“Just the Beginning”: Cleveland Police Violence, Surveillance, and The Trial of Fred Evans
On March 6, 1969, the day before depositions in the trial of Fred Ahmed Evans, the dead body of William R. Evans—the defendant’s brother—was dumped on his lead attorney’s doorstep. An official investigation found that he had been shot by a driver he was attempting to rob. The confessed shooter, said to be acting in self-defense, was never charged. When word of the death got back to Evans, he believed his brother had been assassinated by the police. Judge McMonagle, whose own front porch was bombed in the run-up to the proceedings, did not allow the defendant to attend his brother’s funeral, fearing the spectacle his presence would create. Instead, he arranged for the body to be brought to the jail basement for a private viewing. Defiantly, Evans stayed in his cell.
He was charged with seven counts of first-degree murder for his involvement in a shootout with police. The “Glenville incident,” named for the woefully overcrowded Cleveland neighborhood where the gun battle took place, resulted in the death of three policemen, three Black Nationalists, and one bystander, but the violence was far from over. Riots continued for days after. Prosecutors sought to portray Evans as the chief instigator, but there were major flaws in this narrative. Ballistic evidence showed that none of the victims had been shot with his gun, and he had spent most of the fight hiding in a neighbor’s attic. The question of who shot first—the cops or the Black Nationalists—remains unanswered.
Recently declassified Federal Bureau of Investigation documents housed within the National Archives reveal that prior to his arrest, at least five informants supplied information on Evans and his group, the Black Nationalists of New Libya. They were by his side when he picked up checks, purchased weapons, and drove across state lines through the night. Spies passed along a dubious tip that Evans’ group planned to initiate an attack, with subsequent outbursts to follow in New York, Chicago, and Detroit. One even snuck out of Evans’ home to phone a detective just minutes before those contested first shots were fired. These revelations prove what many had already surmised—that the government was determined to make a villain out of Evans long before his supposed murders were committed. They have an added resonance in a city still working to reform its police department after a 2014 Department of Justice investigation found that officers engaged in a pattern of excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Over the last year, Cleveland has experienced several surges in police presence aimed at cracking down on violent crime, as activists remain skeptical of law enforcement’s progress toward transparency and accountability.
Evans’ FBI file is held in a federal facility hundreds of miles from Cleveland, and digitized scans of its components are not available online, making it difficult for the city’s residents to discover for themselves the scope of illegal surveillance their community faced. Despite declassification, these revealing documents retain their covert nature. Access to the archive of damning historical evidence is tightly controlled as those in power find new ways to punish dissent. The extent of the operation also sheds new light on mysteries in the 50-year-old court transcripts, which are haphazardly piled up in a dark corner of the Cuyahoga County Archives.
The Glenville incident was not Evans’ first encounter with the police. As leader of the Black Nationalists of New Libya, he was the object of frequent pestering by the Cleveland Police Department’s Subversives Unit. He was also a target of surveillance under the FBI’s illegal COINTELPRO program. One aim of the program, an internal letter stated, was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of the Black nationalists.” Like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who Evans sat on a mock jury with a year earlier, he was included in the FBI’s infamous Rabble Rouser Index, a list of individuals with a “propensity for fomenting racial disorder.”
On the evening of July 23, 1968, Evans left his apartment armed with an M-1 carbine, the same type of gun he had learned to shoot in the Korean War. He had purchased the weapon that afternoon with money from Cleveland: Now!, an ambitious redevelopment program started by the city’s first Black mayor, Carl Stokes. The direct connection between this funding and racialized violence constituted a major blow to Stokes’ political career. In the wake of the ’66 Hough Riots, many had voted for him in the hopes that his leadership would help unite the city. When Evans’ carbine jammed soon into the assault, he took refuge in a nearby home until asking the owner to phone the police so he could turn himself in.
It took a few tries before the police responded. When they did, Evans emerged from the house bare-chested, so he could not be accused of concealing a firearm. In the trial transcripts held in Cleveland, he claimed that he was physically attacked until a Black cop called his colleagues off. He also denied being read his Miranda rights. The transcript reads:
[Defense]: Now, at that time, were you told that you had a right to have a lawyer?
[Evans]: Oh, no, no, I never heard anything pertaining to law, believe me.
[Defense]: Were you told anything that might be held against you?
[Evans]: I was told that I would be worm meat.
The twelve-person jury listening to his testimony was all white, as were the three alternates. Glenville’s population at the time was majority Black. Prospective jurors were probed for their opinions on Black Nationalism and African-inspired clothing. After jury selection, Evans’ defense team fought for a new trial, arguing that the lack of diversity would not allow their client to receive a fair hearing. The motion was denied.
But if the jury was stacked against him, there was some hope given the case against Evans was composed of mostly circumstantial evidence. The state of Ohio wanted an informant to testify, but the FBI was adamant about protecting their source who had proved so loyal. To fill the notable gaps, prosecutors leaned on two witnesses who had supposedly been summoned to Evans’ home on the morning of the shootout. In their version of events, the gun battle had been deliberately planned. Both these young male witnesses were facing their own criminal charges—one for first-degree murder.
Walter Lee Washington, Jr., an 18-year-old Black Panther member, said the purpose of the meeting was “to tell when the pop was going to jump off,” or when their multicity revolution would commence. He claimed that Evans had instructed the group on how to load and unload rifles, and what to do if they jammed. He also delivered a soundbite-ready line that might as well have been engineered to further disgrace Cleveland: Now! According to Washington, Evans said he had received $600 “from the suckers,” which he would use to grow his arsenal. This revelation led to a sharp decline in funding for the ambitious program, and it was dissolved two years later, further harming the already disadvantaged Glenville residents.
In his cross-examination, Evans’ attorney Stanley Tolliver drew attention to the fact that a grand jury had suddenly declined to indict Washington on the murder charge—perhaps in exchange for perjuring himself. Thomas Lanier, a second teenage Black Panther, was also asked to report on the alleged meeting, but apparently failed to deliver the testimony prosecutors desired. Despite repeated prompts to speak on guns and money as Washington had done, Lanier would say that Evans gathered them to discuss “Black history” and nothing more.
The court transcripts, running twenty-two volumes in total, are remarkable not for what they reveal about Evans and his associates but rather for what they conceal. They do, however, successfully demonstrate the prosecuting attorney’s eagerness to play up racial divisions:
[Prosecution]: Who, if anybody, did you see when you arrived there?
[Lanier]: Just the brothers and sisters. …
[Prosecution]: When you say the brothers and sisters, what do you mean?
[Lanier]: My brothers and sisters, black people that was down there, my brothers and sisters.
[Prosecution]: Your blood brothers and sisters?
The Court: He said the black people are his brothers and sisters.
[Prosecution]: The black people?
[Lanier]: Yes.
Prosecutors called a third witness, Curtis Martin, to support the idea that Evans offered rifle demonstrations for his young followers, but Martin made no claims to be in Evans’ presence on the day of the incident. The state’s attorney, in asking Martin to describe the meaning of the colors in the Black Nationalist flag, made a clear attempt to portray Evans and his ideology as inherently un-American. “Well, red is for white people’s eyes and green is something else and black is something else,” Martin said.
[Prosecution]: And was there an American flag, red, white, and blue with stars, in this place?
[Martin]: I haven’t seen one.
In Evans’ favor, autopsy reports proved that at least two of the slain officers were under the influence of alcohol at the time of their deaths. Additional testimony spoke to the brutality police acted with that evening. They fired shots into the basement of a local tavern where customers were sheltering from flying bullets. Three women testified that cops tore their clothes and felt them between the legs. Police sent tear gas canisters into a residence where nationalists had barricaded themselves in. Eventually, the building caught fire. The cause of the blaze, like so much in this case, was never determined. Autopsies of two deceased nationalists showed carbon monoxide was present in their lungs. A forensic pathologist confirmed that this meant the men were fatally shot in the head after the fire began. With the approval of Mayor Stokes, the scene was bulldozed before any further evidence could be recovered.
After taking two days to deliberate, the jury found Evans guilty on all counts. Given the opportunity to make a statement on why the sentence should not be imposed, Evans seized upon it. “I became a Black Nationalist because I wanted to help,” he told the court. Evans denied that he was a murderer and said that “when you turn around from evil and wrongdoing, you are bound to run into all these types of oppositions.” Then, in a stunning move, Judge McMonagle went off script for a moment before sentencing the defendant to death by electric chair. He held Evans personally responsible for the Cleveland youth’s allegedly sudden interest in guns. “You know, actually, before we had this Glenville Incident, that has been adjudicated as caused really by you, there was never any open display anywhere of firearms by youngsters,” Judge McMonagle stated, according to the trial transcript. “Now, boys of the same age as your followers … feel that apparently it is the proper and legal thing to do, to have a show of rifles, shotguns, bandoleers.” He does not acknowledge the fact that the US Army trained Evans to handle a deadly weapon, or that he began amassing an arsenal in response to constant surveillance and policing, not the other way around.
Black activists across the country believed Evans had been framed. Cleveland’s mayor, however, was not among them. Stokes repeated unfounded claims about the events of July 23 in a debate prior to his reelection. “I want you to understand this,” he told the audience:
Ahmed Evans and some men with him took rifles and shot down policemen under a situation where we are not talking about any self-defense, in a situation where we are not talking about any aggression on the part of the police. They literally took the weapons and ambushed the policemen. There is no way in the world for me in good conscience to condone that kind of activity and to try to make a hero out of him.
To quell the riots that followed the shootout, Stokes made the controversial decision to withdraw all white policemen from a six-square mile area encompassing Hough and Glenville. Now, with Cleveland voters heading to the polls, he distanced himself from the Black Nationalists just as he had done from Dr. King during his previous campaign.
But Evans did not die by electric chair in September of 1969 as planned. His lawyers secured a stay of execution, and then, in 1972, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Furman v. Georgia resulted in his sentence being commuted to life in prison. He died less than six years later of cancer at a Columbus hospital. At the funeral, attended by a large crowd of Black Nationalists, his son recited a poem, and one of his daughters played the flute. Still, a paranoid sentiment permeated the occasion. One attendee told The Plain Dealer that he did not believe Evans died of cancer but that the CIA had been responsible.
The legacy of Evans’ treatment lives on in law enforcement’s response to the Black Lives Matter movement, which developed as a response to racially motivated violence against Black people, often by the police. The FBI has abused foreign surveillance authorities to investigate BLM protestors’ specious ties to terrorist organizations. Further, the New York Police Department has harnessed facial recognition software to better streamline their surveillance of the movement for racial justice. The technology may have advanced, but the underlying factors motivating unwarranted state spying have not. America is still a country where it is inordinately difficult to send a policeman to prison for manslaughter, let alone murder, but breathtakingly easy to lock up a Black person for the same or harsher crimes.
Early on the morning of July 24, after being handcuffed and put in a bullet-ridden police car, Evans stared out the window and declared, “This is just the beginning.” Sadly, I fear Evans was correct—but not for the reasons he thought.
This essay draws on primary sources from the National, Cleveland Police, and Cuyahoga County Archives.