The Glenville Shootout and the Night That Ended Cleveland: NOW!
Near Cleveland, Ohio
Fred Evans had taken the name Ahmed Evans in the mid-nineteen sixties, aligned himself with Black nationalist politics in the Glenville neighborhood, and in the spring of nineteen sixty-eight received a grant of ten thousand three hundred dollars through Carl Stokes's Cleveland: NOW! community development program. The grant was intended for Afrocentric education and cultural programming. Some of the money went toward weapons.
On the night of July twenty-third, nineteen sixty-eight, a gun battle erupted between Evans's group, the Black Nationalists of New Libya, and Cleveland police. Who fired first is not established in the public record; both sides later claimed the other began it. The battle lasted approximately an hour in the residential streets of Glenville. When it was over, three police officers were dead: patrolmen Louis Golonka and Willard Wolff and Lieutenant Leroy Jones. One civilian was also dead, along with three of Evans's fighters. Fifteen people were wounded in total.
Carl Stokes made a decision that became the defining controversy of his mayoralty. He withdrew white police officers from the Glenville neighborhood and brought in Black community leaders to try to stabilize the situation without further confrontation. The riots that followed the shootout continued for several days. When the community-leader approach failed to stop them, Stokes sent the Ohio National Guard and white officers back in.
The criticism was severe and came from multiple directions. Some in the white community saw the withdrawal as dereliction. Some in the Black community saw the subsequent deployment as a betrayal. And when it emerged that Cleveland: NOW! funds had traveled, through a series of intermediary steps, to Evans's group and ultimately to the weapons used on July twenty-third, the program that was supposed to prove that federal investment in Black communities could work was instead cited as proof that such investment was dangerous.
Evans was convicted of seven counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, later commuted to life in prison. He died of cancer in nineteen seventy-eight. Carl Stokes did not run for a third term. His mayoralty ended in nineteen seventy-one.
