Cleveland, OH: Community Rallies Against White Supremacist Violence in Slavic Village

Left and progressive activists from across Cleveland, Ohio gathered yesterday evening for a small rally at the intersection of Union and Broadway in the Slavic Village. The rally was organized as a show of solidarity for the Charlottesville protests and in remembrance of our martyred comrade Heather Heyer. Brief speeches were given by representatives from about a half dozen Cleveland activist groups including Cleveland DSA, Cleveland Antifa, the Industrial Workers of the World, AMP NEO, and Burning River Anarchist Collective. Activists took turns speaking not only on the necessity of showing up to counteract newly emboldened fascist and white supremacist movements, but on the need for vigilance against the more insidious forms of structural racism that have laid the groundwork for oppression of POC in American society since its founding. Perhaps the most enthralling speech was given by local activist El Hajj Amir Khalid A. Samad of Peace in the Hood, a local community building and anti-gang violence organization.

Samad related a personal story of an encounter with white supremacist violence in the eighties when he worked as an after school counselor at a local community pool in the Slavic village. One day he was targeted at his job by large mob of white men, many of whom were fathers of the local children who were in Samad’s care. Sensing that he was in immediate danger, Samad searched his car and was cleverly able to de-escalate the situation by covering a crook lock with a pillowcase in order to make a convincing simulation of a rifle resting across his shoulder. Faced with the possibility of getting shot, the mob backed down, giving Samad a chance to get in his car and drive away. Samad emphasized this story as an example of the creativity that is often necessary in countering extremism and white supremacy, and instructed the gathered activists to be creative modes of protest and activism.

But on a deeper level, Samad’s story served as a chilling illustration of the kind of anti-black intimidation tactics that many in the mostly white crowd would probably have liked to think of as artifacts of the distant past. Cleveland’s Slavic village has long been a hotbed of racist violence and appalling anti-integrationist efforts by the local white community.  In 1985, a black family’s home in the Slavic Village was the site of an infamous firebombing by racist terrorist Kenneth J. Lowery. While seven occupants of the home escaped unharmed, the bombing took the life of 67 year old grandmother Mabel Gant. While that particularly tragic incident was over thirty years ago, a similar incident of racist terrorism was reported as recently as 2006, when an interracial family had the porch of their home covered in mercury by their racist neighbors Joseph Kuzlik and David Fredericy, who were sentenced on hate crime charges the following year.

 

While the community of the Slavic village has grown substantially more integrated over time, now with relative parity between the numbers of black and white residents, economic decay has brought new sources of tension. The Slavic Village was hit particularly hard by the 2007 housing crisis, and its zip code 44105 reported the most foreclosures in 2007 of any in the country. At one point, 14% of the houses in the Slavic Village sat vacant, and a significant uptick in violent crime accompanied the neighborhood’s economic decline. While an influx of government cash and attention has helped to redirect the neighborhood on a slow path to renewal, there is no doubt that the Slavic Village has been uniquely marked by both the racial violence and the economic violence emblematic of American Capitalism and the constantly shifting fortunes of the real estate market.

It was for these reasons that the Slavic Village was chosen as the site for yesterday’s demonstration. What can be learned from the Slavic Village is that despite the moral victories we can claim after this last week, many of the most insidious forms of violence against POC are still systemic in nature, and can not be counteracted in the same manner as overt fascist demonstrations. Despite the fact that confederate statues are being torn down across the country and that alt-right demonstrators at the Boston rally were massively outnumbered by anti-racist counter-protests, about 20,000:50 by some estimates, we are still far from victory.

Perhaps one of the greatest threats to the physical and emotional well being of people of color and the oppressed in the United States is not out and out racist violence, but the real estate market. For most of our country’s history, real estate and racism have walked hand in hand, and just as racism has always lied at the heart of our criminal justice system, so too is it fundamentally intertwined with the way that property values are determined, and spelled out very clearly by what kind of neighborhoods receive investment and visible in patterns of foreclosures, gentrification, and “white flight.” If we intend to truly shatter the racist foundations of our country, we cannot let the fascists distract us from systemic issues like these. We will have to combat both from many angles.