Clothesline used to strangle Emogene Harrington on December 2, 1965. Image courtesy of the Enquirer archives.
Though much of this collection, and therefore this blog, focuses on the life and works of Theodore M. Berry, it is also a veritable wellspring of primary resources on 20th century history especially concerning the Civil Rights Movement in Cincinnati. I have recently come across some rather illuminating material about the riots which took place in and around Avondale, a predominantly African American neighborhood north of downtown Cincinnati, in June of 1967.
Now, thanks to this collection we not only have a number of articles on the subject, but a series of firsthand accounts of the riots written by citizens of Avondale and correspondence to and from government officials and leaders in the Cincinnati African American community. It has gone down in local history that it was the controversial death sentence pronounced against Posteal Laskey Jr., an African American cab driver, which set off the riots. Laskey was accused and convicted of the murder of one woman, and was generally thought to have been the “Cincinnati Strangler,” a serial killer who assaulted four women in October of 1965 after asking for directions, or to speak to the caretakers of their buildings. He allegedly raped and strangled seven more from December 1965 through December 1966. The attacks sent waves of fear through the city as police were forced to admit they had no good leads on a suspect more than a year after the first victim was discovered. Laskey’s license plate number was given to the police in the wee hours of the morning on December 9th, 1966 when two people witnessed his car speeding away after an attempted attack of a woman in an apartment building on Court Street. Later that morning, the body of 81-year old Lula Kerrick was found strangled in the elevator of her apartment building on Ninth Street. Laskey was brought in for questioning and identified by six witnesses as the “slightly built black man” who had been connected with many of the attacks.
The case against Laskey, though strong in the minds of many, had issues. Chief among them was the distinct lack of physical evidence against him. The police found blood at the crime scenes which they presumed to have belonged to the murderer but when tested, Laskey’s blood type did not match it. To add to public doubt about Laskey’s guilt, 79-year old Anna Scales was assaulted in the basement of her apartment building on December 15th by a short, slender black man who had asked to see the caretaker. At the time, Laskey was locked safely away in police custody. Despite these problems, Laskey was found guilty by an all white jury of one count of first degree murder on April 13, 1967. He was sentenced to death by electrocution.
While protesting the sentence on June 11th, Laskey’s cousin, Peter Frakes, was arrested for loitering. On June 12th, further protests engulfed the Avondale area. Fires, break-ins, and looting resulted in huge amounts of property damage to businesses with and without the “Soul Brother” and “Soul Sister” signs which were supposed to keep rioters at bay. One person was killed during the riots, and 362 people were arrested.
The situation seems fairly cut and dried when it is put forth as I have just done – Laskey’s death sentence was the cause of the rioting. However, the documents in front of me tell a much more complex, and in some cases, incomprehensible tale. Many reports in the Berry collection cite causes for the rioting completely unrelated to Laskey’s sentencing, and some contend the violence was planned long before the verdict. In a report to Edgar May of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Steve Clapp, another OEO employee, reported that Dr. Bruce Green, president of the Cincinnati chapter of the NAACP and Myron Bush, an African American lawyer and City Councilman, received death threats for refusing to join the Negro Mediation Committee. Bush reported that he had been visited by a young male friend of his daughter’s who told him “This is a revolution. You’re either in or you’re out, and if you’re out, you can be disposed of.” Dr. Green reported a phone call about a Black Power “execution list” with his name at the top.
Dr. Green’s wife explained to OEO officials that she believed that the violent riot had been planned before Laskey was sentenced and that a group which gathered to hear Dr. Martin Luther King, who spoke about the importance of peace and non-violent protest, were told to meet the following day at the Abraham Lincoln statue on Rockdale Avenue. She also stated that she saw youths gearing up for the event by filling soda bottles with gasoline later that day. Most worryingly to Berry, Mrs. Green said that the note announcing the meeting was handed up by Clyde Vinegar, an official at the local Community Action Commission, which was an agency federally funded through Berry’s own Community Action Programs and the Office of Economic Opportunity. Dr. Green went on to state that he saw Vinegar with leaders of a militant sect of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) bragging about their participation in the Watts riots in Las Angeles in 1965, and that at a meeting with the NAACP Vinegar explained that “unity was necessary so that Negroes could ‘call a riot in a minute.’” According to Berry, the director of the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission, David McPhetters, Jr., was forcibly taken to the home of the local SNCC chairman and given a list of twenty “black power” demands for City Hall. Joseph Hall, Executive Director of the Urban League, told an OEO Civil Rights investigator that “at least six CAP employees were ‘organizers’ of the rebellion” though the Clapp report is careful to point out that Vinegar was never arrested and that there was no “solid evidence” of his involvement.
It seems that each report and piece of correspondence tells a different story from a different perspective and gives a new set of explanations for the violence. In his statement delivered to the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders on October 6th, 1967, Berry stated that:
“…violence is the result of at least three related factors:
1. The lack of access to the centers of power, whether these are represented by loca [sic], state, or national authorities and the consequent feeling that nobody cares about them.
2. The fact that their voices are not truly a part of the decision-making system which impacts their lives from a variety of quarters.
3. The fact that relief from their acute distress is not forthcoming either in the quantity or quality that they believe the situation demands. Change from their point of view, is simply not occurring fast enough.”
Though I am not at all sure of what really happened in either the case of the Cincinnati Strangler or during the 1967 riots, I am sure that anyone wishing to get a more complete, albeit more confusing, version of events should consult this collection when the Berry project is completed in 2012.
In 2010, the University of Cincinnati Libraries received a $61,287 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the Archives and Records Administration to fully process the Theodore M. Berry Collection in the Archives & Rare Books Library. All information and opinions published on the Berry project website and in the blog entries are those of the individuals involved in the grant project and do not reflect those of the National Archives and Records Administration. We gratefully acknowledge the support of NARA.
