NEW YORK – The ambush attack Thursday night in which five Dallas police officers were murdered and another seven wounded appears to be a repeat of an ambush by black militants of Cleveland police on the evening of July 23, 1968.
Snipers in the suburb of Glenville killed three Cleveland Police Department officers and injured 12 more in what developed into a full-scale gun-battle that waged past midnight.
In a Task Force Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, published in 1969 as “Shoot-out in Cleveland,” the co-authors warned the incident foreshadowed a new pattern of racial violence in America.
The co-authors of the report were then political science professor Louis H. Masotti and the author of this article, then a Harvard University graduate student writing from the Case Western Reserve University Civil Violence Research Center.
Unlike the race riots of the 1960s, in which the violence was predominately the burning and looting of property, the Cleveland shootout targeted people, with black snipers shooting to kill white cops.
The incident at the time was unusual among major outbreaks of racial violence in that it ended in more white casualties than black.
“In human and dollar costs, the Glenville incident was not the most serious event in the recent tide of racial violence in America,” the authors wrote. “But it differed sharply from the current pattern of violence in significant, instructive ways. Indeed, it established a new theme and an apparent escalation in the level of racial conflict in America.”
The authors warned that the shootout in Cleveland was a result of an intensifying political and economic radicalization within the black community. Unless reversed, they wrote, it could easily escalate into attacks by radically militant blacks not limited to killing police, but potentially white civilians simply because they were white.
Shooters military trained
The shooter killed in the Dallas sniper attack Thursday, Micah Xavier Johnson, was a 25 year-old Army reservist who had served a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
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Although Johnson considered himself a black nationalist and he is seen in a widely published photograph wearing a dashiki and holding up his right fist clenched in what is commonly recognized as a Black Power salute, there is no evidence he was a member of the Nation of Islam or affiliated formally with any black militant group.
On his Facebook page, however, he liked pages relating to Elijah Mohammed, the Nation of Islam's deceased founder.
He also indicated he liked the Black Riders Liberation Party, the New Black Panther Party and the African American Defense League.
In the 1968 Glenville incident, the black militant leading the attack was Fred “Ahmed” Evans, born in 1931, who served with a combat engineer Army unit in Korea in which he earned a half-dozen meritorious service medals before he was discharged in 1952.
During 1967, Cleveland police had closed down an “Afro Culture Shop and Bookstore” Evans ran on Superior Avenue near downtown Cleveland for alleged sanitary violations. Evans had characterized the shutdown in various newspaper interviews as resulting from “the repressive element in a white establishment.”
The precipitating incident in the 1968 Glenville attack was a Cleveland police effort to tow away an abandoned auto.
William McMillian, one of the two two-truck operators responding to the police call to remove the abandoned auto, was shot in the back with a shotgun fired from the side of a house that Evans and the black militants associated with him operated.
In response to the shooting, Cleveland police poured into the neighborhood, only to find themselves in sniper crossfire.
“The snipers set up the ambush and used the tow truck as a decoy to bring the police in,” McMillan said, explaining his theory of the incident. “They had their crossfire all planned. We all were sitting ducks.”