[6] Residents of the Hough neighborhood complained extensively of inferior and racially segregated public schools, poor delivery of welfare benefits, a lack of routine garbage collection, no street cleaning, and too few housing inspections.

[9] This was not unusual: The political culture of Cleveland had long been dominated by the mayor, city council, big business, the larger newspapers, and a few powerful white ethnicities.

[17][18][b] In April 1966, the United States Commission on Civil Rights held hearings in Cleveland, during which time it gathered extensive evidence about employment discrimination, police brutality, poor housing, ongoing school segregation, and racism in the community.

[13] The Seventy-Niner's Café[22] was a Jewish-owned bar located on the southeast corner of E. 79th Street and Hough Avenue, and popular with African American residents of the community.

[23] Seventy-Niner's suffered from a number of problems, including drug dealing, the sale of stolen goods, and prostitution,[24] and the owners had begun barring certain individuals from the establishment.

[42][45] Locher initially resisted pleas to send in the Ohio Army National Guard,[46] but Cleveland City Council members John W. Kellogg and Edward F. Katalinas both pressured him to do so.

[48] Most African American residents of Cleveland believed Locher to be completely out of touch with the black community,[1] and the rioting spread outside the Hough neighborhood on the night of July 19–20.

[49] Another death occurred on July 19 when 36-year-old African American Percy Giles was shot in the back of head by a Cleveland police officer according to witnesses at E. 86th Street and Hough Avenue at about 8:30 PM.

[50][j] A white male, Joseph Brozich, was assaulted by a small group of African American youth at E. 105th and Superior Avenue and suffered minor cuts and abrasions.

[20] During the day on July 20, Mayor Locher spoke to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and asked for the federal government's assistance in rebuilding Hough after the riots.

[7] Throughout the day and night, Cleveland firefighters continued to respond to blazes, although they moved in convoys and were protected by National Guardsmen armed with rifles and machine guns.

[7] Throughout the night, police and the firefighting personnel were harassed by hundreds of false alarms, which tended to disperse their forces and allow crowds to form and continue the rioting and looting.

[58] She reported that the police, city hall, and unnamed federal agencies had extensive evidence that "points to certain groups and certain individuals as the suspected plotters" behind the riots.

[58] O'Donnell placed the blame for the riots on welfare, which encouraged women to have large numbers of illegitimate children and allowed unemployed husbands to "sponge" off their welfare-supported wives.

[65] Mayor Locher also decided not to ask the governor for additional National Guard troops,[66] saying that the riot situation had improved over the past two nights.

[64] Chief Wagner continued to claim that black nationalists were fomenting the riot, and specifically named the leaders of the JFK House, a privately run African American community center, for orchestrating the firebombing campaign.

[64] The first trouble during the night began at 7:20 PM, when a jeering crowd of about 30 individuals gathered at E. 79th and Hough Avenue as the National Guard, bayonets fixed, told an African American man to move his car from the intersection.

[68] Shortly after the Toney killing, a crowd of about 125 white people gathered at the foot of Murray Hill in the Little Italy neighborhood on the far eastern border of Cleveland.

It quoted unnamed National Guard sources who said that law enforcement had received hundreds of calls for help from individuals claiming to be besieged by mobs or firebombers.

They were aided and abetted willingly or otherwise by misguided people of all ages and colors, many of whom are avowed believers in violence and extremism, and some of whom are either members of, or officers in the Communist Party.

"[78] At a press conference on July 26, Seltzer stated, "The grand jury saw enough to realize the violence was organized and planned because of specific targets singled out for burning and looting.

The report also made several recommendations, including stronger enforcement of gambling, liquor, and prostitution laws; more frequent housing code inspections; improved garbage collection; and much greater and swifter efforts at urban renewal.

[77] The report also listed too-dense housing, substandard housing, overly high rents, a lack of neighborhood recreational facilities, excessive food prices, substandard educational facilities, a lack of jobs, welfare (which encouraged excessive pregnancies), and common-law marriage (which allowed men to escape their marital and child-rearing duties) as social evils which allowed frustration and bitterness to arise among African Americans.

[82] Mayor Locher praised the grand jury for "the guts to fix the approximate cause which has been hinted at for a long time, that subversive and Communist elements in our community were behind the rioting.

Carl Stokes and many African American community leaders called the grand jury report a whitewash designed to insulate and absolve the Locher administration.

As early as 1972, historians Estelle Zannes and Mary Jean Thomas pointed out that no evidence existed to implicate either black nationalists or communist organizations in the Hough Riots.

[38] In 2003, noted Ohio historian George W. Knepper called the grand jury report a "simplistic and comfortable conclusion" the nearly all-white city administration was more than willing to accept.

Instead of scratching at the deep economic and political grievances that led to a mass group of people to express their frustrations through violence, the official Cuyahoga County explanation was that the commies did it.

[99] Court of Common Pleas Judge John J. McMahon dismissed second-degree murder charges against Patsy C. Sabetta, driver of the car in which LaRiche rode, for lack of evidence.

[100] Mayor Locher came under near-constant media attack in 1966 and 1967 for his failure to revitalize Cleveland and address the worsening racial tension in the city in the wake of the Hough Riots.