by Kyle Swenson
Outside, two young men twisted with Franks—one dressed in dark colors, the other wearing a flowered shirt. A metal pipe smacked into the older man’s side, followed by a splash of liquid that hit his face and doused the store window. As Franks landed on the pavement, two piercing sounds snapped in the air.
“Oh my God, they’re shooting,” Mrs. Robinson said, turning the door lock. A third shot banged. Mrs. Robinson turned around, took a few steps, then felt her feet disappear beneath her. She was on the ground. “Get Bob,” she tried to say, but the words slipped around the blood flooding into her mouth. “Get Bob.”
“Don’t move,” Clarence told her. “The customer’s on the phone trying to call the police. I’ll go get your husband. Please don’t move,” the older man pleaded, “just be cool.”
Someone screamed. Blood jetted out from Mrs. Robinson’s neck and mouth.
* * *
After gassing themselves out on the basketball court for a few hours in the thick May heat, Ronnie and Rickey were ready to get back to the neighborhood. When they strolled onto Arthur, the two friends stopped by Lynn Garrett’s house. He was sitting outside with his girlfriend, Sherry.
Lynn Garrett. Before Ronnie had hooked up with Rickey, he’d pretty much been inseparable from Lynn. The two were the same age, and really what eventually split them apart was nothing so much as Lynn’s pure athleticism. Whatever sport he picked up, he excelled at—basketball, football, he was a natural at it all. And he rode that talent out of the neighborhood, securing a football scholarship to Baldwin Wallace University. In Ronnie’s eyes, that kind of dedication—not screwing around with the usual teenage street shenanigans—was a reason to respect Lynn.
The four stood together, trading street gossip. Someone mentioned they should head up to Grant’s store, a mom-and-pop up on 108th. Walking down the street, the foursome stopped at the Vernon house. Two of the family’s girls, Darlene and Susan, were sitting on their porch. Lynn, Sherry, Rickey, and Ronnie stopped to talk. Whatever they were blabbing about, Ronnie didn’t know. He’d tuned them out. Instead, sex-fiending teen that he was, Ronnie was trying to catch a peek up the Vernon girls’ dresses up there on the porch. His eyes cat-and-mousing for a look, Ronnie didn’t notice the car pulling up in front of the house until he heard the voice shouting from the backseat. “Someone just got shot up at Robinson’s store!” the passenger called out. “Y’all should go check it out.”
Curious, the six neighbors—the two Vernon sisters, Lynn, Sherry, Rickey, and Ronnie—walked up 108th, then hooked a right, heading for the Robinsons’ Cut-Rate.
* * *
Eyes lidded down to slits, head bent as if puzzled, Harry J. Franks lay in the store’s doorway, his body a limp zigzag.
Radios in fifth-district cars crackled out the dispatch at 3:37 P.M: holdup in progress, male shot. Sirens razored apart the afternoon as police fought through the rush-hour traffic. The first Cleveland officers on the scene huddled with Mrs. Robinson while an ambulance screamed to the store. She tried again and again, but the blood coming out of her mouth kept her from telling them what had happened. Outside, Reverend Charles McCann, a retired Catholic priest just passing by, stopped to whisper the last rites over Franks’s body. Called in by the bulletin, a newspaper cameraman snapped his shutter as the priest ushered Franks on. The photograph would be splashed on the front page of the next morning’s Plain Dealer.
Police photographers also arrived, their flashbulbs blinking rhythmically over the street corner and store. Flash: the glass portion of the store’s door spiderwebbed with a bullet hole and still dripping with an unknown liquid. Flash: the wide Rorschach patterns of Mrs. Robinson’s blood inside still marking the store’s linoleum. Flash: a CLOSED sign in the store window, Franks’s body on the ground. Flash: the street corner jammed with rubberneckers, faces from the neighborhood, regulars at the store, police holding them back, everyone straining to see.
By 4:15 P.M., two detectives arrived from the downtown station: Eugene Terpay, a twenty-seven-year department veteran with a face as lined and sagging as an old speed bag, and James T. Farmer, a native West Virginian and Korean War vet with a file thick with decorations and advanced course certificates. Together the investigators started filling their notebooks with details. Karen Smith provided specifics on the two young men she spotted on her walk into the building. A cup, presumably the one holding the acid splashed in the victim’s face, was recovered at the scene. An Ohio Bell employee named Tim Brzuski had been idling in his van at a stoplight on Cedar Avenue when he noticed two young “colored men” tussling with Franks. After hearing gunshots, Brzuski pulled off at a gas station to call police. A neighbor, Charles Loper, informed detectives he’d been on his porch next to the Cut-Rate when he witnessed “two col. Males accost the victim as he came from the store,” the officer’s notes later reported. “They appeared to beat him with an object, a piece of pipe. One of the suspects was armed with what appeared to be a 38 cal. Revolver. This suspect fired three shots at the victim and then both took a tan colored brief case from him and ran.”
The detectives concluded after their initial interviews that they were looking for two young black men, between seventeen and nineteen. “Suspects last seen running SOUTH on Petrarca Ave., then WEST on FRANK Ave.,” the day’s report concluded. “Suspects seen entering a DK [dark] green over lite green Olds.”
The crowd ringing the store continued to press in for a better view. Ronnie Bridgeman elbowed his way to the front; his attention stopped on an older guy from the neighborhood up there watching, too. He had on a plaid apple hat that matched a pair of bell-bottoms, the outfit rounded out by a black shirt and suede jacket. Man, Ronnie thought, a nice hookup. Then he saw the victim. The white man was still lying lifeless on the sidewalk, no sheet yet hiding his body. Ronnie felt ill. The dead should be respected, he believed, not left in the street. Here was a man, a stranger, sure, but another human being, the intimacy of his passing open for everyone to see.
“Come on, man,” he told Rickey. “Let’s go.” The two black teens walked away from the store. Crime scene techs finished their duties. Evidence went into bags. The detectives remained inside, pulling info out of the store owner, whose wife right then was under the knife for an emergency tracheotomy at Lakeside Hospital. A white sheet was eventually placed over Franks. It was too short for his tall body, and his brown dress shoes poked up at the sky.
Uniformed officers were left with the grunt work, quizzing onlookers about possible witnesses. Patrolman Robert Hassel, pen and notebook in hand, circled around to one of the small knots of neighborhood children. He asked if anyone had seen anything. Hoots and giggles came back from the group. But under the tangled voices, someone piped up.
“Yes.”
3
BLACK AND BLUE
Cleveland, May 25, 1975
Stabs of light wheeled across the front window. Rickey always woke easily, and the play of beams in the dark outside fished him up from a thin sleep on the sofa. A burglar? he thought from the couch in the Bridgemans’ front room. Before his mind flipped to any other possibilities, gun barrels were coming through the door.
The first officers inside rushed Rickey; the teen was shoved down into the cushions, arms twisted behind his back. From where he was pinned, Rickey could see directly into Mrs. Bridgeman’s bedroom. One cop had the fifty-seven-year-old woman by her leg, the other by her arm. They handled her like baggage, dragging her out of bed while her pained moans filled the hallway. Mrs. Bridgeman’s heart was bad, Rickey knew. She fell to her knees between the two cops. They yanked her up and marched her out of the room with her hands behind her back, a perp walk in her own home. Ideas crashed in on Rickey all at once. What the hell is going on? They’ve got the wrong house.
It wasn’t unusual to find the Bridgeman brothers’ best friend at their address late at night. Rickey’s stepdad flipped the locks at home at midnight, so if you weren’t in by then, you weren’t getting in; on nights like tonight,
when the three friends killed hours driving the East Side in Wiley’s Sebring, Rickey would just stay over. The three had been out till nearly 4:00 A.M. before heading inside and smoking weed, the joint wrapping their heads in woolly static—and clapping more confusion over the chaos now spilling out in the home.
Wiley had actually been the first to the door when the banging started. As the cops pushed inside, the eldest Bridgeman son darted into his mother’s room, hiding behind the door. Like some silent movie slapstick, officers stepped into the room, in and out, in and out, looking for anyone else, but failing to see him. Finally a plainclothes detective eyed Wiley in the door crack. He yanked Wiley roughly from his hiding spot.
Down the hall Ronnie was asleep in his room when he felt his toe twitch. Popping his eyes open, he found half a dozen cops standing over his bed. The pistols and shotguns worried him less than the sound of his mother’s shouts from the hallway, and the teen shoved past the officers. Despite his repeated questions, the only information he could squeeze from the cops as they began ripping up the house was that they were looking for Rickey Jackson and Wiley Bridgeman.
“What do you want us to do with this guy?” one of the cops asked a sergeant, pointing to Ronnie.
The white-shirted cop looked over at Ronnie. “Take him downtown.”
“For what?”
“Getting in the damn way.”
With the handcuff metal biting their wrists, the three boys were pushed outside. A dozen police cars flung ribbons of red and blue light around Arthur Avenue. Past the blocky shadows and streetlamps, Rickey could see more patrol cars at his own house. His mother, stepdad, and brothers and sisters were all laid out facedown on the pavement.1
* * *
The violence in Glenville didn’t truly stop when the last National Guard jeeps left and the glass was swept up. The rancor born out of the 1968 incident stamped the city. As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, the event’s weight continued to exert phantom pressure on the interactions between black Clevelanders and police. Some small part of Glenville still lingered in every car stop, house raid, and police shooting.
Cleveland wasn’t alone. Harlem, Watts, Detroit, Newark. The urban unrest in the mid- to late 1960s, riding into American living rooms with the nightly newscast, jolted the establishment. Something had switched. The blue notes and gospel rhetoric of the civil rights movement were gone. A more aggressive tone muscled into the dialogue on equality. The images from the front lines were now chaotic. City blocks burning. Soldiers in the street. Black men in sunglasses and berets. “Now that they’ve taken Dr. King off,” Black Power evangelist Stokely Carmichael declared when he learned of the assassination, “it’s time to end this nonviolence bullshit.”2
This rage shook even the top level of American power, where it would derail the best intentions of the era.
When he took office after the Kennedy assassination, Lyndon Johnson—the longtime Senate operator, a Texan gripped by massive ego and ambition—pushed ahead a progressive agenda that aimed to remake the entire country, a societal overhaul equal in impact to Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Great Society forged together civil rights legislation with what Johnson termed the “War on Poverty,” a series of federal programs and interventions mainlining job programs and welfare initiatives into the inner city in order to wipe out the root causes of crime and unrest. “For decades, the conditions that nourish crime have been gathering force,” Johnson said.3 “As a result, every major city harbors an army of the alienated—people who acknowledge no stake in the public order and no responsibility to others.” Food stamps, Job Corps, Head Start child care, and Medicare—all were the product of Johnson’s optimistic hope that the brawn of the federal government could be leveraged for the benefit of the country’s vulnerable.
As much as the right morals were steering the policy, the details themselves were still stunted by racial stereotypes. As the historian Elizabeth Hinton has pointed out, the Great Society’s programs were largely aimed at the individual—school, job training, housing. The policies ignored the longtime structural barriers that ran along racial lines—what good can job training do if the local union won’t hire you because you’re black? Instead, the programs “presented inequality as a problem of individual behavior,” Hinton wrote.4 Success or failure was measured by the “right” behavior; the “right” behavior was the behavior of the mainstream white establishment. They “aimed to change the psychological impact of racism within individuals rather than the impact of the long history of racism within American institutions,” Hinton wrote.5 Conceived as a release from poverty, the programs actually were a form of social control.
In the historian’s telling, this faulty wiring doomed Johnson’s War on Poverty. It failed to hoist young black men out of the ghetto in larger numbers, a failure that was writ large in each of the American cities burning like bonfires in the 1960s.
Johnson personally was aghast at the violence. The president refused to see the riots as collective outcry over larger structural inequalities. No, it had to be the work of instigators—communists or radical Black Power groups, Johnson felt. “There is no American right to loot stores, or to burn buildings, or to fire rifles from the rooftops,” the president told the nation in a televised speech. He tasked a group of mayors and government officials—the Kerner Commission—to perform an exhaustive autopsy on the riots. The group returned with a searing 426-page report laying out the systemic causes boiling black neighborhoods to anger. The conclusion warned that the current status quo “could quite conceivably lead to a kind of urban apartheid within semi martial law in many major cities, enforced residence of Negroes in segregated areas, and a drastic reduction in personal freedom for all Americans, particularly Negroes.”
But Johnson rejected the findings of his own group’s report. Rather, he turned to police, dramatically shifting the administration’s attention away from poverty to law enforcement. When Johnson declared a “War on Crime” in 1965, the program was just another piece of the Great Society agenda, an effort to modernize local police and introduce statistical crime data into their departments with federal money. Now it was a battle cry.
The passage of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act in 1968 drastically reconfigured the national response to crime. Lifting the philosophy of the War on Poverty—federal intervention in urban spaces and a focus on measured, data-driven social control—the program offered hundreds of thousands of dollars of federal grants to local departments through money administered by the newly created Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA). Between 1969 and 1974, the office’s annual budget would explode, from $63 million to $871 million, money going directly to local cops on the front lines. This new federal emphasis on crime drastically altered the tenor of American law enforcement—permanently. The government money went to crime deterrence rather than criminal prosecution. It was a switch from enforcing law to maintaining order. And for Cleveland, it would mean a flood of money and pressure on the police.
* * *
Heavy lights bleached half the room, a twenty-by-ten sweatbox on the fourth floor of the central police station downtown. The desk sergeant on duty stood by the door, looking like he couldn’t care less, like this was someone else’s headache. He barked at the seven young black guys inside to take off their hats, put out their cigarettes, and line up wherever they wanted on the seven slots marked out on the wall. Rickey walked to the very end—number seven. Wiley was six spaces down—number one. Rickey had shaken off the initial shock from the raid hours earlier, but he was still clueless about why they were there.
The seven men faced a mesh screen dividing the room. The other side was dark, and with the bright lights daggering into his eyes, Rickey could only spot vague shapes on the far end. The desk sergeant ordered the group to step forward. Turn to the left. Turn to the right. Turn around. Face the front again. Step back. The lockstep routine over, only silence came from behind the screen. The desk sergeant told the seven men to follow h
im out of the room. It was over, but Rickey still wasn’t any closer to piecing together what was happening.
Rickey was quiet, but far from oblivious. Ronnie and Wiley, with their liquid charm, could make a quick, easy peace with whatever situation they were in. Rickey tended to hang back. But inside that reserve he was alert, constantly observing and assessing. He liked to have the facts before acting or committing to something.
The reticence was a natural by-product of his upbringing. His family had moved often, hopscotching the East Side ten or more times; he got tired of the social dance routine involved in making new friends. He kept to himself, and he killed hours by aimlessly riding the city bus for as long as the change in his pocket lasted. If he got lost, he’d simply cross the street and hop a bus going the opposite way. These wanderings often took him to the Cleveland Museum of Art, probably the last place on earth you’d expect to find him, a poor black kid from the East Side squeaking his shoes down the halls, the high church of Cleveland culture, a marble testament to the buying power of institutional steel and manufacturing capital. Sun-shot Monets, glowering Dutch masters, puzzle-piece Picassos. Rickey’s favorite part of the building was the Armor Court, an exhibition of medieval weaponry. There in the middle of a room stood a knight and horse fully decked for battle, the shiny metal catching the sunlight drifting down from the glass ceiling. The only horses Rickey ever saw in real life were carrying policemen.
Rickey’s mother, Essie Mae Copeland, had been a fifteen-year-old girl in Greenwood, Mississippi, when she learned she was pregnant. This was the late 1950s, in the same haunted Big Cotton flats that birthed the stark blues of Robert Johnson and the White Citizens’ Council movement. Essie Mae’s mother and father sent her off to Cleveland to live with relatives. The baby’s father, Ronald Carter, went, too.
