Abstract

Cincinnati's 'Beacon'

The author comments on Cincinnati and its new National Underground Railroad Freedom Center which opened August 23. A few blocks away about 200 gathered on Fountain Square to view "The People's Freedom Center: A Living Museum of the Missing Pages of History and Contemporary Struggle." The photographs, paintings, posters and banners, which show how the fight for freedom among Cincinnati's poor, blacks and other disenfranchised groups is a constant battle, rebuked the government/corporate orthodoxy that the Freedom Center signals all is well in Cincinnati. In fact, Cincinnati remains the country's eighth most segregated large city. Nine blocks from the Freedom Center lie communities of devastating poverty. Police brutality and racial profiling occur too frequently. Homeless men, women and children survive amid changing city policies that turn toward the punitive. In May 2003 the City Council passed its second law on panhandling, this time requiring panhandlers to register and carry a license. In November 2004 the National Coalition for the Homeless ranked Cincinnati as the "third meanest city in the United States," up from sixth last year. In the city's Empowerment Zone, composed of nine neighborhoods primarily of color, the black infant mortality rate ranges from 24 to 30 per thousand births, compared with a rate of 10 per thousand for the rest of the county in which Cincinnati sits. Because these conditions persist, a class-action racial profiling lawsuit was filed against the city in 2000; it resulted in the historic 2001 "Collaborative Agreement" among the Cincinnati Black United Front, the ACLU, the City of Cincinnati and the Fraternal Order of Police to improve police-community relations.