This column is not written in Atlanta, but in a very real sense it is written about Atlanta. I have just left my hometown, Cleveland, Ohio. Headlines and television coverage have raised questions about the city that called itself, “The Best Location in the Nation.” To Watts, Harlem, Chicago and Omaha, another name has been added to the nation’s shame. It is “Hough Area,” about two square miles of decay where some 60,000 Negroes live.

To ex-Clevelanders who love its schools and churches, its people, faded Euclid Avenue and the fading Cleveland Indians, the ugly Cuyahoga River and the late-blooming developments, the jungle of “Rough Hough” is a sordid, cruel memory. Present day Clevelanders, crossing the city, skirt the region by the rapid transit on the south and the lakefront drive on the north. Even the important Chester Avenue route, which cuts right through the area, has the look of an antiseptic tube thrust through a diseased and festering organ.

And as I left the city this morning through similar tubes and bright, green suburbs, Hough still lay behind me.

It Can’t Happen Here

Since World War II, Hough changed from a pleasant mixed neighborhood into a Negro ghetto, strained ethnically by some pockets of impoverished Puerto Ricans and settlers from what is now called Appalachia. It became a bonanza for unscrupulous landlords and merchants.

The color line bound tightly into one cordon unsanitary for Negro families, criminals, youth eager for a job, addicts, little children and always the anonymous and aimless despairing people. Cleveland is 38 per cent Negro.

Government, labor and capital seemed unable or willing to grasp what was going on. And yet--

Out of 1,038 union apprentices in 22 building trades in the city, only 17 are Negroes; out of 2,140 Cleveland police only 130 are Negroes and only two of them rank higher than patrolmen; 85 percent of Cleveland’s Negroes live in census tracts that are 70 percent Negro; in government housing in the income bracket under $10,000, Negroes must wait longer than whites for houses, live in more substandard or overcrowded units than whites, and pay higher rates for equivalent housing.

The average Negro in Hough (or elsewhere) may not know the statistics, but he knows the facts.

A Priest Speaks Up

In March 1965, Father Albert Koklowsky, the pastor of Our Lady of Family parish, which is right in the heart of Hough, began to write “A Voice From the Slums” in the excellent diocesan newspaper, the Universe Bulletin. He is still there, and his frightened parishioners beg him not to leave. He will not, nor will the Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine.

Sixteen months ago, Father Koklowsky wrote: “I live in a ghetto. My people and I live in a festering junkyard. My ghetto is a creation of the Great Society which has forgotten how to love and how to pity. Here the almighty dollar takes precedence over human dignity.” Now, after a week of rioting and looting, four are dead including a young Negro mother, at least 50 wounded and 187 arrested. The property destruction runs to several millions. Reports on what went wrong and why law broke down are piling up.

These reports are not nearly as urgent as the reading of earlier reports on What Was Bound To Go Wrong. More than 30 years ago a young sociologist (now Msgr. Robert D. Nairn, president emeritus of St. John’s College) proved that another district-in-decay was costing the city many times what progressive and equitable reforms would cost.

When the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights studied Cleveland earlier this year, it opened the festering Hough region. Residents, as well as commission members, were appalled. In May, Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, a commission member and president of the University of Notre Dame, told me in Atlanta, “the conditions in Hough are the worst I’ve ever seen.”

Those responsible for the conditions accepted the reports -- and read them.

For years individual churches in the area often did what they could in the dirt and garbage and despair that is Hough. It was not enough, nor were the brave efforts of social workers and volunteer groups. City and federal agencies planned expensive urban programs that grew strangely unimaginative after downtown projects forced the deprived ones out to create a larger Hough.

In The Jungle

A Negro reporter, Robert McGruden, wrote a perceptive article in Sunday’s Plain Dealer, called “Who Cares?” It told of the anger of concerned Negroes who have picketed, sat-in and protested in order to get reforms, and now see only destruction in the looting and burning. It told of the convictions of many Negro residents who resent “the outsiders who stirred up the teen-age looters,” and then melted into the crowd.

But the article was no consolation for Cleveland’s whites. One woman put it directly, “I hate what is going on. No one can say he likes this, no one in his right mind. But you can’t talk to white people. You have to act to get their attention.”

She was not in the least condoning the rioting. She was simply stating a fact that the white man should have learned long ago: in a free nation, one race cannot hold indefinitely another race in subjection.

“Besides Prayer, Work To Do” That is what Bishop Clarence Issenmann told his people after he pleaded with them for prayers of guidance and reparation. “The riots hopefully are ended, thank God,” said the bishop, “but that does not mean that either the effects or the causes are solved satisfactorily.”

In words as appropriate for Atlanta as for Cleveland, he said: “What we do from now on is proof of our Christ-like charity in action, that the conditions provoking the eruption of these days, under which human beings must work and live in our midst, may cease to be true as quickly as possible.”

That is a blueprint for any bishop or priest, for any Catholic, for any human being.

Paul J. Hallinan

Archbishop of Atlanta