While organizers and activists began attempting to sort this out among themselves, with tiffs at times spilling out onto social media, their supporters in the rest of the nation continued to carry their banner and express solidarity with a movement still working to find its footing and at some moments of infighting one misstep away from implosion. As of March 2016, the tenth anniversary of Twitter, the hashtag #blacklivesmatter had been used more than twelve million times—the third most of any hashtag related to a social cause. Atop the list, however, sits #ferguson, the most-used hashtag promoting a social cause in the history of Twitter, tweeted more than twenty-seven million times.
“#blacklivesmatter would not be recognized worldwide if it weren’t for the folks in St. Louis and Ferguson who put their bodies on the line day in and day out and who continue to show up for Black lives,” Cullors wrote. “And yet, we knew there was something specific about Ferguson and the efforts of the brave organizers in Ferguson that made this moment different: more radically intersectional, more attuned to the technology of our times, more in your face. Ferguson organizers shifted the energy in this country in the direction of Black liberation in the same, and different, ways as the case of Amadou Diallo, Rodney King, Jena Six, Troy Davis and Trayvon Martin.”
The small entrance and modest selection on the ground floor of Guide to Kulchur are a clever mask for the West Side Cleveland bookstore’s expansive basement meeting room, which, by December 2014, had for months played host to an activist collective determined to achieve police reform in this city.
After curving down the stairs, you’re confronted by a lounge of sorts—a series of couches covered by a canopy of cloth. Around the corner, a large meeting table that seats well more than a dozen is surrounded by thick stacks of paperbacks. This is where the local protest movement in Cleveland incubated. Activists from the East Side and West Side, young and old, gathered—at times daily—to strategize and get to know each other.
“We all knew we needed to do something, we had to this time,” said RA Washington, a musician and poet who owns the bookstore and serves as a sort of community elder in the surrounding blocks, the first time I showed up for one of the meetings.
At this point, there was no formal #blacklivesmatter chapter in Cleveland. Organizers of the ongoing demonstrations hailed from a mishmash of other activist groups and labor organizations. Unlike the leadership tug-of-war that took place in Ferguson, there was no concern in Cleveland about external interlopers—almost all of the young activists were local.
On this day, a cold afternoon about three days into my trip home, a hodgepodge of activists and organizers peppered several members of the City Council with questions. They had specific demands and insisted that each local official they meet complete a “report card”—committing to either yes or no on statements such as “the officer who killed Rice should be immediately indicted.”
“We need to show that we as young black people in Cleveland are no longer going to allow these things to happen,” said Joe Worthy, a key organizer with the New Abolitionist Association, one of the groups of younger protesters and activists that have driven the demonstrations here. Worthy was one of the first activists I met when I arrived home. He spoke in a sharp, polished cadence, with little patience for niceties. If a council member started to wander into talking points, it was Joe who would shout him or her down and demand that he or she address the question asked. “We wanted a public commitment to our demands at least from some council members; we also wanted a public commitment to negotiate publicly to bring change,” Worthy declared during the meeting, earning a round of snaps of approval. “These things can’t be negotiated by backroom deals.”
Cleveland is built from a proud activist and civil rights tradition, with locals quick to note that it was here—partially in response to the civil rights movement—that the first black mayor of a major American city was elected. That legacy left a mosaic of community organizing groups—from those focused on black-on-black crime, to those left over from Occupy Wall Street, to those who have for years worked on police brutality issues. But a summit like this, featuring primarily young but also some older activists, many noted, seemed unprecedented, at least in recent local history.
When Tamir Rice was killed, it seemed, activist Cleveland jolted into action.
Determined to learn lessons from St. Louis and New York, top city officials in Cleveland took extremely deliberate steps in response to the renewed protests. The fact that half a dozen council members were gathered here in this bookstore basement to be peppered with questions was evidence of that.
Police Chief Calvin Williams, who is black, voluntarily shut down parts of the highway so that protesters could march. Police officers working nights during many of the early demonstrations talked openly and at times joked around with demonstrators.
“There are things that are wrong within the Cleveland Division of Police, and we will correct them. That is my pledge to everybody,” Williams vowed during a forum titled “Is Cleveland the Next Ferguson?” that city leaders held in early December at the Word Church, the city’s most influential black congregation.
While, like St. Louis, Cleveland is a heavily segregated Midwestern metropolis still battling its way out of tough economic times that have left significant portions of its black population in poverty, in many ways Cleveland had seen a much less violent and boisterous response to the Tamir Rice shooting than Greater St. Louis did in the days after Michael Brown was killed. There had been some protests, and city leaders were feeling pressure.
“Tamir Rice should not have been shot,” Williams said, prompting applause from the crowd. “It is not Tamir Rice’s fault, but it is also not the fault of that officer,” Williams added, which earned him as many jeers as his previous remark had brought claps.
By all accounts, the Cleveland police could not have handled the protests more differently than their colleagues in St. Louis, who suited up in riot gear and deployed tear gas and fired rubber bullets not only at violent looters, but also at peaceful protesters, local elected officials, and residents who had left their suburban homes to observe the ruckus happening outside.
But not in Cleveland. In fact, after some morning commuters and media figures griped about the highway protests impeding traffic and causing “inconvenience,” Mayor Jackson responded by declaring: “That’s the inconvenience of freedom.”
“People are rightfully angry,” Cleveland City Council president Kevin Kelley told me one afternoon as we sat in his City Hall office. “In some parts of the city, the Cleveland Division of Police and the community need to have a relationship that is stronger.”
Behind him, on proud display, was the yellow flag of Old Brooklyn, a West Side Cleveland neighborhood perhaps best known for its high number of law enforcement and public safety families, which lies in Kelley’s district. And in police districts like those, where on some blocks it seems there’s a PROUD SUPPORTER OF THE FOP affixed to at least one car in every other driveway, Kelley and others told me, there are stronger relationships between officers and the community.
“[In my district] most residents are on a cell phone basis with the district commander. We know the person who we’re going to call,” said Kelley. “I think that if in every edge of the city we did as good a job as that, we’d be able to use those relationships as a vehicle to push for progress.”
I knew he was right, in large part because I knew people who had spent their entire lives in his district. My college roommate at Ohio University hailed from a police family in Old Brooklyn. His aunts and uncles were cops, and his cousins—who would crash on our futon on their nearly monthly visits to campus—all seemed to want to grow up to be Cleveland cops, and a few of them did.
Much of Cleveland was not only skeptical of the ongoing protests, but also horrified that the city was in the midst of a crime wave. Things were getting even more dangerous for their officers; who was looking out for them?
“There has been so much nega
tive publicity, we wanted our officers to know that the community is behind them,” Mary Jo Graves, a police dispatcher in Cleveland, who also lived in Old Brooklyn, told me. Dismayed by what she saw as antipolice rhetoric, Graves put out a call on Facebook, asking people to meet her in downtown Cleveland for a rally in support of police. She had hoped for a hundred people; more than four thousand showed up. “I think people are finally fed up,” said Graves, whose “Sea of Blue” rally was one of dozens of similar events that popped up in the months after Ferguson. “Our officers are good people who go out there to do good. Are there some things that need to be changed in law enforcement? Maybe. But it’s important that our officers know they have their community’s support.”
Not long after I finished interviewing the council president in City Hall, I found his colleague councilman Zack Reed holed up in his cluttered third-floor office in City Hall. Just moments after I entered his office, he pointed to a map laid out across one corner of his desk. It’s a simple enough setup, a white poster board with the city’s seventeen districts outlined and dozens of red pushpins inserted, each representing a homicide this year. The council members get an email each Monday, tallying every homicide in the preceding week and telling them how it compares to that point in each of the four previous years. And for each new homicide, Reed inserts a red pushpin at the corresponding location on the map.
Reed described it as a step toward thawing the numbness that many in Cleveland, including members of the council, have felt toward the violence that for years has been prevalent here. Violence both by police and by residents. “It’s in the DNA of not only the residents, but also the police,” Reed told me. “If we don’t change that mind-set, that it’s us against them, then we’re never going to fix this system.”
Every Clevelander knows the long roster of names and cases in which either a resident was killed by police or a local crime story went national in part because it persisted due to residents’ unwillingness to call officers.
The incident that most Clevelanders point to as their most horrifying anecdote of excessive force by police was the November 2012 shooting of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, whose miles-long police chase resulted in their death in a hail of 137 bullets fired by thirteen of the more than a hundred officers involved in the chase. The pursuit began when the two drove past a police officer who believed that they had fired a gun from their vehicle. He radioed for backup, and so began a chase that concluded with a sea of bullets in a school parking lot. One officer, Michael Brelo, emptied two separate sixteen-bullet clips and reloaded a third time before leaping onto the hood of the vehicle and firing bullets through the windshield and into Russell’s and Williams’s bodies. Both victims, it turned out, were unarmed. They had never fired the alleged gunshot that prompted the chase. Their car had backfired.
Brelo would be charged with murder in the 137 bullets case, but a judge would ultimately rule that because it was impossible to say for sure that it was one of the bullets from his gun that had killed Russell and Williams, he could not be convicted.
It is cases like the 137 bullets shooting that community leaders say have led to a deterioration of what little trust remained between the Cleveland community and the police. My dad would mention the case every single time I was home from school or back visiting after I had begun my career.
“A hundred and thirty-seven bullets!” he’d exclaim as he read the paper. “And the one guy jumped up on the hood of the car,” he’d say with exasperation, crafting a gun with his fingers and mimicking the pow pow of the fatal gunfire.
Meanwhile, the DOJ concluded, the police department has in many parts of Cleveland abandoned the community policing that once was prevalent throughout this city; on page fifty of the report, the DOJ stated: “During our tours, we additionally observed that neither command staff nor line officers were able to accurately or uniformly describe what community policing is….”
Several current and former law enforcement officials insist that it hasn’t always been this way—pointing to the 1990s, when, thanks to Clinton administration grants for community policing, police departments in Cleveland and its surrounding suburbs had more officers devoted to foot and bike patrols and neighborhood beats. But when federal money dried up and the local police departments were hit with round after round of layoffs and budget cuts as the national, state, and local economies tanked in the mid-2000s, the community policing model became more stated policy than practice.
“A lot of times, the officers begin to believe that the citizens of color are the enemy, and at this point many of them aren’t getting out of their cars to get to know them,” said James Copeland, a retired police commander who spent twenty-seven years working in East Cleveland, a majority-black community that borders the city. “The departments aren’t representative of the community, so they don’t understand the community.”
While 53 percent of Cleveland’s almost 400,000 residents are black, only about 387 of the department’s 1,551 officers are, about 25 percent. Compounding the perception of the Cleveland police as an occupying force was the decision in 2009 by the Ohio Supreme Court to rule unconstitutional Cleveland’s “home rule” policy. Passed by voters in 1982, “home rule” had required police officers and firefighters, as well as other city employees, to reside within the city limits. While it had long been a point of contention with the police and fire unions, many observers credited the policy with keeping a valuable working-class tax base in the city even as other Midwestern metropolises saw their employees flee to the suburbs in the 1970s and 1980s. While a still-recovering housing market has prevented mass exodus in the years since Cleveland’s home rule was overturned, many officers who had been living within the city limits have since made the move out of the city where they work.
“The Supreme Court said that you don’t have to live in the community, but if you’re working in that community then you’re a resident of that community, you need to treat it that way,” said Copeland. “We know all about the blue code, but we need to let the people vent and then explain to the citizens about why we do what we do. We’ve got to talk to them first. We need to be transparent. That’s called blue courage.”
In the meantime, pain continues to flow throughout Cleveland’s streets as gun violence claims the lives of more residents. As Reed and the other council members prepared for the upcoming Monday-night meeting, they got their weekly homicide update. By this point in the previous year, the first week of December, there had been eighty-three murders.
But this year, as the city was consumed in a fury of discussion about shootings and policing, three Clevelanders had been killed in the past week, including Amir Cotton, a twenty-six-year-old black male and the city’s hundredth homicide of the year. By the end of 2014, homicides would number 102, an uptick from the previous year. And in 2015, homicides went up again, to 118.
“It’s time for us all to wake up,” Reed told me at the end of our meeting as he placed his poster board behind his desk. “We’ve all got to wake up.”
Cleveland would remain one of the primary battlegrounds of the Movement for Black Lives—terminology organizers adopted to describe the protest movement—throughout 2015, with demonstrations breaking out at various points during the year. It was one of a dozen locations where, during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, organizers gathered to “reclaim” the holiday—traditionally considered a day of service—in light of the failure to achieve the justice they had demanded in New York and Ferguson. Activists wanted to transform a day known for reflection into a day of disruption.
Thousands were marching throughout the country, but only a few dozen were here in a musty church basement on Cleveland’s East Side when the poet began. His words cut the air, his message clear: police killings were a genocide, and despite the promises of well-intentioned leaders, they were far from stopping.
The performance was one of several that took place as protesters prepared signs for the second of two marches in Cleveland on
the holiday. In total, somewhere between a hundred and two hundred would participate.
But the gathering, though small in number and a bit more white than may have been expected, marked an important milestone for the still-budding protest efforts in Cleveland. Young and old had come together to coordinate the day’s actions—a march, this lunch and performance, and then a second march.
Every social movement must grapple with the generational and tactical divides that arise between varying groups and factions that comprise the ground troops. In Cleveland, a city with a rich history of civil rights activism, there are not only black activist groups that have been around for decades, tracing their births to the last civil rights movement, but there is also a robust black political establishment.
“As an African-American guy trying to make a difference, I am fighting the white establishment, and I’m also fighting the black establishment,” said Alonzo Mitchell, a fixture among the world of twenty- and thirtysomething Cleveland, who hosts a local radio show and emcees the city’s New Year’s Eve bash.
I’d caught up with Mitchell, a towering figure punctuated by his tightly picked Afro, a day earlier. Mitchell is the definition of outgoing, quickly rattling off half a dozen names of people in DC who must be mutual acquaintances of ours; he was right about at least half of them. He’d moved back here a few years earlier, after doing a stint in DC himself; he’d missed home. More young professionals, he believes, should move back to Cleveland, a wave of immigration he maintains would revitalize this at times struggling Rust Belt metropolis.
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