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SHOOT-OUT
IN CLEVELAND

BLACK MIL
AND THE '

JULY 2

It STAFF REPORT TO THE NATIONAL
COMMISSION ON THE CAOSES AND
PREVENTION OF VIOLENCE

PREPARED BY
Louis H. Masotti & Jerome R. Corsi

A STAFF REPORT
NOT A REPORT
OF THE
COMMISSION »£i

AT*

The White House
June JO, 1968
EXECUTIVE ORDER #11412

ESTABLISHING A NATIONAL COMMISSION ON
THE CAUSES AND PREVENTION OF VIOLENCE

By virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, it
is ordered as follows:

SECTION 1. Establishment- of the Commission, (a) There is hereby
established a National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence
(hereinafter referred to as the "Commission").

(b) The Commission shall be composed of:

Dr. Milton Eisenhower, Chairman
Congressman Hale Boggs
Archbishop Terence J. Cooke
Ambassador Patricia Harris
Senator Philip A. Hart

Judge A. Leon Higginbotham
Eric Hoffer

Senator Roman Hruska
Albert E. Jenner, Jr.
Congressman William M. McCuDoch
*Dr. W. Walter Menninger
•Judge Ernest William McFarland
*Leon Jaworski

SECTION 2. Functions of the Commission. The Commission shall
investigate and make recommendations with respect to:

(a) The causes and prevention of lawless acts of violence in our society,
including assassination, murder and assault;

(b) The causes and prevention of disrespect for law and order, of
disrespect for public officials, and of violent disruptions of public order by
individuals and groups; and

SECTION 4. Staff of the Commission.

SECTION 5 . Cooperation by Executive Departments and Agencies.

(a) The Commission, acting through its Chairman, is authorized to
request from any executive department or agency any information and
assistance deemed necessary to carry out its functions under this Order. Each
department or agency is directed, to the extent permitted by law and within
the limits of available funds, to furnish information and assistance to the
Commission.

SECTION 6. Report and Termination. The Commission shall present its
report and recommendations as soon as practicable, but not later than one
year from the date of this Order. The Commission shall terminate thirty days
following the submission of its final report or one year from the date of this
Order, whichever is earlier.

S/Lyndon B. Johnson
*Added by an Executive Order June 21 , 1968

The White House

May 23, 1969
EXECUTIVE ORDER #11469

EXTENDING THE LIFE OF THE NATIONAL COMMISSION
ON THE CAUSES AND PREVENTION OF VIOLENCE

By virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States,
Executive Order No. 1 1412 of June 10, 1968, entitled "Establishing a National
Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence," is hereby amended
by substituting for the last sentence thereof the following: "The Commission
shall terminate thrity days following the submission of its final report or on
December 10, 1969, whichever is earlier."

S/ Richard Nixon

SHOOT-OUT IN CLEVELAND

BLACK MILITANTS AND THE POLICE:

San Francisco, California
2006

From the collection of the

»R

v J-Jibrary

May 1969

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office
Washington, D.O. 20402 - Price 75 cents

The White House

June JO, 1968
EXECUTIVE ORDER #11412

ESTABLISHING A NATIONAL COMMISSION ON
THE CAUSES AND PREVENTION OF VIOLENCE

By virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, it
is ordered as follows:

SECTION 1. Establishment- of the Commission, (a) There is hereby
established a National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence
(hereinafter referred to as the "Commission"),
(b) The Commission shall be composed of:
Dr. Milton Eisenhower, Chairman
Congressman Hale Boggs
Archbishop Terence J. Cooke
Ambassador Patricia Harris
Senator Philip A. Hart

Judge A. Leon Higginbothar.i
Eric Hoffer

Senator Roman Hruska
Albert E. Jenner, Jr.
Congressman William M. McCuDoch
*Dr. W. Walter Menninger
•Judge Ernest William McFarland
•Leon Jaworski

SECTION 2. Functions of the Commission. The Commission shall
investigate and make recommendations with respect to:

(a) The causes and prevention of lawless acts of violence in our society,
including assassination, murder and assault;

(b) The causes and prevention of disrespect for law and order, of
disrespect for public officials, and of violent disruptions of public order by
individuals and groups; and

SECTION 4. Staff of the Commission.

SECTION 5. Cooperation by Executive Departments and Agencies.

S/Lyndon B. Johnson
* Added by an Executive Order June 21 , 1968

The White House

May 23, 1969
EXECUTIVE ORDER #11469

EXTENDING THE LIFE OF THE NATIONAL COMMISSION
ON THE CAUSES AND PREVENTION OF VIOLENCE

S/ Richard Nixon

SHOOT-OUT IN CLEVELAND

BLACK MILITANTS AND THE POLICE:

A Report to the
National Commission on
the Causes and Prevention of
Violence

by
Louis H. Masotti

and
Jerome R. Corsi

May 1969

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office
Washington, D.C. 20402 - Price 75 cents

Official editions of publications of the National Commission on the Causes
and Prevention of Violence may be freely used, duplicated or published, in
whole or in part, except to the extent that, where expressly noted in the pub-
lications, they contain copyrighted materials reprinted by permission of the
copyright holders. Photographs may have been copyrighted by the owners,
and permission to reproduce may be required.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-60207 1

STATEMENT ON THE STAFF STUDIES

The Commission was directed to "go as far as man's
knowledge takes it" in searching for the causes of violence
and means of prevention. These studies are reports to the
Commission by independent scholars and lawyers who have
served as directors of our staff task forces and study teams;
they are not reports by the Commission itself. Publication
of any of the reports should not be taken to imply endorse-
ment of their contents by the Commission, or by any mem-
ber of the Commission's staff, including the Executive
Director and other staff officers not directly responsible
for the preparation of the particular report. Both the credit
and the responsibility for the reports lie in each case with
the directors of the task forces and study teams. The Com-
mission is making the reports available at this time as works
of scholarship to be judged on their merits, so that the Com-
mission as well as the public may have the benefit of both
the reports and informed criticism and comment on their
contents.

Dr. Milton S. Eisenhower, Chairman

iii

SHOOT-OUT IN CLEVELAND

Co-Directors

Louis H. Masotti
Jerome R. Corsi

Editorial Consultant
Anthony E. Neville

Pictorial Consultant
Judith Harkinson

Commission Staff Officers

Uoyd N. Cutler, Executive Director

Thomas D. Ban, Deputy Director

James F. Short, Jr., Marvin E. Wolfgang, Co-Directors of Research

James S. Campbell, General Counsel
William G. McDonald, Administrative Office

Joseph Laitin, Director of Information
Ronald A. Wolk, Special Assistant to the Chairman

National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence
Dr. Milton S. Eisenhower, Chairman

PREFACE

From the earliest days of organization, the Chairman, Commissioners, and
Executive Director of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention
of Violence recognized the importance of research in accomplishing the task
of analyzing the many facets of violence in America. As a result of this
recognition, the Commission has enjoyed the receptivity, encouragement, and
cooperation of a large part of the scientific community in this country.
Because of the assistance given in varying degrees by scores of scholars here
and abroad, these Task Force reports represent some of the most elaborate
work ever done on the major topics they cover.

The Commission was formed on June 10, 1968. By the end of the month,
the Executive Director had gathered together a small cadre of capable young
lawyers from various Federal agencies and law firms around the country. That
group was later augmented by partners borrowed from some of the Nation's
major law firms who served without compensation. Such a professional group
can be assembled more quickly than university faculty because the latter are
not accustomed to quick institutional shifts after making firm commitments
of teaching or research at a particular locus. Moreover, the legal profession
has long had a major and traditional role in Federal agencies and commissions.

In early July a group of 50 persons from the academic disciplines of
sociology, psychology, psychiatry, political science, history, law, and biology
were called together on short notice to discuss for 2 days how best the
Commission and its staff might proceed to analyze violence. The enthusiastic
response of these scientists came at a moment when our Nation was still
suffering from the tragedy of Senator Kennedy's assassination.

It was clear from that meeting that the scholars were prepared to join
research analysis and action, interpretation, and policy. They were eager to
present to the American people the best available data, to bring reason to
bear where myth had prevailed. They cautioned against simplistic solutions,
but urged application of what is known in the service of sane policies for the
benefit of the entire society.

Shortly thereafter the position of Director of Research was created. We
assumed the role as a joint undertaking, with common responsibilities. Our
function was to enlist social and other scientists to join the staff, to write
papers, act as advisers or consultants, and engage in new research. The
decentralized structure of the staff, which at its peak numbered 100, required
research coordination to reduce duplication and to fill in gaps among the

original seven separate Task Forces. In general, the plan was for each Task
Force to have a pair of directors: one a social scientist, one a lawyer. In a
number of instances, this formal structure bent before the necessities of
available personnel but in almost every case the Task Force work program
relied on both social scientists and lawyers for its successful completion. In
addition to our work with the seven original Task Forces, we provided con-
sultation for the work of the eighth "Investigative" Task Force, formed
originally to investigate the disorders at the Democratic and Republican
National Conventions and the civil strife in Cleveland during the summer of
1968 and eventually expanded to study campus disorders at several colleges
and universities.

Throughout September and October and in December of 1968 the Com-
mission held about 30 days of public hearings related expressly to each of the
Task Force areas. About 100 witnesses testified, including many scholars,
Government officials, corporate executives as well as militants and activists of
various persuasions. In addition to the hearings, the Commission and the staff
met privately with scores of persons, including college presidents, religious
and youth leaders, and experts in such areas as the media, victim compensa-
tion, and firearms. The staff participated actively in structuring and conduct-
ing those hearings and conferences and in the questioning of witnesses.

As Research Directors, we participated in structuring the strategy of design
for each Task Force, but we listened more than directed. We have known the
delicate details of some of the statistical problems and computer runs. We
have argued over philosophy and syntax; we have offered bibliographical and
other resource materials, we have written portions of reports and copy edited
others. In short, we know the enormous energy and devotion, the long hours
and accelerated study that members of each Task Force have invested in their
labors. In retrospect we are amazed at the high caliber and quantity of the
material produced, much of which truly represents, the best in research and
scholarship. About 150 separate papers and projects were involved in the
work culminating in the Task Force reports. We feel less that we have orches-
trated than that we have been members of the orchestra, and that together
with the entire staff we have helped compose a repertoire of current knowl-
edge about the enormously complex subject of this Commission.

That scholarly research is predominant in me work here presented is
evident in the product. But we should like to emphasize that the roles which
we occupied were not limited to scholarly inquiry. The Directors of Research
were afforded an opportunity to participate in all Commission meetings. We
engaged in discussions at the highest levels of decisionmaking, and had great
freedom in the selection of scholars, in the control of research budgets, and in
the direction and design of research. If this was not unique, it is at least an
uncommon degree of prominence accorded research by a national commission.

There were three major levels to our research pursuit: (1) summarizing the
state of our present knowledge and clarifying the lacunae where more or new
research should be encouraged; (2) accelerating known ongoing research so as
to make it available to the Task Forces; (3) undertaking new research projects

within the limits of time and funds available. Coming from a university
setting where the pace of research is more conducive to reflection and quiet
hours analyzing data, we at first thought that completing much meaningful
new research within a matter of months was most unlikely. But the need was
matched by the talent and enthusiasm of the staff, and the Task Forces very
early had begun enough new projects to launch a small university with a score
of doctoral theses. It is well to remember also that in each volume here
presented, the research reported is on full public display and thereby makes
the staff more than usually accountable for their products.

One of the very rewarding aspects of these research undertakings has been
the experience of minds trained in the law mingling and meshing, sometimes
fiercely arguing, with other minds trained in behavioral science. The organiza-
tional structure and the substantive issues of each Task Force required mem-
bers from both groups. Intuitive judgment and the logic of argument and
organization blended, not always 'smoothly, with the methodology of science
and statistical reasoning. Critical and analytical faculties were sharpened as
theories confronted facts. The arrogance neither of ignorance nor of certainty
could long endure the doubts and questions of interdisciplinary debate. Any
sign of approaching the priestly pontification of scientism was quickly dis-
pelled in the matrix of mutual criticism. Years required for the normal
accumulation of experience were compressed into months of sharing ideas
with others who had equally valid but differing perspectives. Because of this
process, these volumes are much richer than they otherwise might have been.

Partly because of the freedom which the Commission gave to the Directors
of Research and the Directors of each Task Force, and partly to retain the
full integrity of the research work in publication, these reports of the Task
Forces are in the posture of being submitted to and received by the Commis-
sion. These are volumes published under the authority of the Commission,
but they do not necessarily represent the views or the conclusions of the
Commission. The Commission is presently at work producing its own report,
based in part on the materials presented to it by the Task Forces. Commission
members have, of course, commented on earlier drafts of each Task Force,
and have caused alterations by reason of the cogency of their remarks and
insights. But the final responsibility for what is contained in these volumes
rests fully and properly on the research staffs who labored on them.

In this connection, we should like to acknowledge the special leadership of
the Chairman, Dr. Milton S. Eisenhower, in formulating and supporting the
principle of research freedom and autonomy under which this work has been
conducted.

We note, finally, that these volumes are in many respects incomplete and
tentative. The urgency with which papers were prepared and then integrated
into Task Force Reports rendered impossible the successive siftings of data
and argument to which the typical academic article or volume is subjected.
The reports have benefited greatly from the counsel of our colleagues on the
Advisory Panel, and from much debate and revision from within the staff. It
is our hope, that the total work effort of the Commission staff will be the

vii

source and subject of continued research by scholars in the several disciplines,
as well as a useful resource for policymakers. We feel certain that public
policy and the disciplines will benefit greatly from such further work.

To the Commission, and especially to its Chairman, for the opportunity
they provided for complete research freedom, and to the staff for its prodi-
gious and prolific work, we, who were intermediaries and servants to both,
are most grateful.

James F. Short, Jr. Marvin E. Wolfgang

Directors of Research

viii

PREFACE 1

This report began to be compiled in the summer of 1968, even before the
smoke had cleared from 5 days of racial violence in Cleveland. Two institu-
tions shared our belief in the national significance of the events in Cleveland
and generously underwrote the study: the Lemberg Center for the Study of
Violence, Brandeis University, and the National Institute of Mental Health,
Washington, D.C. In September, the National Commission on the Causes and
Prevention of Violence, also recognizing the significance of these events, lent
support to the study and urged that it be completed by November 15, 1968.

Hundreds of man-hours were invested in interviewing, research, writing,
and in safeguarding accuracy and completeness as we rushed to meet the
deadline. Of the more than 20 Civil Violence Research Center staff members
and project consultants, four deserve our special commendation: Mrs. Robert
Dickman, John Krause, Jr., Mrs. Yoram Papir, and Mrs. Robert Bauerlein.
They performed innumerable and often overwhelming administrative, clerical,
and intellectual tasks, tirelessly bearing the brunt of the pressure to finish the
report. Ellen Cummings lent her legal expertise, and Timothy Armbruster
and Mrs. Jeffrey Zerby their interpretive skills; Estelle Zannes, Lauren
McKinsey, James Monhart, Robert Farlow, Kermit Allen, III, Forrester Lee,
and Sharon Dougherty conducted more than 200 interviews that provided the
raw material for large sections of the report. Julie Reinstein provided invalu-
able assistance in the office. Two of our colleagues were especially helpful:
Prof. Jeffrey K. Hadden, who helped to initiate and design the project, and
Prof. Charles McCaghy, who conducted several key interviews.

Many Clevelanders were exceedingly cooperative. Mayor Carl B. Stokes,
the members of his cabinet and staff; Police Chief Michael Blackwell and some
police officers; editors and reporters of both the electronic and printed news
media; the leadership of Cleveland's black community; Fred (Ahmed) Evans
and his attorney, Stanley Tolliver; members of Cleveland's City Council; busi-
nessmen of the Glenville area— all gave generously of their time and knowl-
edge. Others were not cooperative, stating that they could not divulge infor-
mation until after the trial of Fred Evans, the black militant who was indicted
on seven counts of first-degree murder in connection with the racial disturb-
ances. Some important records, such as the tapes of police radio calls during
the nights of violence, were unobtainable.

A draft of the report was finished November 15, coincident with another
report sponsored by the National Commission on Violence on the demonstra-
tions in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention of 1968 (the
Walker Report). While that report was published soon thereafter, this one was
not. An important difference in the circumstances was that, in our case, the

report narrated events for which a man was about to go on trial for his life.
The Commission took the position that release of this report prior to the mur-
der trial of Fred Evans (completed on May 12, 1969) would be improper be-
cause—

. . . criminal trials of some of the alleged participants in the incidents
which are the subject of the report were likely to begin in the near fu-
ture. The Commission felt that the public interest would be as well
served by postponing release of the report until after the trials, and this
course of action would avoid any possible interference with the prose-
cution or defense of those cases.

The pros and cons of pretrial publicity have been the subject of much de-
bate. The American Bar Association and the legal profession generally believe
that publicity as to the details of events that may be relevant to the trial
should be avoided, so that the jury can arrive at its decision solely on the ba-
sis of the evidence presented to it in the courtroom with full opportunity to
consider the demeanor of witnesses and their responses under cross-examina-
tion. The Nation's media urge a more liberal standard in the name of the con-
stitutional freedom of the press.

The balance between the constitutional right to a fair trial and the public's
right to know is a difficult one to strike. It was the Commission's prerogative
to decide this policy question as it did. Scholars might have decided it differ-
ently.

Even though the trial is now over and the verdict is in, it is still difficult
for us to decide in our minds what effect prior publication would have had on
the conduct of the trial and the judgment reached. Readers themselves can
judge the fairness and objectivity of this report. We have not attempted, in
this report, to pronounce judgments where none is warranted. Indeed, a fre-
quent theme in this report is that many important questions have gone un-
answered. What we have attempted is a coherent narrative of the events of
the fateful evening of July 23, 1968, organizing the details to facilitate analy-
sis, raising questions where they are warranted, and mirroring the Shootout in
Cleveland against the events that led up to it and those it precipitated. For
jurors during the Evans trial, a picture of the events of July 23 emerged only
through weeks of testimony, presented in no logical sequence and often inter-
rupted by challenges, legal debates, conferences at the bench, recesses, and
the other discontinuities that make criminal trials move slower than baseball
games.

Whatever the wisdom of the Commission's decision (and it is now, in an-
other sense, an "academic matter"), their reason for withholding this report
from publication did not satisfy all critics. Among those inclined to see con-
spiracies where none exists (a disposition of extreme leftists as well as those
on the far right), there were suspicions that the Commission was suppressing
the report because it contained conclusions distasteful to the Establishment
point of view. In Cleveland's black community, the rumor was afloat that the
report was being rewritten at the Commission's direction to excise passages
that would cast doubt on the guilt of Fred Evans. Neither suspicion had any

basis in fact, since no one representing the Commission on Violence ever ad-
dressed a comment to us that in any way challenged the substance of our
report.

We did not spend the period of forced silence idly, however. Those
months gave us an opportunity all authors cherish: a chance to review the
effort, improve it structurally, and sharpen the prose style. In this effort we
had the invaluable editorial assistance of Anthony E. Neville, a professional
writer. Gradually what had begun as a report, a document with no greater
ambition than to be factual, thorough, and useful to a special audience, took
on the aspects of a book, structured and phrased to inform the general public.
When the trial of Fred Evans was over, we added an epilog discussing that
event.

In a sense, however, this book is still incomplete. Fred Evans was con-
victed of first-degree murder by an all-white jury under an Ohio law that re-
quired no proof that he ever pulled a trigger. The effects of that verdict on
the black community in Cleveland are not yet clear. Moreover, the circum-
stances that bred racial violence in Cleveland in the summer of 1968 have not
changed significantly since then, and no one can say with confidence that it
will not happen again. America itself has not changed in the ways that mat-
ter. It could happen again— anywhere.

L. H. M.
J. R. C.

Cleveland, Ohio
May 16, 1969

INTRODUCTION

On the evening of July 23, 1968, shots rang out on a narrow street in Cleve-
land's racially troubled East Side. Within minutes, a full-scale gun battle was
raging between Cleveland police and black snipers. An hour and a half later,
seven people lay dead; 15 others were wounded. Fifteen of the casualties
were policemen.

For the next 5 days, violence flared in Glenville and other East Side neigh-
borhoods. Arsonists heaved fire bombs into buildings; teenagers smashed
store windows and led mobs in looting. The police lashed back, sometimes in
blind fury. In the smoldering aftermath, 63 business establishments were
counted damaged or destroyed. Property losses exceeded $2 million.

In human and dollar costs, the Glenville incident was not the most serious
event in the recent tide of racial violence in America. But it differed sharply
from the current pattern of violence in significant, instructive ways. Indeed,
it established a new theme and an apparent escalation in the level of racial
conflict in America.

Racial clashes have produced bloodshed and property damage before.
Most recent outbreaks, like the Detroit riot of 1967, were initiated by blacks—
itself a deviation from earlier patterns— but the hostility was directed toward
property, not persons. (Sporadic sniper fire-less of it than originally be-
lieved—occurred during major disorders in 1967, but long after the violence
had expressed itself in property damage.) The Glenville incident was differ-
ent; it began as person-oriented violence, black and whites shooting at each
other, snipers against cops. And apparently alone among major outbreaks of
racial violence in American history, it ended in more white casualties than
black.

Moreover, the Glenville incident occurred in the first major American city
to have elected a Negro mayor and in a city that had been spared serious dis-
orders during the volatile summer of 1967. Because of Carl B. Stokes' success
in preventing violence after the assassination of Martin Luther King in April
1968, Clevelanders looked upon him as a positive guarantee against future
racial disturbances in their city. Yet the violence occurred, and the Glenville
incident raised disturbing questions for other American cities with increasing
Negro populations that can expect to have Negro-led governments in the
future.

Lastly, Mayor Stokes introduced a new technique for quenching the vio-
lence. At the urging of black leaders, he placed control of the troubled neigh-
borhoods in their hands, barring white policemen, National Guardsmen, and
white nonresidents from the area. After one night's trial, the policy was al-
tered; police and National Guardsmen were brought into the area, chiefly to

xiii

protect property. Born in controversy, carried out under complicating cir-
cumstances and with only partial success, the technique of "community con-
trol" during riots is still a matter of dispute as to its effectiveness.

Why did it happen, especially in Cleveland? Was the Glenville incident the
result of a vast conspiracy to "get Whitey" or the sudden, unpremeditated act
of a few individuals? Who is to blame? Will it happen again— in Cleveland or
elsewhere?

XIV

CONTENTS

Chapter Page

Preface v

Introduction xiii

Photographs 1

1. Prelude to the Shooting 33

2. A Midsummer's Nightmare 43

3. Reaction: The Crowds, the Police, and

City Hall 61

4. Law and Disorder 71

5. Cleveland in the Aftermath 85

6. A New Pattern? 93

Epilog: The Trial and Conviction of

Fred (Ahmed) Evans 97

CORDONED AREA: July 24, 1968

Shaded area indicates the scene of
the shoot-out the night before.

Fred "Ahmed" Evans in his Afro Culture Shop in April 1967.

The red brick apartment house at 1 23 1 2
Auburndale, where Ahmed and other
black nationalists lived, served as a nest
for snipers in the Glenville battle.

The abandoned Cadillac parked on Beulah Avenue.

A policeman fires tear gas to flush snipers from the second story of the
Lakeview Tavern.

Policemen crouch behind their cars while looking for snipers. UPI Photo

POLICE

Police seek the safety of their vehicles on Lakeview, north of Euclid Avenue.

The Cleveland Press-Will Nehez

Police Officer Lt. Leroy Jones lies mortally wounded from sniper fire. The
officer at right was later wounded.

A police sharpshooter, armed with rifle with telescopic sight, aims his weapon.

UPI Photo

The bodies of two snipers lie in alley behind houses on Lakeview.

Patrolman Ernest Rowell suffered bullet wounds and was overcome by tear

The man at left tied belts of ammunition around his chest.

Hospital attendants carry a policeman shot in the stomach.

National Guardsmen arrive at the scene.

The Cleveland Press-BemiQ Noble

Police frisk suspects at the corner of Euclid and 105th Street. Fire-bombing
and looting of stores continued throughout the night of July 23rd.

Associated Press

Herbert Reed a bystander

beaten by a gang, is led to a

hospital.

A gutted police cruiser stands destroyed before a sign forecasting better days
ahead for residents of the predominantly Negro East Side.

National Guardsmen arrive at the scene.

The Cleveland Press-Eemie Noble

Police frisk suspects at the corner of Euclid and 105th Street. Fire-bombing
and looting of stores continued throughout the night of July 23rd.

Associated Press

Herbert Reed a bystander

beaten by a gang, is led to a

hospital.

A gutted police cruiser stands destroyed before a sign forecasting better days
ahead for residents of the predominantly Negro East Side.

The home of Rev. Henry Ferryman at 1395 Lakeview engulfed in flames.

In the smoldering aftermath of five days of violence, 63 business
establishments were damaged or destroyed. Property damage exceeded

one million dollars.

The next morning Rev. Ferryman views rubble. The Cleveland Press-Tony Tomsic

iSf

fih.^

Ohio National Guardsmen stand by while smoke billows from the Linder Hotel.

UPI Photo

The scene of violence on

Superior Avenue at

Lakeview— burning building and

police cars.

The Cleveland Press-Em Nehez

Baxter Hill (with his hand to face) and members of PRIDE Inc. walk into
sniper area.

The Cleveland Press-Van Dillard

On July 24, the following day, the Mayor's Committee marshals the black
community.

ELEVISIONS
RADIOS

ETC.

IBRYS SUPERIOR LOAN C

gOfflFcOHTS SHIRTS

f; • ' "

Pi 1

Youths from PRIDE Inc. clean up debris after the night of violence. Associated Press

Police search for looters.
The Cleveland Press-Will Nehez

Loot from a furniture store is loaded carefully onto a car in broad daylight. UPI Photo

Guardsman holds looter at gunpoint in shop at 105th and Superior.

The Cleveland Press-Tim Culek
nkii i

26 x 75

Ct «- 66 61

Three unarmed teenagers are brought out under police guard.

UPI Photo

,,*

Mayor Stokes speaks with Harllel Jones, one of Cleveland's leading black
nationalists and a member of the Mayor's Committee who was arrested two
nights later for curfew violation and possession of weapons.

On July 26 Fred "Ahmed" Evans enters pleas of innocence to charges of
shooting with intent to kill a police tow-truck operator, possession of
narcotics, and possession of an automatic rifle.

The Cleveland Press-Van Dillard

Fred "Ahmed" Evans sits in the jailhouse.

The Cleveland Press-Ted R. Schneider Jr.

Black nationalists demonstrate outside the courthouse during Ahmed's trial.

Fred "Ahmed" Evans, his wrists and ankles shackled, arrives at Ohio State

Penitentiary in Columbus after he was sentenced.

Associated Press

Chapter 1

PRELUDE TO THE SHOOTING

In the early years of the Republic, Cleveland was a small inland port settled
by New Englanders who had moved westward, with a smattering of German
merchants and Irish workers along the docks on the south shore of Lake Erie.
Far into the 19th century, Cleveland kept the complexion of a New England
town. In the years following the Civil War, however, surging commercial
growth and industrialization brought to Cleveland an influx of immigrants
from eastern and southern Europe. By 1910 these immigrants and their chil-
dren made up 75 percent of the central city's population. Separated from the
old inhabitants by language, customs, and religion, finding the doors to power
and social acceptance closed to them, the immigrants retreated to ethnic en-
claves of their own. Gradually they gained power in the city's politics, but
the enclaves and ethnic loyalties remained. Later in the 20th century, espe-
cially after World War II, growing Cleveland experienced an influx of Negroes
out of the South and Appalachia. In time, blacks constituted a sizable but
powerless and excluded minority in Cleveland.

The recent history of the Negro struggle for equality in Cleveland parallels
that of other American cities. In the early 1960's, when the civil-rights move-
ment was gaining force in America, several small groups were formed in Cleve-
land. As elsewhere, white participation was welcomed, and a white minister
and his wife were among the prime organizers of the Cleveland chapter of the
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1962. By 1963 there were some 50
separate civil-rights groups in Cleveland, ranging from the moderate National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to CORE (then
considered radical) to the Black Muslims (then, and now, even more radical).

In the spring of 1963, the Cleveland NAACP made a move toward estab-
lishing unity among the various groups. Its efforts to unite with the more
militant groups may have been less an expression of a new militant spirit than
of the political instinct to keep alive and enhance its own standing in the com-
munity. The effort succeeded; out of a series of meetings during the hot
nights of June emerged a new coalition, calling itself the United Freedom
Movement (UFM). Its integrated membership included inner-city ministers,
leaders of the Jewish community, traditional Negro leaders, and some of
Cleveland's new breed of angry young black men.

At best, the new alliance was tenuous. Much of its success would depend
on how well it could assure cooperation and unity from so many diverse fac-
tions. A balance would have to be struck between moderate and militant ap-
proaches. And to survive, the UFM would have to demonstrate that it could
produce results.

34 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

The UFM's first confrontation, over tfte hiring practices of contractors
building the city's Convention Center, ended in no victory. In the fall of
1963, the alliance turned its attention to the city's school system. Although
many Negro children were bussed to alter the segregated system, there was evi-
dence that receiving schools contrived to separate these children from the
white students. Relatively few of Cleveland's schoolchildren were in inte-
grated classrooms. The UFM set a list of demands before the Board of Educa-
tion, with a deadline of September 23 for compliance. The Board and UFM
representatives met in a series of closed meetings, and on deadline day basic
agreement seemed to have been reached. UFM spokesmen, however, argued
that informal agreements in closed session were not official and binding. The
following evening, after hearing a report from the steering committee, UFM
members voted to picket the Board of Education.

The Board of Education responded to the picketing by scheduling a public
meeting September 30, at which it promised to take steps toward "fullest pos-
sible integration consistent with sound educational practice" in the receiving
schools. The board also promised to create a Citizens' Council on Human Re-
lations to encourage true integration. For the moment, the UFM was trium-
phant.

By January 1964, UFM leaders concluded the board was not living up to
its promises. Meetings with the board only deepened the frustration. To es-
calate the pressure, the UFM decided to take its picket lines to schools where
black children were being bussed. The first two demonstrations, on January
29, brought forth angry mobs of whites. At one of the target schools, demon-
strators were forced off the sidewalk as a mob tried to push them in the path
of passing automobiles. The next day, a demonstration planned at Murray
Hill School, in the heart of Cleveland's "Little Italy," produced a more seri-
ous confrontation. At 9:30 a.m., when the demonstration was scheduled to
begin, a crowd of angry whites had already surrounded the school. Many
were young, and many had been seen at the demonstrations the day before.
Reports that the mob had formed deterred the demonstrators from attempt-
ing to march on the school. Sensing that the demonstrators would not march,
the crowd moved to a busy intersection in Little Italy and began to attack
Negroes driving by in their automobiles.

Throughout the day, the mob remained and continued to attack those per-
ceived as "enemies"— enemies that included a number of newsmen. At about
midday, the mob attempted to charge the area where the demonstrators had
assembled. While police lines checked the advance of the crowd, the demon-
strators left to assemble at another location several miles away. By late after-
noon, any thought of a march on Murray Hill School was out of the question.

The Murray Hill incident was the UFM's fiery baptism and a clear signal of
the deepening rift between Cleveland's blacks and whites. It was also a dem-
onstration of the powerlessness of the Negro community, as evidenced by the
official response from City Hall. Mayor Ralph Locher took the position that
the school question was outside his jurisdiction. And while the violence lasted,
he considered requesting an injunction against the picketing. The police were
also a bitter disappointment to the civil-rights leaders. There had been no ar-
rests despite the fact that for an entire day the Murray Hill mob roamed the
streets beating Negroes, newsmen, anyone who enraged them, and throwing
rocks and bottles at passing automobiles.

Prelude to the Shooting 35

The rift grew even deeper when, on February 3, 1964, demonstrators
staged a sit-in at the Board of Education building. Police forcibly removed
them the next day. The UFM had already lost the sympathy of City Hall and
the Board of Education; now the news media became disenchanted. The pro-
test had gone "too far," it had become too "radical," the limit of tolerance
had been reached. The community reaction also opened wounds within the
UFM itself; while the more militant members were demanding further and
more extreme measures, the NAACP faction openly worried about the conse-
quences of the heightened level of protest.

On February 4, the UFM won a temporary victory. The Board of Educa-
tion agreed to immediate diffusion of the bussed students on a level designed
to induce integration. In March, however, it was evident that the board was
pushing forward the construction of three schools in the Glenville area, the
black neighborhood that was to be the scene of racial violence in 1968. These
schools would, by their location, introduce segregation into the school system
once more.

UFM demonstrators, on April 6, joined the Hazeldell Parents Association,
a group of Glenville residents, in picketing one of the school construction
sites. A new tactic was introduced: demonstrators threw themselves into
construction pits and in the way of construction equipment. The next day
the demonstration was carried to another construction site. The tactics re-
mained the same. The only difference was the result: the Reverend Bruce
Klunder, the white minister who had helped to organize the local chapter of
CORE, placed himself behind a bulldozer and in the confusion was run over
and killed.

Police sought to end the confrontation by dragging demonstrators away.
As word of Klunder's death spread, however, further violence became inevita-
ble. Bands of angry Negroes roamed the streets, looted stores, and battled
police late into the night. Klunder's death would be long remembered in
Cleveland's black community.

Blocked by a court injunction against further interference with school con-
struction, the UFM-over the objections of its conservative members-turned
to a new tactic: a boycott of the schools. On Monday, April 20, about 85
percent of the Negro students in Cleveland's public schools stayed home. The
boycott was a Pyrrhic victory. Nonattendance of blacks at predominantly
white schools was precisely what many white parents wanted. The boycott
had not been important in terms of money, power, or lasting prestige— the im-
portant "values" of the power structure.

In succeeding months, a new superintendent of schools, Dr. Paul Briggs,
significantly reduced the crisis. Briggs shifted emphasis from integration to
quality education in each neighborhood. The shift undercut the efforts of
the UFM. The emphasis on quality education in their own neighborhoods
gained increasing acceptance in the Negro community, especially as the con-
cept of "Black Power," with its emphasis on racial separatism, found more
and more adherents.

"Black Power" gained in popularity in the black community during 1965,
but it sent shivers of anxiety into the white enclaves of Cleveland. That sum-
mer, Clevelanders witnessed on their television sets racial disturbances in other

36 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

cities, including the riot in Watts. In the fall of 1965, several organizations of
black militants emerged in Cleveland, led by black nationalists. Traditional
organizations such as the NAACP, and now even CORE, had increasing diffi-
culty generating support from the white community. The only organization
that continued to provide moral and financial support to the black groups
was the Council of Churches, and its resources were limited.

In view of the mounting tensions between the white and black communi-
ties, outbreaks of violence were not wholly surprising. Beginning early in
1966, gang fights and physical assaults plagued the Superior-Sowinski area.
The Sowinski area, like the Murray Hill area, has been a white ethnic enclave
in Cleveland's troubled East Side. As with the Murray Hill area, antagonism
toward Negroes runs high in Sowinski. The Superior area bordering Sowinski
is predominantly Negro.

The attacks and gang fights continued throughout the spring. Negro
youths were responsible for some of the assaults, white youths for others, but
to the Negro community it was apparent that police responded much more
quickly and effectively when the victims were white. "If you're going to beat
up those niggers," a policeman is said to have told a white gang, "take them
down in the park [Sowinski Park] where we can't see it." On Wednesday
evening, June 22, two Negro youths were attacked by a gang of whites. A
crowd that gathered at Superior Avenue and 90th Street confronted police
with their complaints, describing the attackers and pointing to the car they
had ridden in, but the police made no move to investigate. Some in the angry
crowd threw rocks and bottles. Negro leaders met with the police the next
day; the police responded to their grievances by saying they had problems all
over the city, that they were understaffed and overworked, that not every in-
cident could be investigated, that incidents like Wednesday evening's attack
occur all the time in racially mixed neighborhoods.

Violence broke out again Thursday evening. A Negro youth was shot, ac-
cording to eyewitnesses, by two white men in a blue Corvair. The description
seemed to implicate the owner of a supermarket on Superior Avenue. Since
the police would not take any action, Negro youths took the initiative: the
supermarket was burned to the ground. Other white-owned businesses were
harassed during the evening's disturbance.

After still another night of violence, Mayor Locher met with Negro resi-
dents of the troubled area on Saturday, June 25 . He promised to investigate
their grievances. The tension subsided, at least for the moment.

Superior Avenue, scene of the June 1966 disturbances, is a broad thorough-
fare that carries Cleveland officeworkers home to the comfortable suburbs of
East Cleveland and Cleveland Heights. South of Superior Avenue, roughly
embracing the numbered streets between the seventies and the nineties, is the
neighborhood of Hough (pronounced "huff). It is a residential area of dete-
riorating framehouses, old apartment buildings, dwellings vacant and vandal-
ized, occasional small shops, and neighborhood bars. Since the mid-1 95 O's,
Hough has been a predominantly Negro slum.

On the evening of July 18, 1966, a sign appeared on the door of a bar at
79th and Hough Ave.: "No Water for Niggers." Residents of the area were
enraged. A crowd gathered. The manager of the bar and another white man

Prelude to the Shooting 37

paraded in front of the bar armed with a pistol and a shotgun. Police arrived
and, in their attempt to "disperse the crowd," began to push and shove indi-
viduals from the vicinity of the bar. Nearby stores became the targets of
rocks. The crowd began to spread; the Hough riot had begun.

For one full week Cleveland was immersed in mass civil disorder. In many
ways the violence resembled the earlier violence of Watts: looting, vandalism,
burning, sniping. Initially, it was contained in a small area: between 7 1st
Street on the west and 93d Street on the east, and including half-a-dozen
blocks north and south of Hough Avenue. On July 20, the third night of vio-
lence, sporadic damage was reported in a much wider area, including parts of
Kinsman on the south and Glenville on the east. It included thrown fire
bombs, some looting, and attempts to divert the police with false fire alarms.

The damage in Hough was extensive. Before rainfall hit Cleveland on Sun-
day night, July 24, and the violence subsided, four persons (all Negro) had
been killed, countless others injured, and whole blocks of buildings had been
nearly totally leveled. More than 2,200 National Guardsmen had been called
in to patrol the streets. And if Cleveland's racial relations were becoming
polarized before the Hough riot, there was no doubt that the split was pro-
found after it was over.

The grand jury of Cuyahoga County, in special session, began its investiga-
tion of the disturbances on July 26. In its report, issued August 9, the jury
blamed the disorders on—

a relatively small group of trained and disciplined professionals at this
business . . . aided and abetted, wittingly or otherwise, by misguided
people of all ages and colors, many of whom are avowed believers in
violence and extremism, and some of whom also are either members of
or officers in the Communist Party.

The conspiracy theory and the suggestion of Communist domination read-
ily found adherents, and Mayor Locher congratulated the grand jury for hav-
ing "the guts to fix the approximate cause which had been hinted at for a
long time, that subversive and Communist elements in our community were
behind the rioting."

Few in the black community were persuaded by the grand jury report.
They could not fail to note that no Hough residents sat on the panel, and that
the foreman of the grand jury, Louis B. Seltzer, editor of the Cleveland Press,
was being sued at the time of the investigation by a black nationalist leader
for calling his organization a "gun club." Suspicions of bias were fed by the
report's references to the black leader, Lewis Robinson, as one dedicated to
"inciting these youths to focus their hatreds" and to "indoctrinating them
with his own vigorous philosophy of violence."

On August 22, a biracial review panel, composed wholly of citizens associ-
ated with the Hough area, began its own investigation. Their report concluded
that "the underlying causes of the rioting are to be found in the social condi-
tions that exist in the ghetto areas of Cleveland."

"To many," they noted, "it seemed almost inevitable that such neglect and
disregard would lead to frustration and desperation that would finally burst
forth in a destructive way." As to the influence of Communist agitators: "We
would believe that an individual living in such poverty as exists in Hough needs
no one to tell him just how deplorable his living conditions are."

38 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

A week later, controversy over the causes of the rioting reached into the
hearing rooms of Washington. Testifying before Senator Ribicoff s commit-
tee investigating urban problems, Mayor Locher was confronted with the U.S.
Attorney General's conclusion that "it would be a tragic mistake to try to
say that the riots are the result of some masterminded plot." Mayor Locher,
however, persisted. Locher argued: "I would disagree with the statements of
the Attorney General, and I would wholeheartedly agree with the conclusions
made by the grand jury report."

There matters stood at the end of the long hot summer, a war of conflict-
ing viewpoints hardened to a standstill as autumn arrived and quietly passed
into winter. Then it was 1967, and perceptive observers looked ahead to an-
other summer of racial violence in Cleveland. As early as April 6, a Cleveland
Plain Dealer reporter noted: "Even very rational, very hopeful men and
women believe that Cleveland will be on fire this summer."

Like a seismograph picking up faint tremors that warn of a major earth-
quake, the April newspapers recorded a number of fires on Cleveland's East
Side that may have been set by arsonists, and a series of lootings around
105th Street, eastward of the scene of the Hough riot. The Cleveland Sub-
committee of the Ohio State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on
Civil Rights visited the Hough area and saw there ample evidence of the pov-
erty and frustration that would breed another riot.

Store fronts are boarded up. Unoccupied houses have been vandal-
ized. Stench rises from the debris-filled basements of burned-out build-
ings. Litter fills street curbings. Garbage and trash are scattered in
yards and vacant lots. Recent surveys indicate that in some census
tracts as much as 80 percent of the 16-21 age group is unemployed or
school dropouts and that 25 percent of the midyear high school gradu-
ates seeking work are unable to find jobs.

The subcommittee's report noted that women in Hough were paying high
prices for low-quality food in neighborhood grocery stores, using welfare
checks that were inadequate for a decent standard of living. The State gov-
ernment, the report charged, has been indifferent to the plight of Hough resi-
dents; so have the local authorities.

The policeman, if you can find one, still shows little interest in vacant
houses being stripped of equipment during daylight hours, or the prosti-
tutes on parade, or the accosting of resident mothers and daughters
walking home.

The national media shared the prediction that Cleveland was ripe for burn-
ing. In late June, Roldo Bartimole, a Wall Street Journal reporter, and Mur-
ray Gruber, a faculty member of Western Reserve University, published an
article in the Nation entitled "Cleveland: Recipe for Violence." Their con-
clusion: "All the elements for tragedy are now present in this city, self-
proclaimed 'Best Location in the Nation.' It may be too late for Cleveland,
but there are lessons here for other cities that want to avoid disaster." A
month later, in the Saturday Evening Post, staff writer John Skow noted: "It
is hard to find a city resident who believes Cleveland will go unburned
through the summer."

Prelude to the Shooting 39

And yet, it didn't happen. While Tampa, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Newark, and
Detroit experienced major disorders during the summer of 1967, the lid stayed
on in Cleveland. Even Martin Luther King's peaceful efforts to press for bet-
ter jobs for Negroes met with indifferences in the Negro neighborhoods of
Cleveland that summer. Scorned by the mayor as "an extremist" when he ar-
rived in April, King announced in May that Cleveland would be a "target city"
for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. His most severe tactic
against employers discriminating against Negroes would be a boycott of their
goods. King's campaign accomplished few of his aims, yet no one turned to
violent means to abet his cause.

Explanations for Cleveland's quiet summer of 1967 abound. One contribut-
ing cause, perhaps of minor importance, was the channeling of hopes and griev-
ances through the electoral process. Carl B. Stokes, a Negro candidate who in
1965 had come within 2,100 votes of becoming the mayor of Cleveland, was
again challenging the incumbent, Ralph Locher. Having come so close, Stokes
in 1967 had the avid backing and earnest hopes of Cleveland's black commu-
nity.

In 1965 Stokes had run as an independent and gained an advantage from
the multiplicity of candidates. This time he was forced into the Democratic
primary race. Seth Taft, grandson of President Taft and a prominent Cleve-
land Republican, had threatened to withdraw as his party's candidate if
Stokes ran as an independent, for Taft calculated that he would be a certain
loser in a three-way race. Stokes, on the other hand, calculated that since he
would have to run against Locher in either case, it would be easier to defeat
him in the primary, when a lower turnout of voters could be expected.

Stokes was correct. In the primary election of October 4, he defeated
Locher by a plurality of 18,000 votes. The decisive factor was the size of the
Negro turnout. Although Negroes constituted only about 40 percent of the
registered voters, 73.4 percent of them voted in the primary. Only 58.4 per-
cent of the white voters cast ballots in the primary.

The campaign between Stokes and Taft was well fought. Both hired pro-
fessional help for campaign promotion and poll taking; both made personal
appearances and speeches frequently and throughout the city. They met in a
series of televised debates in traditional Lincoln-Douglas style.

In the end, Stokes won, becoming the first Negro mayor of a major Ameri-
can city. His victory was initially interpreted as Cleveland's triumph over
racial bigotry, an indication of a new openmindedness in American race rela-
tions. Examination of the voting data reveals this interpretation as optimis-
tic. Support for Stokes was concentrated in the Negro wards, where he re-
ceived 95 percent of the vote. In the predominantly white wards he received
only 19.3 percent of the vote, and his support was lowest in the three wards
with the highest concentration of white ethnic groups in the city.

As a Negro mayor, Stokes was the subject of critical scrutiny by the public
and of high expectations from those who had felt ignored by previous, "ma-
chine" administrations. His first few months in office were wrecked with dif-
ficulties; there were minor political scandals involving some of his early ap-
pointees, and public squabblings among others of his administration. The
turning point for Stokes came in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination

40 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

on April 4, 1968. While other cities erupted in violence, Stokes took to the
streets to keep his brothers "cool," effectively invoking the help of black na-
tionalists in keeping the peace. Cleveland stayed quiet, and white citizens of
Cleveland were satisfied that in Mayor Stokes they had an effective guarantee
against further racial disorders.

Many Clevelanders realized that there would have to be substantive changes
in the Negro ghettoes, and they stepped forward in May to support the
mayor's new program, "Cleveland: Now!," a campaign to raise $1 1,250,000
to finance programs ranging from youth employment to rehabilitation of
housing to downtown economic development. Some of the projects were eli-
gible for Federal matching funds, and on July 2 Vice President Humphrey
came to Cleveland to announce a $1 .6 million grant to the Negro-run Hough
Area Development Corporation for a program to help small businesses in the
riot-torn neighborhood. By then, pledges to the "Cleveland: Now!" cam-
paign from businesses and citizens had reached the $4 million mark.

With optimism, and with a sense of satisfaction over progress being made,
Cleveland entered the summer of 1968. But some who could see beneath the
calm surface were not optimistic.

On the night of the primary election in 1967, a black militant leader, ca-
vorting in the street, jubilant over Carl Stokes' victory, raised his hand in a
good-will gesture toward a squad car of police nearby and shouted "Peace!"
For Fred Evans, who had taken the Afro name of "Ahmed," it was a rare
moment of truce in his personal war with the police.

Early in 1967, Ahmed Evans had been arrested and convicted of assaulting
police officer James Payne, a Negro. The war with the police was not, by
Evans' assessment, one sided; three times during 1967 police had closed down
his Afro Culture Shop and Bookstore, on Superior Avenue, for alleged "sani-
tary violations." In interviews Evans referred to the police, in classic black-
nationalist fashion, as "the repressive element in a white establishment."

Born in Greenville, S.C., in 1931, Evans was one of 12 children. His father
was an unskilled worker in a textile plant. In the late 1930's, seeking a better
opportunity, the family moved to Cleveland. Evans enrolled in public school
but quit before graduating from Rawlings Junior High. Tall and gangling, he
recalls that schoolmates called him "Big Dumb." Convinced that he was really
smarter than his peers, Evans decided to go to work. He held a variety of jobs
before joining the Army in 1948.

During the Korean war, Evans served with a combat engineer outfit. He
suffered back, shoulder, and head injuries when a bridge he was working on
collapsed. When he was discharged in 1952, he was the recipient on half-a-
dozen medals for meritorious service. Back in Cleveland, Evans drove a bus
for the Cleveland Transit System, then, in February of 1954, reenlisted in the
Army. This time his service was far less distinguished. Shortly after he was
back in uniform, Evans was court-martialed for hitting an officer and sen-
tenced to a dishonorable discharge and 2 years' confinement at the U.S. Army
Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Crowder, Mo. Later his sentence was reduced to
an undesirable discharge and he was released from Fort Crowder after a
7-month term.

Prelude to the Shooting 41

Evans had claimed that the injuries he had incurred in Korea left him with
severe headaches, partial loss of vision, and recurring paralysis of the right
side. He also claimed to be subject to occasional blackouts. It was during one
of these blackouts, he said during court-martial, that he struck the officer.
The records of the Army physicians corroborate Evans' claims. Doctors found
he was suffering from "psychomotor epilepsy." Further testing disclosed that
he has a "paranoid-type personality." Army records state: "He has much
hostility, normally under control, but under stress he exhibits aggressive be-
havior. This condition could become progressive, causing him to act psychotic-
like under stress." After these examinations, the Army release was decided
upon. Evans returned to Cleveland in October 1955, the next year he took a
job with the Pennsylvania Railroad, and he worked for that company for the
next 10 years.

In the early 1960's Evans became interested in astrology. "I say a flying
saucer at 79th and Kinsman," he recalls of the experience that changed his
life. "It hovered for awhile and disappeared. That started me thinking about
the stars and God and I thought that here I was thirty-three and Jesus had
died at thirty-three and I hadn't even got started yet. So I moved off by my-
self to study the science of astrology and philosophy."

In 1966, Evans was the disciple of an astrologer named Emmett (Toneli)
Cobb. When Cobb was confined at Lima State Hospital for the Criminally In-
sane, Evans (now Ahmed) stepped in to fill the gap. Though dismissed as an
eccentric even by some of the important young black leaders, Evans gained
an increasing following in his neighborhood of Glenville. He wore Afro garb
and he spoke the rhetoric of black nationalism. Like others of the new gener-
ation of militant leaders, most of whom had risen to power after the civil
rights activities of the early 1960's, he had seen the inside of a jail, he preached
black separatism and self-help in the black community, and he advocated vio-
lence in retribution to the hostility of the "sick" white society.

Ahmed Evans also indulged in prophecy. He made national news when, in
March of 1967, he predicted that May 9 would be a "terrible day." A Wall
Street Journal article featured his prediction:

He [Ahmed] predicts May 9 will be the "terrible day" that the anger of
this city's black ghetto erupts into violence-partly because, by his cal-
culations, that will be the day when an eclipse of the sun darkens the
sky.

May 9 passed without violence. While the rest of the world scoffed, Ahmed's
misreading of the heavens seemed to cost him no loss of influence in Glen-
ville. Young blacks continued to congregate in his Afro Culture Shop and
Bookstore. In the summer of 1968 Ahmed's group received a grant of
$10,300 from "Cleveland: Now!" funds to develop African crafts. From this
benefaction, channeled through the Hough Area Development Corporation, it
would have seemed that Ahmed Evans was at peace with the white establish-
ment.

But the world that had scoffed at a false prophet had not heard the last of
Ahmed.

Chapter 2

A MIDSUMMER'S NIGHTMARE

Glenville, lying near the northeast corner of Cleveland, is a neighborhood
of two- and three-story houses with broad front porches and small front lawns.
In the 1940's Glenville was a largely Jewish area; today it is very predomi-
nantly Negro. Except for pockets of deterioration, it stands in tidy contrast
to the Hough area, lying to the west.

For Patrolman William Kehoe, performing traffic duty on the East Side,
July 23, 1968, was a slow day. Shortly after noon he called headquarters for
a possible assignment. Lt. Edward Anderson, traffic coordinator for the
Cleveland Police Department, assigned him to check an abandoned automo-
bile in the Glenville area. Anderson had received a telephone call about the
car not long before. "It was just a routine call of an abandoned auto," he
later recalled. "I told the gentleman we'd get to it as soon as possible. I
couldn't promise action that day." Following standard procedure, Anderson
did not ask the caller's name.

The car, a 1958 Cadillac, was on Beulah Avenue, between East 123d Street
and Lakeview. The left front tire was flat; to Patrolman Kehoe, it appeared
the car was a "junk car" that had not been driven for some time. Neighbors
confirmed that the car had been there many days; none had any idea who
owned it. At 1 :25 p.m., Kehoe placed a parking ticket on the abandoned
car, then filled out a routine report for the tow truck division of the police
department.

Kehoe expected that the car would be towed away before the evening rush
hour. But William McMillan and Roy Benslay, operating tow truck No. 58,
had other assignments that kept them from the pickup in Glenville until dusk.
They arrived on Beulah Avenue in their uniforms, which resemble standard
police uniforms except that the jackets are of the Eisenhower type. Cleve-
landers commonly assume that the tow-truck operators are policemen, but in
fact they are civilian employees and carry no weapons.

What happened next has been recounted by McMillan. After Benslay
backed the truck up the Cadillac, McMillan emerged from the cab to check
the license plate number against the assignment card. "The next thing I knew
I was shot in the back. I turned around and saw a man with a shotgun firing
from the side of a house on the corner of Lakeview."

McMillan ran to the front of the tow truck to take cover. A second shot
hit him in the right side. "Another sniper was firing from the bushes just in
front of the truck." Benslay, crouching in the cab of the truck, radioed for
help. Then the shooting stopped.

44 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

"A Negro with a carbine in his hand walked up the sidewalk and stopped
just across from me," McMillan told a reporter several days later.

"Are you one of the sons of bitches stealing cars?" the Negro asked him.
McMillan pleaded that he was unarmed and rose from the street to show that
he had no weapon. The Negro raised the carbine to his shoulder and took
aim. McMillan ran toward 123d Street. As he turned the corner, another bul-
let hit him in the right side. McMillan kept running.

Halfway along the block a Negro woman shouted to McMillan and offered
him refuge. Inside the house he telephoned the police department, but the
lines were busy. When he heard sirens, McMillan left the house and walked
northward on 123d Street. After turning right on Oakland Avenue he spotted
a squad car, which rushed him to a hospital.

McMillan identified the Negro with the carbine as Fred (Ahmed) Evans.

He also offered an explanation of the event. "The snipers set up the am-
bush and used the tow truck as a decoy to bring the police in," he said. "They
had their crossfire all planned. We all were sitting ducks."

McMillan's ambush theory found ready acceptance. Many Clevelanders,
and at least two national news magazines, accepted it unquestioningly. But
other events of that grim Tuesday, and the accounts of other eyewitnesses,
cast doubts upon the ambush theory.

Ahmed lived in an apartment in a two-story, red brick house at 12312
Auburndale, a block and a half from the scene of the tow-truck shooting. On
the evening of July 23, shortly before the tow-truck incident, he had visitors:
George Forbes, the city councilman from Ahmed's area, and Walter Beach, a
former halfback for the Cleveland Browns, who was the director of the
Mayor's Council on Youth Opportunities. According to a summary of events,
issued later by the mayor's office, the meeting lasted from 7:50 p.m. to 8:05
p.m.

Forbes and Beach had come from a meeting at City Hall where Ahmed had
been the subject of anxious discussion. The meeting, which began at 2:30
that afternoon, had been called by Inspector Lewis Coffey of the Cleveland
Police Department. Coffey had intelligence reports, which the police depart-
ment had obtained chiefly through the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that
warned of an outbreak of violence planned for Cleveland the next morning,
July 24, at 8 a.m. The central figures in the outbreak would be Ahmed and
his group, the Black Nationalists of New Libya.

Ahmed's group, according to the reports, had been assembling an arsenal
of handguns and carbines and stashing them in Ahmed's apartment. Some of
the group had gone to Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Akron on Sunday night to
collect semiautomatic weapons; a further trip to Detroit was planned for
Tuesday evening, July '23. In addition to the Wednesday morning outbreak,
the reports added, there was the possibility of simultaneous outbreaks in other
Northern cities.1 In Cleveland, five Negroes would be the targets of assassina-
tion: Mayor Carl B. Stokes, Councilman Leo Jackson, William O. Walker
(publisher of the Negro newspaper, The Cleveland Call & Post), Baxter Hill,
and James Payne. Four of the targets were prominent Negroes; the fifth,
James Payne, was the patrolman Ahmed had been found guilty of assaulting.

A Midsummer's Nightmare 45

The truth of these reports was questionable. Police doubted that a trip to
both Pittsburgh and Detroit had been made in one night. The reports came
from a single individual, a member of Ahmed's group who apparently was not
an infiltrator but a man accustomed to selling information to the FBI and the
Cleveland police. Other intelligence sources did not corroborate his story.
Those who had talked to the informer on the telephone suspected he was
under the influence of drugs.

The reports were serious enough, however, to warrant considerable atten-
tion. On Tuesday morning, Cleveland police checked various aspects of the
intelligence reports. They learned that on Monday, black nationalists had
been in Higbee's, a downtown department store, examining high-powered
deer rifles with telescopic scopes. Nationalists had been seen buying bando-
liers (links of ammunition for automatic weapons), canteens, and first-aid kits
from a downtown army surplus store. There was some uncertainty whether
the nationalists included Ahmed or any of his group.2

Mayor Stokes was in Washington, D.C., that day, participating in a discus-
sion entitled "Is the Big City Dying?" In his absence, Clarence James, the
law director (a position similar to city attorney or solicitor) participated in
the City Hall meeting as "acting mayor." While the meeting was in progress,
Mayor Stokes placed a routine call from Washington to his office. Informed
of the potential trouble, he told James to telephone Baxter Hill, the director
of Pride, Inc., a community self-help organization, and a member of the Com-
munity Relations Board. Unable to reach Hill, James summoned to the meet-
ing Councilman George Forbes, who was also familiar with Ahmed and his
group.

Discussion turned from the intelligence reports to tactics for coping with
the developing situation. There were no grounds for arresting Ahmed and too
little to establish "probable cause" for obtaining a search warrant. By the
laws of Cleveland and Ohio, mere possession of handguns or rifles is not ille-
gal. While possession of automatic and semiautomatic weapons is illegal,
there was only the informer's report to indicate that Ahmed and his group
possessed such weapons. Even if there had been something in the informer's
story to establish probable cause, he could not be used to testify without
"blowing" his cover.

According to the informer's story, Ahmed and his group were planning a
trip to Detroit Tuesday evening to obtain illegal automatic weapons. That
being the case, Inspector Coffey advised, the police should establish a surveil-
lance near Ahmed's house. Furthermore, it ought to be a moving surveillance,
not a stationary one— roving police cars rather than parked ones. Ahmed's
neighborhood was residential, his and nearby streets were narrow, and a
parked car full of men-especially if they were white police officers-would
attract notice. Moreover, Ahmed often stationed guards at his home to watch
for police, sometimes sending them on "patrols" to hunt for police on nearby
streets. Enough cars were available for an effective moving surveillance, and
the police department would assign to the task as many Negro officers as it
could.

One other aspect of the informer's story demanded attention. Although
police investigation had failed to find confirming evidence of an assassination
plot, a decision was made to provide a security guard for the five Negroes men-
tioned as potential victims.

46 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

Councilman Forbes and Walter Beach agreed to talk to Ahmed, to try to
cool him down and work out a solution to his known grievances. Forbes and
Beach knew, as many others knew, that Ahmed was angered over apparent
discriminations against him in recent weeks. With the grant he had received
from "Cleveland: Now!" funds, Ahmed was in the process of refurbishing a
dilapidated and long-vacant store on Hough Avenue, converting it into an Afro-
American culture shop. After investing considerable effort on the cleanup, he
was notified by the white landlord that he could not use the store. And now
he was being evicted from his apartment on Auburndale. After legal proceed-
ings, a 24-hour notice was served by bailiffs earlier on Tuesday. (The apart-
ment actually was not his; it was rented by a 16-year-old who had taken the
African name of Osu Bey.)3

After the City Hall meeting broke up about 6 p.m., Forbes and Beach
drove toward the East Side. On the way to Ahmed's home they stopped on
Superior Avenue at the Afro Set, a shop and gathering place for young mili-
tants. Harllel Jones, leader of the Afro Set, was not there, but Forbes and
Beach talked to one of the young members of the group who agreed to ac-
company them to Ahmed's home. The three drove eastward on Superior
Avenue, then turned south on Lakeview. At the corner of Moulton Avenue,
which is close to the intersection of Lakeview and Auburndale, they saw an
unmarked car "full of white people." It was glaringly evident that the police
had established a stationary surveillance rather than a moving one. In fact,
another surveillance car was facing Ahmed's apartment building from the op-
posite direction, parked where Auburndale joins East 124th Street. Both cars
contained only white officers; both were in plain view of Ahmed's home.

Beach steered his car left onto Auburndale and parked in front of Ahmed's
apartment building. As the three men emerged from the car, Ahmed called to
them from a narrow passageway next to the building. In a backyard confer-
ence, he poured out his apprehension about the police surveillance. There
were, he said, even police on the roof. The police had harassed him before;
he was afraid the surveillance was leading up to another incident of harrass-
ment. He urged Forbes and Beach to try to get the surveillance removed.
The men also discussed Ahmed's eviction problems, and Forbes and Beach
promised to do what they could.4

When the conference ended, the visitors felt they had satisfied Ahmed. As
they were leaving, he told them to give a message to Mayor Stokes: "Tell the
Big Brother downtown that everything is going to be all right."

Forbes decided that there was nothing he could do at the scene to have the
surveillance removed. As a councilman, he knew the police who usually work
in his district, but the surveillance teams were from a special unit. He judged
they would not recognize him or listen to him.

The three men drove westward on Superior Avenue, stopping first at the
Afro Set, then at a grocery store whose owner was a close friend of Ahmed's.
The grocer was not there. Forbes and Beach, having left the third man at the
Afro Set, then tried unsuccessfully to find Harllel Jones at his home on Hough
Avenue. At a nearby office of the Cleveland Legal Aid Program, Forbes tele-
phoned Joseph F. McManamon, Cleveland's safety director, to ask that the
surveillance be removed. McManamon advised him to call Mayor Stokes, who
had returned from Washington, and gave him the mayor's private phone num-
ber. While Forbes and Stokes were on the phone discussing what they could

A Midsummer's Nightmare 47

do about Ahmed's problems, a voice broke in to say that there was an emer-
gency call for the mayor. Stokes asked Forbes to call back in about 5 minutes.
Forbes and Beach returned to the home of Harllel Jones, this time finding
him there. While they were talking, a member of the Afro Set came in to re-
port that shooting had begun in Glenville. Forbes called the mayor. Stokes
already had the news. The emergency call had come from Safety Director
McManamon. The Glenville disturbance had been ignited.

Who shot first? And at whom? Various accounts of where, how, and why
the shooting started have appeared. Even after extensive investigation, ques-
tions remain unanswered.

Accounts of the activities of the surveillance teams, and of what they ob-
served, have been provided by the policemen in the surveillance cars. Three
patrolmen— O'Malley, Sweeney, and Gallagher— were in the unmarked car at
124th and Auburndale, facing westward toward Ahmed's house. When they
arrived at 6 p.m., about a dozen Negroes, including women and children, were
on the porch at 12312 Auburndale. About half were dressed in Afro garb,
the others conventionally. The policemen kept watch through binoculars.
Later in the evening, shortly before Councilman Forbes and Walter Beach ar-
rived at the apartment, they saw Ahmed himself arrive in a red Volkswagen.
Evidently no one was on the porch at this time.

Shortly after Beach and Forbes left, according to James O'Malley, a Negro
carrying a carbine came out of 12312 Auburndale and stood guard. Ahmed
came out a short while later, followed by about 16 others carrying arms and
wearing bandoliers. The man who had come out first crossed the street,
dropped to his knees, and pointed his rifle toward the surveillance car.
O'Malley radioed for instructions and was told to get out of the area imme-
diately. The time, he recalls, was 8:20 p.m.

Patroman Gallagher, driving the surveillance car, turned left onto 124th
Street to escape from the area. As they were leaving, O'Malley saw two men
get into a Ford station wagon and set off in pursuit of the surveillance car.
The policemen heard a shot; it did not hit their car. Moments later the sta-
tion wagon halted the pursuit, turned around, and headed back toward
Auburndale.

Patrolmen Thomas Gerrity and Thomas Horgan were in the other surveil-
lance car parked at the corner of Lakeview and Moulton, facing Ahmed's
house from the opposite direction. They, too, observed the people on the
porch, the later arrival of Ahmed in the red Volkswagen, and the arrival and
departure of Councilman Forbes and Walter Beach. When Ahmed's group
came out of the house, according to Horgan, several of the men headed to-
ward their surveillance car. The surveillance car turned left onto Lakeview,
heading northward toward Superior Avenue, to escape. A green Chevrolet
followed them; Gerrity and Horgan heard several shots, but none hit their
car. Horgan broadcast a warning to other police cars to stay out of the area.
As their car headed west on Superior Avenue, Horgan heard a broadcast
about the tow-truck operator being fired upon. Gerrity and Horgan turned
southward, back toward the scene of trouble. When they arrived within view
of the tow truck, says Horgan, they saw the tow-truck operator running with
his hands up and an armed black nationalist chasing him. Then the surveillance

48 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

car was struck by fire coming from 123d and Beulah. Bullets hit the wind-
shield and the hood and demolished the grille. Gerrity and Morgan returned
the fire, shooting toward two snipers hiding behind the tow truck, until their
ammunition was exhausted. Then they sought escape northward on 123d
Street. By the time they were back on Superior, all four tires of their surveil-
lance car were flat. When Gerrity returned to the police station, a colleague
recalled, the 28-year-old patrolman was "dry-vomiting and shaking so hard he
put his hand on the letter basket and the whole table shook."

According to Lt. Burt Miller, who had been assigned by the police depart-
ment to reconstruct the history of the events of July 23, other police cars
were on the scene when Gerrity and Horgan approached the tow truck. "They
engaged, with other cars that were arriving, in a fire fight with males that were
carrying weapons," he told a City Hall press conference on August 9. Thus,
police cars had converged on the scene and the full-scale Shootout had begun.
Three males, according to Lieutenant Miller, were firing at police from two
corners of Lakeview and Beulah; a fourth lay, wounded or dead, on the side-
walk at 123d and Beulah.

By the testimony of the surveillance teams, then, they were the first to be
fired upon, not the tow truck. Rightly or wrongly, Ahmed regarded the obvi-
ous presence of the surveillance cars over several hours' time as threatening.
The tow truck, it now appears, was not the deliberate target of a planned am-
bush but arrived at the wrong place at the wrong time. Inspector Lewis Coffey
took this view in an interview published in the Plain Dealer 3 days after the
event. According to Coffey, the tow truck arrived on Beulah Avenue "almost
simultaneously" with the initial shootings at the surveillance cars. "Then he
gets it."

The validity of the ambush theory can be examined in the light of other
information. For one thing, it has been established that the owner of the
abandoned car cannot be implicated in any plot to draw tow-truck operators
or police to the scene. Henry R. Leftwich, owner of the 1958 Cadillac, had
loaned the car to a friend while he was hospitalized for long-term treatment
of a back injury. His friend was returning the car on Sunday, July 6, when it
"broke down" on Beulah Avenue. He left it there; 2& weeks later, Leftwich
still had done nothing about removing the car.

Of the sequence of events on Beulah Avenue during the evening of July 23,
there were several eyewitness reports. Not all of them accord with the claim
of Wilh'am McMillan, the tow-truck operator, that he was shot very soon after
arriving at the abandoned car. Residents of the area have reported seeing the
tow-truck officers examining the automobile for a period of time before the
outbreak of shooting. A man and his wife drove by the tow truck as McMil-
lan was getting out to examine the Cadillac. They drove to the intersection of
Lakeview, turned left and proceeded two blocks to Superior, turned left
again, and in that time heard no shots. Other witnesses claim that the tow-
truck operators were confronted by an individual who seemed to argue with
them. This individual walked away, only to reappear with the snipers some
time later. One resident interviewed claimed that the individual who con-
fronted the tow-truck operators then walked away and made a telephone call.
Such a call could have been directed to Ahmed and also could have prompted
the movement from Ahmed's home or given it direction after the movement
had started.

A Midsummer's Nightmare 49

The official police log lends weight to the evidence, supplied by the ac-
counts of surveillance-car activity, that the movement away from Ahmed's
house, and some of the actual shooting, occurred before McMillan was shot.
The tow truck placed its call for help at 8:28 p.m. The first radio report of
shooting came 4 minutes earlier in a conversation between the dispatchery
and Car 604 (which was not one of the surveillance cars). Car 604 gave its
position as 123d and Beulah. Since this is close to the location of the tow
truck, it tends to support the conclusion that the tow truck was inadvertently
trapped in the crossfire between police and snipers.

A puzzling claim was made in a chronology of events released by the
mayor's office at the press conference on August 9. According to this chro-
nology, at 8: 15 p.m. the tow truck "gets [a] call" to pick up the abandoned
Cadillac. This invites the inference that some citizen had telephoned the po-
lice department Tuesday evening with the intention of luring the tow truck
into a trap. Except in response to dangerous accidents, it is not usual operat-
ing procedure for a tow truck to be instructed by headquarters to go immedi-
ately to tow a car. And it has been established that the automobile had been
examined earlier on Tuesday and the tow-sheet report prepared then.

Against theories of an ambush or well-planned conspiracy stands the evi-
dence that on Tuesday evening Ahmed was annoyed and apprehensive about
the police surveillance. He expressed such sentiments to Walter Beach and
George Forbes. He had memories of police violence in Akron. "So we armed
ourselves. And what followed was chaos."

In an interview published in the Cleveland Press, August 2, Ahmed offered
his version of his movements after leaving the house:

I was heading for the Lakeview Tavern [at the corner of Auburndale
and Lakeview] when I heard some shots coming from the end of the
street. Then one of the brothers passed me running. Some policemen
in a blue detective's car opened up with a machinegun and he was dead.
So I ran into a yard and I began trading shots with a policeman behind a
parked car. I couldn't hit him. I wasn't coming anywhere close to him.
And then my carbine jammed.

According to Ahmed, he then hid in bushes and tried to fix the carbine, but
without success.

In an interview for this study, Ahmed said that he had rounded the corner
and was walking on Lakeview when he heard the first shot. When he went to
investigate, he saw the tow-truck operator running along Beulah. Then, he
said, he heard what sounded like a submachinegun blast; he later concluded
that this was the fire that killed Amir Iber Katir, one of his followers. (The
account by Lt. Miller and the observations of a radio reporter who arrived at
the scene support the conclusion that the first person killed was a black na-
tionalist. The corner's autopsy revealed four bullet wounds: the right chest,
right thigh, left leg, and left thigh.5) Ahmed has concluded: "We were am-
bushed, not the police."

An eyewitness recalled that Ahmed came down the street very coolly. By
the time he got to Beulah, the shooting had begun. Ahmed, said the witness,
was carrying an automatic weapon, and when he reached the corner he started
firing.

50 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

Ahmed himself, he came down later. On his side, and when he came
down with the automatic rifle or machinegun, whichever it be, his rifle
drowned all the other guns. ... He came down peacefully. He came
down the left side of the street and when he turned the corner, that's
when all hell broke loose.

Ahmed has admitted that he did not have total control of the situation.
There were many nationalists involved and he was only one. "I had come to
be the leader. But the night of the 23d, there was no leader. After we got
our guns, it was every man for himself."

In the 1-hour period between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday even-
ing, at least 22 people were killed or injured in the raging gun battle between
police and snipers. The major shooting occurred along Lakeview Avenue be-
tween Beulah Avenue and Auburndale, a distance of less than 300 yards, and
ranged no more than a block each way on side streets.

The area is no place to hold a shoot-out. Lakeview itself is narrow. The
side streets are even narrower, and some of them jut at odd angles. Houses
are close together, sometimes separated by narrow passageways. There is little
room to maneuver

When a radio call for assistance went out about 8:30 p.m., it was an ""all
units" call; any available unit in the city could respond. Police throughout
the city left their regular patrols and rushed to the scene, anxious to help
their comrades in trouble. A radio newsman estimated there were 40 to 50
police officers when he arrived at 8:45 p. m. Later there were "several hun-
dred officers," according to the Cleveland Press. Nearby streets accumulated
long lines of abandoned patrol cars as police parked their cars as close to the
shooting as possible, grabbed their weapons, and ran to lend assistance.6

The battle that ensued was a combination of confusion and panic. Police
enthusiastically rushed into the area without knowing precisely, or even gen-
erally, what they were rushing into. The response had largely been personal
initiative rather than planned reaction and an orderly show of controlled
force. Each officer grabbed his gun and did what he could. "Perhaps some
snipers were shot and killed," a policeman recalled of his experience. "I fired,
mostly at shadows." No one assumed command. There was no orderly way
to report to headquarters and no way for headquarters to issue directives.
Police had largely abandoned their radios when they left their cars.

After the initial shooting, the violence clustered around three locations:
East 123d and Beulah (location of the tow truck); two adjoining houses on
Lakeview (1391 and 1395); and, the Lakeview Tavern and 12312 Auburndale
(Ahmed's residence).

Among the first to respond to the call for assistance were Patrolmen Joseph
McManamon and Chester Szukalski in Car 591. They approached the area
from the south, driving up 123d Street. "I didn't see any people, any children
or anyone playing," Szukalski recalls. "All I could see was the yellow tow
truck parked on the northeast corner of 123d and Beulah."

As McManamon pulled in front of the tow truck, shots hit the patrol car
on the passenger side where Szukalski was sitting. Both men crawled out the
driver's side, but Szukalski was hit before he escaped.

A Midsummer's Nightmare 5 1

I got hit in the right forearm first, but I couldn't see where the shots
were coming from. I just knew they were coming from my right and
from a higher elevation. As I tried to crawl to safety, I was hit in the
right thigh. It was the third shot that hit me that really wrecked me.
That one hit my right calf, causing a compound fracture of my right
leg, then hit my left calf. By then I could hardly crawl. The pain was
awful. I crawled about thirty or forty feet to a building, waiting for
help. We [Szukalski and McManamon] could see other policemen in
the area, but they couldn't get to us because the gunfire was. so intense
and constant. We waited about fifteen minutes for our buddies to get
us out.

McManamon was slightly wounded by fragments from the bullet that broke
Szukalski's leg.

As Amir Iber Katir lay dying on the sidewalk and more police cars con-
verged on the scene, the snipers on Beulah Avenue retreated across Lakeview
into the narrow alley that is an extension of Beulah. With police in pursuit
they turned right into the alley parallel to Lakeview and began exchanging fire
with police from between the houses. Some forced their way into the two-
and-a-half-story frame house at 1395 Lakeview and occupied the second floor.
Beatrice Flagg was watching television in her first-floor apartment when the
shooting started.

They started shooting and I was afraid to look out. I told my kids to
get down on the ground and pray. I looked out and there was an army
of police there. I could hear a lot of loud swearing upstairs. I begged
the police to stop shooting but they wouldn't listen. I barred the door
because I didn't want anybody to get in and then I just got back down
on the ground.

Mrs. Flagg and her children escaped from the house after tear gas began to fill
her living room. Mrs. Henry Ferryman, on the second floor with her 9-month-
old baby, also managed to escape.7

Police then occupied the first floor of the house next door (1391 Lake-
view). In the area between the two buildings, Patrolman Louis E. Golonka
was shot and killed. Police, firing at armed men in the alley from windows of
1391 Lakeview, killed Sidney Curtis Taylor (Malik Ali Bey) and wounded
Lathan Donald (Londue). From nearby bushes a man rose and tried to fire at
police. Picking up Patrolman Golonka's shotgun, a policeman fatally shot the
man, who was Bernard Donald (Nondu Bey), brother of Lathan Donald. The
bodies of the three black nationalists- two dead, one severely injured-lay in
the alley amid carbines and bandoliers until after midnight.

Another gun battle was raging at the intersection of Auburndale and Lake-
view. Patrolman Kenneth Gibbons and Willard Wolff, in Car 505, had re-
sponded to the call for assistance and reportedly were the first to arrive at the
intersection. Another policeman was on the scene, however: an unidentified
plainclothesman struggling with a "ymmg punk" near Ahmed's house. As
they left the car to assist, a high-powered bullet hit the motor and the car ex-
ploded. Gibbons was shot and seriously injured; Wolff was killed.

Sgts. Sam Levy and Bill Moran also were among the first to arrive at Au-
burndale and Lakeview. They heard shots coming from backyards. Levy de-
scribes their response:

52 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

We dodged through the yards and crawled along to the back of the
Lakeview Tavern, where I saw shells on the ground. I got to the north-
east corner of Auburndale and Lakeview and I saw some empty ammu-
nition clips in the driveway behind the bar. I started up the driveway
and I must have gone about three steps when I was hit. ... I dove into
the gutter and tried to get behind a car parked near the intersection.
They kept shooting and I was hit again. They shot at anybody who
moved.

Levy took refuge under the parked car. He was stranded for nearly an hour
before help could reach him.

Lt. Elmer Joseph entered Auburndale from Lakeview about the same time
that Sergeant Levy was wounded. He was on the sidewalk when he was hit;
he managed to get himself to cover. Lieutenant Joseph was also stranded for
almost an hour. Henry Orange, a 50-year-old civilian, was wounded at about
the same time, allegedly while assisting police. Patrolman Richard Hart was
shot in the back, apparently by a sniper hiding in a dark doorway, then hit
several more times as he writhed in the middle of Lakeview.

Lt. Leroy James and Sergeant Gentile stopped at Sixth District headquar-
ters to "pick up extra weapons" after they heard the call for assistance. They
entered the battleground area from East 124th Street, thus approaching Au-
burndale from the east. They parked and continued to Auburndale on foot.
As Lieutenant Jones turned the corner onto Auburndale, Sergeant Gentile,
behind him, heard heavy fire. Gentile hurried around the corner, only to see
Jones fall to the sidewalk in the middle of the block. Gentile attempted to
approach Jones, but the heavy fire kept him from reaching his wounded
partner.

Patrolmen Angelo Santa Maria and Steve Sopko also rushed to the scene.
By the time they got there, so many police cars were in the area that they had
to park two blocks away. While Sopko headed in another direction, Santa
Maria ran behind the houses on Auburndale. From there he could see a police
officer lying on the sidewalk. "I yelled to other police under cover across the
street, 'Who is it?' They yelled back, 'Lieutenant Jones.' "

Then, says Santa Maria, he talked to several Negro bystanders, asking for a
volunteer to drive a car alongside Lieutenant Jones so that Santa Maria could
drag him into it. Several offered help; Santa Maria chose a man whom police
later identified as James E. Chapman, a 22-year-old filing clerk who lived next
door to the Lakeview Tavern. Santa Maria got into Chapman's car.

I told him to drive up parallel to Jones and throw himself on the floor
and I would try to drag Jones in. But cars were parked bumper to
bumper. We both got out and separated, trying to get around them.
On the sidewalk a sergeant met me. We decided to throw a smoke bomb
for cover.

Then, according to the Cleveland Press, "the sergeant opened up with his sub-
machinegun to protect Santa Maria, who went into the smoke to get Jones."
(Cleveland police are not issued automatic weapons, and it is against regula-
tions to possess them.) Santa Maria describes the rescue:

I grabbed his legs and started to drag him out when I was hit in the
back. I tried to crawl but I didn't get very far. Some policeman [later

A Midsummer's Nightmare 53

identified as Patrolman Steven Marencky] dragged me, then threw me
over his shoulder and put me in a police car.

Santa Maria did not know the identity of the Negro who was helping him nor
what happened to him next. From newspaper accounts and the coroner's re-
port, it is apparent that James E. Chapman died from a massive head wound,
fired from an automatic weapon from a direction to his right and above him.
The identification of Chapman as Santa Maria's helper was first made by po-
lice in a Cleveland Press article 8 days after the event. Chapman was pro-
claimed a hero, and Bluecoats, Inc., an organization that helps widows of po-
licemen, departed from standard policy to present a thousand-dollar check to
Chapman's widow.8

Two patrolmen made an attempt to rescue Sergeant Levy and Lieutenant
Joseph, who lay wounded on the street, pinned there by sniper fire. Thomas
Smith ran to Lieutenant Joseph, dragged him across the street to safety, then
ran to Sergeant Levy, who was lying under a car. He dragged Levy from un-
der the car, started to pick him up, and was shot in the right shoulder. "I
spun around and then I was struck by crossfire and fell to the ground." Pa-
trolman Ernest Rowell had joined in the attempt to rescue Levy.

Smith was hit. I was hit as I dropped to the ground near Levy. Smith
was still exposed. I managed to pull him near us. I couldn't get him
under the car. So I put my legs over his head. He was moaning that he
couldn't move his legs. I loosened Levy's shirt and partially stopped
the bleeding. We kept assuring each other help would reach us. ...
Finally— it rnust have been an hour later— a tear gas cannister was acci-
dentally triggered by another policeman. But that cloud was a welcome
sight, even though it was burning our eyes. As the cloud covered the
car, I jumped up and ran towards Lakeview Road. The gunfire was rat-
tat-tat-ing in spurts. It was now or never.

Two other patrolmen, William Traine and James Herron, took advantage of
the tear gas and headed toward the car protecting Levy and Smith. With the
help of other policemen they got them placed on stretchers and rolled to an
ambulance about 20 feet away.

Patrolman Leonard Szalkiewicz was wounded on Lakeview, near the in-
tersection of Auburndale, as he was pushing a patrol car blocking the street.
"At first I wasn't sure whether I was shot or whether I was cut by flying
glass." Another patrolman, Anthony Sherbinski, was wounded about 9:30
p.m. as he shot at snipers from the second floor of the Lakeview tavern. A
civilian John Pegues, was shot in the leg about the same time.9

By 9:45 the shooting had died down, and police were able to move into
12312 and 12314 Auburndale to search for suspects. A reporter at the scene
counted 17 men and women, presumably all the occupants of the two houses,
brought out, loaded into patrol cars, and taken to district headquarters for
questioning. Fred (Ahmed) Evans was not among them. No casualties were
found in the two houses. Four rifles and a number of boxes of ammunition
were recovered from the houses, another rifle from a car parked nearby.

The next morning, at 9:30 a.m., police arrested and charged three individ-
uals for participating in the shooting: John Hardrick, 17; Leslie Jackson (Osu
Bey), 16; and Alfred Thomas, 18. All were found at 12314 Auburndale, the

54 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

house next door to Ahmed's. John Phillips, the arresting officer, later testi-
fied in juvenile court that he found Hardrick hiding in the bedroom where
three more high-powered rifles were also found. According to Phillips, Hard-
rick said he had been given his rifle by Ahmed around 5 :30 p.m. on the even-
ing of July 23. Ahmed showed him how to use the rifle and told him to be
on the alert. Jackson, said Phillips, had been given his rifle by a sniper who
came down from the roof of the building after the shooting started. Both
youths, Phillips told the court, admitted to firing their rifles "four or five
times" during the evening.

No other individuals apprehended in the vicinity of Auburndale and Lake-
view were charged by police for participating in the shooting.

On the evening of July 23d, Henry Perryman, minister of a store-front
church on Superior Avenue, was on his way to Akron, scene of recent racial
disturbances, to help "cool things down." His car radio brought news of the
shootings in his Cleveland neighborhood. Perryman turned around and sped
homeward. He arrived back in Glenville to discover that police were firing at
snipers in his own house at 1395 Lakeview.

Distraught, fearful for the safety of his family, Perryman attempted to en-
ter the house, but a policeman held him back. "That man saved my life," says
Perryman. He found his wife and 9-month-old son in safety across the street.
Eleven-year-old Michael Perryman, who had left the house early in the even-
ing, was nowhere to be found.

A fierce gun battle raged around 1395 Lakeview, lasting long after the
shooting had subsided at Auburndale and Lakeview. Police reported that the
snipers were firing wildly from every floor of the house. They called to a
sniper in the basement to surrender, but he answered them with obscenities.
At one point, according to the police, a man came out of the house and fired
a weapon randomly from the areaway between 1395 and 1391. He returned
to the house, and, when he appeared at a window, police shot and felled him.
The shooting from the first floor stopped, but continued from the second.

Around midnight, a group of police attempted to storm the house. They
got through one door; a locked second door barred them from access to the
second floor. They shot off the lock but then encountered a steel wedge be-
hind the door. Furniture and bedding were leaning against the door on the
other side. They could not get to the sniper on the second floor. The body of
the sniper who had been shooting from the first floor, they reported, lay on
the kitchen floor dead.

"At this time," Lieutenant Miller reported at the City Hall press confer-
ence on August 9, "the house erupted in flames." The cause of the fire has
not been determined, but residents of the area are convinced that the police
set the fire themselves. Henry Perryman has made a plea to the city of Cleve-
land for compensation for the destruction of his home.

Perryman watched his home burn to the ground; the house next door
(1391 Lakeview) catch fire and burn also. Police reported hearing shouts of
"Omar, Omar" and "Ali" come from within 1395. Ferryman's 1 1 -year-old
son had still not been found. Fire department units made no attempt to ap-
proach the burning structures to extinguish the flames.

A Midsummer's Nightmare 55

Among others watching the buildings consumed in flames were Council-
man George Forbes, Law Director Clarence James, Walter Beach, and three
other black leaders: Harllel Jones, Wilbur Grattan, and Albert "Breeze" For-
est. Forbes, Beach, and Jones, together with Baxter Hill, had been active
throughout the evening trying to restore peace, trying to talk to the snipers
but unable to get near because of the shooting. James had been touring the
troubled area as the Mayor's eyewitness and reporter.

When the two Lakeview houses began to burn, Harllel Jones wanted to
make sure that everyone had been removed from them. He, Forbes, Grattan,
and Forest approached the burning buildings. As Jones got to the alley be-
hind the houses, he noticed that the bodies of the shot snipers were still lying
there. One of the bodies was beginning to burn; Jones dragged it away.
Lathan Donald, still alive, was also in danger of catching fire. With the help
of the other men, Harllel Jones got Donald onto a stretcher; Grattan and
Forest began to carry the wounded man from the alley. According to the re-
ports of those attempting to assist Lathan Donald-, unidentified police offi-
cers (who had removed their badges) attacked Grattan and Forest, beating
them severely, saying "Leave that nigger here to die." Grattan and Forest re-
treated without the stretcher, but managed to tell two Negro policemen about
the incident before leaving the area.

All the while Forest, Grattan, and Jones were investigating the dead and
wounded behind the burning buildings, Clarence James, Assistant Safety Di-
rector Frank Moss, and others remained by their cars at Beulah and Lakeview.
There they became near victims of the chaos. James described what hap-
pened:

Now there were a lot of shells exploding; it looked like they were burn-
ing shells. As I turned toward the car there were people lined up on the
porches and everything, and an awful lot of police officers were there. I
turned back toward the car. I heard two shots. It probably was my
imagination, but I thought I heard the "zing" of one, and I dropped
right down to my knees by the car. Frank Moss was just diagonally
[across from me] . I could see him. He spun [around] and started to
draw his revolver. . . . Boy, everybody was almost in a freeze position,

and I got a little scared I made up my mind I was going to get the

hell out of there.

James does not know who fired the shots, but he does not dismiss the possi-
bility that the one that came close to him was fired by a policeman.

About this time, Grattan and Forest emerged from the alley, Forest bleed-
ing and in pain. Clarence James and Harllel Jones took Forest to Forest City
Hospital. There, James placed a call to May or Stokes. Stokes spoke with
Harllel Jones, who was outraged over police conduct during the incident, and
managed to calm him down. Later, Lathan Donald was brought to the prison
ward of Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital by two Negro policemen
who had taken him from the alley.

Henry Ferryman and his wife kept a vigil on their burning house late into
the night. Two cars in their driveway went up in flames.

Ferryman was injured in a scuffle with a young militant who had shouted
at him: "This is only the beginning." The next morning, as Ferryman picked

56 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

among the ashes, looking for redeemable possessions, his son Michael, having
spent the night at the home of friends, returned.

On July 30, a week after the incident, a city power shovel plied back and
forth amid the rubble of the two houses, looking for the bodies of the two
snipers whom police had reported occupying 1395 and who were presumed
burned in the fire. No bodies were found.

At 1 1 : 1 1 p. m., before the fire in the Ferryman house started, a call went
out over the police radio: "1384 Lakeview: front door open, man wants to
give himself up, wants [to surrender to] Negro policemen." A similar mes-
sage went out at 12:24 p. m. This time, three white policemen, Sgt. Ronald
Heinz, Patrolmen David Hicks and John Cullen, approached 1384 Lakeview
to apprehend the man who wished to surrender. Fred (Ahmed) Evans
emerged from the house, shirtless, wearing slacks and sandals.

The house from which Ahmed came was across the street from the Ferry-
man house. The only times that 1384 Lakeview appeared in official police
chronologies and records were the two broadcasts offering Ahmed's sur-
render.10

When Ahmed emerged, he was reported to have asked: "How are my
people?" Told that at least three had been killed, he replied: "They died for
a worthy cause." Ahmed said he had 17 in his group.

When police asked Ahmed where his weapon was, he pointed to the bushes
in front of the house. The police found a toga, a loaded carbine, five boxes of
ammunition, and a first-aid kit. Ahmed explained: "If my carbine hadn't
jammed I would have killed you three. I had you in my sights when my rifle
jammed." Before taking him to central headquarters, one of the policemen
asked Ahmed: "Why did you start all this?" He replied, "You police have
bothered us too long."11

Though the battle between police and snipers waged past midnight, the
casualties of that battle occurred within the first hour of the shooting.

A chronology of events, issued by the Mayor's office on August 9, lists the
following casualties:

Around E. 123d St. and Beulah

William McMillan (tow-truck operator) wounded at 8:25 p.m.

Ptl. Chester Szukalski wounded 8:30

Ptl. Joseph McManamon wounded 8:30

Leroy Mansfield Williams (suspect) killed 9: 26(?)

Around 1391 and 1395 Lakeview

Ptl. Louis Golonka killed at 8: 35 p.m.

Sidney Taylor Curtis (suspect) killed 8:40

Bernard Donald (suspect) killed 8:40

Lath an Donald (suspect) wounded 8:45

Around the Lakeview Tavern, 12312, and 12314 Auburndale
a. at Lakeview and Auburndale:

Ptl. Willard Wolff killed at 8:30 p.m.

Ptl. Kenneth Gibbons wounded 8:30

Sgt. Samuel Levy wounded 8:45

Henry Orange (civilian) wounded 8:45

A Midsummer's Nightmare 57

Lt. Elmer Joseph wounded at 8:45 p.m.

Ptl. Richard Hart wounded 8:45

Ptl. Leonard Szalkiewicz wounded 8:55

Ptl. Ernest Rowell wounded 9:30

Ptl. Thomas Smith wounded 9:30

b. at the Lakeview Tavern:

Ptl. Anthony Sherbinski wounded 9:30

John Pegues (civilian) wounded 9:30

c. in the vicinity of 12312 and 12314 Auburndale:

Lt. Leroy Jones killed 8:45

Ptl. Angelo Santa Maria wounded 9:00

James E. Chapman (civilian) killed 9:00

Thus, by 9:30 p.m., the official casualty list read: 3 police killed, 12 in-
jured (counting McMillan, the tow-truck operator); 3 suspects killed, 1
wounded; 1 civilian killed, 2 injured. The count shows 7 lives lost and 15 in-
dividuals wounded: a total of 22 casualties.12

REFERENCES

1. At a press conference on July 24, Mayor Stokes named four cities that, according
to the intelligence reports, were targeted for simultaneous violence: Cleveland,
Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. Others recall that two other cities were named
in the reports: Akron, Ohio, and New York City.

2. In April 1969, during the murder trial of Fred (Ahmed) Evans, the prosecution
established that a gun-buying spree had taken place and that Ahmed was one of
the purchasers.

3. Other sides of the eviction stories were investigated by the Cleveland Plain Dealer
and published Aug. 2. A spokesman for the owner of the shop on Hough Avenue
said that after making a verbal agreement through her attorney to rent the shop to
Ahmed, the owner, an elderly widow, decided not to rent the store "because it
would take more than $1,000 to install toilets and repair the furnace at a time
when negotiations had started to sell the building." Notified of this, the spokes-
man said, Ahmed continued to occupy the building and repair it, despite repeated
protests. According to the spokesman, the issue of race was not involved, since
renters of adjoining stores, belonging to the same owner, included Negroes.

Osu Bey was notified on June 15, when his rent was 6 weeks in arrears, that he
would be evicted from his apartment. The case was brought to court on July 22,
and the eviction notice was served the next day. The owner of 12312 Auburndale
said Bey had been permitting "as many as eight to ten couples" to sleep in the
apartment, in violation of housing ordinances.

4. Ahmed had recently visited Akron during a racial disturbance. There he had wit-
nessed a police attack on the office of a black nationalist group. "They had tossed
tear gas inside, then barricaded all the doors. They blocked the people inside for
about 15 minutes and then, when they were half-suffocated, they went inside and
started hitting them with their billy clubs. Women and kids, too." On August 2
he would tell a Cleveland Press reporter: "When the police drove up on the 23d,
we thought at first it might be just normal surveillance, but then we remembered
Akron."

5. At the press conference on August 9, Lt. Miller said of the dead sniper: "This
male has never shown up. He was removed while the fight went on ... [he] dis-
appeared." Amir Iber Katir, however, was the adopted name of Leroy Mansfield
Williams, who was on the official casualty list. A reporter saw the body of the
first felled sniper being borne by a group of Negroes toward a car some time after
9: 15 p.m.; this agrees with the corner's report that the body of Leroy Williams

58 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

arrived by car at Huron Road Hospital about 9:25 p.m. In its reference to the
body's original location as an "alley at Lakeview Road and E. 123rd Street," the
coroner's report is not helpful, since the two mentioned streets run parallel south
of Superior.

6. The abandoned police cars were vulnerable to one of the tactics of urban guerrilla
warfare. At 12:46 a.m. (then Wednesday morning) the following alert was broad-
cast over the police radio: "All Cars-Check all abandoned police cars for bombs
prior to moving them."

7. Mrs. Ferryman denies newspaper quotations attributed to her that would indicate
snipers barged into her apartment while she was there. According to her husband,
who was away at the time, the first activity of which Mrs. Ferryman and Mrs.
Flagg were aware was the shooting by police, without warning, of tear gas shells
and bullets into the house.

The Call & Post, on July 27, gave this version of the sequence of events:
"Police ordered the Ferryman home evacuated ... to protect the occupants and
to get vantage points from which they could flush out the snipers. The snipers
later entered the abandoned Ferryman home and used it as a sniper's [sic] post."

8. Some people, including several close relatives of Chapman, did not accept the
heroic version of Chapman's death. A friend of Chapman's claimed he saw him
alive as late as 10 p.m. The angle of fire and type of weapon do not rule out the
possibility that Chapman was killed by policemen. Police were reported to be us-
ing automatic weapons. In a late stage of the battle, some policemen were high
off the street, occupying the second floor of the Lakeview Tavern. The coroner's
description of the wound was interpreted as an indication that Chapman was shot
from a distance (and thus probably by a sniper) but Alan Moritz, a noted patholo-
gist who examined pictures of the wound, concluded that distance could not be
determined by the shape of the wound. A reporter for the Negro weekly, the
Cleveland Call & Post, attempted to investigate the Chapman case the day before
the hero story was released and found police would divulge no details. The coro-
ner's report, dated July 24, carried a notation that Chapman was killed while as-
sisting police, but the report was not released to the public for nearly a week, dur-
ing which time a reporter was denied access to it. The Call & Post reporter has
concluded: "Whether Chapman was killed by the police or the snipers will prob-
ably remain a mystery forever." It was to be no idle mystery, however, since
Fred (Ahmed) Evans was indicted for the murder of Chapman. Testimony at the
trial cast further doubt on the heroic version of Chapman's death when the emi-
nent pathologist Cyril Wecht said the fatal bullet was fired from no more than six
inches. No sniper, of course, could have gotten that close to Chapman in the
company of police.

9. The circumstances of Pegues's injury were never spelled out by the police or other
official agencies. An eyewitness gave his account in the Cleveland Call & Post.
Arthur Redan, a 34-year-old bricklayer's helper, was in the Lakeview Tavern when
police ran in and told the 10 customers and employees to lie on the floor. Other
police came in and shoved the 3 women and 7 men down into the basement, fir-
ing at the ceiling in the process, then shot tear gas into the basement. John Pegues,
said Redan, was wounded by a policeman during this episode. When the 10 were
finally released from the gas-filled basement at 10:15 p.m., according to Redan,
the women were pushed about and indecently handled by police, the men were
dragged and pistol whipped, and all 10 were thrown into a police wagon, taken to
Fifth District headquarters, and locked in a single cell "with John Pegues stretched
out bleeding on a bench." Redan said Pegues was refused medical treatment until
5 a.m. Wednesday.

In an interview for this study, Dick Peery, a Call & Post reporter, said he wit-
nessed this violence before police ordered him away from the tavern, disregarding
his press credentials. He saw the men from the tavern being prodded with rifle
butts, one of the three women doubled up in [extreme pain, the other two emerg-
ing from the tavern in] ripped clothes. Peery also interviewed a man who said he
was driving through the area when pob'ce dragged him from his car, beat him se-
verely, and called him a nigger and a cop killer.

A Midsummer's Nightmare 59

10. Detectives who later investigated the attic of 1384 Lakeview, where Ahmed had
been, found cigaret butts and bullets but no spent shells. According to Joseph
Turpin, a workhouse guard who lives at 1384, Ahmed broke in the house about
the time the tow-truck shooting took place. (Turpin, who had been watching the
tow-truck incident, insists that Ahmed did no shooting.) Ahmed went to the attic
and, at least three times during the evening, yelled to Turpin that he wanted to
stop the battle by surrendering. Turpin says he called the police in Ahmed's be-
half at least five times.

11. These statements attributed to Ahmed and published in Cleveland newspapers are
the substance of what police told reporters Ahmed said at the time. At the begin-
ning of his murder trial in Mar. 1969, Ahmed's lawyers were denied a motion to
have these statements suppressed.

12. There is evidence that some individuals who received injuries, mostly minor, were
not included on the official casualty list. It is probable that snipers escaped from
the scene, and some of these may have been injured. Injured or dead snipers may
have been borne to hiding places by friends. Two policemen said they saw a sniper
fall from the roof of an Auburndale house; then four people dragged him to a
panel truck and drove away. Randel T. Osburn, Cleveland director of the South-
ern Christian Leadership Conference, says he saw a number of men running near
Lakeview and Beulah and heading toward Superior: "One guy was running into
an alley and he had been shot and he was holding his shoulder, all bloody. Two
other fellows were carrying a second guy that we never heard anything else about,
so I guess they made a clean getaway."

Chapter 3

REACTION: THE CROWDS,
THE POLICE, AND CITY HALL

Take an army of policemen, especially white policemen, into the ghetto,
add a crowd of onlookers, and you have created a situation ripe for mass vio-
lence.

Just north of the Glenville battlefield lay Superior Avenue, a broad thor-
oughfare that carries U.S. Routes 6 and 20. A crowd began to gather on Su-
perior soon after the shooting started, barely within eyesight range of the
shooting on Lakeview Road. The crowd became unruly, heaving rocks at
passing cars and jeering at the police swarming into the area. When the body
of a dead or dying sniper was carried toward the intersection, the smoldering
hatreds of the crowd were aroused. "Look what they've done to one of our
brothers!" some were heard to say.

By 9:30 p.m., the crowd had grown huge. Most in the crowd were young;
by one estimate, the average age was 22 or 23. Their mood was clearly hos-
tile. "The crowd was berserk," one eyewitness recalls, and the police were
frightened; they ran from their cars "like scared jack rabbits." A police car
on Superior was hit by a Molotov cocktail; there was a "whoosh" and it went
up in flames. The crowd scattered when ammunition in the car began to ex-
plode. A panel truck came down Superior and turned wildly directly into the
crowd. The white driver was grabbed, pulled from the truck, and beaten to
bloodiness. The crowd turned the truck over and set it afire. Herbert Reed, a
21 -year-old patrolman, was pulled from his car at East 124th and Superior by
a gang of Negro youths and beaten savagely. Two news cars containing valu-
able equipment were set afire and destroyed.

As they had done on the first night of the Hough riot in 1966, the police
sensed that the crowd was beyond control and they abandoned the situation.
As the huge crowd began to move, it found itself free of police restraint. A
few black policemen remained to prevent cars with white occupants from run-
ning the Superior Avenue gauntlet.

Mobs began to spread along Superior. Teenagers wrapped sweaters around
their elbows and rammed plate glass windows of stores along the avenue,
breaking them with a single thrust. "All you could hear was glass breaking,"
an eyewitness recalls. Gangs of looters and arsonists spread westward almost
to Rockefeller Park, a buffer zone a mile away from Lakeview. At East 105th
and Superior, close to Rockefeller Park, a block of buildings was burned to
the ground. A store that Ahmed once had rented on Superior Avenue went up
in flames, along with all the buildings next to it. Stores all along East 105th
were looted. The violence spread all the way to St. Clair Avenue, more than a

62 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

mile north of Superior. Sporadically it broke out on the other side of Rocke-
feller Park, as far west as East 55th Street and including the troubled area of
Hough.

Patrol cars were dispatched to disperse looters, to answer calls of shoot-
ings, to pick up youths carrying gasoline cans or weapons. Often they had to
report back "gone on arrival" or "unable to locate." A heavy rainstorm
shortly after midnight offered hope of ending the violence, but the storm was
short lived. The looting and fire setting continued through the night. Fire
engines were brought in from all parts of the city and deployed in groups for
protection against the hindering mobs. Firemen sometimes arrived on the
scene to find hydrants had been opened, making it difficult to hook up hoses.
They faced gangs of youths throwing bottles and rocks at them; some re-
ported sniper fire. Eventually, some fire crews refused to answer calls with-
out a police escort. The next day Fire Chief William E. Barry reported that
the fire department had responded to between 50 and 60 legitimate fires in
the troubled area during the night, most of the fires occurring along Superior
Avenue east of Rockefeller Park. About 20 were "major" fires, involving two
or more buildings. 1

Apart from those picked up as "suspicious persons" and those implicated
in the Glenville shooting, 28 Negroes were arrested during the night of July
23-24 in connection with the racial disturbances. Twenty-one were charged
with looting, one with malicious destruction of property, two with burglary,
and one with armed robbery. Three people related to one another were ar-
rested near East 124th and Auburndale for carrying concealed weapons. All
but five of the 28 arrested were at least 20 years old. Five of those arrested
were women.

During the night, East Side hospitals, already overburdened with the vic-
tims of the Glenville gun battle, began to receive the casualties of the spread-
ing violence. Some were brought in mortally wounded.

About midnight, 19-year-old Eddie Roddick and three of his friends were
waiting for a bus at East 79th and St. Clair. Two cars drove up, according to
Roddick, each containing two white men. "They had pistols poking out of
the windows and they yelled racial insults at us." When one of the men fired
a shot, Roddick and his friends began running. Clifford Miller, a 22-year-old
Marine absent without leave from Camp Lejeune, ran 2 blocks along St. Clair
and then decided to stop. The white men got out of their cars, says Roddick;
one of them struck Miller on the head with his rifle, then another shot Miller
twice in the head with a pistol. (The coroner's examination revealed no
bruises, and only one gunshot wound.)

The white men went back to their cars and started to drive off and we
went to Clifford. We asked him if he was all right and one of us lifted
his head. Then the white men got out of their cars again and one of us
said "Let's get out of here. He's dead. We can't help him."

Then, said Roddick, the white men began to fire at him and his companions,
pursuing them until they escape into a nearby park. A patrol car, responding
to a report of the shooting, conveyed Miller to Mt. Sinai Hospital, where he
was pronounced dead on arrival.

Reaction: The Crowds, the Police, and City Hall 63

Three days later the police picked up a white man and his two teenage sons
as suspects in the shooting, but released them for want of evidence. The mur-
der of Clifford Miller has never been solved.

James C. Haynes was a 30-year-old stock clerk who earned extra money as
a custodian and guard in the apartment building in which he lived at 1 270
East 83d Street. The building was close to Superior Avenue, and Haynes was
aware of the looted and burning buildings at 105th and Superior, three-
quarters of a mile to the east. Apprehensive about trouble in his own neigh-
borhood, Haynes armed himself with a pistol. Around midnight, according to
his father, a gang of youths attempted to enter the building; Haynes exchanged
fire with them and the youths fled. (Others says Haynes merely fired into the
air and the youths scattered.) Haynes returned to his apartment, picked up a
shotgun, then walked downstairs and out of the building.

What happened next has never been clarified. One thing is clear: shots
rang out. The body of James Haynes was later found in an alley behind 8203
Superior Avenue, riddled with shotgun wounds, another Negro fatality in
Tuesday's long night of violence.

Around the corner from Haynes' apartment, a number of young black mili-
tants were gathered at the Afro Set, the craft shop and meeting place run by
Harllel Jones. Early in the evening, Jones had given assurance to Law Director
Clarence James and Councilman George Forbes that his followers would not
participate in the violence. He himself was traveling through the troubled area
with James and Forbes, helping them in their effort to restore peace and calm
their fellow black citizens. Lyonel Jones (no relation to Harllel), director of
the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, was at the Afro Set to help keep the situa-
tion calm there. As a further precaution against trouble, James had stationed
a Negro policeman at the building.

Police may have heard the pistol shots fired by Haynes, or they may have
responded to a message, broadcast on patrol-car radios about 1 1 :45 p.m., that
two policemen were trapped in a building on East 82d and Superior and that
Negro males were setting it afire. (The source and substance of that report
are further unsolved elements in the episode.) In either case, very quickly
there were several patrol cars at the scene.

According to Lyonel Jones, eight policement barged into the Afro Set,
shot at the ceiling, and ordered the occupants to leave. A white captain or-
dered the Negro policeman whom James had stationed there to return to
Fifth District headquarters. "Get your black ass out of here," he was over-
heard saying in response to the policeman's protests.

Then, say eyewitnesses, a patrol-car crew drove into a gas station, turned
off the headlights, and began to fire in the direction of the apartment build-
ing where James Haynes lived. Another car, they say, drove into the alley be-
hind Superior where Haynes was later found dead. Police believed they were
being fired at; a patrol-car broadcast about 11:50 p.m. indicated two police-
men were "pinned down" by snipers hiding in bushes in front of a funeral
home near East 82d and Superior.

Law Director James, Councilman Forbes, and Harllel Jones arrived in a
police car at 82d and Superior after the shooting had subsided. (James
had been informed of the trouble there by the mayor's office in a phone

64 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

conversation.) Another police vehicle, Car 35 1 , was parked in front of the
Afro Set. As James got out of the car, a group of young militants approached
him in a state of excitement: "That's the car that did the shooting; that's the
car that did the shooting [in the Afro Set] ," they said, indicating Car 35 1 .

As James approached Car 351 to speak to its occupants, it pulled away
from the curb and proceeded down Superior Avenue. James grabbed the
microphone from his police car and radioed the following message: "Car 351,
this is the Law Director; return to the scene on Superior that you just left."
Car 351 kept going, slowed down momentarily, then sped up again as James
repeated his message. Then it turned into a side street.

James and Forbes got into the police car and ordered the driver to pursue
Car 351 with the siren on. They turned where Car 351 turned, but the patrol
car was not in sight. James called the radio dispatcher: "This is the Law Di-
rector in 8C. Will you locate Car 35 1?" He heard the dispatcher broadcast
the message: "Car 35 1 : your location?" There was no answer. Then James
thought he saw 35 1 ahead of them, running without lights on. He pursued
the car, siren still screaming. As he drew near, Car 35 1 slowed to a stop in
front of him. The headlights came on. "Car 35 1 ," James radioed, "this is the
Law Director right behind you. Please get out of your car and come back to
me."

When the three policemen in Car 35 1 approached, James asked one of
them, a sergeant, if he had heard him at 82d and Superior telling him to stop
and return to the scene. The sergeant replied, "No; we didn't hear you."
Raising his helmet, he added: "You know, we can't hear to well with these
things on." Another said: "We've got the radio turned down and did not hear
you call." Why, James wanted to know, would they have the radio turned
down when there was all this trouble in the city? James found their answers
unconvincing.

Then James asked the sergeant to accompany him back to 82d and Supe-
rior while the other officers followed in Car 35 1 . (Only when they arrived
back at the Afro Set did James realize that one of the other officers was a cap-
tain, and thus in charge of Car 35 1 .) As they rode back, James told the ser-
geant about the complaints of residents that Car 35 1 had done unnecessary
shooting. The sergeant denied the claims, saying Car 35 1 had just arrived on
the scene.

When they reached the Afro Set, James learned that a dead body has been
found in the alley behind Lakeview. He and others examined the body of
Haynes, then James asked the police captain, "How did this happen?" "I
don't know," said the captain; "we had just come up." James asked what
had happened to the Negro policeman he had stationed at the Afro Set. The
captain admitted that he had sent the officer to Fifth District headquarters,
but denied that the man ever mentioned that he had been under orders from
Law Director James.

Residents of the area were giving James their versions of what had hap-
pened. They told him about the patrol car parked at the gas station firing at
the apartment building on 83d Street. One confirmed that spent shells were
lying on the ground at the gas station. A police photographer had arrived,
and James sent him to take pictures of the shells. Then James and others ex-
amined the exterior of the apartment building. "That building has been rid-
dled with bullets," he told the policemen. "How did this happen?" The

Reaction: The Crowds, the Police, and City Hall 65

captain and the sergeant again replied that they had no knowledge of the mat-
ter since they had just arrived. People in the crowd said they had seen a pa-
trol car shooting at the building. Concerned that the shooting might have
produced casualties, James, the policemen and others entered the building to
examine it. In a second-floor apartment they found that high-powered bul-
lets had gone through windows and torn through the walls, leaving gaping
holes where they lodged. There were holes above the beds of two small chil-
dren who had been sleeping when the shooting started.

City officials later promised an investigation of the shootings near East
82d and Superior, probing for instances of police misconduct. If the investi-
gation took place, the conclusions have not been made public.

Through the long night of July 23-24, 1968, Mayor Stokes and top offi-
cials at City Hall struggled with the decisions to be made about how to cope
with the violence in Cleveland. They were hampered by inadequate and con-
fusing information about the violence as it happened, and by the lack of con-
tingency planning for such emergencies.

When he learned of the outbreak of shooting from Safety Director Joseph
McManamon about 8:30 p.m., Stokes decided to meet with McManamon and
others at Sixth District police headquarters, then changed his mind and moved
the meeting to City Hall. When Stokes arrived at City Hall about 9 p.m., offi-
cials were monitoring the police radio and McManamon had a direct hookup
for talking to police at the scene of the Glenville gun battle. The number of
patrol cars that had rushed to the Lakeview-Auburndale area, the tension of
the situation there, the lack of coordination and measured response, made it
difficult to assess what was happening. It was similarly difficult to get a clear
picture of events as the violence spread. An aide described the situation at
City Hall as "totally confusing."

It sounded a.lot worse than it was. It sounded like the city was burn-
ing down and that people were being shot over the whole city. ... In
fact, there were a couple of isolated shootings that were not related at
all. They are the normal shootings that you would have.

He and others report that frequently during the night the police radio carried
rumors and false reports that exaggerated the extent of the violence.

Partly to rectify this, Mayor Stokes sent Law Director Clarence James into
the troubled area to act as his personal observer and reporter.

Perhaps buoyed by its success after the assassination of Martin Luther
King, the Stokes administration found itself inadequately prepared to handle
the violence of July 23. Control of the situation was, in the beginning stages,
left to police on the scene, and, as Stokes was later to admit, Cleveland police
were inadequately trained and supplied to cope with urban guerrilla war-
fare.2 According to Maj. Gen. Sylvester Del Corso, Adjutant General of the
Ohio National Guard, he had tried to get the Stokes administration to discuss
measures for handling racial disturbances but had been rebuffed.

By 9: 15 p.m., Stokes had decided that the situation might get beyond the
control of local forces before the night was over. He called Gov. James A.
Rhodes, who was attending the National Governors Conference in Cincinnati,
to inform him of the situation. The Governor immediately called General

66 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

Del Corso, who was in Akron, and told him to report to Stokes. Within a few
minutes, Rhodes left for his home in Columbus to monitor the disturbances
from there, General Del Corso was on his way to Cleveland, and the Ohio Na-
tional Guard had been placed on alert.

In addition to determining the level of force needed to control the violence,
Mayor Stokes knew that he would have to inform the public of the situation,
to avoid misunderstanding and panic and to keep people out of the troubled
area. After talking to the Governor, the mayor went down the street from
City Hall to the television studies of WKYC. There he taped a special an-
nouncement to be used by WKYC and distributed in copy to other Cleveland
television and radio stations. Many Clevelanders, watching a televised baseball
game between the Cleveland Indians and the Baltimore Orioles, got the first
news of the violence when Mayor Stokes interrupted the broadcast shortly
before 11 p.m.:

We've had a bad situation here tonight but as of this time we have the
situation controlled. But we do need badly the help of every citizen at
this time, particularly in the Lakeview-Superior Avenue area. Stay at
home and cooperate with the police. Go home if you are on the streets;
if you are at home, stay inside and keep your doors locked so that we
can contain the situation.

Later this message was broadcast over the civil defense network.

General Del Corso arrived at City Hall about 1 1 p.m. and began delibera-
tions with Stokes on the use of National Guard troops. Shortly after midnight
the mayor signed a proclamation, addressed to General Del Corso, formally
requesting National Guard assistance. "Law enforcement agencies under my
jurisdiction can no longer adequately cope with the riotous situation that ex-
ists in the City of Cleveland," the proclamation began.

General Del Corso communicated with other National Guard officials, then
emerged at 1:10 a.m. to report on the situation to the press. A total of
15,400 Ohio National Guardsmen had been mobilized, he announced, includ-
ing 2,600 from the Cleveland area. The 107th Armored Cavalry Regiment in
Cleveland had 1 ,800 Guardsmen to assist police. Seven hundred Guardsmen
undergoing summer training at Camp Perry, 60 miles from Cleveland, would
be brought into the city. By daylight, General Del Corso estimated, there
would be 2,600 National Guard troops in Cleveland, ready to be deployed.

Still, there had been no decision about how, when, and how many Guards-
men should be deployed in the troubled area. It would take some time to get
troops combat ready. In the meantime, Mayor Stokes was trying to keep
abreast of the situation in the troubled area, talking frequently on the tele-
phone with Clarence James and with black community spokesmen like Baxter
Hill and Harllel Jones, who were also working to calm things down. A young
black nationalist was in the mayor's office, occasionally leaving the office to
make telephone calls of his own to friends, urging them to "cool it." About
2 a.m., a number of black leaders met with Stokes in his office to help him
assess the situation.

By 3 a.m., when General Del Corso notified him that he had a number of
troops ready for deployment, Mayor Stokes had decided that the time had
come to use the National Guard. Two hundred Guardsmen, together with 24
Jeeps and other military vehicles, were sent to the troubled area to patrol the

Reaction: The Crowds, the Police, and City Hall 67

streets. To each of the Jeeps were assigned three Guardsmen and one Cleve-
land policeman. About 4:30 a.m. the police, on orders from the mayor, were
instructed to report any sniper activity to the National Guard. Looters and
arsonists, said the police-radio announcement, "are to be arrested by police or
National Guard without the use of deadly force." Half an hour later, the po-
lice heard another announcement on their patrol-car radios: All vacations
and holidays are canceled; all personnel will work 12-hour shifts.

As dawn arrived amid a drizzle, smoke still rose from gutted buildings along
Superior Avenue. Police continued. to receive reports of looting and of spo-
radic gunfire in areas of the East Side. But the worst of the violence had
abated. Cleveland, for the time being, was under control.

From the history of racial disturbances in Cleveland and other American
cities, Clevelanders, on the morning of July 24, 1968, had every reason to ex-
pect that more trouble lay ahead. If past patterns were repeated, more vio-
lence would flare at nightfall. The authorities had to devise a strategy to cope
with it.

More than 100 leaders of the black community gathered at City Hall about
8:30 a.m. to meet with Mayor Stokes. The attendance at this meeting was
entirely black; not even the white members of the mayor's staff were per-
mitted to take part. Many at the meeting had been up all night, assisting in
City Hall or walking the streets, attempting to quell the violence.

Stokes opened the meeting with his assessment of the situation, then
called for discussion on how best to handle it. A number of options were
available to the mayor: He could impose a curfew, strengthen police and Na-
tional Guard units in the troubled area, or use various combinations of force
such as placing National Guard in the area and not police. Many at the meet-
ing were concerned that if police were allowed to remain in the area, there
would be further shooting. They feared that black nationalists would be made
fidgety by the continued presence of the police and would begin shooting, or
that if police were allowed to remain in the area, they would seek revenge for
their three comrades who were killed the night before. Several spoke in oppo-
sition to a curfew, noting that if it were applied to just one area it would be
resented by the citizens of that area and would not prevent outsiders from
coming into the area and beginning violence again.

The meeting at City Hall produced no real consensus, and Mayor Stokes
revealed no plans of his own. When the meeting broke up about 10 a.m., he
retired to his office to discuss strategies with his staff, while about 20 of the
participants in the meeting, most of them militants, adjourned to the Audi-
torium Hotel to continue discussions.

An hour later Stokes addressed a press conference originally scheduled for
9:30 a.m. He attributed Tuesday night's violence to "a gang who will meet
the full measure of the law" and described the present situation on the East
Side as "quiet."

Security measures are being maintained with a minimum number of
National Guardsmen on our streets and a sizeable force in ready reserve
should they be needed. I have met with Negro leadership at City Hall
and they have joined me in an all-out effort to make sure that Cleve-
land's night of terror will not turn into a riot. We are constantly

68 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

re-evaluating the situation and assure that this city will not be governed
by hoodlums.

The mayor indicated that he had not yet decided upon a strategy for Wednes-
day evening.

Early in the afternoon the group of militants returned from the Audito-
rium Hotel to City Hall. Now they presented a definite proposal to the mayor:
They would go back into the community and try to bring it under control
themselves, preventing looting, burning, and additional loss of life. They
wanted a period of time to attempt this; if it did not work, Stokes could
choose a different strategy. Stokes listened. He still made no commitment.

This was not the first time such a proposal had been suggested to Stokes.
Bertram Gardner, who had spent the night on the streets, proposed such a
course to the Mayor in a conversation about 7:30 a.m. Gardner wanted Stokes
to take the police and Guard out of the area, while Gardner sent about 200 or
250 blacks into the community to try to calm feelings. He wanted only about
6 hours: from about 1 1 a.m. to about 5 p.m. At the 8:30 a.m. meeting,
others had proposed a similar course.

About midafternoon, Stokes discussed the idea with others in a small meet-
ing in his office. Richard Greene, director of the Community Development
Department, endorsed the proposal. He felt that the black community ought
to be given a chance to "pull itself together." Councilman George Forbes ex-
pressed confidence that the strategy would work. Not all were convinced.
General Del Corso expressed serious reservations about the wisdom of the
proposal.

When the mayor made his decision, he did not make it rashly. He had had
the benefit of numerous opinions and arguments for and against competing
strategies. Some options, like the curfew, had been seen as fraught with diffi-
culties. Stokes had heard compelling arguments about the volatile situation
that would be created by the continuing presence of white law enforcement
officers in the black community. The "all black" strategy appeared to be the
only rational policy to reduce bloodshed. In accepting it, Stokes knew he
was taking a calculated risk. There would be safeguards, however. He ac-
cepted the suggestion by Richard Greene that Negro policemen function in
the area as well as the black leaders. He would also station police and the Na-
tional Guard around the perimeter of the area, so that they could respond
quickly if trouble did arise.

Though the decision was not his alone, Stokes had to assume full responsi-
bility for it. It was a novel strategy, one that a white mayor would have had
greater difficulty in instrumenting. It was Stokes' rapport with the Negro
community that brought forth the proposal in the first place and that now
gave hope that it would work.

At 4: 15 p. m., Mayor Stokes released a detailed plan for Wednesday night.
About 6 square miles of the city were to be cordoned off until 7 a.m., Thurs-
day morning. The southern boundary would be Euclid Avenue, eastward from
East 55th Street. The northern boundary would be Superior Avenue, from
East 55th to Rockefeller Park, then along the park's eastern edge up to St.
Clair, eastward along St. Clair (with a small section north of it) to the city line
adj oining East Cleveland. This perimeter was to be patrolled by units of three
National Guardsmen and one police officer, beginning at 7 p.m. The National

Reaction: The Crowds, the Police, and City Hall 69

Guard was to retain a mobile reserve to deploy within the cordoned area
should serious trouble arise.

"Normal patrol within the cordoned-off area/" said the memo, "will be re-
stricted to regular Cleveland police as directed by the Safety Director. Na-
tional Guard troops will be committed to the area only if needed."

Though the memorandum did not mention that only Negro policemen
would be allowed in the area, Mayor Stokes spelled out this provision in a
press conference at 4:45 p.m.

There will only be Negro policemen and possibly a Negro sheriff in the
area guarding the people. . . . There will be 109 [individuals] who will
represent the groups themselves and about five hundred persons who
are familiar with this situation will be in the area.

All white nonresidents, including newsmen, were to be kept from the area.
The mayor repeated that it was important for people to stay home and off
the streets. He made two further announcements: that the sale of liquor in
Cuyahoga County (embracing Cleveland) had been stopped for 72 hours be-
ginning at 1 1 a.m., Wednesday; that four emergency centers had been set up
in East Side churches and community centers to provide food and shelter for
those displaced by Tuesday night's disturbances.

The Reverend DeForest Brown, director of the Hough Area Development
Corporation, was named spokesman for the Mayor's Committee which was to
patrol the streets that night. Said Brown:

We, out of our concern, have accepted the responsibility to restore law
and order out of a chaotic situation. Leaders will be out talking to the
black community about its responsibility to itself.

The mayor had made his decision. On Wednesday evening black control
was established for the black community.

REFERENCES

1. Barry's figures were far in excess of those reported by others. In a summary report
on the violence, issued Aug. 9, the mayor's office said there were 24 reported fires
during the first 24 hours of violence, of which 14 were set by vandals, 1 was a rekin-
dle of an earlier fire, 6 were false alarms, and 4 were fires unrelated to the disturb-
ance.

2. In addition to lacking weapons equal in power to those the snipers used, the police
lacked armored vehicles and had to commandeer trucks from Brinks, Inc., and rush
them to the Lakeview area.

Chapter 4

LAW AND ORDER

Wednesday, July 24, passed in heat and mugginess, the mugginess fed by
light rainshowers that swept over the city at noontime. Through the day the
police responded to sporadic calls of looting and of looters hawking stolen
goods on street corners. They closed bars that were violating the liquor ban
and investigated rumors of looting and violence planned for Wednesday even-
ing. Here and there merchants boarded up the windows of their stores or
carted away valuable merchandise. (Later there were claims that some mer-
chants took what they could, then encouraged looters to take the rest, figur-
ing they would get adequate recompense from their insurance companies.)
As 7 p.m. approached, the roving patrols of police and Guardsmen retreated
to the perimeter of the cordoned area. There was a thunderstorm early in the
evening, but at dusk the sky was clearing and the heat and mugginess lingered.

The Negro leaders carried the message from City Hall back to their com-
munities, meeting with small groups to explain the evening's strategy and to
organize for effective peacekeeping. At the office of Pride, Inc., on St. Clair,
Wilbur Grattan, a black nationalist associated with the New Republic of
Africa, addressed a group of about 30, most of whom were members of the
Circle of African Unity. Grattan had spent much of the previous night in
peacekeeping and most of the day in the meetings that led to Mayor Stokes'
decision to exercise black control in the black community. He described
what had been discussed during those meetings, praised the bold policy that
had been adopted, then turned to matters of organization for the evening.
After being told by Grattan that they would receive orange arm bands labeled
"The Mayor's Committee," the group worked out the problems of geographic
assignments for each of them. Baxter Hill, director of Pride, Inc., closed the
meeting in his office with a reminder of the significance of the responsibili-
ties they were about to undertake.

Hill stayed on for awhile at the Pride office, which was to be the headquar-
ters for the peacekeeping operation through the night. (A Negro radio station
broadcast the telephone number of Pride, frequently during the evening, urg-
ing listeners to report crowds, looting, or other indications of trouble.) The
expected 500 peace patrols were to be divided into four "companies," headed
by Harllel Jones, William (Sonny) Denton of the United Youth Council, and
two from Baxter Hill's organization: Benjamin Lloyd and Ronald Turner.

While the Negro leaders were hastily organizing their peacekeeping force,
the Cleveland Police Department was preparing for its role in the troubled
area. White policemen were assigned to work with National Guardsmen pa-
trolling the perimeter of the cordoned area. At Fifth District headquarters,

72 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

situated within the area, police climbed aboard military trucks and joked
about being back in the Army. American Legionnaires served them coffee.
About 100 Negro policemen (out of a total of 165 Negro officers in the
2,200-man police force) were assigned to patrol the cordoned area, using 21
patrol cars. Negroes on the county sheriffs staff were assigned to help them.
White police, it was understood, would enter the area only if the Negro offi-
cers needed additional assistance.

The sky had not yet darkened when firetrucks were called to East 105th
and Superior to extinguish fires that were rekindles (accidental or intentional)
of burned-out stores. A crowd gathered to watch. Nearby, some Negro busi-
nessmen were removing merchandise from their stores and, when the owner
of a record store left, some who had stood watching walked in and helped
themselves to odds and ends he had left behind.

The crowd at the intersection had swelled to several hundred when mem-
bers of the Mayor's Committee arrived to disperse them. A few of the peace
patrols talked to the crowd in front of the record store. Most stood in the
middle of the intersection, imploring the crowd to go home. A rumor was
afloat that a child was trapped in the basement of a burning pawnshop. Fire-
men said they had searched the basement and no child was there. Noting that
such a thing could happen, the Mayor's Committee pleaded with parents to
take their children home.

Children stayed on. Some of them found clothing in the back of a store
that had been nearly gutted the night before, and soon a crowd was surging
toward the rear of the store. After considerable cajoling, the Mayor's Com-
mittee managed to discourage the looting. But the technique of talking to
the crowd from the middle of the intersection was not dispersing the people.
Walter Beach, Ron Lucas, Baxter Hill, and Harllel Jones decided that if they
were going to be effective, they had to walk among the crowd and talk to the
people, two or three at a time. Though it took more than an hour to disperse
the crowd, the technique worked.

Through the night, teams of peace patrols drove up and down the commer-
cial streets of the area, stopping wherever four or more people were standing
around, pleading with them to disperse. Occasionally members of the Mayor's
Committee stood in front of stores where windows had been broken or iron
gates torn down, directly confronting the potential looters. This technique
could not be wholly effective, for the Mayor's Committee lacked the man-
power for permanent guards at every commercial establishment. Potential
looters, some of them professionals, lurked in the shadows, sometimes for
hours, waiting for the peace patrols to leave the scene. Days later they would
be seen hawking stolen goods on street corners. Occasionally a looter broke
into a store, setting off the burglar alarm, then hid nearby until someone came
to investigate, turned off the alarm, and walked away. Most looters made off
with what they could carry, but some filled automobiles with merchandise.

The Mayor's Committee observed adults, including women, among the po-
tential and actual looters, but teenagers gave them the most trouble. Roving
bands of teenagers usually were the first to break into a store, then proved
unresponsive to the appeals of the peace patrols. "We couldn't control the
kids," Walter Burks, executive assistant to the Mayor, recalls. "We would tell

Law and Disorder 73

them to stop and they would walk away and you would get into your car to
drive someplace else and you would drive back and they were right back with
their hands in [the windows of a looted store] ." Some of the troublesome
youths, says Burks, were not more than 10 years old. The next day Mayor
Stokes ascribed most of the trouble Wednesday night to "roving bands of
young people generally between the ages of fourteen and seventeen."

An observer who accompanied members of the Mayor's Committee on
their patrols recalls that some were particularly effective in their work. Harl-
lel Jones, a young militant, wiry and ordinarily soft-spoken, dispersed a crowd
at 123d and St. Clair that had gathered in front of a furniture store that had
been broken into. "At 105th and Massey," the observer adds, "Harllel dis-
persed perhaps the potentially most dangerous crowd of about two hundred
people. It took him about twenty to twenty-five minutes." Like the other
militants who were particularly effective Wednesday night, Harllel Jones suc-
ceeded by making eloquent pleas to the pride of the black community. "If
there was one man who stands out as having done the most effective job pos-
sible of maintaining peace," said the observer, "it was Harllel Jones."1

Noticeable by their absence were the clergymen and other moderate and
middle-class Negro leaders. Though a number of them had participated in the
meetings at City Hall, few were on the streets Wednesday night and their ef-
fectiveness was limited. Had more moderates helped out, the members of the
peace patrol felt, the sporadic looting might have been prevented entirely.

White policemen appeared in the cordoned area over the protests of the
Mayor's Committee. When a pawnbroker's window was broken at East 101st
and St. Clair, white policemen responded to the call. They ignored requests
of the peace patrol to leave. Similar incidents occurred elsewhere. At East
123d and St. Clair, an observer recalls, an alarm went off in a furniture store.

All of a sudden National Guardsmen and white policemen, who appa-
rently had been stationed in East Cleveland, appeared on the scene.
They started backing up toward the buildings as if they were actually in
a state of emergency. Nothing had occurred and, fortunately, the Law
Director arrived on the scene.

Law Director James talked to the white officers, and they left.

The reaction of some white policemen to Mayor Stokes' strategy of black
control was made clear to those monitoring the police radio Wednesday night.

This came in response to a report of a heart-attack case within the cor-
doned area: "White or nigger? Send the Mayor's Committee."

When a report was broadcast that a child had fallen off a second-floor
porch, the return call came: "Tell the Mayor's Committee to handle it."

When the police dispatcher requested cars to respond to a fire call, an anon-
ymous voice suggested that Mayor Stokes "go p. . . on it." Responses to other
calls included "F . . . that nigger Mayor!"

At the Fifth District headquarters, the heavily guarded bastion within the
troubled area, police responded in a fury of curses and epithets, directed to-
ward Stokes and Safety Director McManamon, when told they could not
carry rifles while patrolling the perimeter of the cordoned area. A policeman
there, delivering a monolog to a bystander on what is "wrong" with Negroes,

74 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

gave this assessment of Mayor Stokes: "You need a sheepdog to lead sheep;
you don't have a sheep lead other sheep. "2

The tension at Fifth District headquarters lasted through the evening. Two
television newsmen who entered the building were grabbed from behind by a
commanding officer, pushed through the building, and thrown out into the
parking lot where other policemen shouted at them abusively. After appealing
to another commanding officer they were let back in, and ultimately the first
officer apologized for ejecting them.

At a press conference late the next morning, Mayor Stokes pronounced the
strategy for Wednesday night a qualified success.

It is our considered opinion that we made significant headway last night
in bringing to an end the violence and lawlessness that has occurred on .
our East Side. No one was killed or shot or seriously injured during the
night.

Stokes admitted that there had been trouble; he reported that 3 fires had been
set, 36 stores looted, and 13 persons arrested in the troubled area.3 "Most of
the trouble," he said, "was caused by young teenagers, roving in small bands."
He expressed thanks to the National Guard patrolling the perimeter, the Negro
policemen working within the area, and especially the 300 members of the
Mayor's Committee "who patrolled the troubled areas until dawn to keep
things cool." He announced that bus service and garbage pickup had resumed
in the cordoned area and that city workers had begun to tear down danger-
ously damaged buildings. He emphasized, however, that more trouble could
be expected.

Earlier in the morning, Stokes had met with Negro leaders at City Hall.
During that meeting the resentment over the limited participation of moder-
ate Negro leaders in the peacekeeping was brought into the open. It was gen-
erally agreed that the peace patrols had been only partially effective; the arson
and looting had not been completely curbed. Changes were needed: A cur-
few now might help remove the gangs from the streets; more cars equipped
with radios were needed; more sound trucks would help; and broken windows
should be boarded before nightfall.

While the Negro leaders continued their discussion in the City Council
chamber, the mayor addressed the press conference. There he announced a
change in strategy: The National Guard, he said, was being brought into the
area to protect stores against looting. This change in strategy, like others he
made that Thursday, was to haunt Carl Stokes for weeks to come, for it pro-
vided an indication to his critics that he had given in to pressure from others
or conceded the failure of his Wednesday-night strategy. Throughout the en-
suing controversy, Stokes would maintain that the strategy had succeeded be-
cause it had prevented bloodshed, and he valued life over property. Changes
in the strategy, he argued, became appropriate after tempers had cooled in the
black community and the protection of property could be safely entrusted to
white law enforcement officers.

One of the first to criticize the mayor was Councilman Leo Jackson, whose
district includes part of Glenville and who is- said to represent the views of
older, established Negro residents. "If you want to say what happened last

Law and Disorder 75

night-no shootings, no sniping-was a success, then it was," Jackson told a re-
porter. "But if you consider the looting, the destruction, the breaking of win-
dows, the wholesale gutting of buildings, last night's activities were a total
failure."

Businessmen whose stores were victimized Wednesday night were bitterly
critical of the mayor's policy. The white owner of a looted clothing store
drove to the scene about 1 a.m. and could not get out of his car because of an
attacking mob. A Negro policeman ordered him out of the area for his own
safety. At the perimeter he pleaded with National Guardsmen and police for
help, but was told there was nothing they could do. The owner of a looted
furniture store got the same response from police at Fifth District headquar-
ters. A partner in a drycleaning chain, two of whose stores had been looted
the previous night, had his main plant looted of clothing Wednesday night-
half a million dollars' worth, he estimated. "We're wiped out," he said bit-
terly. "We couldn't get help. That means 70 people out of work-70 families
without incomes."

White policemen were openly critical of the mayor's Wednesday-night
strategy. A 30-year-old patrolman angrily submitted his resignation. When
Police Chief Michael Blackwell called the mayor's strategy "a brilliant idea,"
there were murmurings that Blackwell, a 42-year veteran of the force, was a
traitor to his department and a politician protecting himself.

Gen. Del Corso, who had argued for much stronger measures Wednesday
night, declined to criticize the mayor.

I made my suggestions but the Mayor made the decision and I am sure
he did a lot of soul-searching all day. We're here to assist and cooperate
with the Mayor. He wanted to use this means [citizen-patrols] and it is
beginning to be productive. It is proving successful.

It came as a shock to City Hall when, on August 9, Gen. Del Corso told the
Ohio Crime Commission that Stokes had "surrendered to black revolution-
aries."

That same day, after the Stokes administration presented a summary of
events to city councilmen and to the press, Council President James V. Stan-
ton, considered by many to be a leading contender for the office occupied by
Carl Stokes, joined in the criticism. "I find no moral grounds," he said, "for
taking duly constituted law enforcement away from the families and property
of that area regardless of any justification by the Administration that there
was no loss of life." Stanton's charge brought a rejoinder from Safety Direc-
tor Joseph McManamon. "He can't say that," McManamon retorted, "unless
he means that Negro policemen aren't duly constituted officers." He added
that the concentration of Negro policemen on Wednesday evening added up
to the normal number of police in the area.

In the days following the Wednesday-night disturbances, support for the
mayor's strategy, sometimes in the form of newspaper advertisements, came
from civil rights groups, religious and charitable organizations, liberal political
groups, and from Cleveland educators, industrial leaders, and other prominent
citizens. A professional polling organization found that 59 percent of its re-
spondents supported the mayor's strategy; 14 percent criticized it; the rest
were uncertain.

76 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

Four hundred National Guardsmen moved into the cordoned area on
Thursday morning to help Cleveland police control the sporadic but persistent
looting. Police were also kept busy through the day enforcing the liquor ban
and tracking down rumors of violence threatened for Thursday night. Teen-
agers employed by Pride, Inc., carted away debris from damaged buildings.

Meanwhile, Mayor Stokes pondered a strategy for Thursday night, ques-
tioning whether to impose a curfew and whether to allow National Guards-
men and white policemen in the area after dark. Early in the afternoon he
took a walk, touring the streets of Glenville for the first time since the trouble
began July 23, urging residents to keep their children at home Thursday
night. At 4 p.m. he met with Baxter Hill and other Negro leaders at the office
of Pride, Inc. He sought their counsel on a strategy for Thursday night. Most
agreed that additional enforcement was necessary. With some reluctance,
stemming more from concern for the unpredictable behavior of white police-
men than of black nationalists, they agreed that National Guardsmen and
white policemen should be allowed to remain in the area after nightfall.

Mayor Stokes announced his decision at a press conference about 6:30
p.m. A curfew would be imposed on the cordoned area, beginning at 9 p.m.
and extending to 6:30 a.m., Friday morning. The National Guard would
stay in the area,4 and no policemen would be constrained from entering the
area.

Though the announcement was carried on television and radio stations, it
was a late-hour decision that caught many unprepared. Some police first
learned of the curfew from a police radio broadcast 20 minutes before the cur-
few was to begin. Sound trucks were sent into the area to announce the cur-
few, but did not reach some neighborhoods until 10:30 p.m. People were still
walking the streets after 10 p.m. and some businesses were still open. A re-
porter saw a National Guard unit still encamped in Rockefeller Park at 10:30
p.m.

Stokes had disbanded the Mayor's Committee, but a number of Negro lead-
ers worked Thursday night to keep the peace, patrolling the area in nine cars.

Though the peacekeeping operation on Thursday night was massive, ac-
cording with the wishes of those who had urged strong enforcement, it was
not 100 percent successful. At a predawn press conference, John Little, the
mayor's executive secretary, gave a summary report of the night's violence. A
major fire had occurred on East 55th Street; there had been four minor fires,
of which two were described as "flareups" toward the eastern end of Superior
Avenue. Thirty people had been arrested: one for attempted arson, two for
looting, the rest for curfew violations. Guardsmen had been sent to disperse
more than 100 youths roaming the streets in the southeast corner of Cleve-
land, far from the cordoned area. There were no reports of sniping.

Friday was a time of relative calm. There were indications the community
was returning to normal. The liquor ban was lifted in the suburbs of Cuya-
hoga County, and Mayor Stokes was expected to approve a lifting of the ban
in Cleveland the next morning. (He did.) The Friday-night curfew was de-
layed until midnight, permitting residents of the cordoned area to attend a
Cleveland Indians baseball game.

For the forces of law and order, Friday was not completely a dull day.
That afternoon, an army of about 35 policemen and 100 National Guards-
men, equipped with rifles, shotguns, and tear gas, surrounded the Esquire

Law and Disorder 77

Hotel at 10602 Superior Avenue. They were there in response to a tip that a
number of snipers involved in Tuesday night's Shootout were hiding in the
hotel. A police bullhorn urged the men to give themselves up. The episode
turned seriocomic when three unarmed teenagers emerged from the hotel.
Nothing incriminating was found in their rooms but they were arrested any-
way, on suspicion of possessing stolen property (a radio, a camera, and two
adding machines).

On Friday night, at the Afro Set, Harllel Jones and six youths were charged
by police with violating the midnight curfew. The police searched Jones and
said they found brass knuckles in his pockets; without a warrant they searched
his car and claimed to find a .38-caliber revolver. (Police later changed their
report to read that they found brass knuckles. The court dismissed the case
against Jones on September 16 on grounds that the search was illegal.) Mayor
Stokes, having gotten word of the arrest, arrived while Jones was being held,
assured the watching crowd that no harm would befall Jones, and assigned a
Negro policeman to accompany Jones through the arresting process. After
the mayor left, according to Jones' followers, police kicked down the door of
the Afro Set, gassed the shop, broke the front window, and damaged articles
in the store.5

There were few other incidents of violence Friday night, and on Saturday
morning Mayor Stokes pronounced the crisis past. National Guardsmen had
begun to leave the area. Police were restored to 8-hour shifts. There would
be no curfew Saturday night. The mayor, other City Hall officials, and hun-
dreds of policemen went to a Catholic church to attend a memorial service for
the three policemen slain Tuesday night.

Not all the tensions had subsided. Cleveland had not seen the last of vio-
lence.

Julius Boros and Charles Ray were television cameramen from Chicago, as-
signed by the National Broadcasting Co. to accompany two news teams cover-
ing the disturbances in Cleveland. They had been dispatched to Cleveland
shortly after trouble broke out Tuesday night, July 22.

Boros and Ray were still on assignment in Cleveland Saturday night. At
about 2:30 a.m. (Sunday morning), a disturbance broke out at the entrance
to the Haddam Hotel on Euclid Avenue, a block away from Fifth District po-
lice headquarters at Chester and East 107th Street. According to eyewit-
nesses, a young black man was arguing with the hotel's night watchman.
The watchman pulled a gun, fired a warning shot into the ground, then struck
the Negro on the head with the gun. Bars and nightclubs along Euclid were
closing, and a large crowd began to gather at the scene. As police also started
to arrive, the Negro involved in the altercation got on a bus and left the area.

In the crowd of Negroes was 19-year-old Jerome Pritchard, who had been
yelling at the watchman and who now, according to police, shouted obsceni-
ties at them and urged the crowd to attack the police. Pritchard was later
charged with carrying a knife and inciting a riot. Observers say police jumped
on Pritchard and began to beat him. Others were being attacked. A bystander
said that, without provocation, a policeman struck him in the jaw with the
butt of a rifle, chipping three of his teeth.

78 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

Boros and Ray, who had been sitting at Fifth District police headquarters
awaiting newsworthy developments, rushed to the scene when they got word
of the disturbance a block away. With other members of the NBC crews they
went in separate cars, and Ray's crew got there first.

According to Charles Ray, a 40-year-old photographer who had covered
racial disturbances before, the scene was "tumultuous." Policemen were
swarming into the area, patrol cars were blocking traffic, and crowds were
standing on the corners of 105th and Euclid. Ray took wide-angle shots of
the scene, then moved toward the other side of the street to film a ruckus go-
ing on there. As he raised his camera to his eye, says Ray, more than a dozen
policemen rushed at him, shouting "Get that camera!" A plainclothesman
grabbed the camera, raised it as through to smash it to the ground, but ran
across the street with it. The other police turned away as Ray demanded his
camera back. He found a lieutenant in the middle of the street, showed him
his press credentials, and demanded the return of his property. The lieuten-
ant shoved him away, saying "Get out of here; don't bother me."

About five policemen, Ray recalls, grabbed him, pushed him against a wall,
pinned his arms, and began a search. One took his light meter, another exam-
ined his wallet. A policeman took off Ray's glasses, folded them, and stuck
them in the pocket of Ray's coat. Then all began hitting him.

It looked like a football huddle . . . Everyone was pounding on me at
once, and fists were flying in my face. Feet were kicking me in the back
and buttocks and I was trying to avoid getting hit in the groin, so I
doubled up ... and put my hands and my arms over my head to pro-
tect my face and head as best I could.

The police pulled Ray from the ground, punched and kicked him some more,
then dragged him to a police station wagon and threw him inside. Ray's foot
was caught in the door as it slammed, trapped but uninjured, and police re-
fused to help him dislodge the foot. "You dirty bastard, we hope your foot
is broken," said one of the policemen who drove him to Fifth District head-
quarters. At the police station, says Ray, he was rabbit punched by police be-
fore being thrown into a cell.

Julius Boros, a 36-year-old cameraman who had worked many years as a
photographer in his native Hungary, arrived at 105th and Euclid after Charles
Ray. He had to walk half a block to the intersection because patrol cars and
other automobiles were backed up on 105th. Near the intersection an NBC
soundman yelled to him that Ray had had his camera stolen and was being
beaten by police. "Don't go up there," he warned.

But Boros kept going. He did not see Ray, but across the street he saw
police roughly handling about 1 2 Negroes lined against a wall with their hands
up. Ray estimates he stepped 5 feet into the street from the curb; there he
began to film a "general shot" of the activity. Suddenly there was a police-
man running in his direction, hatless, hands held high, face contorted in rage,
screaming "You son of a bitch!" Boros turned, thinking someone else was
meant, but the policeman pounced on him, grabbed the camera, threw it to
the ground, and started kicking the cameraman.

Boros fell to his knees. Half-a-dozen police, Boros estimates, rushed over
and began kicking and punching him and jabbing him with their rifle butts.
They picked him up, dragged him a few feet, and resumed to pummeling. The

Law and Disorder 79

next few moments were to be crucial ones. According to Boros, he was dazed,
his eyes were closed, and as he began to sink once more under the pummeling,
he feared he would lose consciousness. He grabbed at anything that would
support him. He had hold of a policeman's shoulder with his left hand, he re-
calls, then the policeman's belt as he slid toward the ground. His right hand
grabbed an object and, when his eyes responded to the tactile signal, Boros
found he was holding the policeman's gun by the barrel.

That is how Boros describes those few moments, and it is doubtful whether
Cleveland policemen ever will believe his account. When he realized what had
happened, says Boros, he said, "Officer, here is your gun." As he reached out
his hand, the policemen on top of him became aware of the gun and began
shouting. The gun was grabbed away. Then the officer who had assaulted
Boros originally put his face close to the cameraman's and screamed, "You
are under arrest!"

The beating then became ferocious. Boros was dragged behind a patrol car
on 105th Street and pummeled as he lay prone on the ground. "God help
me, please," he cried out. "Please help me." It was then, for the first time,
that he noticed Charles Ray, undergoing beating nearby, unable to assist him.
Boros was then thrown to the floor in the rear of a patrol car. He recalls
nothing of the trip to Fifth District headquarters; cold water, slammed in his
face at the police station, brought him back to awareness. He remembers po-
licemen beating him and swearing at him as he was led from the garage into
the building. In the hallway he appealed to a high-ranking officer for help,
but the officer ignored him. At the window where he was fingerprinted, says
Boros, the policeman who had originally assaulted him stood 3 or 4 feet away,
lit matches, and threw them at him. When another policeman struck him with
a rifle, Boros screamed out in terror: "Please help me. Don't kill me here!"
Boros spoke briefly to Charles Ray, locked in a cell, as he was led to a cell of
his own. There he found running water to slake his thirst and wash his bloody
face. In pain, suffering nausea, Boros asked police officers passing his cell to
get him a doctor. "Not now," they said.

Law Director Clarence James learned of the trouble at Euclid and 105th
from Walter Burks, executive assistant to Mayor Stokes. When he arrived
there, all was quiet. In another telephone conversation with Burks, James
learned of the arrest of the NBC cameramen. James went to pick up Council-
man George Forbes, and both went to Fifth District headquarters. The police
station was, by James' recollection, a nervous armed camp "ringed with police
officers, shotguns, and machineguns." A policeman guarding the door from
the garage was reluctant to let them in, despite James' position as city law di-
rector. After vehement protest they eventually got in, and James began to no-
tice peculiarities. He passed through a room containing four or five captains
and three lieutenants, an unusual number of high-ranking officers. An inspec-
tor said they were there taking care of "platoon business." No Negro police-
men were in sight. Few patrolmen were wearing badges; a sergeant and a cap-
tain were wearing theirs, but they were unnumbered.

When Forbes and James saw Boros, his face "a mass of blood and puffed
up," James ordered him taken to Lakeside Hospital.

A few Negro policemen came into Fifth District headquarters, and James
asked one of them to accompany him to a nearby coffee shop. Over coffee
the Negro policeman told him that black suspects were being beaten at the

80 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

Fifth that night. The paddy wagon would be backed up to the garage door,
then, before the electric door was all the way up, prisoners would be dragged
from the wagon, beaten and kicked. When the NBC cameramen were brought
in, the policeman said, a lot of officers were cleared from the building to mini-
mize the number of witnesses.

Meanwhile, Julius Boros was taken to the emergency room at Lakeside
Hospital by two police officers— one black, one white— who were "very nice
to me." There he was examined and X-rayed and given some pills in response
to his pleas of pain. Then he was dismissed. "There is nothing wrong with
you," he quoted the doctor as saying: "You have some bruises." He was
given a prescription to have filled. The two police officers returned Boros to
Fifth District headquarters.

Clarence James felt Boros needed further medical attention, and ordered
that Boros be taken to the prison ward of Metropolitan General Hospital.
Soon thereafter a lawyer from NBC arrived and requested that Boros be taken
back to Lakeside Hospital. Evidently the change of plans was conveyed to
the police ambulance while Boros was en route to Metropolitan Hospital; he
recalls that, during the trip, a policeman (one of the two who had accom-
panied him on the first trip) opened the window separating front compart-
ment from back and said, "Julius, we just had a call on the radio that changed
the story; we are going back to Lakeside."

Boros recalls that he sat at Lakeside Hospital; nothing happened until one
of the police officers told him he had to be taken to Central Police Headquar-
ters. Law Director James and Councilman Forbes also went to Central Police
Headquarters, only to find that the person in charge in the detective bureau
did not have the proper form to release Boros. No one there appeared to
know anything about the matter, including a lieutenant who said he had just
come on duty; soon thereafter he went home. Eventually, with the help of
attorneys for NBC, Boros was released from custody. He was given back his
confiscated possessions, but not his camera or his watch.

Boros was then taken to Lutheran Hospital, where he was treated for
broken ribs, a ruptured spleen, fractured vertebrae, and facial scrapes. He had
bruises and cuts on his face, arms, back, abdomen, and legs. He had a broken
tooth. Boros still required hospital treatment after he returned to Chicago
August 2.

The police, meanwhile, offered a brief and rectitudinous account of the
Boros incident. Patrolman Donald Kupiecki, according to the account, had
apprehended a Negro suspect at the corner of 105th and Euclid when he
asked Boros to move because he was causing a traffic hazard. According to
the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Kupiecki said that Boros then grabbed his gun from its holster. The
two men wrestled for the weapon, which pointed at the policeman, ac-
cording to the report. When Boros was subdued and was being placed
into a police car he kicked Kupiecki, the report states. It adds that
Kupiecki was treated at Lakeside Hospital.

Police Prosecutor James Games examined both sides of the story and decided
that a charge of assault against a policeman was warranted against Boros.6 He
further stated that both cameramen had been treated in a "proper and reason-
able" manner by police. In a trial in mid-January 1969, Boros was acquitted
of the charges.

Law and Disorder 31

(This account of the troubles of Charles Ray and Julius Boros has been
based on notarized statements they made in July 1968. During his trial in
January 1969, Boros substantially repeated his version of the events and his
testimony was corroborated by eyewitnesses. It took the jury only 70 min-
utes to decide to acquit Boros of the charge of assault and battery. Though
Boros' acquittal tends to sustain his account and implies that one or more po-
licemen may have been chargeable with assault, Police Chief Gerity has indi-
cated there will be no departmental investigation of the incidents.)

On Sunday, July 28, Cleveland began to assess the damage from 5 days of
violence. A task force of architects and contractors walked through the dis-
turbance area, examining damaged properties, using as their guide a list of 73
properties that had been reported damaged to the police department, the fire
department, the mayor's office, or listed as damaged in newspaper accounts.
A group of alumni of the Harvard Business School also analyzed the property
damage, and in their report to the mayor's office listed damage to 63 separate
business establishments. Their list contained 10 fewer names than the task-
force report because two of the properties were empty stores with apartments
above them damaged by water, four were not privately owned businesses, and
four were businesses with two locations, both damaged, but listed only once.

The task force of architects and contractors had surveyed damage and de-
struction of buildings and estimated the total property loss to be $1,087,505.
To this, the Harvard Business School alumni added an estimate of $1,550,225
for losses in equipment and inventory so that, in total, dollar losses exceeded
$2.6 million.

Of the 63 business establishments burned or looted, two-thirds were on
Superior Avenue. There were 1 1 damaged businesses on East 105th Street,
10 on St. Clair; the rest were scattered. The damage tended to be clustered.
Half of the damaged businesses on Superior Avenue were in a four-block area,
between 101st and 105th. In another cluster, between 121st and 124th, 14
businesses were damaged.

Despite the clustering, the damage was far more widespread than during
the Hough riots of 1966. Then the burning and looting had been concen-
trated in a smaller area with only furtive attempts to spread the violence. The
unlawful activity in 1968 seemed born of greater self-confidence, less fear of
getting caught, than in 1966, and this was interpreted by some as an indica-
tion that Mayor Stokes had made a mistake in withdrawing Guardsmen and
white policemen.

In defending his policy of withdrawing troops Wednesday night, the mayor
admitted that there was property damage, but said he valued life over prop-
erty. Nonetheless, it would be valuable to know when the incidents of prop-
erty damage took place. Unfortunately, the task force and the Harvard Busi-
ness School group did not investigate the question, and the only analysis of
the timing of looting and arson is one presented by the mayor's office on
August 9. According to that analysis, of a total of 47 looting incidents, 26
occurred during the first 24 hours of violence, 17 during the second 24 hours
(essentially when the Mayor's Committee was patrolling the streets), and 4
during the remaining days of trouble. Of the 34 fires blamed on vandals and
other incendiaries, 14 occurred during the first 24 hours, 7 during the second
24-hour period, and 13 during the rest of the week.

82 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

The analysis by the mayor's office would indicate that violent activity had
been reduced Wednesday night. The figures, however, do not concur with
those presented by others, including a statement published by the Plain Dealer
on July 26, that "at least forty-seven stores in the cordoned area were either
burned or looted yesterday." The precise amount of damage Wednesday night
will probably never be confirmed.

Hardest hit among the 63 businesses were groceries (17), furniture stores
(10) and clothing stores (8). The Lakeview Tavern, involved in the Tuesday-
night Shootout, was the only bar reported looted, although the State Liquor
Store on East 105th Street was looted twice. (It was not included among the
list of 63 damaged establishments, since it is not a privately owned business.)
Opinions vary on whether Negro-owned businesses were carefully spared from
damage, as they had been during the Hough riots of 1966. A reporter for the
Call & Post cited evidence that Nergo merchants were spared, though some of
the 63 businesses listed are Negro owned. Certainly racial strife was a con-
tributing factor in the pattern of looting and violence. A 20-year-old Negro
college student who participated in the violence told an interviewer: "I
burned the corner Jew who had been getting my folks for years. I didn't have
a desire to loot. I just had to put that cat out of business." But the choice of
targets for looting may have had more to do with the commodities coveted
than anything else.

The alumni group of the Harvard Business School talked to 50 of the mer-
chants whose businesses had been affected. Of these, only 4 (8 percent) of
the owners believed that they had full insurance coverage; 22 (44 percent)
had partial insurance coverage; and 24 (48 percent), the largest group, had no
insurance coverage at all. At the time of these interviews, 14 of the mer-
chants (28 percent) were open for business and required no help; 20 (40 per-
cent) said they would reopen in the same area if they got short-term financing
or adequate insurance payments; seven (14 percent) had not decided what to
do; and nine (18 percent) had closed their businesses and did not plan to re-
open in the neighborhood.

A. L. Robinson, of the Cleveland Business and Economic Development
Corporation, cited an effect of the looting that cannot be measured: "I think
the looting put fears in the heart and mind of a great many people who under
normal circumstances would like to go into business [in the area] ." An older
resident of Glenville looked at looted buildings and asked in bitterness: "Why
do we destroy ourselves?"

REFERENCES

1. While Jones was facing physical risks, attempting to keep the peace, police were at-
tempting to search for weapons in his apartment. They obtained a search warrant,
then called City Hall for permission to enter the cordoned area. According to the
Cleveland Press, "City Hall called back and told police Jones would give them permis-
sion to search his apartment without a warrant. Police declined under those circum-
stances."

Wilbur Grattan, another of the active peacekeepers on Wednesday night, had al-
ready clashed with the forces of law; the previous night he had been attacked by po-
licemen while attempting to remove a wounded sniper from behind a burning build-
ing on Lakeview.

Three other peacekeepers-George Forbes, Walter Beach, and DeForest Brown-
were summoned to a county grand jury hearing on August 24 without the courtesy

Law and Disorder 83

of prior notification. "To have three policemen come barging into my office with a
summons and escort me downtown is an insult," said Councilman Forbes. "No won-
der there are riots."

For Harllel Jones there were to be further troubles with the police.

2. The Negro is much better off than he would have you believe, the policeman said. If
the truth were known, he added, the Bantus used to sell themselves into slavery be-
cause they found it far more advantageous for them to do so. The Bantus, in turn,
would take into slavery the Bushmen. The policemen felt the Negroes had been very
happy as slaves. When "cotton was king" the times were good and this general pro-
priety of the South extended not only to the whites but also to the Negroes. Now, he
felt, Negroes are "con men" trying to convince the American public of how bad
things are when really they are not so bad at all.

3. Newspapers quoted Stokes as saying in a 1 a.m. statement that 10 fires had been set
by that time Wednesday night. At the City Hall press conference on Aug. 9, Safety
Director McManamon stated that, in the 24-hour period beginning at 8:30 p.m., Wed-
nesday evening, there were 23 reported fires, of which only 7 were set by vandals or
other incendiaries; the rest were rekindles, false alarms, or fires unrelated to the dis-
turbances. According to McManamon, there were only 17 looting incidents during
the 24-hour period.

4. According to one source, Mayor Stokes considered using for nighttime duty only the
400 Guardsmen assigned there during the day. Gen. Del Corso balked at this, insist-
ing that all the troops-more than two thousand -be allowed to patrol the area at
night. Del Corso insisted "all or nothing," and Stokes gave in to his wishes.

5. About 2 months later, Harllel Jones had another of his many run-ins with the police
(none of which ever ended in a conviction): Police raided the Afro Set on the pretext
that missing girls were there. No girls were found, but police confiscated black na-
tionalist flags, marked out-of-town telephone directories, knives, gas masks, and a
shotgun. Several days later, 300 Negroes marched in orderly protest over the incident.

On Mar. 3, 1969, Harllel Jones filed a $100,000 damage suit against the three po-
licemen who arrested him in July 1968, charging false arrest and illegal search and
seizure.

6. During the early morning hours of July 28, Charles Ray signed a disorderly conduct
waiver which effectively immunized him against criminal charges.

Chapter 5

CLEVELAND IN THE AFTERMATH

In the wake of the violence of July 1968, Clevelanders held a mirror to
their city. Few were happy with what they saw, but the impressions formed-
and the remedies proposed— were many and varied.

Members of the Fraternal Order of Police were angry. Six hundred police-
men attended an FOP meeting on August 1 at the Plumbers Union Hall, where
heavily armed cops guarded the meeting from the rooftop. There were denun-
ciations of the Stokes administration and a motion, favorably voted, calling
for the resignation of Safety Director Joseph McManamon. A similar motion
to oust Police Chief Michael Blackwell was defeated, largely out of considera-
tion of his age (67) and longstanding FOP membership. Two nights earlier, a
hastily organized meeting of several hundred police wives had also brought
denunciations of the Stokes administration. *

The mayor refused to fire McManamon. Partly in response to police pres-
sure, however, he and his administration began taking steps to correct long-
standing deficiencies in the Police Department. After studying riot control
measures in Philadelphia and New York City, the Cleveland police established
a 60-man tactical unit, trained in the use of high-powered weapons and pre-
pared to cope with situations involving heavy gunfire. Early in September,
Mayor Stokes announced a campaign to recruit 500 additional police officers,
and the NAACP began a program to encourage and prepare Negro applicants
for the openings. At the same time, the mayor announced a $186,615 grant
from the Ford Foundation to be used for police training, to pay tuition costs
for policemen enrolled in college courses of their choosing, and to give 900
city employees (including policemen) training in modern management tech-
niques. Other funds came from the U.S. Department of Justice for a new pro-
gram to improve police-community relations.

More changes were announced. Safety Director McManamon promised to
improve the police department's telephone system so that calls could be an-
swered and responded to more quickly and efficiently. Late in September the
city began replacing rundown equipment with 164 new police vehicles, and
McManamon ordered that patrol cars on the East Side be integrated. Patrick
Gerity, who succeeded Michael Blackwell as police chief in mid-October, be-
gan a shakeup of the police department that resulted in the reassignment of
104 men.

Some of the changes made police unhappy. When Cleveland's Civil Service
Commission expanded the recommended reading for a police promotion test
to 26 books— including works on sociology, race relations, and national crime
problems-police rebelled. "What are you trying to make us-social workers?"

86 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

a policeman asked the secretary of the Civil Service Commission at a meeting
of the FOP. Claiming applicants for promotion would not have time to read
the books before the exam scheduled for November 1 6, the FOP sued to have
the test delayed and the reading list shortened. The suit was dropped when
the Civil Service Commission agreed to reschedule the test for December 14
and reduce the reading list to 14 books.

In an editorial on September 27, the Cleveland Plain Dealer called for an
end to the tensions and cleavages opened by the Glenville incident.

This city must not be turned into a mutual aggravation society. It is
time for all groups-for their own safety, for their own good, for their
children's future-to work together for a peaceable, lawful, orderly
community.

The editorial went on to condemn "anyone who tries to keep up the ven-
detta."

Three days later the Plain Dealer began a series of front-page articles, en-
titled "The Cleveland Police: What's on Their Mind," that effectively kept
the vendetta going.

The first installment of the series contained a barrage of quotations from
policemen critical of Mayor Stokes, Safety Director McManamon, and Police
Chief Blackwell. The article cited pernicious claims that the mayor was "pro-
tecting" black nationalists. "He wants to get them in the police department,"
one officer was quoted. Though it had been promised that the series of arti-
cles would separate fact from rumor and myth, the few facts interspersed
among the critical opinions were negative ones-for example, concerning out-
moded police vehicles. Nothing was said of reforms and improvements then
in progress. (The next day, in a side article, the Plain Dealer did point out
that Cleveland had recently acquired 164 new police vehicles, and that many
of these were already in service.)

The second installment, which purported to be about inadequate equip-
ment, opened with a quotation in 14-point type that perhaps unintention-
ally, had racist overtones: "We're like a British outpost in Africa." Like the
first article, the second published comments of policemen alleging lack of
leadership and inadequate equipment.

The third installment, on October 2, frankly discussed racial attitudes in
the police department. It began with a quotation in large type: "This busi-
ness about putting a white and Negro policeman in the same car won't work.
You got to have a close relationship between partners. If you're not bud-
dies, forget it." There were several quotations of the most-colored-people-
appreciate-us sort. Of the troublesome minority of black militants, a police
lieutenant offered this analysis: "I think these black nationalists are financed
directly by Communists or front groups."

The next installment of "The Cleveland Police: What's on Their Mind" re-
peated the charge that the mayor was pushing black militants into the police
department and contained the allegation that standards were being lowered to
let them in. The fifth and last article in the series expressed police dissatisfac-
tion with the courts and with U.S. Supreme Court rulings affecting police
procedures.

Cleveland in the Aftermath 87

At the beginning of the series, the Plain Dealer had announced that seven
reporters- three police reporters, two city hall reporters, (one of them a
Negro), and two general assignment reporters- were compiling and writing the
series. Nearly all of the work, however, was done by the three police report-
ers. It has been noted in sociological studies that policemen often develop a
conspiratorial outlook on the world and a persecution complex about them-
selves as a group. ("We're alone, we're a football," a patrolman told one of the
reporters.) While police reporters do not necessarily develop the police atti-
tude toward the community, they tend to reflect that attitude as an uncon-
scious or unstated condition of their continuing rapport with the police. "The
Cleveland Police: What's on Their Mind" gave free rein to expressions of cyni-
cism, conspiracy, and group paranoia.

The series of articles in the Plain Dealer was defensible as "news" because it
brought to the attention of Clevelanders serious problems, especially problems
of morale, in the police department. It is noteworthy, however, that the po-
lice had publicly aired their grievances in the days and weeks following the
Glenville incident, that tensions had begun to subside at the time the articles
were published (and deserved no rekindling), and that steps had already been
taken to improve the situation in the police department. While the series of
articles led readers to an impression of a police department suffering stagna-
tion, much of the discontent may actually have stemmed from the uncertainty
and insecurity that impending changes and improvements in the department
were then creating.

Many Clevelanders who regard the Plain Dealer as the city's most responsi-
ble newspaper were shocked by the content and tone of "The Cleveland Po-
lice: What's on Their Mind." Negro leaders were outraged. The local chap-
ters of the NAACP and CORE announced boycotts against the Plain Dealer.

Other articles appearing in the Cleveland Plain Dealer fed suspicions that
the newspaper was carrying on a vendetta of its own.

On October 3, concurrent with the fourth installment of the police-gripe
series, a front-page, five-column headline read: "FBI Is Refused Warrant
in Glenville Riot Probe." The article told of the refusal of the U.S. Attorney
General in Washington to grant a warrant to the FBI to search a farm in Ash-
tabula County, 50 miles east of Cleveland, allegedly used by black militants
involved in the Glenville incident. A source within the police department was
quoted as saying, "Our information was that the FBI felt there were weapons
and possibly dead bodies [at the farm] ." The implication was made that the
Justice Department had thwarted the legitimate work of the FBI, possibly be-
cause of racial sensitivities.

According to reporters interviewed for this study, the editors of the Plain
Dealer had known of the warrant refusal for some time but had saved the
story to use as a "tie-in" with the series on police complaints. The Cleveland
Press investigated the matter and came up with a different story. The Press
article reported that 50 locations had been reported to Cleveland police as
possible gun locations, but there was insufficient information to link the Ash-
tabula farm with the Glenville shootings. "If we did [have enough informa-
tion] ," a police official said, "we would have sought our own search warrant."

88 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

The next day the Plain Dealer reported that U.S. Representative William E.
Minshall, a Republican running for reelection in a predominantly white subur-
ban area of Cleveland, was calling for a special session of the Federal grand
jury to investigate the Glenville incident. Minshall accused U.S. Attorney
General Ramsey Clark of "shielding" the guilty parties in the incident. On
October 5, the Plain Dealer, under an eight-column headline, reported that
U.S. Attorney Bernard J. Stuplinski had responded with the promise of a Fed-
eral grand jury investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Glenville
incident. That afternoon, in the Cleveland Press, Stuplinski denied that he
had any intention of calHng a special Federal grand jury to probe the incident.

Federal agencies, including the FBI and the Alcohol Tax Unit have been
gathering information as to possible violations of Federal law since the
first shot was fired in Glenville.

If any violations of Federal law are found, Stuplinski indicated, they would
be presented to a regular session of the grand jury.

On October 16, the Plain Dealer unleashed a major expose, revealing de-
tails of an incident, embarrassing to the mayor and other high officials, that
had taken place 5 months earlier. Under a five-column headline, "CORE
'Bodyguards' Freed by City Hall in Gun Case," the Plain Dealer told of the
dropping of concealed weapons charges against two Negroes "at the request
of unnamed officials at City Hall" in May 1968.

The two East Side Negroes were temporary bodyguards for CORE'S former
national director, Floyd B. McKissick. They were arrested during the early
morning hours of April 5 , 8 hours after the assassination of Martin Luther
King, outside the home of a prominent Negro stockbroker where McKissick
was sleeping. Shortly after they were arrested, Roy Innis, then associate na-
tional director of CORE, showed up at Sixth District headquarters to appeal
for their release, saying that McKissick had announced on a nationwide news-
cast that his life had been threatened and that the two arrested men were
protecting him. Noting that McKissick had not requested police protection,
the officer-in-charge at Sixth District headquarters declined to release the two
men. Later in the morning, however, they were released on orders from Chief
Prosecutor James S. Carnes.

A jury trial on the concealed weapons charge was scheduled for May 21.
On checking the court records on May 16, one of the arresting officers found
that the case had been advanced to May 6 and the records marked "Nolle
Pros," indicating that the charges had been dropped by Prosecutor Carnes.

After the Plain Dealer revelations on October 16, John T. Corrigan, prose-
cutor of Cuyahoga County, proceeded to take over the case dropped by the
city of Cleveland, an unusual move considering the charges were only for a
misdemeanor. Corrigan succeeded in getting indictments against the two men
from the county grand jury. Carnes, who had resigned as city prosecutor in
September, was unresponsive to reporters' questions about the case. Mayor
Stokes at first refused to comment on the case, then admitted he had been
instrumental in having the charges dropped. But he defended the move as
necessary during the volatile hours following the King assassination, when
"we were . . . trying to hold the city together and trying to keep down any
issues that might erupt."

Cleveland and the Aftermath 89

That seemed a reasonable explanation to many Clevelanders, and reason
enough for allowing the issue to die quietly. Reporters interviewed for this
study indicated that the editors of the Plain Dealer had knowledge of the
dropped charges months before they decided to publish their expose.

The Plain Dealer articles, opening old wounds, suggesting conspiracies,
casting doubt on the integrity of the Stokes administration, may have in-
creased the credibility of a racist pamphlet widely distributed in the white
neighborhoods of Cleveland's West Side. Entitled "Warning!," the bulletin
detailed an alleged plot by black nationalists to attack the West Side to "get
the white man where he lives." Weapons and ammunition for the attack, it
said, had recently been moved from a farm in Ashtabula County. The plot
would include planned auto accidents to block streets, fire bombings in a con-
centrated area to draw police into an ambush, and a main attack by 50 to 75
carloads of black nationalists, shooting at every white person in sight as they
rampaged through the West Side and escaped through the western suburbs.

The warning was built upon distrust of the Stokes administration. The
anonymous authors said they had warned the Cleveland police of the plot, but
the police has replied that "with this administration they probably won't be
allowed to take any action." Because the black militants have a friend in City
Hall, the pamphlet said, they are better equipped and organized than they
were in July. "Because we can expect no preventive action or help from
Cleveland City Hall, it has become necessary for you, the potential victim, to
protect yourself and your property."

Others were busy during the fall of 1968 polarizing the Cleveland commu-
nity in other ways. Robert Annable, a telephone company employee and the
president of the United Citizens Council in Cleveland, organized a rightwing
group called the Citizens Committee for Law Enforcement. The purpose of
the new organization was to back police in their demands for heavy weaponry,
to provide financial support to policemen in civil suits and disciplinary ac-
tions, to "investigate" the liberal organizations that were pressing for investi-
gation of the police department, and to set into motion a campaign to have
Mayor Stokes removed from office. At the end of September, Roy Richards,
head of the new group and chairman of the Cleveland branch of the Wallace
for President Committee, filed a recall petition in probate court, stating that
Stokes had acted illegally "in allegedly channeling 'Cleveland: Now!' funds to
Negro militant groups, allegedly appearing at a public function with armed
black nationalists, and allegedly mishandling the restoration of order during
the Glenville disorders last July."

The Citizens Committee for Law Enforcement also printed up posters por-
traying Mayor Stokes and Safety Director McManamon, with the caption,
"WANTED to answer questions for the murder of three policemen." The
poster began showing up on bulletin boards in police stations, alongside an-
other which showed Mayor Stokes marching in a parade on the anniversary of
the Hough riots behind armed black nationalists and captioned, "These pic-
tures show how to start a riot which KILLS, wounds and maims policemen
who are replaced by BLACK POWER social workers by the Mayor."

Through the fall of 1968, white residents of Cleveland's West Side who put
credence in rumors and anonymous pamphlets waited fruitlessly for an

90 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

invasion by black nationalists. What came instead were further instances of
polarization, instigated by the anonymous pamphlets and several racially ori-
ented beatings on Cleveland's West Side. A rumor spread among parents of
white students at Shuler Junior High School and John Marshall High School
that their children were threatened with mass attacks by black nationalists
called in by Negro students to protect them. Negro parents were told that
white gangs were assembling to attack Negro students. On Monday, October
21, 70 Negro students walked out of John Marshall High School and a smaller
number walked out of Shuler Junior High School. Amidst this walkout,
rumors spread over the West Side that students and principals had been beaten
up.

Negro groups contributed to Cleveland's polarization. In September, noisy
interference of a City Council meeting by black militants did little to win
sympathy for their grievances, however meritorious. And in October it was
revealed that a group of black nationalists calling themselves the Black Infor-
mation Service were attempting to coerce some East Side merchants into turn-
ing over 10 percent of their profits, allegedly for neighborhood-improvement
projects. The extortion shamed the Negro community and brought condem-
nation from its leaders.

Many months after the violence of July 1968, the neighborhood of Glen-
ville bore the scars. On Lakeview Road there was a large vacant area where
two houses burned to the ground during the gun battle, giving the block the
appearance of a row of teeth with two incisors missing. On Superior Avenue
there were stores that were black, gaping shells, others that hid protectively
behind plywood panels at their windows. Graffiti scrawled on the plywood
told of hatred and smoldering violence. "Black people buy Protection: 20-20
shotguns Passport to freedom" was scribbled on a boarded-up drycleaning
store. Said another: "Kill Wild Beast. Stand and be counted in the war
against the Beast." Here and there were more positive evidences of the new
black pride. The marquee of an old movie theater that had become Muham-
mad's Mosque proclaimed: "Allah is the Greatest." Among the stores doing
business on the avenue a number bore Muslim names, some incongruously:
The Shabazz Market advertised kosher meat. Some stores sold African handi-
crafts, as Ahmed once had done.

Though they had cause for bitterness and fear, many merchants elected to
stay on in Glenville. One who had particular cause for bitterness was Jack
Friedman, owner of a department store at East 105th and Superior. Friedman
had been active in the community affairs of Glenville, a white man seeking
racial harmony and better conditions for Negroes of the neighborhood. Most
of his employees, including several top managers, were black. Friedman made
many of them stockholders in the enterprise. A Negro businessman said to
him once, "Friedman, why don't you put on burnt coffee? You're one of us."
During the Hough riots of 1966, Friedman's store had been spared while
others nearby had windows smashed.

In 1968, his department store was hit on the first night of violence, some
time after Friedman had returned home from a meeting at the Office of Eco-
nomic Opportunity. It was "like the feeling of cold ice," he recalls, when he
learned of the damage. The store was a shambles. Display cases were smashed,

Cleveland in the Aftermath 91

their contents gone. Vandals broke into a case displaying shoes only to dis-
cover that all the shoes were for right feet. Looters grabbed clothes even from
the mannequins, sometimes taking pajama bottoms and leaving the tops.
Friedman estimates that, of $60,000 worth of merchandise in stock, he was
left with less than $500 worth.

But Friedman decided to stay. "I have faith in Glenville and a small bunch
of hoodlums isn't going to destroy my faith in it." He wanted to help heal
the wounds and continue to work for the betterment of the Negro commu-
nity. "I happen to be of a minority group myself," he said. "I know what
they've gone through."

REFERENCE

1. A police sergeant, Louis Bors, took matters into his own hands 2 weeks later. He
went to the Governor's office in Columbus (wearing his uniform), carrying a 10-page
petition calling for the ouster of Stokes, McManamon, and Law Director James for
"willfully neglecting to enforce the law, gross neglect of duty, malfeasance, misfea-
sance, and non-feasance in office." Governor Rhodes refused to act on the petition

Chapter 6

A NEW PATTERN?

In recent years America has seemed embarked on a course in which out-
breaks of racial violence deepen the rift between black and white, and the
rising tensions and mutual distrust that lead to further outbreaks of violence.
The pernicious cycle cannot be broken, obviously enough, until tensions are
defused and mutual trust is established.

Racial violence in the United States has a long history, and the changing
patterns of that violence have reflected changes in the relationships and atti-
tudes between blacks and whites. Slavery in the 18th century established
master and slave in the relationship of dominant and subservient, and violence
was a legitimate means for the white master to underscore and enforce that
relationship. As Gunnar Myrdal noted in An American Dilemma (1944):

The social pattern of subduing the Negroes by means of physical force
was inherent in the slavery system. The master himself, with the back-
ing, if needed, of the local police and, indeed, of all white neighbors,
had to execute this force, and he was left practically unrestricted by any
formal laws.

Negroes did not always resign themselves to this subjugation, and there were
several notable attempts at slave rebellion. All of these attempts failed, but
the mere fact that they had been tried served to increase the legitimacy of
white-inflicted violence for maintaining slaves in subjugation.

With emancipation the pattern of violence changed. Vigilante justice, espe-
cially in the form of lynching, was an extralegal means of inflicting punish-
ment on whites as well as blacks, but increasingly it became, especially in the
South, a mode for keeping Negroes "in line." The Tuskegee Institute, which
began counting lynchings in 1882, established four criteria for including
events in their records:

1 . There must be legal evidence that a person was killed.

2. The person must have met death illegally.

3. A group must have participated in the killing.

4. The group must have acted under the pretext of service to justice,
race, or tradition.

In the peak year of 1892, the Tuskegee Institute counted 161 lynchings of
Negroes, declining to 67 in 1910 and 20 in 1930. In 1963, the Institute
stopped counting, for lynching as a mode of racial violence had virtually dis-
appeared, and the count no longer provided a useful index to race relations.
Another pattern emerged late in the 19th century: riots, in which whites
were the attackers, Negroes the victims. Generally whites sought to inflict

94 Shoot-Out in Cleveland

personal injury on a group of Negroes; the Negroes, as victims, usually did
little to counterattack. In 1908, the white community of Springfield, 111., en-
raged by two alleged rapes of white women by Negroes, launched 2 days of
rioting, burning, and lynching aimed at the Negro residents of the city. Most
Negroes fled in terror. About 2,000 of them gathered for protection in the
Springfield Arsenal; others fled to safety elsewhere. Before the riot ended,
5,000 militia were patrolling the streets of Springfield. Riots of a similar sort
occurred in Wilmington, N.C. (1896); East St. Louis, 111. (1917); Washington,
D.C. (1919); and Tulsa, Okla. (1921).

Negroes did not remain passive in rioting. The next pattern to emerge was
one in which the opposing races sought to inflict physical harm on each other.
An example was the 1919 riot in Chicago. On July 27 of that year, a 17-year-
old Negro drowned during an interracial scuffle at a public beach in Chicago.
The incident touched off a week of racial warfare. Though the riot produced
property damage, the major objective was physical harm. Thirty-eight per-
sons were reported killed (23 Negroes and 15 whites), while a reported total
of 537 were injured (342 Negroes, 178 whites, 17 undetermined). Even with
National Guard units in the city, the violence did not die down until Chicago
faced rain and falling temperatures. The same type of racial violence was evi-
dent in the 1943 riot in Detroit, Mich. There, in less than 3 full days of riot-
ing, 710 individuals were injured or killed. Once again, persons of both races
participated in the violence; the major form of violence was physical attack.

The spate of riots in American cities during the mid-1 960's followed a dif-
ferent pattern. These were Negro-dominated, property-oriented riots. Ne-
groes initiated the violence and directed their hostilities toward property
rather than persons. Most of the property was white owned but located
within the Negro ghetto. The violence seldom spread beyond the borders of
the ghetto. Generally the only white casualties of the violence were police or
other law enforcement officers trying to control the rioting.

The precedent for this kind of violence occurred in Harlem in 1935. On
March 19, a Negro youth was caught stealing from a dimestore in that pre-
dominantly Negro section of New York. A crowd that gathered outside the
store got the impression that the boy had been murdered by white employees
of the store. As the rumor spread, Negro mobs began to roam the streets of
Harlem, breaking store windows and looting. Except for confrontations be-
tween police and looters, almost no whites were drawn into the violence.
Looting continued through the next day, but was finally brought under con-
trol by police and local Negro leaders.

In 1967, riots of this pattern occurred in a number of American cities. The
National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission) stud-
ied these riots and concluded:

While the civil disorders of 1967 were racial in character, they were not
interracial. The 1967 disorders, as well as earlier disorders of the recent
period, involved action within Negro neighborhoods against symbols of
American society— authority and property— rather than against white
persons.

A New Pattern? 95

The violence that erupted in Cleveland at the end of July 1968 may have
marked the beginning of a new pattern. Though it soon fell into the estab-
lished pattern of Negroes destroying property in the ghetto, it began as vio-
lence aimed at personal injury. Black dominated throughout, it ended in
more white casualties than black. Though the white victims were policemen,
attacked as symbols of the white society rather than as men, the mode of
vengeance had taken a significant step beyond damage to white-owned busi-
nesses. A small, well-equipped army of black extremists was responsible for
the bloodshed (whether or not they fired the first shot). The depths of anger
and extreme beliefs from which the violence spring are indicated by the fact
that the presence of a Negro in the mayor's chair did not prevent it from hap-
pening. The extent of alienation of many blacks from the white society is in-
dicated by the fact that Negro leaders could not stop the violence once it
started. (A fair appraisal of the mayor's one-night strategy would acknowl-
edge that no blood was shed, that the peace patrols were undermanned, that
most of the trouble came from juveniles, and that traditional methods of full-
scale repression during riots have not been notably successful either.)

To acknowledge that the Cleveland riots began as person-oriented violence
is not to say that the Glenville incident was a planned ambush, part of an in-
tercity conspiracy, or "the first stage of revolutionary armed struggle," as Phil
Hutchings of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee called it. On
the same day that Hutchings gave his interpretation of the event, U.S. Attor-
ney General Ramsey Clark offered the opinion that the Glenville incident was
"the random act of a handful of very extreme and violence-prone militants."
He found "even less evidence now of militant agitation or conspiratorial ef-
forts to cause . . . [riots] than in the past several years." Mayor Stokes also
concluded there was no evidence of a police ambush or intercity plot. He
blamed the incident on the "spontaneous action taken by a group who were
armed and emotionally prepared to do violence." After its investigations the
Cuyahoga County grand jury "substantially" agreed with the mayor's analysis.

Baxter Hill had a convincing rejoinder to the conspiracy theory. "When an
insurrection comes," he said, "everybody'll be in it and we'll all know about
it."

It is beyond the scope of this inquiry to speculate whether such an insur-
rection, in Cleveland or elsewhere, will ever come. But, like the specter of an
atomic holocaust that now forces nations to seek peace among themselves,
the possibility of interracial civil war may yet goad Americans, black and
white, to noble steps: to erase tensions and misunderstandings, to correct
longstanding inequities, to restore tranquillity in their nation.

EPILOG

THE TRIAL AND CONVICTION OF
FRED (AHMED) EVANS

Last August, the grand jury of Cuyahoga County met and returned seven
first-degree murder indictments against Fred (Ahmed) Evans. On March 6,
1969, the seven counts were amended at the request of counsel for the de-
fense to delete the word "murder" which is a conclusion and insert "to kill
by shooting" in its place.

Counts 1,3,5, and 7 pertain to the killing of Leroy C. Jones, Louis E.
Golonka, Willard J. Wolff, and James E. Chapman as civilians and read as fol-
lows:

. . . unlawfully, purposely, and of deliberate and premeditated malice,
did kill one [Jones, Golonka, Wolff, Chapman] by shooting him, pur-
suant to a conspiracy to kill and murder theretofore entered into by and
between the said Fred (Ahmed) Evans, Lathan Donald, Alfred Thomas,
John Hardwick and Leslie Jackson.

Counts 2, 4, and 6 pertain to the killing of Leroy C. Jones, Louis E. Go-
lonka, and Willard J. Wolff while in the discharge of their duties as policemen
and read as follows: ". . . unlawfully, purposely and wilfully did kill [Jones,
Golonka, Wolff] a duly appointed, qualified and acting policeman of the City
of Cleveland, County of Cuyahoga, in pursuance of a conspiracy to kill, while
said [Jones, Golonka, Wolff] was in the discharge of his duties as a police-
man."

The criminal statutes in Ohio upon which these indictments are based are
2901.01 and 2901.04. They respectively read as follows:

Conspiracy

One who enters into a conspiracy to commit an unlawful act is guilty
of any unlawful act of his co-conspirators in furtherance of the conspir-
acy and it is not necessary that the conspiracy be one to commit the
identical offense charged in the indictment or even a similar one, it be-
ing enough that the offense charged was one which might have been
contemplated as the result of the conspiracy, and it is not in error for
the court to so charge under an indictment for first degree murder where
a conspiracy to rob has been shown.

98 The Trial and Conviction of Fred (Ahmed) Evans

Killing of a Police Officer

No person shall purposely and willfully kill a sheriff, deputy sheriff,
constable, policeman, or marshall while such sheriff, deputy sheriff, con-
stable, policeman, or marshall is in the discharge of his duties.

Whoever violates this section is guilty of murder in the first degree
and shall be punished by death unless the jury trying the accused recom-
mends mercy, in which case the punishment shall be imprisonment for
life.

The State introduced 266 exhibits and called 86 witnesses in order to prove
circumstantially, if not conclusively, that Ahmed Evans with four other co-
defendants was guilty of conspiring to murder on July 23, 1968. The State
built its case on the testimony of approximately eight gun dealers who sold
guns to Ahmed, and the testimony of Robert Boone, a neighbor, who said
that he saw cars with out-of-State license plates delivering guns to Ahmed's
house. The prosecution demonstrated that Ahmed had the funds necessary
to make these purchases by calling DeForest Brown, director of the Hough
Development Corporation, who testified that Ahmed's group had received a
grant from "Cleveland: Now."

Later they brought in Detective Robert Birt, who gathered many of the
guns and bullets from Ahmed's apartment and the scene of the shootings on
the night of the 23d. Sgt. Victor Kovacic was asked to present his findings
regarding the matching of bullets and guns to wounds. During the progress of
the trial, the State offered into evidence a slug fired from Ahmed's gun which
was allegedly found in police Car 591.

Several key witnesses were also called upon to relate their contacts with
the defendant. Walter Washington, a youth who claimed that he was at 12312
Auburndale on the morning of July 23, stated that he heard Ahmed talk about
killing "the beast" and said that Ahmed showed his followers how to use the
guns present in the house at that time. Patrolman James O'Malley and several
other police officers from the surveillance teams assigned to watch 12312 tes-
tified that Ahmed left 12312 Auburndale with other men, armed, at about
8:10 p.m. on July 23. Another crucial identification of Ahmed was made by
William McMillan, the tow-truck driver, who was shot and who alleged that it
was Ahmed who shot him. Finally Sgt. John Ungvary related conversations
he had with Ahmed wherein Ahmed described his brand of black nationalism
as "revolution by force." He also stated that Ahmed predicted "blood in the
streets of Cleveland" and a war by the black people on "the beast."

The defense emphasized that the corner's examination revealed that two
of the policemen, Golonka and Wolff, were legally drunk at the time of death
According to the eminent forensic pathologist, Dr. Cyril Wecht, James Chap-
man was killed by a gun held at no more than 6 inches from his head-and
hence by a policeman. The defense maintained that the guns in the posses-
sion of Ahmed's group were bought to form a rifle club and that they were
legal, legitimate purchases. They disputed the credibility of Walter Washing-
ton as a witness (he was a convicted arsonist and thief). Several witnesses wh
were at the hospital when McMillan was admitted testified that McMillan re-
ported that he did not see who shot him.

Reports were presented to the jury that Car 591 has been repaired in Sep-
tember 1968, and that there had been no detection of a bullet imbedded in

Shoot-Out in Cleveland 99

the vehicle until April 1969. In order to impugn the validity of police testi-
mony, the defense subpenaed seven persons who testified that they were vic-
tims of police brutality at the Lakeview Tavern on July 23. No policemen
admitted having knowledge of these acts. A key defense witness was Joseph
Turpin, Jr., a workhouse guard in whose house Ahmed surrendered. He
claimed that Ahmed was in his house from 20 minutes after the shooting be-
gan until he surrendered to the police. He said that Ahmed was not one of
the men he saw shooting at the tow-truck driver and that Ahmed had said he
wanted to surrender to stop the shooting and burning.

After the closing statements by lawyers of both the State and defense,
Judge George J. McMonagle explained the charge of the law to the jury. He
told the jury that the indictment was not evidence in the guilt of the defend-
ant. It was merely a formal way of legally charging a person with a crime. In
actuality, a presumption of innocence must surround the defendant until the
jury comes to a verdict. Regarding the use of a "reasonable doubt," Judge
McMonagle stated that it must be more than a possible or imaginary doubt. A
reasonable doubt is when the jury cannot "feel an abiding conviction to a
moral certainty of the truth of the charge." He told the jury that they also
must determine the degree of credibility that they would assign each witness.

In further explaining the charge of aiding and abetting, he cited Revised
Code Sec. 1.17 which states that to aid or abet is "to help or assist ... en-
courage, counsel or incite. To procure one to do something is to persuade, to
induce, to prevail upon or cause it to be done."

His definition of conspiracy was a paraphrasing of conspiracy as it appears
in 2901 .01 of the Ohio Revised Code. In McMonagle's words, a "conspiracy
is merely an agreement or understanding between the parties to the conspir-
acy. It need not be an expressed agreement. ... It may be implied from all
of the evidence and circumstances . . ."1

He charged that "direct testimony of conspiracy is unnecessary, but it [the
conspiracy] may be established by circumstantial evidence showing concerted
action in committing an unlawful act, or by proof of facts creating an infer-
ence or inferences that the unlawful act was in furtherance of a conspiracy."
The judge said that if circumstantial evidence is consistent with either guilt or
innocence, the jury must give the defendant the benefit of the doubt. The
jury may draw inferences from proven facts but not inferences upon infer-
ences.

He informed them that the defendant was innocent if the State had not
proven beyond a reasonable doubt these charges. On the other hand, if the
defendant was found to be guilty of any one of the charges of first degree
murder, the jury still had the option of granting or withholding mercy.

One of the final parts of Judge McMonagle's charge to the jury was that of
the lesser but included charges: murder in the second degree and voluntary
and involuntary manslaughter.

The jury retired to deliberate immediately after the judge's charge at about
4 p.m., Saturday, May 10, 1969. They discussed the evidence for the remain-
der of the day. On Sunday, the jurors took several oral ballots and eight writ-
ten ones-seven for the seven counts and one for mercy. By the end of the
day all the jurors agreed to the defendant's guilt, but one juror wanted more
time to think about the issue of mercy which she alone at that point favored.

100 The Trial and Conviction of Fred (Ahmed) Evans

When the jurors reconvened on Monday morning, May 12, they were un-
animous that Ahmed was guilty of first-degree murder on all seven counts,
without mercy. On that Monday, approximately at noon, the verdict was re-
turned in open court.

Before sentencing Ahmed, the judge asked him if he had any statements.
Ahmed replied:

I fully understand the ways of life as they are now, and the truth of
the matter is I have no regret. ... I have no malice towards anyone,
white people nor anyone else ....

This will not end by the means that have been used today against the
black man who are willing, who are able, who are strong enough to
stand up.

The electric chair or fear of anything won't stop the black man of
today.

I feel justified in that I did the best I could. And, of course, con-
cerning these charges I am not a murderer.

Judge McMonagle answered:

... If it can be said there was any defense you presented ... it was
that you did not agree with our laws, and apparently you were not
bound by them

I think it is perfectly obvious that we cannot have a system where
every man is his own law.

Furthermore, Ahmed had inflicted a horrible wound on the community.
The judge hoped that the community, white and black together, would con-
tinue to work together for coequal status within the law.

Thereupon, he sentenced Ahmed to die in the electric chair on September
22, 1969, between the hours of midnight and sunrise.

REFERENCE

1. The essence of a conspiracy is the agreement or joining together, and in some States
and under Federal law, this combination for an unlawful end is itself a crime, even
though the agreed act is never carried out. In Ohio, however, conspiracy is not un-
lawful per se, and there can be no violation of the law unless some substantive crime
(here, murder) is committed pursuant to the conspiracy. Even then, the defendant is
charged and tried for the substantive offense, not for the conspiracy.

TASK FORCE REPORTS

0 VIOLENCE IN AMERICA
Historical and Comparative
Perspectives

D THE POLITICS OF PROTEST
Violent Aspects of Protest
& Confrontation

D FIREARMS AND VIOLENCE
IN AMERICAN LIFE

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS

D CHICAGO

D CLEVELAND

D MIAMI

D COUNTER-INAUGURAL

COMMISSION REPORTS

D PROGRESS REPORT TO
THE PRESIDENT

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Full text of "Shoot-out in Cleveland: black militants and the police; a report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence"

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