CLEVELAND'S NEIGHBORLY WAY

! Trouble began last February, when Marlene Armstrong, 44, her two daughters and two grandchildren became the first black family to rent on an all-white west side Cleveland street. There were taunts (''Nigger! Get off the porch!''), broken windows, fireworks assaults, ugly spray-painted graffiti (KKK) on the side of the house. Someone installed a ceramic black jockey on the lawn. One night last week a gang of young whites began launching bottle rockets toward the Armstrong house, but suddenly the fun went out of it. A 23-year-old friend of the Armstrongs' fired a shotgun at the whites, wounding eight, none seriously. Police charged the alleged gunman, Michael Spraggins, with felonious assault and released him on $5,000 bond. Marlene Armstrong insisted that her family had been endangered. Said she: ''Either we were going to die or those people were going to die.'' Observers recalled other recent incidents, including the unsolved fire-bombing death of a black woman in her house in another formerly all-white neighborhood in Cleveland. ''This isn't something that happened overnight,'' said Avery Friedman, an attorney who specializes in fair-housing law. ''It's been brewing for several months.'' Later in the week the Armstrongs moved to a black neighborhood on the city's east side.