OHIO COMMUNITY GATHERS ON ANNIVERSARYOF 1968 RIOTS
A corner of the AKRON — library on Vernon Odom Boulevard filled Tuesday night with the memories of a most violent night in Akron’s past.
Gloria J. Williams was restocking the shelves in the library on that hot afternoon in July 1968. Her manager sent everyone home early.
Williams, 15, at the time, stepped out onto the street as the National Guard came storming down from South High School, where Miller South is now. She glanced at black kids to her right as a tear gas canister flew over her head.
“I thought I was on fire. My skin was beet red,” said Williams. “I actually felt like I was on fire.”
It was 50years ago, almost to the hour, when the 1968 riots erupted alongwhatwas then Wooster Avenue. The crowd Tuesday gathered at the Akron-Summit County Public Library branch to hear historian Dave Lieberth put the violence in historical context. Then they shared personal experiences, confronting the past together.
As Lieberth’s presentation wound downand the crowd shed its memories, elected leaders and everyday citizens stood up and committed themselves to empowering youth, so that Akron may never relive the worst of July 1968.
Lieberth started, as the former chair of the Summit County Historical Society often does, at the beginning.
Itwas the hottestweek in perhaps the hottest year, at least politically. TheVietnam War would claim a record number of American soldiers. Assassins would take the lives of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
AndAkron, in 1968, “was a citywhere blacks andwhites lived separately,” Lieberth explained.
The city, like others across America, was primed for unrest after a century of slavery followed by a century of segregation and discrimination. In the mid 19th century, Lieberth said that Akron — home to fierce abolitionist John Brown — had been a “sanctuary city” for slaves fleeing the South. The men who hunted them found themselves hunted in places like Akron and Hudson.
But by 1900, sentiment shifted in the city. In August that year, a lynch mob burned downcity hallwhen they found an empty jail cell where they’d expected to find a black man to hang.
By the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan controlled much of City Council and the school board.
By 1968, blacks who’d migrated to the North for opportunity, held only 12 of the city’s 2,000 best paying jobs in the rubber industry. The cafeteria at Firestone, a major employer, was segregated. Blacks trying to eat were told to wait in line until they tired and went home, or given a seat but never served.
The metropolitan housing authority packed blacks in one neighborhood and whites in another. Classified ads in the newspaper advertised housing based on skin tone.
Lieberth’s presentation, aided by 50-year-old Akron Beacon Journal photos, recounted with an urgent pace howhundreds of police and National Guard troops stormed Wooster Avenue, night after night, forming a wedge that pushed blacksoff the streets and into paddy wagons.
By week’s end, 400 were arrested, dozens injured. Fifty-seven Molotov cocktails crashed through windows and 1,000 soldiers occupied the city as a curfew fell at night.
“There was even a machine gun placement set up on Wooster Avenue. Look at the size of those bullets,” Lieberth said, clicking the button on his slideshow to reveal a young soldier aiming at the crowds of black people from inside a city fire station.
“Really,” ashockedwoman said in the audience.
“Collective violence is the measure of the extent of frustration of people who see no other way to be heard,” Lieberthsaid, quotingEdwin Lively, who chaired a commission assembled byMayor John Ballard to determine the riots’ causes and develop solutions to prevent future unrest.
Toward the end of the presentation— which was attended by Mayor Dan H or rig an and some of his staff, Akron City Council members Russ Neal, Linda Omobien and Veronica sims, witnesses to the riots and curious residents — Lieberth turned the microphone to John Roberts, the last of the ‘‘elders ofWoosterAvenue,’’ a group of 11 residents who convinced Ballard to lift the curfew, withdrawthe troops and allow black leaders to restore order.
“John’s the last surviving member,” Lieberth said, forced to pause until applause subsided, “of that group of 11 men who met with the mayor.”
Roberts then challenged the community to finish what Martin LutherKing Jr. started but could not finish himself.
“I want each and every one of you to leave here with the drive to give the young people — I don’t care what color they are, I don’t care, it doesn’t matter — but get them to understand the dream that Martin Luther King foresaw,” Roberts said.