Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire, far left, with activists in Cleveland, Ohio during a trip to the city for a series of speaking engagments on African and African American affairs. (Photo: Martha Grevatt), a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.
From the Hough (1966), Detroit (1967) and Glenville (1968) Rebellions: Learn From History, Fight for the Future
By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire
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Note: The following talk was delivered in East Cleveland, Ohio on July 30, 2011 at the Black on Black Crime Inc. offices located in the McCall Motel. This event was a commemoration of the Hough, Detroit and Glenville rebellions between 1966-68. The keynote speakers were Abayomi Azikiwe, PANW editor, and Don Freeman, a longtime leader in the African American community in Cleveland since the 1960s. The meeting was chaired by the Oppressed Peoples Nation youth group and Workers World Party. Sponsors of the meeting included the Peoples Fightback Center, the Lucasville Uprising Freedom Network, the New Black Panther Party--Cleveland Link and Workers World Party.
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I want to first of all thank all of the organizations here in Cleveland that came together to put on this event tonight. The work of these organizations is a concrete tribute to the legacy of struggle over the last 45 years that we are commemorating this evening.
Last week in Detroit at the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center (CAYMAC), our city hall, the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice (MECAWI) joined with progressive City Councilwoman JoAnn Watson to host a public forum entitled: "The 1967 Detroit Rebellion: An Historical Review by Those Who Were There and Those Fighting for Justice Today." This was an historical event in and of itself due to the fact that it represented the path that the Motor City has travelled over the last four-and-one-half decades socially, economically and politically.
There are many similarities between the origins and development of the African American communities in both Detroit and Cleveland. Both communities of African Americans grew tremendously during the course of the twentieth century. The industrial revolution, the rise of mass production in the auto, steel and overall manufacturing sectors of the economy attracted hundreds of thousands of Africans into these cities.
Although in Detroit and Cleveland, when African Americans arrived in mass beginning during the period leading up to World War I and extending throughout the 1920s, the Great Depression, World War II and the period of the 1950s rights through the late 1960s, the conditions prevailing in these northern midwest cities objectively were just as bad if not worst than what people had migrated from in the rural areas of the South. Our ancestors were faced with profound challenges in both the South and the North which included the superexploitation of their labor, residential segregation, institutionalized discrimination in the labor market and the educational systems, and of course, police terrorism.
Urban Politics in the Post World War II Period
As the modern civil rights movement began during the mid-1950s with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56 leading right through to the student struggles of the early 1960s and the organizing efforts to win the vote in the Black Belt areas of the deep South, a movement was also underway in both Cleveland and Detroit as well as other cities. In Detroit the struggle for civil rights was linked up with the efforts of organized labor to win decent working conditions in the plants and the service sectors of the labor market.
African Americans in general were confined to the dirtiest and most exploitatative jobs within the factory system. Many of them worked in the foundries and as janitors. The foremen and plant supervisors were typically all white and the logic of racial capitalism in the United States took on a similar character as in apartheid South Africa where one's race largely determined your social class position within society.
In Cleveland, as our local brothers, sisters, comrades and friends will address, represented a microcosm of urban segregation throughout the country. Many African Americans moved into the Hough and Glenville sections of the city where they were exploited through the neglect of the city administration resulting in poor municipal services, substandard education and constant harassment by racist gangs backed up by the police.
During this same period in Detroit, African Americans, after settling in select areas of the east and west sides of the city during the decades between World War I through World War II, began to move into the Virginia Park area and others neighborhoods north and west of there starting in the late 1940s and accelerating at a rapid rate all through the 1950s up until the middle years of the 1960s. Detroit had experienced racial upheaval going all the way back to the civil war in 1863 when it was a main depot in the Underground Railroad that led many Africans out of slavery into the city and also across the border into Canada.
In 1943 one of the worst so-called race riots occured in Detroit leaving dozens dead and millions of dollars in property destroyed. This outbreak took place during the World War II period when large scale migration into Detroit and the subsequent competition for jobs and housing led to racial conflict.
Although African American workers would play a key role in winning recognition by Ford Motor Company of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union in 1941, the character of racial capitalism and national oppression remained dominant. In 1942, a struggle erupted over whether African American workers should be allowed to move into the Sojourner Truth Homes, a public housing project on the eastside. It was these events that would fuel the anger that brought about the massive explosion of June 1943.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, urban renewal programs were designed to break up the African American community in Detroit on the eastside. The Chrysler Freeway was constructed to run right through the black community and resulted in the demolition of Hasting Street, a major business district that was the home to many small businesses, social clubs, community organizations and churches.
Although the people fought this forced removal, the city fathers were determined to carry out its program of re-location. When African Americans were moved into the Virginia Park area and other neighborhoods on both the east and west side, they were faced with overcrowding, poor city services, racial segregation, discrimination and neglect in the public education system and persistent villification and exploitation by the police.
The Movement for Change During the 1960s
There are other similarities between the struggles in Detroit and Cleveland during the 1960s. Both cities saw the rise of coalition building efforts across racial lines during the early years of the decade.
In Cleveland the work of the NAACP, CORE and other community organization would led to the creation of the United Freedom Movement (UFM) where challenges were carried out against racism in education and housing. The tragic but deliberate death of Rev. Bruce Klunder was a watershed event in the city.
At the same time more militant forces began to emerge through the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) which was heavily influenced by Robert F. Williams, Malcolm X and the national liberation movements and socialist revolutions that were gaining strength during the time period. Malcolm X would visit Cleveland and Detroit during the Spring of 1964 to deliver the "Ballot or Bullets" speech that prefigured in many ways the struggle that would evolve as the decade proceeded.
In Detroit on the twentieth anniversary of the 1943 so-called race riot, over 200,000 people would march down Woodward avenue demanding jobs, education and the end to housing discrimination in the city. In fact it was at this event that the late Rev. C.L. Franklin and others would invite Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to help lead the march where he delivered the first "I Have a Dream" speech at Cobo Hall.
This march grew out of the work of a coalition of the Detroit Council for Human Rights (DCHR) that was largely headed by Rev. C.L. Franklin of New Bethel Baptist Church. The coalition consisted of community organizations from various tendencies including both proponents of civil rights as well as black nationalists and revolutionaries.
In the aftermath of the march in June 1963, the efforts of the Freedom NOW Party and the Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL) would lead to Malcolm X visiting the city in Nov. 1963 to address the Grassroots Leadership Conference. Malcolm X would deliver his historic "Message to the Grassroots" speech at this conference.
Nonetheless by 1966, the civil rights struggle in the South was to take on a new phase. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would end, at least on paper, legalized segregation and disenfranchisment. Nonetheless, discrimination and national oppression would continue with a vengeance.
In 1965 Malcolm X was assassinated and several months later the Watts Rebellion would take place ushering in a new era of urban rebellion on a wider scale. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), under new militant leadership of Stokely Carmichael and Floyd McKissick would adopt Black Power as their slogan and program of action.
Around this same period Hough would erupt along with many other cities across the U.S. The Black Panther Party and other revolutionary nationalist organizations would emerge in a renwed effort to organize for fundamenal change which inevitably involved the struggle against police terrorism.
By 1967, when Detroit exploded, many felt that a real revolutionary uprising was in the making. The Detroit Rebellion was described as the largest and most profound racial unrest in the history of the United States.
These developments between 1963 and 1967 would draw the attention of the FBI and other government law-enforcement agencies. The Counter-Intelligence Program which had its origins during the 1950s and was directed against the left, initiated a renewed effort in 1967 with the creation of special units to undermine so-called "Black Nationalist Hate Groups."
RAM, SNCC, CORE, the Black Panther Party as well as the SCLC and the NAACP were targeted in the COINTELPRO operations. Nonetheless, it appears that after the assassination of Dr. King on April 4, 1968, the Black Panther Party and other revolutionary organizations would be its principal focus.
As the Black revolutionary movement became more organized and armed in 1968 with rebellions erupting in over 100 cities after the martyrdom of Dr. King, the FBI and the police would intensify their efforts. By the time of the Glenville Rebellion of July 23, 1968, just one year after the Detroit uprising, the FBI had identified the revolutionary movement as a serious threat to national security.
Consequently, the process of preemptive prosecution was enacted against revolutionary organizations, their leaders and cadres. Hundreds of these revolutionaries were arrested, charges with criminal activity, jailed and imprisoned. Many of them even lost their lives in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Oakland and many other cities.
Capital Flight and Low-Wage Capitalism: From the 1970s through the 2000s
We would be remiss if we came here this evening and only discussed our valiant and heroic revolutionary history of the 1960s. Today we face problems that in many ways are worse than they were some four to five decades ago.
In Detroit we have focused our attention on the economic issues that have become so essential in the lives of the majority of our people. This is why the Moratorium NOW! Coalition has demanded a freeze on all forclosures and evictions in the state of Michigan and throughout the country.
We are demanding that a national jobs program be enacted to re-employ and fully employ the 30 to 40 million people in the U.S. who are either unemployed on underemployed. The federal government under the Obama administration does not even address this issue of jobs and income.
Also we see a direct relationship between the ongoing bailout of the banks to the tune of trillions of dollars, the Pentagon war budget and growing gap of wealth between African Americans and whites. The stark realites of the social conditions in both Cleveland and Detroit are reflective of this increasing impoverishment of the people.
The implementation of these demands requires organization and mobilization. We must build the necessary revolutionary organization that will address the challenges of the current period.
Once again thank all of you for holding this important meeting and extending an invitation for our participation from Detroit.
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