It is truly amazing how your Democrats are destroying my city. Your party is running this city and look at what the Democrats are reaping,
...VOTE REPUBLICAN!!!
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Racial Strife Flares in Cincinnati Over Downtown Business Boycott
By Robert E. Pierre
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 2, 2002; Page A03
CINCINNATI -- A city ripped apart a year ago by the worst civil unrest since Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968 is again roiled. This time, it's over a boycott of downtown hotels, stores, entertainment venues and restaurants.
The protest, started nine months ago, was energized in March when entertainers Bill Cosby, Whoopi Goldberg, Wynton Marsalis and a pair of old-school soul groups, the Temptations and the O'Jays, canceled shows. The Progressive National Baptist Convention also yanked its 10,000-member convention in support.
In response, the Cincinnati Arts Association, which runs three government-owned performance venues, has sued boycott organizers for $600,000, arguing that the boycott is divisive and counterproductive.
There's a war going on here, and boycott organizers -- whose demands include greater police accountability and economic development in depressed communities -- see themselves as liberators of the besieged while city leaders portray themselves as hostages to the whims of a vocal minority.
Each side at times sounds desperate. In letters seeking national support, one of the chief boycott organizers wrote: "Police are killing, raping, planting false evidence, and along with the prosecutor and courts are destroying the general sense of self-respect for black citizens." In turn, Mayor Charlie Luken denounced the boycott as "economic terrorism."
Business owners see themselves as pawns with little power to effect change. One restaurant owner placed a newspaper ad asking patrons to continue their support, only to have customers greeted with protest signs that read: "Eat, drink and be racist."
Boycott organizers said they will keep up the pressure until their demands are met. The irony is not lost on anyone here that 1960s staples -- boycotts and riots -- have been brought to bear in a 21st-century effort to spur change.
"Cincinnati is in the dark ages," said the Rev. Stephen A. Scott, vice chairman of the Coalition for a Just Cincinnati. "There is so much systematic racism, it's unreal."
Luken acknowledges there are problems: "In many parts of the city, there is lack of trust of the city and the police department. . . . We are not perfect. We have never claimed to be. We have always been open to systematic change."
Cincinnati, in the southwest corner of Ohio where it borders Kentucky and Indiana, appears a friendly enough place, with downtown ballparks, trendy main street coffeehouses and an image, in some quarters, as one of the nation's most livable cities. With 300,000 residents, about 40 percent of whom are black, the city consistently elects black officials and has had three black mayors.
To get this message out, Vice Mayor Alicia Reece, who is black, and Luken, who is white,in March unveiled a national advertising campaign to show the strong black presence in politics and business. Reece and Luken said the campaign was meant to counter what they view as a negative, and incorrect, perception of the city.
"The only image you [outsiders]had of us was us turning over hot dog stands and burning up buildings," said Reece, 30, who opposes the boycott. "Cincinnati has issues, and a lot of them have been in place for 70 years. I believe that we are working to metamorphosize."
Not fast enough, though, for many observers who point out that this is the city that permitted the Ku Klux Klan to erect crosses at the public Fountain Square in the 1990s.
The harshest criticism is reserved for the police, with some arguing that little has changed since the summer of 1968, when riots broke out after blacks accused police of using loitering laws to harass them, an allegation supported the next year by the Kerner Commission, which studied Cincinnati and seven other cities.
Tensions have flared in recent years over, among other things, the mistreatment of blacks during the summer jazz festival. But it was the fatal shooting of Timothy Thomas, 19, last April 7 that sparked the latest unrest. The unarmed Thomas was running from police trying to arrest him on 14 misdemeanor warrants when he was shot.
The wounds from the ensuing uprising -- which led to more than 800 arrests and dozens of injuries -- remain raw. And when, months later, a judge cleared the officer of criminal wrongdoing, Robert Braggs was there as local youth again taunted police in riot gear with this slogan: "No justice, no peace; no justice, no sleep."
Braggs, now 19 and a student at Cincinnati State, grew up in the suburbs. But he said he felt a kinship with his peers in the city. At the time, however, he was making a documentary for an internship at Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center.
He's not passionate about the boycott. "It's not for my generation, I don't think," Braggs said. "But I'm glad they're doing something."
And he also notes that the boycott helped push city leaders to the negotiating table. City officials are rushing to agree to an out-of-court settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Cincinnati Black United Front over a federal lawsuit accusing the Cincinnati Police Department of 30 years of discrimination. The lawsuit charges that police habitually violate the rights of blacks through such practices as racial profiling and excessive use of force.
No one wants April 7 -- the anniversary of the Thomas killing -- to pass without some major announcement of change. Thousands are expected at a downtown march that day.
"The march is just like one event in a series of pressures and social movements here," said march organizer Dan La Botz, a professor of history and Latin American studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. "There are many things taking place."
Not everything has to do with the police. Among the stated demands of the boycott's organizers are that more money be pumped into depressed communities, that the charges be dropped against those arrested in last year's civil unrest, that laws be equally enforced across race and gender lines and that election laws be changed to move from at-large city council seats to single-member council districts.
Luken said so many groups are involved in the boycott -- with so many varied demands -- that it's difficult to tell who to negotiate with. "I couldn't even begin to describe the list of demands," he said.
None of those issues has anything to do with the Cincinnati Arts Association, said Steve Loftin, whose group sued the boycotters.
"We feel that they have unfairly placed the burden on our organization," he said. "There are no actions that we can take. We are powerless as a group of individuals and feel very much that we are innocent and had this put upon us."
Steven Reece Sr., whose daughter is the vice mayor, also believes the boycott is misguided. In the 1960s, he said, the fight was to gain access to all-white venues for black entertainers. Now, they are being asked to stay away. And too many of the boycott leaders, he said, are looking for handouts.
"This is not the 1960s," said Reece, a business owner who worked for Cincinnati's first black mayor. The current protest, he said, has moved little from those in the '60s that were focused on starting day-care centers and programs to feed the hungry.
"Now it's about economic development, contracts and ownership," he said. "Blacks should be arguing about the property."
Scott, who worked with Reece on Jesse L. Jackson's campaigns for president, scoffed at that assertion. "Steve Reece is willing to sell out if he can get a piece of the development," Scott said.
The fighting has disenchanted some residents. "Leadership in both communities is lacking," said Bruno Ash, 53, who is white and owns a business providing underwater construction. "I'm not seeing it from the white side and I'm not seeing it from the African American side. Everyone is saying just calm down and everything will be all right and nobody likes that."
Ash was attending a discussion at Kaldi's Coffee House of "A Lesson Before Dying," an Ernest J. Gaines novel set in a small Louisiana Cajun community in the late 1940s.
The book explores racism, heroism and healing, and was chosen for the library's "On the Same Page" program in which everyone reads the same book. The discussion was cordial and civil but still there was tension, particularly when Jerome Manigan asked why white people must feel superior to others and constantly disassociate themselves from racism.
Manigan, 54, a Cincinnati native, admits to being afraid of the police, although his father and brother were local police officers. He supports the boycott and attended the discussion even though he didn't think the book was appropriate. In the book, the main character, Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting party to a liquor store shootout in which three men are killed; the lone survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
"Why does the black man have to die with dignity?" Manigan asked. "Why does he have to die at all? What are you trying to reinforce?"
For an hour, the small group went back and forth, between the book and the past, the book and the present, sometimes laughing and other times serious.Still, for Ash, the evening was a success.
It was important, he said, "just to get an open dialogue where we're not threatening, or being threatened and violence is not out there."
washingtonpost.com
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(See the picture of the guy with the sign (Mr. Babe Baker). He has come out against the boycott and is a vocal advocate to stop the black-on-black killing that has plagued this city since the riots. The writer can't even get that right. Talk about poor journalism. What else did he get wrong?)
VOTE REPUBLICAN!!!! Lets get together to get rid of these inept politicians and fix this city or we will suffer further slide. The Democrats have had their chance and blown it big with riots and strife. Even the KKK fiasco was during their control of the city. Yes, that's right folks, the Democrats controlled the city when the KKK put up the crosses.
STOP THE BLEEDING!!!!!!!
VOTE REPUBLICAN!!!!!!!!! |
