I knew came from entertainment television and in the ’60s that was not a good place to learn about what was going on in America. I remember 4 April 1968 but not 21 February 1965. Yet, I knew Malcolm much better than I did Martin.

I knew Malcolm because some librarian in the Washington County Library system saw fit to order The Autobiography of Malcolm X and in the summer of 1967 put a copy on the bookmobile that stopped in the parking lot of the Tunnel Barbershop on Tuesday mornings. I found the book on a bottom shelf and reading Malcolm’s story—as told to Alex Haley—blew my mind.

Decades later I would share Chapter 11 of the book with my students in my attempt to show them that there was a way through and out of even the worst circumstances. I would not come to read Dr. King’s work until many, many years later. Every Black History month teachers trotted out his speeches and played the Good-King parts but ignored what I came to think of as the more important words that Dr. King left behind.

In that vein, I present what I think of as Dr. King’s most important writing, his: Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

16 April 1963

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham’s economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants–for example, to remove the stores’ humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained. As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?” We decided to schedule our direct action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic-withdrawal program would be the by product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Then it occurred to us that Birmingham’s mayoral election was coming up in March, and we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the run off, we decided again to postpone action until the day after the run off so that the demonstrations could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr. Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community need, we felt that our direct action program could be delayed no longer.

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?” The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I it” relationship for an “I thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state’s segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self respect and a sense of “somebodiness” that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible “devil.”

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the “do nothingism” of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as “rabble rousers” and “outside agitators” those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies–a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: “Get rid of your discontent.” Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . .” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime–the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some -such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Ann Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle–have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They have languished in filthy, roach infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as “dirty nigger-lovers.” Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful “action” antidotes to combat the disease of segregation. Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago.

But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: “Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.” In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?”

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful–in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.”‘ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent–and often even vocal–sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jail with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment. I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation -and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping “order” and “preventing violence.” I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather “nonviolently” in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia, but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

I wish you had commended the Negro sit inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Faith was central to King’s life. Like Aaron McGruder, I wonder how he might have felt about that faith if, instead of dying, King had lived to awaken from a coma in 2000.

Bonus No. 1: But just how hard are we trying…?

From Trayvon Benjamin Martin to—the list shows no indication of stopping–the most recent police murder, the death toll continues to rise. And Trayvon was far from the first. Hell, we don’t even know, or will we be likely to ever know, the name of the first. Robert Barbee, “a black field investigator for social security,” is one place to start.

“Barbee, was shot by the police when they mistook his pipe for a gun.” Our memories are too filled and we forget that what we are surprised by has always been with us. Roldo Bartimole, in his 1 November 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 7), continues to remind us of what we never learned. In To FOP:, Roldo writes:

“Stand up and be counted for law and order!” asks the Fraternal Order of Police, in a full page advertisement in both daily newspapers, signed by Frank Schaefer, [FOP] president.

What Kind Of Law-n-Law, FOP?

The kind Schaefer suggested when he called for “wiping out” the Black Panthers? Or the kind that saw your members in storm trooper style intimidate black voters in polling stations in the last election?

Or is it the law and order called for by James Magas, your competition with the Patrolmen’s Police Organization, who calls for ‘on the street justice,’ meaning police murder of those accused of killing a policeman?

Or maybe it’s the kind of law and order exemplified by the Cleveland police back in 1964 when you watched while civil rights advocates were beaten in Murray Hill? Or the kind of law and order that police this year gave us by allowing white youth to terrorize blacks and whites in Tremont?

Or The Kind Of Law And Order That In 1967 Saw Robert Barbee Shot In The Back In Dayton By A Policeman Who Thought That Barbee Had A Gun In His Hand? Or Is It The Law And Order That Saw Cleveland Policeman Robert Livingstone Shoot 15-Year Old Donald Wylie In The Head For Stealing A $25 Portable Radio?

Or 12-year-old Tamir Rice for the crime of playing in the park? Roldo’s list goes on and on.

Last year, among all the other news, Ohioans learned of a $61-million bribery scheme to raise our electric rates. But the electric companies have been forever looking for ways to pass along any costs that might reduce their profits. In his top THRU THE GRINDER piece Roldo asks the question: Electric Bill High? he answers with:

Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. customers may wonder why the utility had to seek another rate increase this year. The probable reason is the high cost of welfare for CEI retired presidents and board chairmen. CEI will have to ensure above-poverty welfare benefits to Ralph Besse when he retires next month. You will pay the bill.

But poor recipient Besse’s welfare check will be $41,828 a year as retirement pay from CEI, a terrible reduction in his standard of living. How would you like to take a $87,828 income cut when you retire? Besse’s present haul from CEI is $129,167.

In 2020 dollars that would be: $861,593.83. Feel more compassionate now?

Next up is The Wet Noodle. Roldo writes:

Cleveland Rep. Charlie Vanik, the flexible liberal, voted for the District of Columbia Court Reform and Criminal Procedure Act. That’s the law that makes Washington D.C. a concentration camp for blacks. A blueprint for a police state, says Rep. Sam Ervin, North Carolina Democrat and a conservative. (Only one Ohio representative voted against the bill. Congressman Louis Stokes.)

Besides the well-known provisions of “no knock” search, [The kind of no-knock warrant that saw the police murder of Breonna Taylor. JH] which allows police to enter a premise without notice… the bill also:

—Allows police to keep someone in detention for 60 days without trial;
—Lowers the age to 15 for juveniles to be tried as adults;
—Eliminates trials for juveniles;
—Authorizes imposition of life sentences for a third felony;
—Provides for a maximum sentence of three years for rifling coin-operated devices;
—Authorizes wiretaps and electronic surveillance for a wide range of suspected crimes.

This may have been the earliest beginnings of the disastrous Biden 1994 Crime Bill or, perhaps and more likely, just another example of my own limited memory.

In Leave The Lettuce, however, Roldo writes about events that I actually have some once-removed memories of. He writes:

When asked to merely take lettuce off the shelves so farm workers in California can earn a living wage and avoid hunger, [Pick ‘N’ Pay president Roy B.] Minor’s answer was, “No. See our lawyers.”

Better to see his customers.

Pickets can get assignments by calling the Boycott Committee.

Two other points: Growers, rather than deal honestly with the farm workers, signed a sweetheart contract with the Teamsters. If the price of lettuce goes up it has nothing to do with higher wages since to double pickers’ wages would add 1 cent per head of lettuce. Workers are asking $2.10 an hour.

[The strikes/boycotts were not limited to the West Coast. The North Coast got its share in 1978 and I remember honking support for workers marching near Camp Perry in 1983. JH]

Finally, Roldo takes a righteous dig at one of Cleveland’s elites in:

Chintzy: Despite all the talk about giving more to United Appeal, UA President W. Braddock Hickman, president of the Federal Reserve Bank, didn’t increase his gift a penny. He gave the same as last year, $1,200.

We hope he re-solicits himself. Let’s set an example Brad.

In his 15 November 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 8), Roldo, seven months after Kent State, tells us that the peripheral events to that tragedy still consumes Clevelanders. In BEGINNING OF THE END FOR MORSE: CWRU’S JUDGE, Roldo ledes:

Although Political differences already had ruptured relations between Case-Western Reserve University President Robert Morse and some trustees, the 4 June meeting, just after the Kent State murders, saw the first break come into the open.

At the end of a trustee meeting, Kelvin Smith, multi-millionaire-Republican reactionary, made an unscheduled move, not on the agenda.

Smith Revealed To The Trustees The Contents Of A Letter He Had Written To Morse Objecting To An Advertisement Run In The Newspapers. The Ad—Entitled “Common Sense: The American Campus, 1970”—Was A Defensive Tract On The Policies Of The University As To Use Of Campus Facilities.

The Minutes Of The Trustee Meeting Say That The Letter From Smith To Morse “Raised Some Questions Related To The Approval By The Board Of Trustees On The Statement… And To The Appropriateness Of Its Publication.”

Smith, one of the most vocal anti-Morse trustees, “raved on” about the ad.

Roldo provides lots of detail—mostly about the piles of cash involved—but continues on to a more mundane (and personally more interesting to me 50 years later) topic under the headline OFFING A LIBRARY writes:

Sometimes the people who pull strings get them tangled.

That happened to Robert Merritt, president of the Cleveland Library board who pushed hard for the merging of the Cleveland, Cleveland Heights and County libraries.

Merritt had it all planned. Logically. Reasonably. To everyone’s benefit, in his elite mental set. “Viewed realistically,” he said, “the Cleveland Public Library presently is THE county library, and all that a merger will do is bring back into the fold the county branches and all additions.

The scheme to merge the libraries, however, failed.

[Why did it—rightly– fail? JH] Roldo continues:

It was clear that the audience—packed into an overheated room—wanted to express itself against the merger. Essentially the merger would turn over the Cleveland libraries to white suburban control since the board members would be named by the County Commissioners and the Court of Common Pleas.

[When I came to Cleveland in 1984, and moved into a Coventry apartment, I was amazed at the libraries. I regularly used both the Coventry and main branches of the Cleveland Height’s system as well as the Cuyahoga County Library branch in South Euclid. Now, living in North Royalton I mostly use our excellent county branch, but I also make use of my CleveNet card at the library in Brunswick. JH] Roldo continues:

The library story isn’t over though. It’s hard to see how Merritt will ever be able to function adequately as library president.

[Board member]Dr. [Martin] Sutler expressed it best at the end of the meeting. He warned that Merritt and [University Circle Inc. head Murray] Davidson had “placed this institution in the focus of the eye of a growing storm… Mr. Merritt,” he said, “The community is going to tie a noose around your neck.”

Probably the main reason Merritt’s desires didn’t win out was not that the black community organized and their protest brought reason to the library board, nor that Merritt realized he shouldn’t make decisions for others.

The reason was that the pressure was put on Merritt by those who feared bulldozing the black community on the libraries would jeopardize passage of the three school issues (the library members are named by the school board).

Merritt has made permanent enemies.

Finally, under the headline NOTES, Roldo tags hypocrisy by Cleveland newspapers and police organizations. First in PD, Press Flunk, he writes:

Both the Plain Dealer and the Cleveland Press flunked the city’s Equal Employment Opportunities test. Both newspapers, despite all the editorials of the last decade about the importance of equal opportunities and the chastising of those who protest without doing the positive things, have such poor records in hiring minorities that neither can enter into contracts with the City of Cleveland.

[We have had many talks about the importance of diversity in controlling organizations, but I can’t think of any more important than the staff—reporters, copy-desk and editors—of our media organizations. In order to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted” the staff must reflect the readers, not the advertisers. One of the changes in my lifetime has been the withering away of the non-college educated journalists. When I started in 1980, the New York Times still hired reporters out of high school. Reporters like Jimmy Breslin, a personal favorite, Mike Royko and one of my heroes, Hunter S. Thompson all did just fine without college degrees. They learned journalism where we all should have done: on our beats and from our betters.

I read Royko’s columns in the Marietta Times and discovered Thompson’s Hell’s Angels on the Washington County Bookmobile. JH]

Roldo concludes with another piece on the topic that launched this post: police fraternities. In, Fraternity, Brotherhood, he writes:

Racism among white police officers in the Cleveland Police Department continues unabated. The most recent example:

It’s customary for the police to send officers to represent the department at the funeral of an officer of another city who is killed in the line of duty.

In Detroit recently a black officer was killed in a raid.

The Fraternal Order of Police requested and received permission to send officers and police vehicles to Detroit.

The Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association requested and was given permission to send officers and police vehicles to Detroit.

The Shield Club requested and was denied permission to send officers and police vehicles to Detroit.

The Shield Club Is Made Up Of Black Officers.

The Request Was Denied By Inspector Stephen Szereto.

Can’t have a bunch of Black police officers driving around Detroit in a Cleveland police car. Someone my assume the car was stolen and open fire with say, 137 bullets.

In his 28 November 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw—a Blue-Moon installment—(volume 3, number 9), Roldo, writing in EX-TRW CHIEF SLURS MAYOR STOKES—RACIAL JOKES BY ELITE, ledes:

The recent dinner meeting of the Bluecoats, an organization of blue noses supposedly dedicated to aiding policemen killed on duty, provides a perfect example of our sick society and the moral bankruptcy of those given the most status in America.

It involves a blatant use of racism by a multi-millionaire ‘pillar’ of the community. The silence of America’s leading journalist. And the censorship of the whole affair by the Cleveland media.

Frederick Coolidge Crawford, board chairman emeritus of TRW, Inc., Cleveland’s leading war-making corporation, and the director of a number of major Cleveland institutions, made crude racial jokes and slurs involving Mayor Stokes and the black community in his introduction of New York Times columnist and executive James Reston.

Reston, considered a leading intellectual journalist of liberal bent, allowed the racial slurs to stand by not answering them in his talk to the Bluecoats audience, a Cleveland Who’s Who gathering. Reston made no comment about the racial jokes used in introducing him.

Wouldn’t you like to have been behind the door of Reston’s office when he got back to New York? Roldo continues:

The incident was reported in a story written by Edward Whelan of the Plain Dealer. Such incidents usually die with self-censorship by reporters and Whelan deserves credit for including it in the story. However, it was edited out by Van Richmond, an assistant city editor, and Ted Princiotto, managing editor. Several Plain Dealer and Press executives were at the dinner. The Press had no one assigned to cover the meeting.

[I knew Ned Whelan briefly in the mid-’80s when I freelanced for Cleveland Magazine. Working in the same offices as Mike Roberts, Frank Bentayou and Ned was an education in Cleveland jouranlism. Frank was my first Cleveland mentor and warned me to duck when Mike and Ned got into one of the screaming matches. JH] Roldo continues:

The edited out portion of the PD story:

Crawford told two racial jokes to the all-white audience.

In prefacing one joke, he commented upon someone being ‘black balled.’

Crawford then added: ‘I guess it takes two black balls to get elected in this city.’

The remark elicited a mixture of laughs and agitation.

Reston did not comment upon Crawford’s digression.

Crawford’s first joke was about a “colored boy” and an Army general. Crawford added his version of a Stepin Fetchit, dialect for the ‘boys.’ The joke didn’t even require the racial tone given to it by the former TRW chief executive.

Roldo goes on over the next three pages to detail financially and socially the kind of person Crawford was, what he stood for—hint, not peace and puppies—and the money that drove his life.

In two back-of-book shorts, Roldo updates his readers on the lettuce boycott and a nasty bit of censorship at WVIZ-TV. On the the rabbit food, he writes:

Scabs For Cleveland: One continually hears criticism of those who seek violent means of moving the Monster but the same people rarely lend much effort to the non-violent methods.

Cleveland failed in the job of helping in the grape pickers strike and it seems headed for failure in the lettuce boycott.

The lettuce boycott needs volunteers and money and some cooperation. There is no reason a community the size of greater Cleveland can’t financially support a boycott organization. Other than the talkers don’t really give a damn.

Many readers say they didn’t give to United Appeal. Well, it’s not too much to ask to sit down and make out a check for $10, $20 to the Boycott Committee [of United Farmworkers].

Further proof of the ineffectiveness of Clevelanders is shown by the double-cross of Pick-n-Pay which verbally agreed to purchase only union lettuce. Once the boycott committee shifted to Fisher-Fazio, Pick-n-Pay went back to scab lettuce.

Pick-n-Pay executives have refused to talk to boycott representatives. They can do this with impunity as long as the Cleveland community refuses to back the boycott in visible ways.

We’d suggest both Pick-n-Pay and Fisher-Fazio be avoided. And that Uncle Bill’s and Ontario’s be avoided during the coming Christmas season as they are owned by Cook United, owner of Pick-n-Pay.

Educational: For those who missed Ch. 25’s Realities, 9 November, entitled “The Banks and the Poor,” an outline of the rape of the poor and not so poor by banks, you’ll never see it here again.

Or, so says Betty Cope, station manager, who can’t find time to repeat the show. The show originally was rescheduled for Friday but was bumped by a special on pollution.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: Tamir Rice Family Demands Accountability in Dropped Investigation.

Bonus No. 2 Yesteryear’s Fascist Is Tomorrow’s Elder Statesman.

Bonus No. 1: [Via Reader Paul] 3 Strangers Share Their Deepest Secret: Hey, Stranger!

Bonus No. 2: Historians having to tape together records that Trump tore up.

Bonus No. 3: In my world too…

Here’s what I think of as a Truth. Most people want to be of help to other people, but seldom for altruistic reasons. Yes, there are truly good people out there who give anonymously, but most have personal, professional or even business reasons for the giving—of resources or personal time—what they choose to do. And they don’t want the invisible people to be a bother.

Having a private agency of professionals to gather and disperse other people’s money, in your name, can be quite handy.

In his 1 October 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 5), Roldo Bartimole details for us a recent speech delivered by Brigadier General Horace Armor Shepard at a United Appeal dinner.

Under the headline, Charity Cheat, Roldo writes:

Generals keep blurting out what elites are supposed to talk about only over cocktails at the Union Club or at the country club.

This time retired General Shepard, the millionaire board chairman of war-making TRW, Inc. had the misfortune to speak the truth in public.

Sheppard told fellow businessmen… that some stronger methods were needed to get employees to pick up a bigger slice of the United Appeal tab.

“YOU CONTROL THEIR PAYCHECKS AND JOBS AND YOU CERTAINLY CAN HELP SPREAD THE LOAD,” SAID SHEPARD BLUNTLY.

A LITTLE EXTORTION, THEN, CAN BE ACCEPTABLE FOR CHARITY.

Not only did Shepard call upon his friends to lean more heavily on employees, but he admitted that the corporate share of United Appeal collections has skidded from 50 percent to 30 percent.

But that’s not enough.

“TO SOME PEOPLE WHO COMPLAIN ABOUT THIS (REDUCTION IN CORPORATE GIVING), I SAY, FINE, LET’S GET IT DOWN TO 25 PERCENT AND SPREAD THE LOAD,” SAID SHEPARD.
…
Shepard is paid $212,000 a year by TRW, Inc., which is in the top 40 in war contracts, thus the once-youngest Air Force general still lives off the taxpayer.

Further Shepard owns 111,720 shares of TRW common stock. At current market prices ($34 a share, 25 September), Shepard’s stock has a value of more than $3,700,000.

Simply on the salary, Shepard, who is a member of the goals committee of United Appeal, should have personally given a most generous gift of $8,500 last year.

But he gave NOTHING. $0.00 ZERO.

In answer to our request for Shepard’s gift, United Appeal public relations director Charles Nekvasil said that a gift was received from the tax-exempt Shepard Foundation, but it was marked ‘do not publish.’

I have to wonder if Shepard kept the dollar amount from his foundation secret from the IRS as well. Shepard’s actions, Roldo writes:

Reveal—with some developments, particularly the most recent formation of the self-anointed Commission on Health and Social Service—the bankruptcy of the private system, the subservience of ‘professionals’ in social work to monied elites, and the troublesome time elites are having to keep their flim-flam game afloat.

…[T]he principal fault of the commission at the outset stems from the mindset of its members. They represent the profound preconception that dire social, medical and other physical needs of deprived people should be met by a hopelessly ineffective private giving system.

BUT, AS GEN. SHEPARD SAID, IT’S CHEAPER.

The heyday of private philanthropy came historically after the Civil War and as a social Darwinism response to the industrial revolution. Rather than an answer to social ills at the time, charity was an acceptable method of free enterprise, despite advocacy of survival of the fittest. For it allowed the rich an option, a free choice befitting laissez faire philosophy. The option was more important than the possibility the dispensed charity might spoil the poor.

Being rich is all about having options. Roldo continues, looking back on studies and reports produced to detail the problems of Cleveland’s poor. He writes:

It’s been two years since the Stein Report on the Crisis in Welfare, a Stokes-ordered study which the Mayor has largely ignored, as have most others.

It’s been, indeed, six months since the Welfare Action Committee on the Crisis in Welfare was formed to ‘update’ the ignored Stein Report, and supposedly to take some actions toward implementation. The study hasn’t been completed and is now overdue.
…
Having worked on the Stein Report and having attended many of the small gatherings at which decisions of content were made, I got a first-hand view of the protectionist nature of study commissions. For every institution related to welfare there was a commission member carefully chosen to protect it.

This is the fox-guarding-the-hen-house approach to report writing. Kind of like allowing employees to write their own evaluations, or corporations deciding how much tax they ought to pay. Roldo continues:

To give one an idea of how these ‘in’ study groups work, the Stein Report was broken into sections as they related to welfare and major community institutions. When it came time to write the education section, for example, Hugh Calkins, then a member of the Cleveland Board of Education, wrote that chapter. His report was so protective of the school system that it had to be re-written by another commission member. But merely the fact that a decision maker of the school system was the one to prepare the criticism belies the nature of such elite-dominated studies.

The section on the private voluntary sector as it related to welfare could have been the most explosive of the study. For the figures provided by the Welfare Federation showed dramatically that United Appeal dollars were being spent primarily in non-poverty areas and for services not related to the most serious social problems.

True to the protection code, however, Herman Stein, study chairman and then Provost of Case-Western Reserve University, handled the chapter exclusively by himself. Stein gingerly avoided alienating anyone.

The new commission also will undoubtedly serve a protectionist role so that the real problems of private social welfare systems and its function in Cleveland remain unexamined. Although the elites will go to the public for funds, there has been no mention of public hearings so the public might have the opportunity to have a say.

Roldo wraps up the issue with a listing of commission members, their salaries and their 1969 United Appeal gifts. In all but two cases, Roldo writes: “the gifts appear low.”

Walking Gillighan this morning a question again came to my mind: How givers come up with odd gift amounts like $2,150 or $1,445? But then it occurred to me that their accountants, in the process of preparing annual tax documents most likely juggled the numbers to come up with just the right dollar amount to maximize tax deductions. A good accountant is worth their weight in food stamps.

In his 15 October 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 6), Roldo moved onto another kind of charity: good works. In Drug Cure Peddler, Roldo ledes:

For some $250,000 Cleveland businessmen are buying the cure for Cleveland’s drug problem.

The cure is an old one: a stern God.

It’s all wrapped up in a bright expensive promotional package called Teen Challenge and Youth In a Fix, Inc.

[Don’t you know that whoever came up with the Fix pun did a 1970’s high-five? JH]

Teen Challenge, which will open a live-in center for drug cure is the mission arm of the Church of the Assemblies of God, a biblical fundamentalist group. There are about 30 such centers in various cities. The cure is a daily routine of prayer and study.

[AOG is well known among social workers, and not in a good way. Believing that prayer can cure all social ills makes money, but any alcoholics, drug addicts, homosexuals or transgender teens unfortunate enough to fall under their control suffer. Such programs, including Alcoholics Anonymous, have a 95 percent failure rate. JH]

[Tiffany’s Chairman Walter] Hoving writes:

We know now that an addict must find something stronger than himself, something outside of himself that can help him overcome his craving for narcotics. Your [Teen Challenge] method of invoking a complete change in the individual by calling upon the power of God through the Holy Spirit to help him, in my judgment, is the only way.”

The message is clear enough. It’s the individual who has to be changed. Addiction results simply from personal failings. Thus the drug problem has nothing to do with society or its failures to the individuals.

[Or, I would add here, to the blinding greed of pharmaceutical company’s like Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family. JH ] Roldo concludes:

Racism, living conditions and oppression then have nothing to do with drug addiction among blacks; the war, a hypocritical, unsatisfying society have nothing to do with young whites turning more and more to drugs. They’ve merely fallen away from God.

Why shouldn’t business and civic elites pour money into a program that vindicates them and reinforces what they’d like to believe: That our problems will be solved by adjusting individuals; the system and institutions they operate remain sound and in no need of change.

Then it’s not too surprising that the “public opinion makers” have fallen into line to endorse the hocus-pocus.

Mayor Stokes writes: “I urge Cleveland citizens to offer… their generous support.”

Under the heading FOUNDATION FAT Roldo offers a few examples of how much money you can make supervising charity. He writes:

The Kulas foundation, housed in the office of Jones, Day, Cockley and Reavis paid trustee Jack Reavis, [If I had a dollar for every time Roldo mentions that man… JH] who is senior law partner of Jones-Day, $4,000 for part-time work and law partner-trustee Frank Joseph, $9,250.
…
The Louis D. Beaumont foundation, housed in the law offices of Hahn, Loeser, Freedheim, Dean and Wellman, paid the late Edgar Hahn, of the same law firm, $18,000 as trustee, and paid law partner Irwin Loser, since retired, $6,000. Both for part-time work.

[Note: Adjusted for inflation—$100 in 1979=$670.39 in 2020—Reavis’ part-time charity work would have put $26,681.55 in his wallet. JH]

Following the shootings at Kent State University and general unrest on college campuses across Ohio and the rest of the country in the wake of President Richard Milhous Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, heads did roll. Roldo, in Repression At Top, writes:

One has to smile at the media treatment of the forced resignation of Robert Morse, president of Case-Western Reserve University. Morse comes off looking like the hero who tried valiantly to side with students in their anguish last spring.

Anyone who bothered to follow the Spring protests at CWRU would know that Morse hid from the Student Strike Committee, waited until school ended and then had a handful arrested.

The only person in an administrative position who made any attempt to relate to striking students was fired by the university without cause shortly after before students returned. Hunt Blair, head of career planning and placement, was told on Friday not to return next Monday.

His dismissal is attributed to Morse and his second in command Herman Stein, who probably deserves more credit for, as the media puts it, ‘handling students.’ Blair was fired for his close relationship to the few militant students at CWRU.

So Morse is hardly Mr. Clean.

Repression at the top at CWRU, however, is welcome for it puts the faculty on the spot. CWRU faculty is sort of an academic Silent Majority. Possibly a kick from the right will awaken it.

Finally, in BANKS BALK, Roldo looks at the big Cleveland Banks who have been tagged as unqualified to hold city funds. He writes:The City of Cleveland has $16.9 million in time deposits [1970’s certificate of deposits, JH] resting in Cleveland banks and authorization for placing up to $55 million in banks.

The city was supposed to place the funds in Cleveland banks and hopefully those banks would use the funds to back programs in poverty areas of the city.

But some Cleveland banks are having trouble qualifying for the sizable sums and hence the lucrative profits.

The problem: discrimination.

As bastions of white Protestant racism, most banks have such poor employment records where minorities are concerned that they aren’t qualified to do business with the city without firm commitments that they will hire more blacks within specified time periods.

Among the banks on the ‘unqualified’ list as discriminators are: National City Bank, Society National Bank, Union Commerce Bank and Central National Bank.

Roldo takes the extra step of listing the directors of the banks. His list of names includes many that he has highlighted before: Francis Coy, Charles Spahr, Willis Boyer, Robert Morse, Richard Tullis, Howard Metzenbaum, Vern Stouffer, Jim Carney, Thomas Patton, Edward Sloan, Fred Hauserman, George Dively, Fred Eckley, Mark Loofborrow and Karl Rudolph. Roldo concludes:

It’s amazing how these civic leaders have been imploring everyone else to be charitable and tolerant but seem to have overlooked their operations.

I’m sure those named would sputter that charity was one thing, but business was business.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Back in late 2001, early 2002, someone in the administration of President George Walker Bush asked a dangerous question: What else could be out there right now that we cannot imagine? What was needed was a team of people with really twisted minds to conceive of the inconceivable; to say out loud what no one wanted to whisper. What could be next?

And they knew exactly who to turn to: the people who made a living at doing just that kind of imaginings, the writers of thrillers and science fiction. And they came up with a lot of scenarios. Most of them we’ll never know about, but some made their way to television shows like 24 and Homeland and movies like Angel Has Fallen or Skyfall. I think we can safely say that the really good story lines never saw light of day.

The other day, as I watched tens-of-thousands of National Guard troops pouring into not only our nation’s capitol but to the capitols of many (most?) of our state capitols, the writer in my wondered: just how many insurrectionists are embed in the National Guard? I served in the Guard for six year (1980-86) and for three of those years I was a platform instructor at Ohio Army National Guard’s military academy at the Rickenbacker Air National Guard Base. I knew more than few people back then who, under the right circumstances, could have been convinced that storming the Capitol on 6 January was a good idea.

As a writer of fiction, here’ nightmare scenario. If I were going to write a book about a military coup in the United States—as Charles Bailey and Fletcher Knebel did back in 1962 with their Seven Days In May—my first plot point would be to figure out how to get troops on the scene. Scaring the bejeezus out of Congress by placing a rampaging mob in the corridors of the capitol would work.

But how do you get the troops to turn against their country? You do that by having the Commander and Chief schedule a prime time announcement from the Oval office to give the troops, already in place, their marching orders.

Has your sphincter clenched yet?

Are you incredulously asking: how could the generals permit such an abomination?

Because abominations are what they do.

You should read the book, but, you could, for as long as it stays up, watch the movie.

[Update @ 0418 on 18 January: Fear of insider attack prompts additional FBI screening of National Guard troops: AP. Justine Coleman ledes:

The FBI is screening all 25,000 National Guard troops heading to D.C. as fears mount among defense officials that those responsible for security at the inauguration could participate in an insider attack, The Associated Press reported Sunday.

The screening effort comes as D.C. has beefed its security ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday and after the deadly pro-Trump raid on the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told the AP on Sunday that officials are aware of the potential risk, and commanders have been instructed to keep an eye out for any issues among their troops. National Guard members are also receiving training on how to find any threats within their ranks, he said.

That’s good news.]

Bonus No. 1: Trump ally Mike Lindell of My Pillow pushes martial law at White House.

Bonus No. 2: Attorney in Mike Lindell martial law plan denies knowing of pro-Trump plot.

Bonus No. 1: The essential Dave Brubeck.

Bonus No. 2: Last Days at the Lodge.

Bonus No. 3: American Dream, 2021 Edition.

After I finished writing yesterday’s Readin’ Roldo, I kept circling back to the questions: Why did Cleveland Mayor Carl Burton Stokes bring General Benjamin Oliver Davis to the city to become his Public Safety Director? And why did Davis depart after only six months? After reading the September 1970 issues of Point Of Viəw, I got an inkling of what was going on.

[Update: After I wrote, but had not yet posted, the following, Roldo wrote a comment offering his more detailed analysis.]

Mayor Stokes brought Davis here for a purpose and pushed him out after six months because the purpose had been served. Roldo, in his 1 September 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 3), lays out what the purpose might have been. In Observations, Roldo ledes:

Why Is Carl Stokes Smiling So?

Joking at press conferences, prancing about the city with an aide challenging all comers to tennis doubles to highlight recreation needs, wider than usual grins.

Why So Confident, Mayor?

Always a master of timing, the Mayor managed frowns in telling the Cleveland Plain Dealer—which found so much comfort in being the first to endorse the first black mayor—to give its endorsement next year to somebody else.

What Do You Know That Others Don’t Mayor?

Mayor Stokes recognizes that his ambush of Gen. Ben Davis assures him a very long, successful political life in Cleveland. Not only did Davis become ensnared in the trap but the regular Democrats, the Republicans and some big businessmen boxed themselves in a corner. They did so by openly or tacitly raising the Davis for Mayor banner. It was blasted down by expert anti-aircraft fire.

But, we believe, it established a significant political lesson by which Cleveland will be ruled for some time to come: No White-Sponsored Black Need Apply For The Job Of Mayor Of Cleveland.

[Stokes enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1945 after having dropped out of high school. He served for two years as a private and was honorably discharged in 1946. I doubt he ever saw a general, let alone a Black general, or had the chance to ponder what it was like to be the son of an Army general, graduate from West Point and become a general yourself. Their lives were very different and perhaps this is what threw Stokes’ expectations for Davis awry. JH] Roldo moves on to Joe Bartunek and his attitudes toward voters, particularly Black voters.

All White Joe—Cuyahoga County Democratic Party boss Joe Bartunek, chosen ostensibly to open up and reform the local Dems, continues instead the racist policies of his party.

Bartunek, who this year will be telling students at Cleveland State University where he is chairman of the board of trustees, has a peculiar sense of how the system should work.

Most students are taught, for example, that voting is the American way.

However, Bartunek told party and labor leaders at a meeting in Columbus recently that he had no intent of registering Negroes in his county. Bartunek turned down funds to register in black areas where 80 percent of the voters are of the same party as Bartunek.

We think of the Republican party today as the party of voter suppression, but we cannot forget that the Party of Lincoln was fighting against the Democrats and that—despite what would happen with the institution of Jim Crow following Reconstruction—Republicans did not have a monopoly limiting the vote.

Next Roldo provides a snippet of how sometimes the big dogs can get fooled. He writes:

Back Door Policy—Although Sam Bauer has been acting welfare director, replacing Steve Minter, he only plays Mr. Front Man. Former director Eugene Burns will run the show from his five-room suite in the County Welfare Building. The suite, concealed by a metal door that looks at first like a utility closet door, has private backdoor elevator service for Burns. He will direct operations with a tighter fist than Minter from his behind-the-scenes headquarters. Burns wants to avoid the public flack welfare directors usually get, especially from clients.

The County Commissioners were said to be unhappy with Minter, particularly after last year’s $24 extra clothing allowance turned out to be a costly item. Clients, poorly informed by the department on their rights, were expected to call in and request additional money over the usual $5 allowance. Those who didn’t call were not supposed to get anything. but welfare workers filled out orders without contact from clients, merely telling supervisors the client had called. Minter, they say, knew of the practice but winked at it, making clients and workers happy, but not the commissioners.

I’m starting to think that Dennis Kucinich is going to be an ever-present present and not pleasing noise in Point Of Viəw for the foreseeable future. Roldo writes:

Making Friends—The world just won’t go fast enough for the ambitions of Dennis Kucinich. At a recent City Council finance committee meeting, Kucinich had harsh words for its chairman Mike Zone. He told Zone publicly that if he couldn’t keep order, “let’s get a chairman who can.” The startled Zone replied, “Aw, Denny” then in an aside: “Somebody take him outside and change his diaper.” That was seconds before dangerous Denny strode out of the room.

Following up his examination of equal employment figures for Cleveland, Roldo looks at how the three downtown department stores fare. He writes:

The Discriminating—All three big downtown department stores have refused to supply information proving that they are equal employers of minority groups. Halle’s, Higbee’s and May’s have been balking for about a year now. Frankly, we’re surprised at top Boy Scout Francis Coy, winner of the coveted human relations award of the National Council of Christians and Jews, refusing such information to Project Equality, an interfaith program for equal hiring policies. It’s unchristian. And Herbert Strawbridge, board chairman and president of Higbee’s, and new appointee to find a new Safety Director, surprised us by the project “outsiders” that they won’t tell him how to run his business. Walter, and son Chisholm Halle, chairman and president of Halle’s, have also been unpleasant about revealing how well they’re doing on minority hiring. Apparently they have something to hide.

And still more Kucinich:

Using People—Milt Schulman, his protege Dennis Kucinich and Ted Sliwa tried to harvest hate at a recent meeting of anti-public housing people in Ward 9. As the crowd thins (some 200 compared to 1,000 at earlier meetings), the rhetoric gets heavier. Schulman and Kucinich warn Ward 9 whites that Stokes and blacks are out to get them and are arming on the East Side. Meanwhile, the real estate interests begin to smell panic and profit. The ‘better sell your house now’ telephone calls have started.

In his 14 September 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 4), Roldo goes hi-tech with a story about Boeing’s 2707. He ledes:

“The first subtle erosion of the government’s promise to prohibit flights of the commercial supersonic transport over populated areas was published quietly last month in the Federal Register,” wrote Doug Bloomfield, consumer writer for the PD. Bloomfield at that time was covering aviation and not an SST fan.

Charles Tracy, Cleveland Press aviation writer, loves the SST and thinks everyone else should too. Bloomfield’s articles bothered Tracy. One gets the impression in talking to Tracy that anyone who doesn’t salute the SST is un-American.

Roldo notes that Tracy’s son was an engineer working on the tail section of Boeing’s billion-dollar SST in Seattle. Was there a connection? Could be.

Thus the 24 May article in which Bloomfield suggested that the FAA was loosening its rules against sonic booms of the SST angered Tracy.

So, as many others do when they read something they don’t like in the newspaper, Tracy sat down and wrote a scratched out a protest letter. But he didn’t mail it to the PD‘s Letter-To-The-Editor column, he wrote Clay Hedges, head of the Federal Aviation Authority, asking, Tracy said, “why the FAA didn’t speak out” about such distortions as those written by Bloomfield.

The complaint letter worked its way through the federal bureaucracy to William M. Magruder, SST Development Director, U.S. Department of Transportation.

Magruder approved. In August, He came to Cleveland to speak at the City Club to those assembled that they had nothing to worry about. He said that “Noise of the SST will be no problem” and that scientific studies “…completely satisfy me that ecology will be safe. A 500-plane fleet of SSTs will have so small effect on the atmosphere.

This was, of course, the real sticking point. Sonic booms were one thing, but because the SST was to fly at altitudes far above normal air traffic, its exhaust had a disastrous effect on the Earth’s ozone layer.

There was also another Cleveland connection, Roldo writes:

On 13 August… Tracy interviewed Glenn D. Babbitt, president of Cleveland Pneumatic. Babbitt said that the media was misinterpreting facts about the SST.

Roldo reminded readers that Cleveland Pneumatic was in possession of a $2.1 million contract for the plane’s landing gear.

I have often suspected why Roldo didn’t play larger on Cleveland radio (I have heard him a couple of times on WCPN’s Sound of Ideas) or television, but in this issue, he lays the story out.

Roldo On Air—Point Of Viəw almost had a TV ‘debut’ on NBC’s Channel 3’s new Sunday morning 90-minute show, ‘Scene on Sunday.’ But it was abruptly canceled—forever.

It was a precarious deal anyway. I was asked to write three- or four-minute commentaries to be used on the program and told the bosses at the NBC affiliate would not be told about it. [Never a good sign. JH] It would be two or three weeks before the bosses would realize it, it was intimated. But it was over much sooner.

The first commentary was taped 4 September at WKYC-TV’s studio. The next filming, I was told, would be on the Case-Western Reserve University campus on 16 September.

But on 10 September, a call came from Rick Reeves, ‘Scene’s’ producer, who said he had been ‘enjoined’ from using the piece—and all others by me.

The decision was made by Joseph Varholy, the station’s program manager, who later said, “I haven’t screened it (the piece)” but the decision was made on the recommendation of others. Varholy said he “really didn’t have time” to discuss the matter but that he would screen it if I liked.

No thanks. Actually, if Varholy did find it acceptable I’d begin to worry.

With full justification. Roldo reaches back again to remind us that the nation, not just Cleveland, had been paying attention to the events of 23 July 1968. He writes:

Media Myths Live On—The Cleveland media came in for sharp criticism in a Columbia Journalism Review article by Terry Ann Knopf, research associate at Brandeis University’s Violence Study Center. She says: The failure of the media to tell the right story in the case of Cleveland (23 July 1968 Glenville Shoot-Out) goes beyond the lack of initiative or an inclination to sensationalize. It also indicates a bias—one which, notwithstanding Vice President Agnew’s declarations, cuts across political and geographical lines. The media are no more aware of this bias than is the general public aware of its own. In part we could call it a class bias in that those who comprise media staffs—reporters, editors, headline writers, etc.—are part of the vast American middle class and, as such, express its views, values and standards.

Both the general public and the media share the same dislike of protesters; both are unable to understand the violence as an expression of protest against oppressive conditions; both prefer the myth of orderly, peaceful change, extolling the virtues of private property and pubic decorum. both will grant that it took a revolution to secure our independence and a civil war to end slavery (at least officially), but that was all long ago and somehow different.

I am reminded here of a high school friend who would take exception anytime we would speak of the American Revolution of 1776. She would tell me that it wasn’t a revolution—this was the 1971 or 1972 when revolution was a dirty word—but rather what happened in 1776 was the American war for independence. We never got around to the Civil War.

Finally, Roldo marks another loss to the journalism community of Cleveland. He writes:

Bye-Bye—Good reporters don’t die, they just go away… from the Plain Dealer, that is.

Don Barlett, the PD’s investigative reporter, has left the Plain Dealer for the second time.

A Journalistic Diogenes, Barlett leads a nomadic life looking for an honest place to report. This trip is to Philadelphia.

After I set down a few words about Don Barlett’s part in writing the exposé of the HADC, Roldo sent me an email writing:

Don Barlett was a hell of a reporter. Don’t know how he got messed on the Hough story. He was warned that he was going to get slammed.

He had taken a job as an aide at a state mental institution and wrote a series that shamed the institution and state. But Vail made a deal with Rhodes that Rhodes would fix the problem and the PD would lay off on the stuff Barlett had found. Of course, Rhodes did nothing.

Vail seemed to always be making deals, and seldom for the good of Cleveland.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

At the bottom of yesterday’s Readin’ Roldo I noted that Davis commanded the famous Tuskegee Airmen of the U.S. Army Air Corps. This morning I discovered that Roldo Bartimole devoted most of Volume 3, Nos. 1 & 2 to Davis in his short tour of duty—21 January-27 July 1970—as the Public Safety Director of Cleveland. I wanted to know more about the man.

Here is what Britannica has to say:

Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., in full Benjamin Oliver Davis, Jr., (born December 18, 1912, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died July 4, 2002, Washington, D.C.), pilot, officer, and administrator who became the first African American general in the U.S. Air Force. His father, Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., was the first African American to become a general in any branch of the U.S. military.

Davis studied at the University of Chicago before entering the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, in 1932. After graduating in 1936 he was commissioned in the infantry and in 1941 was among the first group of African Americans admitted to the Army Air Corps and to pilot training. Upon his graduation he was swiftly promoted to lieutenant colonel, and he organized the 99th Pursuit Squadron, the first entirely African American air unit, which flew tactical support missions in the Mediterranean theatre. In 1943 he organized and commanded the 332nd Fighter Group (the Tuskegee Airmen). By the end of the war Davis himself had flown 60 combat missions and had been promoted to colonel.

After the war Davis held other commands, and he helped plan the desegregation of the air force in 1948. He graduated from the Air War College in 1950, commanded a fighter wing in the Korean War, and was promoted to brigadier general (a one-star general) in 1954. In 1959 Davis became the first African American officer to reach the rank of major general (a two-star general) in the air force and was promoted to lieutenant general (a three-star general) in 1965. After retiring in 1970 he was named director of civil aviation security in the U.S. Department of Transportation. In that post he devised and coordinated measures that effectively ended a wave of aircraft hijackings in the United States. Davis became an assistant secretary of transportation in 1971.

His six months in Cleveland are missing from the official record. They never happened. Additionally, director Anthony Hemingway makes no mention of the famous flier in his 2012 movie about the Tuskegee airmen: Red Tails. Instead, Hemingway gave command of the squadron to a fictious Col. A.J. Bullard, played by Terrence Howard. Bullard was named in honor of Eugene Jacques Bullard the first Black combat pilot who flew in The Great War.

I’ve ordered a copy of Davis’ autobiography to read what he had to say about his stay here in Cleveland, but suffice to say that for a man whose life was so distinguished, his time in Cleveland really sucked.

In his 20 July 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 1), Roldo, under the headline, HATE CLIMATE BUILDS; RACISM UNCHALLENGED, ledes:

While Gen. Ben Davis was “learning” how to solve the problem of student unrest in Washington, D.C. last week, his policies and police force were ensuring Cleveland would have a most unrestful summer.

The former Air Force general, being boomed in the press here as alternately for mayor of Cleveland and D.C., has bridged the gap between the police and the Stokes administration.

He joined the cops.

With white politicians peddling racism wholesale cheap (see yesterday’s Readin’ Roldo) the General has been supporting attacks on blacks and allowing his police to afford the same privileges to white hoods.

Reading the next sentence, written sometime in early July, I had to wonder what Roldo was hearing on the back channels. He continues:

But the General may have trouble getting through the summer with his image intact. Black endurance, even in Cleveland, may not be that strong.

The latest test of that endurance involves attacks on Blacks and “nigger loving” whites in the Tremont area.
…
If nothing else, the attacks united a variety of usually quarreling community groups. Citizens went to City Hall to see the General who was in D.C.

Instead, the group met the General’s Colonel, William Hendrickson.

Hendrickson scoffed when told the protestors were coming, identifying one as a pesky crank. About an hour before, this same woman, overcome by fear and fatigue, collapsed at a public meeting. She and her children had been sleeping on the floor to avoid being shot.
…
With Hendrickson was Dennis Kucinich, Tremont councilman who is always alert and willing to exploit a situation. However, looking meek and concerned in front of reporters and TV cameras, Dennis has been strangely silent during this tense period and has spurned invitations to meet with constituents until they came to City Hall. Dennis said he had toured the tense area but residents curiously had never seen him.

What follows is a portrait of a Kucinich I did not know. I came to Cleveland in 1984 and by that time Kucinich was out of the mayor’s office and between political gigs. Roldo, however, has never let go writing as recently as last August, in KUCINICH—BORN TO RUN, NOT NECESSARILY TO WIN about rumors of Kucinich making a mayoral comeback. Roldo wrote then:

Now, a few months short of 74 years old, Dennis is running again. Or so he isn’t saying anything to refute talk of his interest in the mayoral race of 2021.

He was born to run.

The big question is, however, does he have any chance of winning and of operating a government. A government he had much trouble with in the late 1970s.

He was a one-term, two-year mayor. He squeezed into those two years, among other problems, a voter recall, a financial default, a tax hike vote and a vote on Muny Light. There were no slow days.

He was not re-elected. However, he did become a U.S. Congressman from 1997-2013. He also served in the Ohio Senate in 1995.

Now it is time to look back at his City Hall days.

Returning to July 1970, and the city hall office of William Hendrickson, Roldo continues:

Kucinich’s silence might well be taken as tacit approval by neighborhood troublemakers. He has said that his concern in Ward 7 was with the “stable white community,” not blacks and white Appalachians.
…
The Tremont harassment follows too closely the bitter battle against public housing in Cleveland being led by reactionary white politicians (Kucinich, Richard Harmody and Jim Stanton) who see local benefits in a [George] Wallace-[Spiro] Agnew approach. Most of the threats in Tremont demand removal of Blacks from public housing.

Kucinich, who has been carefully building a city-wide reputation as a youthful anti-black politician, blames, as might be expected, left-wing radicals for the Tremont troubles. At the meeting he hid behind Gen. Davis, obsequiously applauding the Safety Director and placing full confidence in him.
…
The General has become the media darling. The Cleveland Press said last week that Davis “has impressed all segments of the community as a tough, fair-minded administrator.” There’s no criticism of the General’s travels or his Tuesday and Thursday working-hours golf dates.

The Press went on to say, “One rarely hears about disaffection between the mayor’s office and the Police Dept. since Davis has been on the job.”

That’s easily explained. The police, through Davis, now get everything they want. Why would the police complain as they now have the freedom to attack blacks at will and allow white citizens the same privilege?

It’s been carefully noted, too, that Davis fired former Asst. Safety Director Frank Moss, a black, for filing an incorrect report. Moss had a month to go for 25 years’ service. Meanwhile, a white police officer, charged with shooting his wife and then himself, remains on the street, no less the force.

Throughout this period, blacks have shown more patience than this community deserves.

In order to provide more context for Davis’ time in office, Roldo appended information under the head, BACKGROUND. He wrote:

The trouble in Tremont started 18 June when a party was held for an African student and some whites broke it up.

From that time on there has been a steadily growing harassment, including gunfire at buildings housing blacks and whites who have associated with them. Grocery stores have been threatened about serving blacks; several have been fired upon. Windows of an agency serving both white and black youth have been broken and the landlord of another agency was beaten. The apartment of a man who took petitions out for a recall of the area’s councilman, Dennis Kucinich, was set afire and a black woman was called and told of the fire in her “friend’s,” before the fire engines arrived. Children “go to pieces” from threats and obscenities by telephone. (At a meeting discussing the problems in a church basement a tap on the window was heard. Almost immediately one of the black women slumped to the floor out of fear.

On the evening of 13 July, the women were harassed by armed youths. The police were called but didn’t arrive for an hour. They were cussed for being late by a black man, Juba Chilembiwe, who was roughed up at the scene and arrested. The next day Juba was dead. The police said he hung himself in his cell with his belt.

No one believes the story.

Roldo continues:

The police story differed from those present during the incident. Juba swore at the police, asked them why they had been late. A reporter was told by the police that a black man had been raving about racism on the West Side and that they picked him up for drunkenness. Then he hung himself.

The women also swear that he wore no belt. It is normal police procedure to take belts from prisoners.

Two days after the death, the body was cremated, ensuring no reliable autopsy. The word of the police and the County Coroner’s office are unreliable.

Dennis Kucinich blames left-wing radicals for the trouble in his ward.

That is a very different Kucinich from the man who hung out in California with Shirley MacClaine and moved distinctly to the left.

Finally, a note on war supplies. In yesterday’s installment I noted that Davis ordered some 30,000 rounds of hollow-point ammunition. Mayor Stokes was not happy. Roldo, briefly, writes:

GENERAL THWARTED—The order for 30,000 hollow-point bullets, commonly known as dum-dums, by Gen. Davis, has been reversed by Mayor Stokes. Stokes stopped the order and told aides if the Safety Director would like to complain he should see the mayor.

But as we’ll see in the next issue, Davis gets the last word.

In his 1 August 1970 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 3, number 2), Roldo goes right for the jugular with the headline, THE DAVIS DEBACLE. He ledes:

“I wish I had a machine gun now. I’d shoot them all down.”

Those are the private words attributed to Gen. Benjamin O. Davis Jr. by an admiring councilman. They were aimed at black militants who refused to stand for a pledge to the flag at a city council meeting.

“There are fundamental causes—poverty, living conditions. Until they are removed, or their effects decreased, I don’t think anybody is going to come up with very dramatic and immediate changes.”

Those are the words of a humbler Gen. Davis to a Detroit reporter before he came to Cleveland as Safety Director.

Davis said recently that he was trying to: “constructively instill in the police dept. a grave concern for the rights of all the city’s citizens and innate courtesy for all.” But when police without warrants took recorders, cameras and files from Panthers, Davis saw nothing to investigate. And he told officers privately not to call blacks “niggers,” but to use “son of a bitch.”

The general got confused with what he was supposed to say as a public official and what he really felt. In the end, 37 years of military emerged unconditionally as victor.

He quit with a blast that Mayor Stokes not only did not support him but gave “support and comfort to the enemies of law enforcement.” The charge, unexplained and without the General’s naming the “enemies shook the administration to its toes.” More on that later.

Cleveland had descended into the “Good Negro, Bad Negro debate. Roldo continued:

Where white liberals found the suave, cool Carl Stokes an acceptable Negro, the General earned the same acceptability from a far larger segment of whites, those who don’t know and fear blacks. The psychological relief from the burden of having to think of oneself as a bigot with the added dividend of allegiance to an authority figure could be a potent political combination nationally.

But as good a mayoral candidate as Davis looked last Tuesday, by Wednesday the chinks in his armor were visible and by week’s end there were embarrassing holes.

Davis began getting tacit support from parts of the media and the Democratic and Republican parties looking for a candidate next year. By the end of the week he had the damaging endorsement of the American Independent Party of George Wallace. Even the Cleveland Patrolman’s Association offered him a post. The offer was made by James Magas, association head, who the week before called for “on the street justice,” the new euphemism for murder when the accused murderer of a policeman is arrested.

Back in the late ’80s I knew a Marine Corps colonel who would have approved of Magas’ position. (I do have to chuckle at the completely unrelated spelling of the his name to our twice impeached soon-to-be-ex-president’s slogan.) The colonel once told me that if he had his druthers, he would line rioters up on the sidewalk and summarily executive them. Roldo continues:

But why did Davis quit so suddenly and in a huff?

Davis probably learned of attacks upon him prepared at City Hall with the knowledge of the Mayor. A report documenting requests for protection of blacks and white in Tremont and, to use a favorite word of the General’s, the “negative” response by Davis, was being prepared. It would have severely criticized Davis.

Further, a cross-fire of criticism from the West and East sides, black and white, was in the making.
…
Because of Davis’ lack of concern about attacks on black in Tremont, clergymen had to be recruited through the Council of Churches to patrol the area. The City Community Relations division also took an active role.

Thus it was amusing, but not surprising, that among Gen. Davis’ “enemies of law enforcement” were Rev. Arthur LeMon, head of the Community Relations unit, and the Council of Churches (actually, Davis means the Council’s Metropolitan Affairs Commission, a black buffer unit that allows elite-level clergymen to avoid all the tough issues).

Davis’ charges had the old “soft on communism” tone to it. Like old Joe McCarthy waving his list, Davis refused to name the “enemies.” Stokes eventually released the list made up of names given to him, he said, by Davis.

Was that enough for Britannica to ignore Davis’ six months in Cleveland? Perhaps.

In his THRU THE GRINDER section, Roldo touches on three items:

SECOND TO LAST ACT?—Before quitting, Gen. Davis ordered 30 pump action shotguns and 275 Smith & Wesson 38 heavy barrel revolvers for his troops.

And:

CHOP-CHOP—Plain Dealer editors chopped two important facts out of a recent story on a robbery of 300 TV sets. First, one of the five men charged with the theft was a fireman and so noted the original copy of the reporter. Second, the lawyer for three of the five was Hugh Corrigan. This was penciled out of the story. County Commissioner Corrigan rarely handles any court cases. It will be interesting to watch what charges are finally made by County Prosecutor John T. Corrigan. The Corrigans are cousins.

Further Jim Stanton, close friend of both, got avid support, including financial, from the firemen in his Congressional primary victory.

And:

DIRTY DOW—The beauty of being a major polluter of the Great Lakes for Dow Chemical is that it reaps profits from its destruction. Having dumped mercury into the lakes for years, Dow is now collecting some $550,000 this year to clean up the lake.

The city of Cleveland has authorized $250,000 this year added to some $300,000 for Dow.

This last reminds me of the chutzpah of the Sackler family marketing a drug to treat the addicts hooked by their own devious marketing of OxyContin.

As a final note, this post covers two month because Roldo decided to give himself some breathing room for the summer, omitting the first issues from July and August. He returned to bi-weekly publication in September, where we’ll go tomorrow.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…