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Chapter 9: From Riots to Reconciliation: The Religious Interests Involved in Healing Cincinnati after Racial Unrest
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h 197 Chapter 9 From Riots to Reconciliation The Religious Interests Involved in Healing Cincinnati after Racial Unrest Anand Edward Sokhey The city of Cincinnati is no stranger to the spotlight, having been on the front lines of national debates involving morality and family values for decades. Battles over the distribution of Larry Flynt’s Huss s tler magazine, the display of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography, the establishment of parental advisory labels on music albums, and the passage of gay rights legislation have shaped the contemporary political culture of the city. Nestled along the Ohio River at the conw w fluence of the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, the greater Cinw w cinnati area has come to be regarded as conservative and traditional in its general outlook, a sentiment famously characterized by Mark Twain: “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it’s always twenty years behind the times” (Lazare 2001).1 In 2001 Cincinnati again received national and international media attention. This time, however, the extra press did not come as a result of the city’s proactive efforts on moral issues (Button, Rienzo, and Wald 1997; Sharp 1999). Instead, the world watched as Cincinnati played host to racial unrest. On April 7, 2001, the fatal shooting of a young, unarmed AfricanwAmerican man, Timothy Thomas, by white police officer Steven Roach sparked intense protesting and sporadic violence. Thomas was the fifteenth black man killed by the Cincinw w nati police since 1995 (Horn 2001c). His death came just weeks after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a local organization, the Cincinnati Black United Front (CBUF), filed a racial profiling suit in federal court against the Cincinnati Police Department (Adams 198 From Riots to Reconciliation 2001). The events bore at least a superficial resemblance to those that had occurred approximately ten years earlier in Los Angeles: an encounter between white police officers and a black man brought widespread racial tensions to the surface. Research Methods: The 2002–2003 Cincinnati Clergy Study I rely heavily on print accounts of the violence in Cincinnati and its aftermath, since most of the engagement of religious interests with racial reconciliation following the riots was hidden from the view of the general public. I also use a mail survey of clergy in Cincinw w natiwarea churches, temples, and mosques conducted in the fall and winter of 2002–20032 to document how Cincinnati religious leaders contributed to the resolution of the city’s racial problems in the first two years following the riots. Surveys were sent out to 539 houses of worship randomly selected from the list provided in the Cincinw w nati Bell Yellow Pages (this sample represents just under half of the listings). Three waves were mailed in order to obtain a sample large enough from which to draw substantive conclusions. In the end, 109 clergy returned surveys, resulting in a response rate of approxiw w mately 20 percent.3 Several of the returned surveys from the first two waves arrived with comments mentioning the location of the respondent clergy’s parish,andtheextenttowhichitsmembersweredirectlyaffected(or unaffected) by the rioting. These sentiments prompted a more thorw w ough investigation of the impact of proximity: Did being removed from the action allow clergy to be removed from these issues? After the data set was complete, I measured the distance of each respondw w ing clergyperson’s house of worship from a set address in the Overw thewRhine neighborhood, which was the epicenter of the violence (see appendix for variable coding). Finally, I also conducted extensive phone interviews with reliw w gious leaders from several Cincinnatiwarea churches under the conw w dition of anonymity. The clergy I chose to interview were selected to achieve variance both in terms of proximity to the riots and denomw w ination. Therefore, the interviews covered a broad geographic and theological range. These interviews provided valuable insights into clerical activity and the efficacy of the organizations active in the city concerning racial reconciliation after the riots. In this chapter, I inquire about the nature and patterns of involvement among community leaders, addressing three familiar [44.195.47.227] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:05 GMT) Anand Edward Sokhey 199 questions: (1) What was the level of local political engagement among Cincinnati’s religious leaders, and in what activities did they parw w ticipate? (2) What are the resources available from church, denomiw w national, and community sources that these religious leaders have at...