1968 – The Year that Changed it All

Rioting, chaos, assassinations, ghetto and student uprisings caused a nation to doubt itself.

America, at war in Vietnam, was having a nervous breakdown at home.

Cleveland, a troubled city, had an uprising in the black community, a four-day outbreak of violent hostilities.

Vietnam, raging in 1968, would take the lives of from 55,000 to 58,000 Americans with a total death count of 1.7 million during only the American phase of the Indochina war, 1965-1973.

President John F. Kennedy had already been assassinated in November, 1963, a lasting shock to the American psyche. Malcolm X had been assassinated by February, 1965. In 1965, Watts erupted in August in Los Angeles as did Hough in Cleveland in April.

We had seen the rise of the civil rights movement, black power and the Black Panther Party.

But 1968 brought two other significant assassinations of public figures allied with progressive traditions and hope of better lives for the deprived.

Historians someday will determine whether America survived the shocks of this time period.

I believe these shock waves continue to reverberate in the American culture and not to our benefit.

Here is some of what the events of 40 years ago brought to us...

- Assassinations – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4; Sen. Robert Kennedy, June 6.

- Vietnam - Tet Offensive - January.

- Chicago Democratic National Convention & rioting – Aug. 26-29.

- The election of Richard Milhous Nixon, November 5.

And here at home:

- Cleveland – Glenville riots, July 23-27; 11 killed - three police and eight citizens and possibly two other civilians, who were never found.

It was a very bad year for America.

Personally, it was a year that changed my life and that of my family.

I found it impossible to continue what is considered a “normal life.” I returned from a meeting in Aurora, Ohio on April 5, where I had attended a conference of Ohio professors. George Wiley, a black man and the leader of the Welfare Rights Organization, happened to be the speaker that morning after King’s assassination.

Wiley said at that meeting he would no longer plead with white folks for understanding, yet that was what he was doing, pleading for understanding of why riots had broken out in many major cities the night of King’s assassination.

Unbelievable to me, the audience of educators was not sympathetic. They were antagonistic. The typical reaction was, “Why are they (blacks) burning our cities?” “When are they going to stop?”

These were supposedly the most educated people in our society. To me, it was shocking reaction to a human cry for understanding.

Conventional life became unacceptable, impossible. It turned out to be a significant date for me. I became 35 years of age that April 5th and determined to leave conventional journalism as an inadequate form for truth-telling.

I quit my job at the Wall Street Journal and started own publication, Point of View, a small newsletter with a small distribution.

I’d like to think that I have followed for these many years the command of Leonard Levy, a leading historian of the free press in early America. He said the First Amendment gave the press, “A right to engage in rasping, corrosive and offensive discussion of all topics of public interest.”

Nineteen sixty-eight was a very tough year for Cleveland.

It was the year that ghetto uprisings turned tragic for Cleveland.

Mayor Carl Stokes helped maintain peace in Cleveland after the killing of Dr. King. He walked the streets urging calm. In other American cities, violence and rioting erupted. Along with him was a man named Fred “Ahmed” Evans. He was to become a pivotal but tragic figure in Cleveland’s decline.

Stokes was hailed by the Cleveland Establishment for his peace-keeping after King’s death. As a result of his success, a program was proposed to supposedly help those in poverty. It was called Cleveland Now! It was a program that depended for private donations to solve the serious problems of the city. Even the donations of school children earned great praise in the newspapers, as they became press agents for Cleveland Now!

I began Point of View at this time. Indeed, the first issue of the newsletter critically examined Cleveland Now! as just “another gimmick,” not a real solution.

I wrote: “Just ask yourself: Is the answer to the massive physical and social problems of American cities to be found in the 55 cent contributions of widows, 10 cent donations of welfare children or one hour’s wages of laborers?

“Cleveland Now! creates the illusions that it is. Therefore, it is a pornographic answer to the city’s ills. It is a diversion.”

My point was that if the community were really serious about the problems it faced, massive public funding would be necessary to accomplish its goals. No major funding was available, even if anyone seriously expected it, because we were, as we are now, spending our treasure on an expensive, unwinnable war, then in Vietnam.

However, Cleveland Now! itself became the downfall of this false attempt to solve problems and a wound that Carl Stokes would not survive politically.

That’s because some funds from Cleveland Now! were used by Black Nationalists to buy guns used in what became the Glenville shootout of July 1968. Ironically, the second issue of Point of View (POV) revealed that a similar program to pay the same Black Nationalists had operated during the 1967 primary election. Top Cleveland businessmen funded this first program, run out of the Call & Post newspaper, to “keep peace” in Cleveland that summer. They had an ulterior motive for this secret funding.

Here’s how the article, unreported elsewhere in the media, started in POV: “Cleveland business leaders last summer ‘bought peace’ in the ghetto by paying some black activists about $40,000 in a 10-week period to do what they had decided to do already – keep it cool.” The late W. O. Walker of the Call & Post told me that “Ralph Besse headed it up,” talking of the payments. Besse was a leading Cleveland businessman as chairman of Cleveland Electric Illuminating (CEI) and a former partner in the Squire, Sanders & Dempsey law firm.

The payments ended the weekend the Democratic primary concluded, leaving the obvious impression that the businessmen wanted peace during the primary to help Stokes become the Democratic candidate. After that the conventional wisdom believed Stokes would be unable to win enough votes of white Clevelanders to be elected Mayor. His white opponent, Seth Taft, the choice of the Cleveland business establishment would be elected. Taft was a partner in Cleveland’s leading law firm, Jones & Day. Stokes, however, prevailed to become the first black mayor of a major American city.

Fred “Ahmed” Evans, a leader in keeping peace in during 1967 election, was a principal in the Black Nationalist movement. He was blamed for starting the Glenville shootout, using guns that had been bought with Cleveland Now! funding. He also was one of the nationalists paid to keep peace by Besse’s group.

Evans had gained a reputation on a fluke, being quoted in a front page Wall Street Journal article. He predicted doom and that blood would flow in a race war coinciding with an eclipse of the sun. The day of the prediction passed without incident. However, the Cleveland police became obsessed with Evans “at a time when he was harmless,” a knowledgeable observer wrote to me. The notoriety elevated Evans’ image from an eccentric astrologer to a leader. He complained it also made him a target for police. Indeed, on the day of his doom prediction, police raided his astrology storefront and arrested him for “housing violations.”

It may be that the Wall Street Journal story provided the spark that eventually blew up on July 23, 1968 in Glenville.

I wrote later in The Nation magazine of the conflict: “Mayor Carl B. Stokes had steered the community peacefully through the difficult period after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Indeed, at the time of the shooting the Mayor was enjoying his height of popularity. Yet there were strains, especially between the administration and a police department which rejected a black leader. The Glenville episode started on a day when the Mayor was out of town and the police were warning of impending violence and plots to assassinate black leaders, including the Mayor. The police have been and remain eager to raid black nationalists’ headquarters and constantly keep alive the concept of themselves as the ‘thin blue line’ between whites they protect and blacks they patrol.” (For July 14, 1969 article in Nation: http://www.thenation.com/archive/detail/13231875).

The Cleveland Police bristled at having a black mayor as their commander. Most mayors, especially black ones, have great difficulty controlling and disciplining the police who see themselves as a force unto themselves.

Glenville really marked the end of the Stokes era although he did win re-election in 1969. The business backers of Cleveland Now! retreated and cut him off. Stokes also lost confidence in the business community. His press secretary told me that a bitter Stokes would no longer serve their interests.

Nineteen sixty-eight could be cited as the year Cleveland began its steep decline. The city still had many Fortune 500 corporations, more than any cities other than New York and Los Angeles.

However, the racial disturbances and animosities ingrained themselves into the fabric of the city and I don’t believe they yet have worked themselves out.

Few remember just how intensely the 1968 Glenville disturbances divided the city.

County Prosecutor John Corrigan and his prosecutorial hirelings revealed the pervading poisonous intensity of public feeling in prosecuting Evans and others. The prosecutor accented this toxic atmosphere with his office’s racial bias.

Again, from The Nation:

“The political nature of the trial extended beyond being merely an attack upon black nationalists. Charles R. Laurie, the assistant prosecutor, made broad insinuations about Mayor Stokes’ involvement. ‘Why did City Hall let the police go in there unprepared? Why? What were they going to fight back with? Spitballs?’ At another point Laurie said: ‘Under the façade of making dolls and dashikis (the program funded by the city with Evans as its head) in the shop … they prepared for war against the men in blue. City Hall gave him the money and what did he do in gratitude? He gave them hot bullets in return.

“The prosecution lawyers, both white, several times during the summation, called the two Negro defense lawyers ‘boys.’ Laurie badgered one young Negro girl, finally screaming, ’You hate white people, don’t you?’ He then asked her, ‘Wasn’t my color the people that put up the money for these (poverty) programs?’”

The Plain Dealer inflamed community passions by a headline the day after the outbreak that it was a “massacre of police.”

However, it was not clear at all how the shooting started or why.

The Cleveland situation resulted in a study by the President’s Commission on Violence. “A small, well-equipped army of black extremist was responsible for the bloodshed (whether or not they fired the first shot),” the final Commission report read.

However, the Commission’s working staff said this was NEVER the judgment of the study. One staff member from the Case Western Reserve Civil Violence Center said that the final written report “bore no resemblance to what had been studied.” She said that a writer was hired by the Commission to prepare the final report. “As it turned out, Mr. Anthony Neville, whom the commission employed… rewrote the entire report and completely altered the tone of it if not the substance.” Some called the final report “Neville’s Novel,” to indicate that putting the entire blame on the black nationalists was a major distortion.

Part of the reason for this resulted from conflicting evidence of what really happened and how the shooting began.

The Commission report could not determine who shot first, the police or militants. The Plain Dealer also assigned a team to investigate the hostilities. Its work never saw print as the paper censored it, claiming the reporters it had assigned didn’t have the ability to come to the conclusion they did. The New York Times of Sept. 2, 1968, in a front page article and a full page inside, concluded, as essentially did the censored PD article, “The Cleveland explosion has been called both an ambush of police and an armed uprising by Negroes. However, the weight of evidence indicates that it was closer to spontaneous combustion.”

What’s certain is the animosity between parts of the black community and the police had been brewing for a long time.

During a previous riot, Mayor Ralph Locher’s police chief, Richard Wagner, revealed the police attitude toward the black community. He took his personal hunting rifle into Hough, taking positions atop houses during the 1965 riot. Wagner’s racial attitudes were revealed when he said of a woman killed while searching for her children, “They sacrifice one person and blame it on policy brutality.”

Police Sgt. John Ungavary, head of a Police Red Squad looking for subversives, had testified before a U.S. Senate committee at this time. He said, “What we need is a law that would let us charge them all (black nationalists) as conspirators…. Wouldn’t it be far better than to wait for an overt act?”

This type of anger and hostility, combined with obviously poor training, helped create the atmosphere that led to the tragic shootout. Is it possible these same attitudes prevail today?

The hostilities were so divisive that Stokes decided to remove white police personnel from the riot area. This enraged white police officers. So radical was this move that it received four-column, front page coverage in the New York Times. The headline read: “Negro Patrol Ordered in Cleveland.”

The Plain Dealer and the Cleveland Press, of course, took the side of police. Their bias showed in the handling of a case of a 22-year old black man killed during the hostilities. It was reported that the young man, James Chapman, was killed by a sniper as he tried to help police. I got a copy of the coroner’s report of his autopsy, which revealed his head wound had abundant powder burns. Powder burns suggested he was shot, not by a sniper, but in a close up shot. During the trials, a Pittsburgh coroner testified similarly and said the Chapman, who was with police, had been killed by a shot from not more than 18 inches.

Testimony of a working NBC cameraman, Julius Boros, reveals how incensed and out of control police had become. A Hungarian refugee, Boros testified about his severe beatings by police. He said that he had never seen such treatment living in Communist Hungary.

Boros was trying to take film during this period. A number of police started to attack him.

“I was lying down, and they pulled my back, my shoulders and I was scared to death here that they will pound my head and I will die. That’s when I started screaming. I said, ‘God help me, please. Please help me.’ That was the worst. This position because there was so many on me and that’s when I did look up, you know and I see Charlie Ray (also an NBC cameraman) next to the wall, you know, and very clearly I see two cops behind him with sticks – I shouldn’t say two. I should say not one, more than – maybe three or four… I don’t know But more than one policeman behind him pounding his back, you know, hitting, and his hands were up and his head was looking down, watching me and he said, ‘Jules,” and I said, ‘Charlie.” You know that was the one word I could say but that was when I was sure I will die because I have the feeling if one will grab me and hit my head down, that’s it.”

At the police station for booking, Boros said, “And that’s when he (police officer) lit a couple of matches and throwing it in my face, twice, two matches.” Boros was “bleeding all over.” His kidneys were damaged where blood was found. He said he screamed, “Please help me. Don’t kill me here.” (Although these details didn’t appear in the local press, full testimony can be found in POV, Vol. 2, # 13).

Evans met with two black city officials before the shootout began and he told them, “Tell the Big Brother (Stokes) downtown that everything is going to be all right.” However, he wanted police cars (from a tactical unit) on the lookout at the apartment removed, fearing their intentions.

One of those officials, George Forbes, then Stokes’ point man at City Hall, recounted, “I went to see Ahmed at Auburndale and 123rd street. I was the last guy to see him, along with Walter Beach (former Browns football player employed at City Hall). I talked to him and told him to cool it and I would be back. When I went back, I was shot at like I was a rabbit.” (From “Blacktown, U. S. A.” by Frank Keegan, then a Cleveland State University dean.)

There was evidence that the police were operating on two radio frequencies that day and this caused some officers to unknowingly enter an area where the gunfight had already started. There was the theory that they got caught in crossfire and possibly were shot by other policemen.

Here’s what I wrote in The Nation: “Some speculate that the tactical unit (operating on a high frequency radio band) had made contact with militants, possibly initiated it, but had not alerted the regular patrol police. As the gun battle spread, a police tow truck became involved, was hit and radioed for help on a low frequency band, bringing regular patrols into the area. The fact that four policemen were shot within a one-minute time span and four others in another one-minute period indicates that they were unprepared for what they encountered.”

We still live with 1968 because the events still color our thinking and our feeling, whether we realize it or not.

There is no way to erase this past. The only path is to correct it.

While there certainly have been gains for many African-Americans, we have not found a way to correct the ills of racism. The killings in Cleveland today among young blacks challenges us find ways to redress inequalities, particularly economic and educational, before we can even think of having a resurgent Cleveland

In 1968, Cleveland was tested. It failed the test. Though Cleveland had been failing many of its challenges, I put this tragic year as a clearly defined time that began Cleveland’s great decline.

The building of stadiums and arenas and rock and roll halls, convention centers, new restaurants, hot spots for the young and rich, and luxury downtown housing, having new slogans - ­­­­­Positively Cleveland and Cleveland + - don’t begin to address the severe social and racial problems Cleveland continues to face.

Not until Cleveland’s white and blacks work to heal the “racial wounds,” as Barack Obama put it, will this community begin to address its other problems in any adequate manner.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Roldo Bartimole roldoATroadrunner.com
Illustration by Ralph Solonitz
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