The Hough Uprising, 1966

On the evening of July eighteenth, nineteen sixty-six, a white bar owner at the corner of Hough Avenue and East Seventy-Ninth Street refused to give a Black customer a glass of water. The Seventy-Niners Cafe had posted a sign reading "No Water for Niggers." The refusal was not a misunderstanding. Within hours, the Hough neighborhood was in open revolt.

The uprising lasted five days, from July eighteenth through the twenty-third. Four people died, all of them Black. There were two hundred seventy-five arrests, approximately two hundred forty fires, and property damage estimated at one point two million dollars. The Ohio National Guard was deployed on the third day.

The city's official explanation attributed the uprising to outside agitators, specifically communist organizers and Black nationalist provocateurs. The mayor and police chief repeated this at press conferences. No evidence for the claim was ever produced, and every subsequent scholarly examination of the uprising has rejected it.

What the scholarly record finds instead is a neighborhood that had been under systematic pressure for more than a decade. Hough had transitioned rapidly from white to Black during the postwar years, as white residents moved to the suburbs and Black families, blocked from those same suburbs by real-estate covenants and lending discrimination, moved into Hough. Housing was overcrowded and substandard. Rents were high and landlords performed no maintenance. Merchants overcharged. Police harassment was routine and documented. The city's investment in the neighborhood was essentially zero.

The glass of water was the match. What burned had been waiting to burn for a long time.

The official communist-agitation narrative offered an explanation that required no examination of policy. It was comfortable and it was wrong. Cleveland would test a different approach the following year.