by Kyle Swenson
Dizzy from no sleep and the conflicting scraps of information coming from seven miles away, the mayor appeared ill. For the country’s first black big-city mayor, his worst fears were coming true. Carl Stokes likely didn’t pass a day behind the big desk at City Hall without thinking of the Hough riot—how to patch the damage, how to avoid it again, how to use it right. Hough was the wedge that put him into office. But on July 24, 1968, Stokes was staring down the kind of five-alarm crisis no American politician—white or black—had dealt with before.
Among the black Americans who crashed through racial barriers in the 1950s and 1960s, Stokes was unique. Not a legal wizard uprooting Jim Crow from the courtroom or a preacher spinning eloquent calls to action, he was a pure politician, his instincts precisely machine tooled to the needs and fears of voting blocs well beyond his base.
The ground game of Cleveland politics was fiercely sectarian. Yes, the city was Democrat and pro-labor, but under those umbrellas were neighborhoods still clinging to their European ethnicity with white knuckles; these constituencies regularly elected city leaders from their pack, creating steady political energy behind certain candidates. The political pull of these ethnic politicians—known in Cleveland as “the cosmos”—forced the mostly white Republican business elite to cede control of the city to second- and third-generation Slavs, Czechs, and Hungarians early in the century. Not that the power shift completely sidelined the WASP pashas of the economic upper rungs. Instead, it created a two-part governance structure: let the ethnics control city hall; by establishing a series of foundations (including the first-ever city foundation), the economic elite retained influence through charitable giving. The two sides found areas of overlap. “The ethnics’ rise to power ushered in a period of governance that catered to the immigrants’ mistrust of politics: limited government, low taxes, and few services,” historian Leonard N. Moore wrote.16 “The industrials allowed working-class immigrants to run local government so long as they kept taxes low to attract investment, maintained services for businesses, and deferred to the wisdom of the business elite in reaching economic decisions.” This tag team of interests steered city hall and dominated the thirty-three-person city council for the two decades following the Second World War. And although blacks elected a number of representatives to the city’s legislative body during that stretch, the power structure largely ignored Cleveland’s African Americans while pursuing a small-government, low-taxes mantra.
Stokes’s particular genius was to read his position in this fractured scheme. The son of Georgia migrants who came north for work, Stokes grew up poor on the East Side, selling scrap metal and running errands for working girls to help pay family bills. A stint in the army and time as a state liquor inspector were followed by law school and a job working as a county prosecutor. He was touched by hot ambition early on, that desire twinned with the bravado to push open doors he wasn’t supposed to walk through. Stokes eyed public office—first a state senate seat, then Cleveland’s city hall.
His insight was to look at Cleveland’s African Americans not as an ignored minority, but as an untapped voting bloc. The city’s black population wasn’t sizable enough to float him to higher office alone, but Stokes realized he could piece together enough ballots from different areas to carry a Democratic primary in a one-party town. Any success there, however, hinged on convincing white and ethnic voters to see Stokes as a viable candidate. He would show up uninvited to Democratic Party ward meetings in ethnic districts, neighborhoods unfriendly to the black cause. Stokes would walk in and ask to address the crowd. It was almost a taunt—if you’re a racist, show me. “Those people disliked Negros,” he wrote in his autobiography in a chapter tellingly titled, “How to Get Elected by White People.”17 “But they didn’t dislike Carl Stokes—didn’t, that is, after he had talked long enough to show them he was a real human being.”
Stokes’s road show was part of a strategy. The candidate spent his off-hours poring over old voting records at the county board of elections, studying how black candidates fared in specific districts, how newspaper, labor, or party endorsements tweaked the numbers in certain parts of the city. Some white voters would never check a box by his name, Stokes figured. “So even if you lose votes because you’re black, you can still dip into the band of liberal whites if you can convince them you are progressive, socially committed, intelligent, and, well, one extraordinary black man,” Stokes wrote later. “I had everything to gain and nothing to lose by running visible in white suburbia.”
The calculus worked. Stokes served in the state assembly from 1962 to 1967. Bolstered by what he saw in the voting patterns, he ran for Cleveland mayor in 1965. In a contentious, three-candidate showdown, Stokes lost by less than 1 percent of the vote. Two years later, when it was time for the city to elect a mayor again, Stokes was confident about his chances.
The game changer proved to be Hough. Following the 1966 riots, local business leaders who had long ago ditched politics for the sotto voce influence of foundation giving were mortified. Riot damage was lost dollars. A black mayor, many in this clique believed, could be a safeguard against more racial strife. “Curiously enough, that made me the most desirable candidate,” Stokes wrote later. On November 7, 1967, a major American city elected its first black mayor, with 129,396 votes to his opponent’s 127,717. Overnight Stokes entered the front ranks of national African American figures. Within the week he was on the cover of Time magazine. Yet it’s telling how far Stokes—and his establishment backers—went to frame the election not as a civil rights victory but a political score. When the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Cleveland on Election Night, Stokes asked him not to speak at the public festivities.
The new mayor walked into city hall with a liberal agenda that included public housing and equal opportunity employment. But police reform topped the list. In his days as a lawyer and a prosecutor in the 1950s, Stokes witnessed how the courts operated. “Few judges worked past noon, and many headed for the racetrack at midafternoon,” Stokes wrote.18 “Homicide detectives were usually willing to lower a charge from first-degree murder to second degree, or even manslaughter, if two conditions were met. The first was that the man charged with the crime had to come up with some money, at times as little as a hundred dollars. The second, but most important, was that he had to be a Negro accused of killing another Negro.”
The black community’s relationship with the city’s police department was at an all-time low by his inauguration. Most black men and women in the city knew that if a police officer saw a suspect running from a crime scene, he would not hesitate to unload his service weapon at the fleeing target. “And all the police knew that few policemen faced charges or an appearance before the grand jury for shooting a black man while on duty,” Stokes would later say. Cleveland’s police chief, Richard R. Wagner, was also no friend to the black community. Before a panel of state legislators, the department’s top man had testified that the death penalty was a useful deterrent for racial disharmony. “We need capital punishment in order to keep the Negro in line,” he said.19 During the Hough riots, Wagner roamed the churning streets armed with a deer rifle.
In reality, it didn’t matter who sat at the top of the division. A clique of senior officers reigned. In 1966, Cleveland ordered an outside review of all city departments. The hard look concluded that the real machinery driving the police department was invisible. “Perhaps the division can best be described as a loose federation,” the report concluded, built around “small empires.” “It is further confused by informal arrangements, power centers, and unusual lines of communication which make the apparent structure of organization virtually meaningless.” But the status quo was fortified enough to scare off any potential change in the police structure. When the city’s departmental review was released to the public, the chapter on the police division was not included.20
The new mayor had the opportunity to make good on the symbolic promise of his election four months into his term
. On April 4, 1968, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on a hotel balcony in Memphis. Reaction to King’s murder exploded across the country: 110 cities saw rioting; thirty-nine people would eventually be killed. But in Cleveland, Stokes gambled. He ordered Cleveland police officers out of the East Side. Instead, he deputized black leaders and citizens—a peace patrol—to walk the broiling neighborhoods, urging the folks to “keep it cool.” The plan worked. Unlike nearly every other American city, Cleveland saw no violence in the aftermath of King’s murder.
And now, three months later, in July 1968, Cleveland was waiting to hear how Carl Stokes would calm the rage set loose by the events in Glenville. Inside his all-black city hall meeting, the assembled leaders were split on whether Stokes should again pull the police from the neighborhood. Trusted members of the department were warning the mayor to keep police out. With three of their own dead on the streets, the Cleveland police were amped up—dangerous, even. A small-scale race war was chewing through the city. The racial mood was bitter. Stokes was still confident “black people were not going to kill black people.” So he issued the order: all cops out; the National Guard would man the perimeter; only black police and community leaders wearing red armbands—known as the Mayor’s Committee—were allowed in.
On Wednesday night, thunderstorms knocked in early, clearing the streets. By nightfall, a thick heat stuck to the city. More than five hundred members of Stokes’s peace patrol scuffled along the sidewalks and alleys of the East Side, unwinding the tension they found among groups of young blacks. No violence was reported. But the patrols were helpless to stop looters picking their way through the abandoned businesses along Superior Avenue.
At the Fifth District headquarters on the East Side, officers stewed. The city’s finest had been attacked and bested—embarrassed, even—by a group of wild-eyed militants. The orders from city hall to stay away from the conflict fueled emotions. When the mayor’s office swatted down a request from officers to carry high-powered rifles on patrol for protection, anger spiked. All night, patrol car radios smoked with heated words. “Tell Stokes to go piss on it,” officers repeated to one another, comments reported a year later in a report by federal officials. “Fuck that nigger mayor.”21
Thursday morning broke peacefully. The mayor’s plan had prevented more violence. But the overnight damage and looting continued, angering the white business community. Under pressure, Stokes rescinded his order barring white police from the area—a retreat that effectively sank the career of the most famous black politician in America.
* * *
Glenville was in ruins. Days after the violence died off, the area was still locked down under curfew and patrolled by armed National Guardsmen. Firefighters continued to aim lazy ropes of water at smoking buildings. The black businesses along Superior Avenue—once busy mom-and-pop shops—were now skeletal wastes. And there picking through the wrecked guts of the neighborhood were two unchaperoned boys, Wiley and Ronnie.
The Bridgeman boys played rough and tumble. No sitting inside sucking thumbs. With three years on his younger brother, Wiley was the leader, brainstorming the games. They’d string thick ropes over tree branches, then swing around like Zorro swashbuckling on TV. They did so many swan dives off garages onto beat mattresses that when they actually got near water, the Bridgemans had the high jump already down. Hard play, that’s how they were wired. So while the rest of the city stayed home scared, Wiley was leading his little brother out on an adventure to the heart of the calamity.
But as the two kids jumped around the wreckage, they caught the attention of a group of passing National Guardsmen. “Get the fuck away from up here,” one of the glowering young men in fatigues shouted. They were kids themselves, really, with faces that didn’t seem like they could hold a beard, and skinny arms and legs sticking out from their fatigues like tentpoles. Ten-year-old Ronnie wasn’t impressed. “Man, fuck you,” he belted.
The guardsman who spoke walked over to the little boy, sticking the end of his bayonet right into Ronnie’s breastbone. He felt the metal bite through his shirt to his skin. “You know I have the right to send you to hell right now?” the soldier growled.
Ronnie, Wiley, the guardsman, and his fellow platoon members all froze, locked into an inevitably bad situation. Another voice suddenly broke the spell. “What did you just say to that kid?” An older National Guardsman, an officer, bolted over, knocking the rifle from Ronnie’s chest. “Get out of here,” he told Ronnie and Wiley.
The little boys hoofed it home. But that sting on Ronnie’s chest—the first hard touch of authority—he wouldn’t forget.
* * *
Glenville did more than mow down Carl Stokes’s political prospects. It also raised a curtain on a new phase in the civil rights movement.
The move to pull police out of the conflict area exposed a rift between the department and Stokes that had been percolating ever since the reformer took office. The mayor openly criticized the actions of police during the Glenville riots, later writing that their attitude had been “self-protective, corrupt and destructive.”
Stokes also felt the pushback to his leadership was not about his effectiveness but the obvious—“a black mayor had pulled out the white police,” he wrote in a scalding section of his book. “This had clearly been a fear all along, that a black mayor would interfere with the police function of protecting the white community against the black peril.” Stokes’s own position, however, was undercut when it was unearthed that Fred Ahmed Evans had actually received funding from a community program sponsored by the administration—money that may have paid for the guns and ammunition that murdered those three police officers.
The bad blood between the two sides ended any chance to reform the department. A systemic reorganization of the ranks was fought. The mayor’s effort to recruit more black police candidates sparked a testing scandal involving stolen answers and resulting in the indictment of two members of the Civil Service Commission. Stokes became convinced the police had bugged the phones in his office. When the mayor ran for reelection in 1969, several hundred armed off-duty police officers sat at East Side polling sites, harassing voters about pulling the lever for Stokes—banana republic scare tactics in an American mayoral election.
With Stokes’s face-off with police so public, the mayor’s political enemies used it to their advantage. Soon, many local politicians eyeing city hall fell in behind the department, lashing out at Stokes as lax on crime and pro–black militant. Ralph Perk, a West Side pol who talked up his credentials as an “average neighbor and average citizen,” mounted those anxieties in his own play for city hall in ’69. “Here in the city of Cleveland our streets are so unsafe that residents on the East Side, the South Side, and the West Side are afraid to come out at night,” Perk said on the stump. “When I am elected we will get rid of all these unofficial armies that now are parading the city.”
Crime had become political, and any criticism of the department—accurate or not—was swallowed up by the larger campaign dynamics. You were either anticop or anticrime. Stokes himself understood the untenable position he’d landed in. Although he beat Perk by almost four thousand votes to earn a second term, America’s first black mayor was paralyzed after 1968. Stokes opted not to run for reelection in 1971. He would later say police reform in Cleveland had been “my greatest frustration, my greatest failure.”22
Glenville’s fallout spread well beyond the Cuyahoga River. For those viewing the march toward racial equality as a nefarious siege on the status quo, the Cleveland incident was proof that the peaceful sit-ins and demonstrations of the early 1960s were now curdling into an open race war. This was Malcolm X’s bullet. As a federal report published by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence a year after the shooting noted, up until Glenville, the spasms of racial violence in the U.S. had mostly been directed at the destruction of property. “The Glenville incident was different,” the report read. “It began as person-oriente
d violence, blacks 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.”23
In Cleveland, if the Hough riots had pulled to the surface the anger and distrust between the black community and the white establishment, Glenville filed the edges of those feelings down to razor blades. Jacked up by the rhetorical punches megaphoning out of politicians, the average Cleveland police officer felt besieged, targeted, hated. As one anonymous Cleveland beat cop told the Plain Dealer only a few months after Glenville, “We’re like a British outpost in Africa.”24
2
THAT PARTICULAR DAY
Cleveland, May 19, 1975
On the third Monday in May dawn caught the city raw and edgy, and already two up on the new week’s body count. A thirty-year-old housewife had been found strangled on her dining room floor on East 138th, and a barkeep was gunned down on East Ninety-third—fresh whodunits in a year that was already outpacing the last in violent death. A record-setting year for murders—just what the town needed in spring 1975. More damn reasons to worry.
Troubled thoughts hounded sleep across the city. It was shaping up to be an ugly season. Buried currents were bursting open like bad pipes. That morning at the federal courthouse the families of the Kent State University students killed by National Guardsmen in 1970 were scheduled to begin a civil trial against the federal government. Down the hall in the same building, political storm clouds massed in the pre-trial stages of an NAACP lawsuit against the school district over segregation on the East Side in the 1960s. Behind the walls of the Georgian and Van Sweringen Tudor houses in the heights, business captains were restless about the start of Cleveland’s first International Business Week, a bit of overseas goodwill that might, fingers crossed, pump life into a local economy that was wobbling. There were plenty of other civic worries large and small to stack on the pile: an upcoming mayoral election in November; a long-shot push to bring the 1976 Republican National Convention to town; power struggles among black politicians; gangland bombings. To top it off, the Indians were already six games back in the American League East.
