By Bridget Mackie

Reimagining the Cuyahoga River Fires

By Bridget Mackie

In 1952, Carl Stokes was working as a liquor enforcement agent in Toledo, Ohio. He had come a long way from his childhood in government-subsidized housing in Cleveland’s East Side. After dropping out of high school at seventeen and joining the U.S. Army, he traveled to Alabama and Germany, places that instilled in him a desire to become educated. Once discharged, he went back to complete his high school diploma and eventually enrolled in West Virginia State University. There, Stokes met a professor who inspired him to pursue a better education back in Cleveland at Western Reserve University. It was in Cleveland that Stokes began working part-time and put aside his education for the material gains that a better job could get him. Using some connections within the Ohio government, Stokes got a job as a liquor enforcement agent.

On November 3, 1952, the same year he was working as a liquor enforcement agent, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught on fire. The resulting damage was estimated to cost over $1.3 million and included the destruction of three tugboats, the dock of the Great Lakes Towing Company, and the Jefferson Avenue Bridge. Despite the enormous damage, this was not the fire that would be ingrained into the public consciousness; in fact, the fire of 1952 was not covered outside of Cleveland at all.

When most people hear about the Cuyahoga River Fire, the one they are talking about is the fire in 1969. This was the fire that caught the attention of a nation with growing environmental fervor. This was the fire that led to the passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act. This begs

the question: Why would one fire become a national rallying cry while the other was barely remembered? All told, the Cuyahoga River has caught on fire at least thirteen times in recorded history, between 1868 to 1969. Much of the newspaper coverage on these early fires focused on how expensive the damages were. This is due to the attitudes toward the Cuyahoga River at the time. In the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, Cleveland was a city built on industries like steel and oil, both of which are heavy polluters. Because of the Cuyahoga’s proximity to industry, it was valued for its uses as a shipping route, not as an ecosystem that deserved protection. The Cuyahoga became a dumping ground for industrial waste via the sewer system, which made it one of the most polluted rivers in the United States.

It is important to note that many business owners and members of Cleveland’s government tried to address the pollution on the Cuyahoga River, suggesting measures to reduce the amount of industrial waste that entered the Cuyahoga and starting initiatives to clean the oil slicks off the river. The goal of these initiatives was to prevent fires from disrupting shipping along the river and to keep businesses safe; clearly, the primary motivations of these initiatives were economic and not environmental.

Towards the middle of the twentieth century, the economy of Cleveland, along with those of other industrial cities, began to shift as automation in manufacturing contributed to a decline in jobs within the industry. Between 1952 and 1969, the years between the two final fires, Cleveland lost some 60,000 jobs in manufactur-

ing. As factory jobs went away, the population began to move outward from the city center into the surrounding suburbs. The deindustrialization and decentralization of Cleveland meant that many citizens living in the suburbs could look at the pollution within the city from a different perspective.

In 1967, fifteen years after he was employed as a liquor enforcement agent and nine years after completing his law degree, Stokes was elected mayor of Cleveland, becoming the first Black mayor of a major U.S. city. The issues the incoming Stokes administration faced were numerous. Air and water quality in the city were abysmal, Cleveland’s East Side was facing a worsening housing crisis, and the previous year a riot in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Hough resulted in the deaths of four people. These were the problems Stokes sought to address; he wanted to transform Cleveland from a rapidly decaying industrial city to a thriving service city.

The day after the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, Stokes took the local Cleveland media on a tour of the river, emphasizing its heavily polluted nature. Stokes saw the fire as a way to finally turn attention towards Cleveland’s many problems. His goal was not only to reduce the pollution on the river, but to show how pollution had infiltrated much of Cleveland and that many of the city’s problems were interconnected.

By 1969, the predominantly Black East Side of Cleveland, where Stokes grew up, had reached a breaking point. Neighborhoods like Hough faced a tremendous degree of urban decay. Broken glass littered the streets along with other refuse, ongoing rat infestations made housing situations unbearable, and many residents faced rising rents despite poor housing conditions.

In addition, Hough was racked with two race riots, the first in 1966, which resulted in the deaths of four people, and the second in 1968, which caused the deaths of seven people. These riots exemplified the tension escalated by the degrading urban environment within Cleveland and brought national attention to the city. Unfortunately, many government officials had flawed ideas of how to deal with the urban crisis. Stokes’ mayoral predecessor, Ralph Locher, spoke with a senate subcommittee after the 1966 riots and deflected most of the blame of the riots onto the residents of Hough themselves. He argued that “we must not forget—nor sweep under the rug—the problems of the individual unaccustomed to urban life.” The sentiment that it is the fault of inner-city residents for their condition proved particularly hard to dispel.

Many residents in the suburbs of Cleveland viewed the degradation of the inner city with sadness and disgust. These suburbanites saw pollution in the city as a problem necessitating action, signifying how the relationship between those living on the periphery of the city and the downtown had changed. Now, suburban Clevelanders, with a safe distance from the problems of the inner city, felt comfortable enough to demand change.

Though suburban residents sought to improve conditions in the inner city of Cleveland, many, like Locher, expressed that the problems of Hough were the fault of its inhabitants. It was easy for these citizens to look at the unrest within the inner city of Cleveland and compare it to their relatively stable, predominantly white suburbs and conclude that the people were the problem. The white residents of Cleveland used these racist sentiments to blame Black residents of Cleveland for the deteriorating state of the East Side. One white woman wrote to Mayor Stokes about the issues in Hough, writing, “Why don’t these people living there take a broom and shovel and clean up their yards instead of throwing garbage out their windows?” This misunderstanding of the systemic nature of these environmental issues led many of the early programs in Hough to focus on educating the residents on proper trash disposal. This ignored the broader, more complex issues relating to the deterioration of adequate housing, and the need for funds to help clean up Hough.

Stokes had a unique position as both mayor of Cleveland and a former resident of government-subsidized housing in the East Side. He knew what it felt like to “[grow] up poor and Black in Cleveland,” and he knew the benefits of federally-funded housing. Stokes understood that solving the problems in Cleveland required viewing the city as an organism where everything was connected. While giving a testimony to the Civil Rights Commission in 1966, a year before he became mayor, Stokes stated that “metropolitan Cleveland’s citizens must be awake to the facts that unchecked and uncontrolled disease does not stop at the city boundary; nor do the rats that often carry the diseases know they are to stop there; water and air pollution affects all of the county.” Stokes argued that these issues associated with urban crisis were not exclusive to the inner cities. They could spread if the

root cause was not addressed. As mayor, Stokes sought to draw attention to this idea after the Cuyahoga River fire, which became a way to intertwine the hot button environmental issues, like water and air pollution, to the less glamorous ones, like housing and urban decay.

The Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969 did indeed draw attention to Cleveland. Original reporting on the fire may have been confined to local news, but subsequent essays published in Time in the following month and National Geographic the following year brought the Cuyahoga into the national conversation, stressing its environmental significance. Unfortunately, much of this news coverage alienated Cleveland and treated it like an urban wasteland, characteristic of the declining industrial city.

Stokes perceived this messaging and fought against it. He called on his brother, Louis Stokes, a representative for part of Cleveland in Congress, to help him obtain federal funds to mitigate the pollution in the Cuyahoga. In the fall of 1970, Louis Stokes drafted a bill aimed at utilizing the Army Corps of Engineers to investigate flood control and water quality on the Cuyahoga River as well as find ways to mitigate these issues. Eventually, the resolution passed, but the Army Corps of Engineers focused their efforts primarily on flood control rather than water quality. The federal government was still reluctant to focus on the River as being anything other than industrial.

The same year Louis Stokes drafted that bill, the first Earth Day celebrations were held across the country. Many Clevelanders attended local marches and talks that called for federal legislation to reduce air and water pollution.

In a statement to press the week before Earth Day, Stokes expressed concern that focusing on air and water pollution would overshadow what he viewed as the more pressing issue of poverty in Cleveland. He stated, “I am fearful that the priorities on air and water pollution may be at the expense of what the priorities of the country ought to be: proper housing, adequate food and clothing.” He was not alone in this sentiment; many civil rights activists were similarly concerned that the issues of environmentalism appealed to a white middle-class while ignoring the problems in the predominantly Black East Side neighborhoods. Those white suburban environmentalists were viewing the environmental issues of the city from a distance; they had no personal experience with the polluted banks of the Cuyahoga River or the rat-infested homes on the East Side.

This dilemma raises concerns about the proper way to address environmental issues. On one hand, any progress, however little, might be deemed a success. But on the other hand, what are the little gains worth if other, larger problems persist? Stokes fought hard for people to recognize that the problems within Cleveland, and in many deindustrialized cities, were connected with the environment, and that they should be viewed and addressed as a whole. The Clean Water Act was eventually passed in 1972, though Stokes left office in 1971. Unfortunately, many of the problems Stokes sought to fix went unsolved. As he predicted, the problems of pollution often overshadowed the poverty of the downtown. In the decade that followed Stokes’ administration, scores of environmental legislation were passed, but the economic crisis within Cleveland worsened. Today, Cleveland has transformed from an industrial city to a service city, as is evidenced by the growth of the health industry and college campuses within Cleveland. And though the Cuyahoga is often seen as a triumph of environmental activism— the river now has populations of fish living in it—Cleveland remains one of the most impoverished cities in the United States, with about 30% of its residents living below the poverty line. And yes, one could argue the issues of poverty are more complex and elusive than reducing pollution in a river, but it confronts us with the question: which issues are we more willing to face? H

Art by Samantha Clancy