“Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last!” Nope, not the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This time it’s a frumpy white man, depicted by editorial cartoonist Jim Borgman in the July 22 Cincinnati Enquirer, facing Cincinnati’s new National Underground Railroad Freedom Center with arms raised, unshackled from his ball and chain of “‘Racist City’ stigma.” As the cartoon suggests, Cincinnati–scene of urban unrest three years ago following the shooting death of a black teenager by police–still doesn’t get it.

The $110 million Freedom Center, billed as a “museum of conscience” and a “beacon of freedom for all people,” opened August 23 with ceremonies featuring a Who’s Who of celebrities, First Lady Laura Bush, national media play and a $1,000-a-plate fundraising dinner with 1,500 paying guests. The ceremonies did not go by without comment, however. As guests dined on gold-rimmed china and linen from Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s canceled wedding, 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. Children’s Hospital, ranked eighth in the nation in pediatrics, lies in the center of the zone.

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. A boycott of downtown travel and tourism, initiated in 2001 by a coalition of several groups, continues to this day. This past March the Center for Constitutional Rights called the boycott a “focal point of national attention in part because the fight against police brutality and misconduct, economic apartheid and political disenfranchisement in Cincinnati is one of the most important racial justice struggles in the country.”

To his credit, Spencer Crew, CEO and executive director of the Freedom Center, says he wants the center to address these issues. But when asked how this might be accomplished, he offers the Freedom Center as a space for reflection and dialogue. Given Cincinnati’s troubling racial climate, the answer appears evasive and more in line with the city-corporate stance of ignoring the boycott by waiting it out. City and corporate figures may say they are working to bring about change, but they have never sat down with boycotters to discuss their demands. That Cincinnati would build a Freedom Center now and then call for conversation strikes many as hypocritical.

In fact, corporations are throwing big money at the Freedom Center. Just as environmentally dangerous corporations underwrite Earth Day celebrations to greenwash their public image, so too are freedom-dubious corporations jumping to support the Freedom Center to improve their market share. Willing to spend millions to commemorate a struggle of the past, these forces show little interest in addressing the inequities of the present.

No one opposes a museum’s recounting the sordid history of slavery and the underground railroad resistance against it. But the Freedom Center glosses over serious mention of the events of April 2001 and the continuing aftermath. In the center’s designated “dialogue zone” visitors may “write” their thoughts and reflections, as long as they stay within the limits of the magnetic words provided by the center. Even more revealing is the Freedom Center’s recently named “100 Everyday Freedom Heroes,” a list that includes people one would expect, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela but that suffers from inexplicable absences, including Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Ella Baker and Malcolm X. Who makes the list? Cincinnati’s own corporate mogul Carl Lindner, CEO of the American Financial Group, chief owner of the Cincinnati Reds, former owner of the Cincinnati Enquirer and former CEO of Chiquita, which under his direction was the subject of investigations alleging bribery, tax evasion schemes and pesticide practices that harmed and sterilized banana workers.

The center’s architecture and approach to exhibits, while competently handled, seem to play it safe for a setting investigating slavery and the struggle against it. This is far from the gripping architecture of the Holocaust museum in Washington, which powerfully reinforces its subject. Everywhere one looks the materials, colors, details and displays are muted, antiseptic. Nothing challenges. Meanwhile, the docents explain proudly that the imported-marble facades will bleach white over time, a chemical process that serves as an ironic metaphor for Cincinnati’s identity and its new museum of conscience.

The urban rebellion in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood that followed the April 7 death of yet another black man, Timothy Thomas, at the hands of police shocked city residents. Mayor Charlie Luken lamented the “violence” as “unthinkable” and at a press conference pleaded for it to stop. At times like these it is vital to think clearly about how social problems, especially violence, are defined. In Cincinnati the media identify the core problem as “police-community” relations. But reducing the myriad and interrelated forms of violence in the inner city to a problem of police-community relations misses an opportunity to understand such issues in a deeper and more systemic sense. We need to understand how violence has been waged against people of color for a very long time.

Since the late 1940s a series of moves on the part of government and the private sector have reinforced an American form of apartheid. Ushering in the explosion of the suburbs for the white middle class, the Federal Housing Authority’s liberalization of the mortgage market, its regulations favoring new construction of single-family detached houses and its appraisal process helped insure that neighborhoods continued to house the same social and racial classes. Under “urban renewal,” many black neighborhoods were razed to make way for freeways, sports arenas and corporate redevelopment. Global restructuring of the economy then gutted the black working class’s job base in the manufacturing sector.

Add to these the rise to power of neoconservatives, who divest the state of responsibility for meeting social needs, evidenced by rollbacks of affirmative action, the elimination of welfare and cutbacks in housing, combined with more punitive measures like increases in police forces and prison-building and a continued militarized economy.

The “hypersegregation” of blacks in the inner cities is now a structural reality. As sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton note in American Apartheid, “One-third of all African Americans in the United States live under conditions of intense racial segregation…. No other group in the contemporary United States comes close to this level of isolation within urban society.”

Recent census data show that Cincinnati is the ninth most segregated city in the United States, with Over-the-Rhine, about 77 percent black, being its poorest neighborhood. This extreme social and spatial isolation exacerbates the effects of poverty, making it difficult to sustain neighborhood institutions and social organizations. These trends take a particular form in Cincinnati. Consider that in 1996, at the request of an alliance of corporate, business and city power, the Urban Land Institute came to Over-the-Rhine bearing gifts of a homeownership agenda for a community where approximately 75 percent of the population have incomes well below the reach of the rental market, let alone homeownership. Consider Cincinnati Pops director Erich Kunzel’s “dream” to build the Greater Cincinnati Fine Arts and Education Center near Music Hall, which, after originally promising no displacement, called for the removal of the Drop Inn Center, the area’s largest homeless shelter and lead institution in the Over-the-Rhine People’s Movement.

And consider the motion passed by the City Planning Commission last July not to fund additional low-income housing units on Vine Street in Over-the-Rhine, a motion that discriminates against a particular race and class and ignores the city’s own Consolidated Plan, which identifies the need for 30,000 affordable housing units. Further, city records show that between January 1995 and the first quarter of 2000, 60 percent of the $8 million invested by the Department of Neighborhood Services in housing programs in Over-the-Rhine supported market-rate rather than affordable housing development.

Last, consider the mayor’s about-face decision last summer not to support the $4.5 million tax-credit package of ReSTOC, a community-based, nonprofit housing cooperative, intended to finance construction of economically mixed housing in Over-the-Rhine, a project that qualified for state funding. The mayor then forced ReSTOC to sell one of the buildings in its package to a private owner to develop dotcom enterprises.

These examples of institutional violence have one thing in common: the way they market Over-the-Rhine as an idealized version of itself, effectively erasing it as a place for poor people of color. Revitalization efforts are selling an image that has no place for the poor who actually live there. “Development” means attracting people of higher incomes to live and play and work.

I am not suggesting that the neighborhood keep out newcomers, including people of higher means. The point is that the city fights to deny resources to community-based organizations while promoting renovation that caters to white, wealthier residents. And in this process, the buildings and urban ambience are sold like a stage set to folks who want to consume an urban night out. Over-the-Rhine is being Disneyfied, and this requires pushing people who don’t fit the postcard image out of the way. No wonder Over-the-Rhine residents feel resentful.

Gentrification is often advocated as an antisegregation measure. This may be true in the short run, before poor residents are displaced. But community development today is rarely conceived outside the ideology of corporatism, with its lingo of public-private partnerships, enterprise and empowerment zones, tax incentives, and abatements and deregulatory legislation, all of which are ploys to advance privatization and subordinate social movements to the interests of business and the profit system. Community development has been reduced to a kind of plea bargaining with the powers that be, and thus what gets constructed as hope within the community is the desire to have a little more money funneled in its direction. That community institutions persist at all in these circumstances is an amazing testament to their perseverance in meeting desperate need.

Urban disruptions like the rebellion in Cincinnati are indictments of entrenched patterns of police-community relations and community development. Gentrification that produces displacement is an act of violence. Economic development that neglects to provide jobs for Over-the-Rhine residents is an act of violence. Building stadiums and supporting corporations at public expense while closing inner-city schools are acts of violence. We should not be surprised when communities erupt in righteous anger against the bonds of their oppression.