His acquaintances, a city councilman and a former Cleveland Browns football player, hoped that talking to Evans might quell any potential disruption. But Evans insisted he felt unsafe, and was arming himself out of self-preservation. After experiencing months of harassment from law enforcement when they repeatedly closed his Afro culture store, Evans felt he had plenty of reason to be fearful. What happened next is where the various reports start to get muddled. The two civilians, dressed in official uniforms, were fired upon from nearby homes by black nationalists.
What Happened When Violence Broke Out on Cleveland’s East Side 50 Years Ago?
Armed policemen rushed to the scene. But according to Evans , the ambush came from police officers, not from his group. He was walking down the street, armed, when he heard the first shot, and saw one of the men in his group get hit by what he believed to be a submachine gun blast. Ultimately the local police decided Evans was the main person to blame. Longtime resident and activist Donald Freeman remembers being stunned by the mayhem as he walked home from work. He and others could only speculate as to how many people might be injured or killed, and what this would mean for the community.
Late in the evening of the 23rd, Evans emerged from a house, surrendering himself to the police. An eye-witness later said that Evans had tried to surrender multiple times throughout the evening in order to end the battle, but had been unable to reach the police.
He was taken into custody, along with 17 other African-American men and women. Evans was eventually charged with first-degree murder for the seven slain, and three of the teenaged black nationalists were charged with first-degree murder, shooting to wound and possession of a machine gun. The shootout and arrests led to another round of violence in Glenville in the coming days—something Mayor Stokes anticipated and tried to avoid.
In a controversial move, Stokes made the unprecedented decision to pull out all white police officers and instead rely on community leaders and African-American officers to patrol the neighborhood on the following day, July He later struggled to move forward with his urban renewal programs, chose not to run for another term in , and left Cleveland for a career in New York City. As looting and arsons continued in the area, Stokes gave way to political pressure and ultimately called in the National Guard.
Janice Eatman-Williams, who works at the Social Justice Institute at Case Western Reserve University, recalls seeing the National Guard tanks rolling down the street and worrying about family members who had to go outdoors to get to work. For Sherrie Tolliver, a historical reenactor and the daughter of the lawyer who represented Evans at trial, the memories are even more personal.
In the aftermath, he faced charges of seven counts of first-degree murder, two for each of the three policemen killed and one for the civilian who died. At the trial, prosecutors argued Evans and the other members of the group amassed a cache of weapons, ammunition and first-aid kits in order to deliberately lead a rebellion. The defense team countered with their assertion that the violence was spontaneous, and that some of the police officers who were killed were intoxicated one slain officer was found to be under the influence of alcohol.
Nearly all the witnesses called were asked to testify about when Evans had bought weapons, and what his intentions with them were, rather than whether Evans actually did the shooting that resulted in the deaths. At the end of the trial, Evans was sentenced to death by electric chair.
He died of cancer just ten years later, at age Reflecting on the event 50 years later, Tolliver is struck by how long it took her to grapple with the violence her community experienced. Somebody shot through our house, and we got death threats. In her view, people who know about Glenville seem to have the opinion that it was instigated by troublemakers who wanted to kill white people. But the story was much more complicated than that.
Freeman agrees that the relationship between police officers and African-American communities is still strained, citing the shooting of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams , both unarmed in their car, as one example. But others hope that by more closely examining the history of the Glenville shootout, there may be opportunities for coming to terms with what happened.
Eatman-Williams recently hosted a conference where community members could speak about their memories of the incident, and their hopes for the future, and documentary filmmaker Paul Sapin has been following Glenville High School students as they do their own research into the shootout. The teenagers have interviewed Glenville residents, visited libraries to do research, and even traveled to South Carolina to meet Louis Masotti, one of the authors of the official government report published on the Glenville shootout in Popularity Popularity Featured Price: Low to High Price: High to Low Avg.
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