A Noose on the 11th Floor. A Slur on the Way Out. And a Finding of No Racial Animus.

News / Civil Rights — REAL POWER.TV

On October 24th, 2023, a painting crew reported to the eleventh floor of 776 Euclid Avenue and found a body hanging.

Not a real one. A human-shaped cardboard cutout, strung up by a noose, four words written across the chest of it. “My motivation to work.”

The men worked for O’s Versatility Construction, a Black-owned subcontractor. They told Cleveland police that white workers on that job had been calling them the n-word for months. They packed their tools and said they wouldn’t be back. According to the police report, as they walked out, a white worker on that floor called after them. The report records the word he used. It’s the one you’re already thinking of.

Police classified it as ethnic intimidation and aggravated menacing.

The general contractor, Cleveland Construction, investigated. And announced the display did not appear to be motivated by racial animus. It said the man responsible worked for a subcontractor and asked that he not come back. When a trade publication asked how it reached that conclusion, the company declined to answer.

Count who paid. One man lost access to one jobsite. A Black-owned company lost the work, the payroll, the relationship. The project lost nothing. Not a day. Not a dollar.

Glen Shumate wouldn’t have been surprised. He’s executive vice president of the Construction Employers Association, and he founded the Contractors Assistance Association to open this industry to Black and women contractors. He told News 5 he’s seen racism on these sites himself, and that many of the five hundred employers he represents have reported the same.

His remedy was training, education, and accountability before the fact.

Cleveland Construction’s statement said it already runs exactly that. Toolbox talks. Regular education on its zero-tolerance policy.

They had the training. They still had the noose. Then they had a finding of no racial animus.

That isn’t laziness. Ohio built a law that cannot bite.

Ohio’s hate crime statute is called ethnic intimidation. It hasn’t been amended since March 19th, 1987. It reaches five offenses, and assault is not one of them. You can beat a man in this state because he’s Black and the hate crime law does not touch it. When it does apply, it raises the charge one degree. The ceiling is a fifth-degree felony.

Twelve months. That’s the whole thing.

So when a Cleveland officer wrote ethnic intimidation on that report, he wasn’t being lenient. He reached for the strongest tool this state gave him. A year, at the outside, for a noose.

And Cleveland has been under federal supervision on exactly this for half a century. The Shield Club sued over hiring in 1972, when this city was thirty-eight percent Black and its police force was eight percent. A consent decree followed in 1977.

Here’s where fifty years of that landed. Cleveland Fire today is seventy-four percent white and thirteen percent Black. The city hired thirty-one firefighters last September.

Not one of them was Black.

Then Symeon Sylvester Williams Sr. Thirty-nine years old, a Cleveland fire cadet, dead at the training academy on May 16th, 2025, first reported as a medical emergency during a fitness exercise. This past May his sister filed a wrongful death suit against the city and an academy lieutenant, alleging he was hazed for his race and his age, and that it stemmed from racial animus against Black cadets and firefighters in that department.

Hold onto this line from the complaint. Williams was one of only two African American cadets in his class. After the other was removed, he was the only one left.

The city expressed condolences and hasn’t addressed the allegations. Council called them disturbing and demanded a transparent investigation. That case hasn’t been decided and I won’t decide it for a court.

But you understand why a Black family in this city didn’t wait for the official finding.

These things end in money and silence. Two other Northern Ohio nooses made the record in the last fifteen years. Both settled. Both gone. So every new one arrives looking like the first anybody ever heard of. Fifty-five have been reported at forty American worksites since 2015, and the federal government keeps a data category to count them.

You don’t build a spreadsheet for something that happens once.

They come one at a time. That’s the design. One crew off one floor. One sister filing papers a year later. By the time the next lands, nobody connects the two.

We keep meeting these things separately. Separately is how you lose.

Here’s what’s in our hands, and it’s two fights.

The first is at 601 Lakeside. Every major project in this town runs on something public. Abatements. Public land. Public dollars. Council attaches community benefits agreements to that money. And none of it touched this. A contractor can preside over a noose on a publicly supported jobsite, investigate itself, clear itself, walk one man off the property, and keep every dollar.

An abatement is not a right. Nobody earns one with a rendering and a groundbreaking. City land sold at a number no private buyer would ever be offered is not a transaction. It’s a gift, and every gift is optional. And it isn’t the city’s money. It’s ours, out of the same Glenville and Hough pockets funding the schools getting carved up to pay for it.

So if our money builds it, our land sits under it, our children’s schools pay for it, and a Black man still can’t work that site without a rope on the wall, then we aren’t just being excluded.

We’re subsidizing our own exclusion.

Council doesn’t need a new law to fix that. The power is already in the vote. Put it in the agreement. A documented hate incident on a publicly supported jobsite triggers a report to the city, a review the contractor does not run, and a consequence attached to the money. A company investigating itself and clearing itself is not an investigation. It’s a press release with a timestamp.

And when a developer says he can’t sign that, Council has one word it almost never uses.

No.

Not as a threat. As the ordinary operation of a legislature deciding what it will buy with public money. If a company won’t protect the people who put the building up, Cleveland shouldn’t pay to help them put it up. That isn’t radical. That’s a city with self-respect.

The second fight is in Columbus. House Bill 569 would have widened who that 1987 law protects and forced departments to report the data. It went nowhere, because ignoring it cost nobody anything.

Bring it back with a Cleveland address on it, and that jobsite written into the language. Our Legislative Black Caucus has members representing the corridor those men were painting in. Put it on the floor. Make leadership schedule it or explain in public why they won’t. Then make somebody stand up, name and district attached, and vote against protecting workers from a noose.

Ida B. Wells started counting because the people holding the pen were never going to write it down. That hasn’t changed.

What changed is that we know exactly which desks the pen sits on. One at 601 Lakeside. One in Columbus.

No company named in this piece is a client of Strategic Resources Consulting.

If any of this is sitting heavy with you, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is there any hour of the day.

Who answers when a noose shows up on a job this city helped pay for? We’ll keep asking. Subscribe and follow this one with us. → realpower.tv