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The plundering and burning continued after daylight and throughout the week. Under a greasy pall of smoke, fire trucks shuttled furiously through the streets, as often as not in response to false alarms. Several apartment buildings were burned. A store run by Goodwill Industries, a charitable organization chartered to help the handicapped, was ransacked and burned. The 79ers Bar, where it all began, was destroyed by a fire bomb. To no one's surprise, the regional urban-renewal office was wrecked and looted. Indeed, as one observer put it, Hough's busy arsonists were pursuing their own program of "instant urban renewal."
Odd Enforcement. Mayor Locher decried the Hough upheaval as "shameful and irresponsible," then vacillated until late in the second day before he requested 1,500 National Guardsmen to patrol the district. By the time they arrived, about midnight, the mobs had spectacularly refuted Chief Wagner's ebullient assurance: "This situation will not get out of hand because I've got my men there to see that it won't."
Wagner's men were there all right—and they were so conscious of the possibility that they might be accused of riot-incited brutality that they maintained a general attitude of scrupulous courtesy—at times almost to the point of being ineffectual. In the daylight hours following the first upheaval, officers rubbed their shotguns and watched placidly while leisurely looters emptied the shelves of riot-smashed stores. When one tearful shopkeeper begged the cops to stop the thieves from walking away with his livelihood, they shrugged and repeated what Chief Wagner himself had told reporters: "We don't want to increase the tension by making arrests in the middle of a riot." During the arrests that were made, at least one cop seized the opportunity to line his pockets. He cornered a Negro woman suspected of looting, frisked her until she was all but bare from the waist up, found some money and took it, with the explanation: "That's stolen property, you know."
J.F.K. House. In another ugly confrontation, at a police and National Guard roadblock, 21 bullets were sprayed into a car driven by a Negro named Henry Townes, 22. Townes's 16-year-old wife, their seven-month-old baby and her four-year-old son by a previous marriage were all wounded, and a National Guard captain was hit by a ricocheting bullet.
As the week went by, the toll of destruction reached millions; four lives had been lost, 46 people injured, and 187 arrested. The cause, Locher and Wagner hinted persistently, lay in an organized conspiracy. Cleveland does have its Black Muslim Temple of Islam (No. 18). There was at least one representative of the pro-Castro Revolutionary Action Movement in town. A group called the J.F.K. House—for Jomo Freedom Kenyatta and John F. Kennedy—is suspected of running a Hough-headquartered training school in street warfare.