Making Rent in Bed-Stuy

by Brandon Harris

  On April 9, protesters stormed a city council meeting demanding answers concerning the shooting, in which Thomas had been shot in the back four times by Officer Stephen Roach. Mayor Charlie Luken, part of a political dynasty in the area, was dismissive of their anger and eventually left the chamber before the meeting ended. The local pastor Rev. Damon Lynch III, a senior member of the civil rights organization Cincinnati Black United Front, suggested the protesters bar the doors until they get some answers. The current Cincinnati mayor, John Cranley, then a city councilman who presided over the committee that was holding the meeting, slammed his gavel down and demanded order, but none was to be found. After Councilman Jim Tarbell, long known as one of the key figures in Over-the-Rhine’s gentrification, told protesters that the officer had fired his weapon because Roach thought “his life was in danger,” the protesters headed for the streets.

  Four days of looting and skirmishes with police ensued, largely confined to the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood after police barricaded the neighborhood’s southern border to keep the violence from spreading to the central business district. More than $5 million in property damage occurred and a citywide boycott was imposed, but it went largely unenforced in white neighborhoods. In the aftermath, an economic boycott of the city led by various black advocacy groups cost the city an estimated $10 million, leading Luken to call the involved parties “economic terrorists” in the months before 9/11.

  A year after the unrest, in the spring of 2002, Cincinnati Black United Front, the ACLU of Ohio, the City of Cincinnati, and the Fraternal Order of Police entered a collaborative agreement to repair the toxic relationship between the police and black communities. Initially, it didn’t seem to work; crime spiked in Over-the-Rhine, with the city setting new homicide records in 2003 and 2006. Some citizens felt that the police, in retaliation for the violence, stopped policing violent crime aggressively in Over-the-Rhine. But soon a massive gentrification effort in the neighborhood began, spearheaded by the corporately financed nonprofit 3CDC, and a significant police presence has become a routine feature of Over-the-Rhine and its increasingly upscale population.

  The events of 2001 surely informed Blackwell’s fears. Yet the streets of the city’s Clifton district, where the campus is located, were quiet the Wednesday afternoon after the video of the DuBose killing began playing on local media, nonstop. The University of Cincinnati closed early for the day and armored cars were moved into place in the event chaos spread, but both moves proved completely unnecessary. A rally sponsored by Black Lives Matter organizers outside the Hamilton County Courthouse, at the very site where an angry mob burned down the previous courthouse during the riot of 1884, proceeded peacefully. Several hundred attendees, a near-equal mix of black and white, old and young, stood in a driving rainstorm to vent their frustration.

  DuBose’s family members spoke from a megaphone atop the courthouse steps, calling for peace and godliness. Chief Blackwell, the second African-American police chief in the city’s history, wended his way through the crowd, talking to protesters while his department largely kept its distance from the proceedings. Although the DuBose family set a relatively calm tone, the Black Lives Matter organizers sounded angrier calls for justice. Twenty-nine-year-old Kevin Farmer, wearing a neon baseball cap and a white T-shirt with “Black Lives Matter” written on it in black Sharpie, walked around Over-the-Rhine with a megaphone before the rally, antagonizing passersby for their complacency. He was visibly estranged from the family members and some other BLM leadership during the rally after, one in which many attendees questioned whether Deters would have indicted the officer if he was a city policeman as opposed to a university one. Tensing is the first police officer in the city’s history who has been charged with murder while on the job.

  The energy of the protest grew diffuse, with various points of dialogue due to the multiple megaphones being employed among different parts of the gathered crowd. A singalong of Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” broke out near the courthouse doors while another man in the crowd below repeatedly demanded that DuBose “have a street named after him.” Some attendees criticized the DuBose family among themselves or to the various members of the local media making their way through the crowd. While some questioned why Mark O’Mara, who defended Trayvon Martin’s killer, had been chosen as their attorney, others thought the DuBoses were being used by the media and by the local government to control black anger. “They always get the families to call for peace,” the protestor Africa Benson told me. “They always send someone to shut us up.” Many observed that the prayers of blacks, no matter how earnestly offered, had not stopped the killing of black men by police around the country.

  A march commenced, winding through the section of Over-the-Rhine that has been transformed since Burton and Thomas died there, to the local police headquarters downtown, and back again. As the crowd passed sleek restaurants and clothing shops, mostly Caucasian onlookers offered uncomprehending stares. As the march made its way along the northern edge of Washington Park, some black onlookers offered vocal calls of support, honking car horns and high-fiving protesters. While one middle-aged white woman standing next to a brand-new wine bar held up a fist in solidarity, on the other side of the street a grizzled, middle-aged white man snapped “All lives matter” toward the crowd. It went largely ignored amid the shouts of “I am Sam DuBose,” “No justice, no peace, no racist police,” and “This is what democracy looks like.” The cops came out in force, armed with guns and zip ties, when the crowd reached the police station. The protesters chanted “The system is broken” for a few minutes before turning around and returning through Over-the-Rhine to the courthouse, and soon the march was over, but not without the sense that we were at the spark of a reckoning, not the embers.

  The day before the Hamilton County prosecutor, Joe Deters, finally unveiled the footage of DuBose’s killing, Erick Stoll’s program drew crowds the Mini had never before seen. They had come because they were looking for new ways of seeing and talking about what was happening all around them. Wood denied them that privilege, introducing the screening with the same call to refrain from criticism or commentary about the organizations that were at the heart of Over-the-Rhine’s recent transformation and her cinema’s very existence. Stoll looked on grimly, before turning away from her, his head resting on the adjacent wall, arm wrapped around his shaggy mane as if to protect himself from the disrespect he, and his audience, were being shown. Surely Wood couldn’t have thought all those people had shown up to the Mini, which routinely hosted screenings for half a dozen people or fewer much of the summer, to discuss documentary aesthetics and movies as “cultural products.” Yet that’s exactly what she suggested the conversation be limited to.

  The movies were uniformly outstanding. The opener, Community Media Productions’ We Will Not Be Moved, provides some context for the current situation; efforts to push black and Appalachian residents out of Over-the-Rhine date back to the 1970s! The film consists only of stills of local residents and various Over-the-Rhine locales, overlaid with audio from remarkably candid interviews. In these testimonies, local residents don’t mince their words as they speak about fixed incomes and the incoming development class that hoped to displace them; back then political correctness was a term that hadn’t been dreamed of. “The key really isn’t income, it isn’t even white or black, because I’ll tell you something, there are Appalachians in Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati that are every bit as nasty as the blacks,” the developer Phil Aleman suggests in one interview.

  “He would buy houses because the people that lived in them were so wrong, so he would buy those buildings and throw them out,” a young Kathy Laker Schwab says about Aleman, while driving through the neighborhood. (Nearly forty years later she now runs Local Initiatives Support Corporation, ostensibly “the nation’s leading community development support organization,” and consults for 3CDC.) “He didn’t purposefully buy buildings to throw people out,” she adds after a cool and genuine laugh
. “I mean, there is something to be said for getting rid of people who just aren’t good for the neighborhood.”

  Stoll’s own films anchored the program. He and his collaborator Jarrod Welling-Cann’s work-in-progress documentary Good White People, about the plight of a former Over-the-Rhine convenience store owner and karate dojo operator, Reginald Stroud, followed a startlingly edited short piece about the city’s Lumenocity festival, a semiprivate end-of-summer light show that takes place in the same recently renovated park where police officers used to carelessly run over homeless women. In Stoll’s telling, the city’s new vision for the space (Private events! Corporate sponsors! Privatization of city services!) is more than troubling.

  Despite this somber and somewhat incendiary program, there was some levity. The local artists Arthur Brum, Liz Cambron, and Aalap Bommaraju truly had the last laugh. Their short experimental piece Pills seems to say, with great, penetrating humor, much about the compromised ethical position spaces like the Mini inhabit. Although Wood painfully admitted during the truncated postscreening Q&A that the Mini “was problematic, I guess,” the polite, city-planning term “gentrification” and its more sanguine cousins “urban renewal” and “revitalization” went unexamined in the galling talkback, one in which many of the filmmakers looked visibly strained. The ways in which we frame the creation and patronization of spaces such as the Mini, or the nearby Over-the-Rhine museum, a place where I can assure you We Will Not Be Moved will never screen, are actually what’s problematic. The museum and microcinema are dedicated to a different vision of the past and a future unburdened by the sins of the present so meaningfully documented in Stoll’s program. Pills suggests, with flourishes of hysterical candor that recall post-’68 Godard, that the changing landscape of our inner cities, from Brooklyn to Birmingham, should really be called class warfare.

  The day after the video of DuBose’s shooting emerged, Raymond Tensing, who was fired by the University of Cincinnati on the same day that the indictment was announced, requested his job back through the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio, claiming he had not been given due process. “The great American Ray Tensing wants his job back,” the local radio demagogue Bill Cunningham announced at the beginning of a segment on his popular 700 WLW broadcast, one in which he went on to complain about how little black activists cared about rising rates of black-on-black crime, citing the recent shooting of a four-year-old girl in the Avondale neighborhood where DuBose lived. His guest, Colerain High School’s baseball manager, Kevin Coombs, had coached Tensing when he was a student. “He’s a tremendous young man,” Coombs said, before complaining that Deters had “way overstated the facts of the case.”

  Despite Coombs’s disillusionment, and that of the Fraternal Order of Police, whose president Jay McDonald called Deters’s comments “way out of line,” a narrative spread in which the city was saved by the forthright actions of the prosecutor, capped by a glowing Los Angeles Times profile of the once-scandal-ridden former state treasurer. But his decision not to indict the other officers on the scene, who seem to have been involved in a conspiracy to cover up the nature of the killing, drew anger among many in the community, while his inclusion of a second charge against Tensing, for manslaughter, suggested the possibility that Deters believes he may not win his murder case in a city in which successful prosecution of police is rare.

  In a phone call that afternoon, Harry Black wouldn’t elaborate on what he felt would happen if a murder conviction didn’t take place, saying, “It would be irresponsible to speculate.” He suggested that the city would institute body cameras on all police officers in the following twelve to sixteen months. When asked how he would place these events in the city’s history of racial unrest and whether they represented a perversion of the progress many say Cincinnati has made on these matters in the last decade, he reframed the events: “The way everyone conducted themselves, working together, cooperating, there’s much more transparency and a lot of communications,” Black said, suggesting that the events of the past week “serve as a validation to the work that many men and women have contributed to the city since the tragic event in 2001.”

  The outlook was less sanguine when a candlelight vigil at the same courthouse drew a crowd of a couple hundred people on Friday night. “This is all going to be peaceful today and hopefully justice will prevail, but the statistics have shown that they don’t convict officers here,” Kevin Farmer said through his megaphone at the beginning of a vigil that morphed into yet another protest march. Although Farmer’s second assertion is demonstrably true, his first proved false. He was arrested, along with five others, at the end of the evening. The march had wound through downtown, along many of the same Over-the-Rhine streets that Wednesday’s had, before culminating in the city’s most prominent landmark, Fountain Square. In recent years the square has been under the purview of 3CDC.

  As the protesters entered the square, an indie rock concert was under way at the Proctor & Gamble Music Stage on its western side, with several hundred enjoying alcohol and Skyline Chili while watching a set from a local band. That the band’s corporately subsidized show and the murmurs of their mostly Caucasian audience drowned out the chants of the mostly black protesters as they entered the square was an irony lost on no one, especially those leading the march.

  Things grew more tense as the marchers exited the square. A black woman drew the ire of a white motorist in a brown sports utility vehicle on Sycamore Street, just east of the square. After a heated exchange of words, she threw a cup at the driver’s side window of his car. He leaped out of his vehicle, brandishing a large knife, and stared at her menacingly. Nearby protesters pleaded for calm or cried foul before the man got back in his car and sped away, past several police vehicles that paid him little attention.

  As the march circled the block back toward the square, confusion set in; where would the protest end? Adam Clark, an associate professor of theology and African studies at Xavier University who had mentored many of the activists, complained just before the march reentered the square that among the local Black Lives Matter organizers there were “some constructive leaders and some not-so-constructive leaders,” while others suggested that the police would finally pounce once the protesters camped out on 3CDC’s property. The protesters entered the square for a second time, but didn’t push past the crowd. They stayed, many with their hands raised in the air, chanting, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” The band’s set was already petering out, but now it abruptly stopped. An awkwardness ensued, and for a brief time the protesters’ chants were louder than any music. But then over the square’s public address system, the Strokes’ “Someday” rang out just as loud as the sounds of the previous band had, and the protesters were once again drowned out.

  As the protesters moved toward the eastern end of the square, nearby vendors stopped selling beer and chili despite the fact that another set from that night’s headliners, Buffalo Killers, was yet to come. At that point police finally mobilized a show of force, forming a phalanx along the park’s southeastern front. Several protesters got very testy with nearby officers, screaming at them from point-blank range, their hands behind their heads in a show of nonviolence. “Don’t shoot,” one man screamed at the officer in front of him, speaking metaphorically; the cop didn’t have a gun drawn. A nearby cop said, “I’ll light your ass up,” in response.

  Farmer was among the first arrested. He was charged with two counts of menacing and one count of disturbing a lawful meeting, allegedly after threatening business owners in the square. As his arrest ensued, a middle-aged black woman nearby cried and claimed that Farmer had been the one roughly handled. Kimberly Thomas, a close friend of Sam DuBose—who unlike his family has been supportive of the marches—came to the aid of several people being arrested and was violently thrown to the ground by one officer. She was charged with two counts of resisting arrest. Damon Lynch IV, son of the Cincinnati Black United Front leader, was charged with disorderly conduct for “refusing to leave
an intersection and balling his fists” toward an arresting police officer.

  As the deflated crowd cleared away, I glimpsed Damon Lynch III watching his son being loaded into a paddy wagon while his wife was being threatened with jail herself for failing to vacate the street, trying to see what was being done to her son. Nearby, I found Clark again. “They arrested who they thought was the leadership,” he claimed. “Sean George put his hands on Hakiym,” another nearby man suggested, referring to a Cincinnati SWAT team member and Brian Simpson, a member of the local hip-hop group Lyrical Insurrection, who performs under the name Hakiym Sha’ir and was arrested for “refusing to back up when ordered by police.” Apparently Simpson asked George who his supervisor was. The cop refused to answer. “They pulled him back, he said, ‘Why are you touching me?’ and they suddenly jumped and attacked him, that’s what happened,” recalled Rev. Troy Jackson, the former pastor of University Christian Church and the last white person from the march who lingered on as the paddy wagon drove away.

  Walking north on Walnut Street, back toward Over-the-Rhine, I passed an empty lot to my east. At least a dozen police vehicles were arrayed there along with several dozen officers. They were exuberant with victory, red faces stretched in wide smiles or mid-guffaw, giving pounds and backslapping one another in a sickening display of celebration. I stifled bile in my throat and hit the bars.

  It was lively on Cincinnati’s gentrification frontier after the march, but no longer with talk over justice and peace. I intercepted some friends at a wine bar that had opened recently, Liberty’s, and they were already a bourbon deep. I quickly caught up with them, navigating my emotional shell shock by flirting with a portly redhead at the bar with a trust-funded friend while conversation wandered back to when to go to which bar/club after how many drinks when later . . . To most of these well-to-do young people, none of whom had been down to the march, or to any of the marches before, the notion that they could or should attempt to be part of a movement to address this problem seemed quaint at best. Certainly, for the children of some of the city’s best-endowed families, income inequality was not their fight; most issued little enthusiasm for the cause. This set was too demure, too self-consciously aligned with the status quo, whatever their assumed liberalism (at least on social issues) would indicate, to challenge the great quandary of our times in such a personal way. The mere fact that I had mentioned DuBose was a bit of a turnoff.