3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

grant earmarked for an urban renewal project, "Cleveland: NOW!". Bureaucrats within
Stokes' administration had allocated the grant money, and Stokes became known as a
benefactor of cop-killing revolutionaries . The embarrassing incident tarnished the
mayor's legacy.°
It is unclear why and how the shooting in Cleveland really began . No one knows
who fired the first shots 9~ Because a situation existed in which any catalyst could have
triggered bloodshed, it does not really matter. Both sides were primed for violence . Each
expected a confrontation; each, to a certain degree, desired it . Cleveland's police officers,
like those in Oakland, were white. Some had emigrated from the southern states, and
brought with them all the racial assumptions associated with that region ; or, they had
descended from immigrants who had worked their way out of the slums . Many were not
predisposed to empathize with the plight of blacks living in the ghetto .
On the other side, Ahmed Evens and his comrades-in-arms were itching for a
fight . The shootout in Cleveland seemed to bear credence to the notions that merely
having weapons at hand created an impetus to use them, and that those who go looking
for trouble often find it . It is certainly within the realm of possibility that Ahmed Evens
9°For more on Mayor Stokes and the Ahmed Evens incident, see Estelle Zannes,
Ch~kmate in Cleveland : The Rhetoric of Confrontation During th
(Cleveland: Case Western University Press, 1972).
9rAn exhaustive investigation by the Civil Violence Reseat+ch Center at Case Western
Reserve University, under the direction of Louis H. Maseru and Jerome R. Corsi, proved
inconclusive . Maseru and Corsi's report soundly condemned police conduct in
Cleveland's black neighborhoods . See Maseru and Corsi, Shootout in Cleveland: A
Report Submitted to t_he National Commission_ on_~ Ca_us~s_ aid P~,wention of Violence
(New York : Bantam Books, 1969) .
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