Boycotters demand amnesty for people arrested in last year's riots. Cincinnati officials refuse to negotiate.

        High-profile performers — Bill Cosby to Whoopi Goldberg — cancel appearances in Cincinnati. Attempts to mediate the dispute have failed.

        Now, people on both sides of the boycott issue are starting to ask: When will it all end?

        Mayor Charlie Luken's response: Probably never.

        Even as the city inches closer to a groundbreaking settlement in a class-action racial profiling lawsuit, there's reason for pessimism. Even if the city and boycotters would agree to negotiate, the fractured leadership of the boycott movement, and the breadth of their demands, makes it unlikely that all groups would agree to call off the boycott.

        “A boycott is a very, very powerful weapon, and it's so powerful that it sometimes makes demands that are very, very hard to satisfy,” said Howard Bellman.

        He is a professional mediator who most recently worked on Ohio's school funding case. “A boycott has no ground rules.”

        Of all the disputes that Mr. Bellman has worked on — including strikes, American Indian treaties and international border disputes — boycotts can be the most difficult.

        Negotiating a boycott raises unique issues, he said. Among them:

        • Who has standing to negotiate?

        • Is there someone who can speak for all the different boycott groups?

        • Who has the authority to comply with the demands?

        • Does either side really want to settle?

        “Sometimes powerful people in the equation don't really want to settle. Sometimes you run into people whose goal is to have the fight, and not the settlement, and they're not interested in making demands that can be resolved,” said Mr. Bellman, a University of Cincinnati graduate.

        “At that point, I would ask, "OK, does that mean the boycott is going to go on forever?” he said. “What is the end game? How do you see this scenario playing out? Are you being realistic?”
       

Luken: Ignoring demands

        Ask Mr. Luken those questions on any given day, and his answers range from fighting mad to a quiet resignation about the new realities of racial politics in Cincinnati.

        “I'm here to tell you, if people can get away with making give-me-this-or-else demands of our city, then it will never, ever stop,” Mr. Luken told the Metropolitan Club last month.

        “There is a right, and there is a wrong, and there are some things you have to stand up for every once in a while.”

        Other days, Mr. Luken believes that the boycott will end — if it ends — not with a bang, but a whimper.

        “Clearly, there will be someone calling for a boycott for a long time to come. The question is how much energy it will have,” he said.

        He notes that the Rev. James W. Jones, the leader of the Coalition for a Just Cincinnati, has been calling for a boycott of Cincinnati since 1979.

        “If we have a successful resolution to the collaborative, the very next day, one of the boycotters will say, "Nothing has changed. Boycott Cincinnati.' I'm not naive about that.”
       

Lynch: Boycott could end

        That's not true, said the Rev. Damon Lynch III, leader of the Black United Front.

        He said a settlement to the lawsuit “would be seen as an act of good faith by the boycott groups, meaning we'd be willing to sit down and negotiate some of the more substantive issues.”

        But boycott leaders often display similarly conflicting attitudes about how the boycott will end.

        While the Black United Front has focused on police issues, the Coalition for a Just Cincinnati has campaigned on a broader list of demands that includes an end to what it calls “economic apartheid.”

        Until both sides determine that a settlement is preferable to a lengthy dispute that will do untold economic damage to both sides, there's little that even a professional mediator can do, Mr. Bellman said.
       

Can Judge Jones help?

        Cincinnati Councilman Paul Booth knows that all too well. He tried to get nationally known figures — civil rights leader Martin Luther King III, former Labor Secretary Alexis Herman and former President Jimmy Carter — to come to town to mediate the dispute.

        Only Mr. King came, and it wasn't to mediate. It was to support the boycott.

        Mr. Booth has quietly dropped the proposal.

        “I will continue to take the position that the matter is not going to be resolved without the two sides coming together — if not in the forum that I suggested, then some forum,” he said.

        That forum may be in a group led by Nathaniel Jones, a retired judge of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.

        The group of about 25 unidentified business and civil rights leaders has been meeting behind the scenes for three weeks. Judge Jones is deliberately vague about what they're doing, saying the process should “take its own course.”

        He hopes that the racial profiling settlement, which could come mext week, will ultimately lead to progress on the boycott.

        “Until then, we think the prudent course is to keep it low-key and see how that process plays out,” Judge Jones said.

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