The 40th Anniversary of the Glenville Riot and Shootout (45th Anniversary this year)

Police Mag via RealClearHistory.com ^ | July 23, 2008 | Robert O'Brien

[Kid Shelleen]

---snip--- If you weren't around in 1968, then you have no idea how turbulent this year really was. It is considered by many historians to be the year in which worldwide revolution came close to reality.

In the United States, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy shocked us to our core. Riots in hundreds of cities also erupted. The Vietnam War raged in Southeast Asia. Protests against the Vietnam War roiled the nation's campuses. It was a very messy time to be alive. It was even a messier time to be a cop.

Buried among 1968's turmoil and upheaval was Glenville, which if it occurred today, would be ranked among the top police confrontations of all time.

[ansel12]

In Glenville's aftermath, CPD went back to the drawing board, establishing a new, larger, better armed, and better trained tactical unit. It also bought a new armored vehicle and authorized 1,200 officers to purchase and carry individual military surplus .30 caliber M-1 carbines.
Glenville shook Cleveland to its very core. Anger turned to outrage when taxpayers learned that the M-1 carbines used by the Black Nationalists to shoot police were obtained through "Cleveland, Now," city funded charitable contributions.

This article's version of how SWAT started doesn't fit the "war on drugs" line.

The violence back then was intense, and common.

[Standing Wolf]

Then came the order from the mayor. Fearing a bloodbath of retribution by police, he ordered only black officers into the riot area. All white police and all National Guard were ordered to stay outside the riot perimeter.
The mayor's plan didn't work. The second day of rioting saw more rampant looting and arson than the first day. On the third day of rioting, the mayor finally relented and "allowed" white police and Guardsmen back into the riot area. Working with their black colleagues, they eventually brought the rioting under control after four days.

I'll bet the police officers' uniforms were blue: not black, white, purple, or pink with white polka dots, but plain old-fashioned blue.

[Nepeta]

1968. The year everything happened.

This piece doesn't even mention the Soviets going into Czechoslovakia or Apollo 8 orbiting the moon.

[hinckley buzzard]

It is odd that the piece does not mention that on Jan 1 1968 Cleveland inaugurated Carl Stokes as mayor, the first black mayor of a major American city. When he was elected in November 1967 many hoped and expected that he would quell racial tensions. His vacillation and inexplicable posture toward the police contributed to the spread and persistence of the rioting--it was perceived that the City had lost the capacity or even the will to maintain order.

[katana]

Hardly odd at all. Sickening but not so very odd. To mention that the mayor was himself black, Carl Stokes, the first black ever elected mayor of a major American city, would be considered "racist" and might even evoke comparison to another more recent first ever incompetent.

I remember those days well. Out in the rural suburbs between Cleveland and Akron the air rang for miles with the "pop, pop" sound of residents limbering up their guns in backyard target practice. If the rioters had ventured out of Cleveland proper they would have faced opposition.

[Larry381]

My uncle was a cop in NYC during the Harlem riots of 1968 & I remember him calling my father so he could borrow his German Mauser with a hunting scope to protect himself from snipers on the Harlem rooftops. He actually came over from Manhattan in his police car to get it. I lived in Astoria in those days and I well remember gangs of white youth with rifles trying to board buses into Harlem to help the police-Mayor Lindsay finally had to stop bus service over the Triborough bridge to prevent it.
In those days I believe a large chunk of the (armed) white community was so angry at the riots (and Mayor Lindsay) that they would have stopped at nothing had the riots continued.