Don Freeman, 1939-2025, Veteran Cleveland-based Activist Leaves a Profound Political Legacy

His spectrum extended over decades from Civil Rights, Socialism to Revolutionary Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and community organizing

By Abayomi Azikiwe

Editor, Pan-African News Wire

Thursday July 31, 2025

Historical Review

During the 1960s, the city of Cleveland, Ohio was at the center of several political trends emerging within the African American community nationwide.

Its burgeoning African American working-class population, many of whom came from rural areas of the South looking to improve their socioeconomic situation, grew impatient as they sought to intervene in the civic life of this major midwestern industrial municipality.

After World War II a new generation would emerge in the United States which became committed to eradicating the legacy of enslavement and legalized segregation in the South as well as other regions of the country where African Americans had migrated in large numbers. The efforts of the Civil Rights Movement were not limited to the South, people in many Northern, Midwestern and West coast cities launched legal and mass struggles against de facto segregation in all its manifestations.

Don Freeman, who joined the ancestors on July 22, was very much influenced by the popular movements for national liberation and socialism sweeping the world in the 1950s. Freeman lived in a housing project and later moved to the Glenville section of Cleveland.

He was a serious student while attending Junior and Senior High School. He would later enroll at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland from where he graduated in History in 1961. Prior to graduating from CWRU, Freeman had already begun his political involvement on the Left.

In 1960, he was one of the early members of the reconstituted Student League for Industrial Democracy which became the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Freeman attended an early conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) held in Atlanta during October 1960. It was at this SNCC conference that he first met and talked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., then the President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

Freeman joined the Cleveland Public Schools system as an English and Social Studies teacher after graduating from CWRU. His emphasis on African American history in his classroom instruction plans drew attention from the school administration.

After meeting Malcolm X and holding extensive discussions, he would grow closer to the ideological orientation of Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism. By late 1962, he and fellow activist Max Sanford laid the foundation for the formation of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) which emerged the next year.

Ballots or Bullets: The Fire Next Time

The organization took a different approach than other Civil Rights organizations of the time period by providing a philosophical basis for violent resistance and armed struggle. RAM would move closer to Malcolm X after his departure from the Nation of Islam (NOI) in March 1964. Other influences on RAM included Robert F. Williams, then in exile in Cuba and later China, for his efforts in forming rifle clubs as self-defense units against the racist violence of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina.

On a website entitled Blackglenville.com, it says of Freeman and RAM in this period:

“Following the organization’s launch in 1963, they established a publication called Black America. The publication became a platform for Freeman to publish work about African Americans’ struggle for liberation in the U.S. His writing helped solidify African Americans’ coalition with the anti-imperialist struggles in other countries, which showed readers the international fight against the oppression of all people of color throughout the world. Freeman also founded the Afro-American Institute in 1962, which was an affiliate of RAM. This was the first secular black nationalist organization in Cleveland since the Universal Negro Improvement Association founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914. His focus was to teach African and African American history and continue the work of RAM.” (https://www.blackglenville.com/don)

Freeman attended two important gatherings in Detroit in November 1963 and several months later in April 1964. The Northern Negro Grassroots Leadership Conference was held in November where Freeman spoke prior to Malcolm X when he delivered his well-known address entitled “Message to the Grassroots.” Gloria Dandridge of SNCC in Cambridge, Maryland also spoke on the same panel with Freeman and Malcolm X.

After the April 12, 1964 address in Detroit entitled “Ballots or Bullets”, Freeman said he spoke with Malcolm X privately and was informed that he was leaving soon for a pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia as well as an extensive tour of West Asia and Africa. Just several weeks later, the-RAM affiliated Afro-American Student Movement (AASM) would hold a conference at Fisk University. A follow-up conference was held in late October and early November 1964. (https://www.crmvet.org/docs/641030_student_conf.pdf)

As a result of the media coverage of RAM’s activities, the FBI and other intelligence and law-enforcement agencies began a campaign of disruption against the organization. In 1965, the Cleveland Public Schools terminated Freeman from his teaching position. He was accused by the school board of teaching black supremacy. Freeman denied the charges and hired an attorney to represent him against the accusations.

The following year, a rebellion erupted in the predominantly African American Hough section of Cleveland on June 23, 1966, which lasted for four days. The violence was triggered by whites firing a gun into a crowd of African American youth.

During 1965, Carl B. Stokes ran for mayor and was nearly declared the winner. A recount of the votes gave the elections to a white man, Ralph S. Locher.

However, after the Hough Rebellion, Stokes would launch another campaign for mayor the following year in 1967. This year represented a high tide of African American resistance and rebellion when over 160 incidents of civil unrest were reported by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder. (https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/national-advisory-commission-civil-disorders-report)

SCLC leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., visited Cleveland on a regular basis during the summer of 1967 in support of the Stokes for Mayor campaign along with advancing the program of Operation Breadbasket, a people-center anti-poverty initiative. Stokes would win the race for Mayor in late 1967.

During June 1967, 16 people were arrested in raids conducted by the FBI against members of RAM and others. The federal government had concocted stories claiming that these African American revolutionaries were planning to assassinate Civil Rights leaders such as Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP and Whitney Young, the leader of the Urban League. (https://www.nytimes.com/1967/06/22/archives/16-negroes-seized-plot-to-kill-wilkins-and-young-charged-16-negroes.html)

Such allegations were part and parcel of the FBI’s counterintelligence program aimed at discrediting and disrupting so-called “Black Nationalist Hate Groups.” This same approach would result in the assassination of Dr. King the following April 1968.

Nonetheless, prior to the ascendancy of Stokes in Cleveland, the Detroit Rebellion beginning on July 23, 1967, would mark the largest urban rebellion led by African Americans up until that time period. These rebellions ushered in a new era of militancy across the U.S.

Dr. King in 1967 had taken a firm position against the war in Vietnam and was planning his historic Poor People’s Campaign aimed at occupying Washington, D.C. during the spring of 1968. SCLC was reaching out to broad sections of the population including Black Nationalists, antiwar activists and oppressed peoples throughout the U.S.

One year after the initiation of the rebellion in Detroit, there were rumors circulating nationally that a number of cities would be targeted for a planned armed uprising on July 23, 1968. Nevertheless, it was only in Cleveland that a group of Black Nationalists led by Fred Ahmed Evans ambushed police in the Glenville section. Ten people died on the first night of the rebellion including three police officers.

Reports were circulating that Evans, who had met Dr. King in Cleveland, was extremely aggravated by his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Evans and his Black Nationalists of New Libya organization began to purchase and stockpile weapons in response to police harassment in the African American community.

News articles began to appear after the Glenville shoot-out and rebellion of July 1968 that Evans had purchased the organization’s arsenal with funds supplied by the Cleveland Now project which was sponsored by the federal Office for Economic Opportunity (OEO). These reports were designed to destroy Stokes’ political career.

Stokes ordered all white police officers out of Glenville, a move which contributed immensely to restoring order. Evans was arrested, put on trial and convicted on several counts of murder. He was sentenced to die in the electric chair. National protests in September 1969 brought attention to his legal plight. Later due to a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1972, the death penalty was temporarily overturned. Evans later died in detention in 1978.

Reflections of a Resolute Radical

In his later years, Freeman would write his own political autobiography entitled “Reflections of a Resolute Radical.” The book was released in 2017 and thoroughly discussed by him at a forum held at the Cleveland Public Library. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Nkc_GbsMh1s)

Freeman and his wife, Norma Jean, who preceded him in death, published and edited the community magazine Vibrations for decades. They would continue to travel and lecture until recent years.

The contributions of the Freemans and other RAM activists made an enormous contribution to the African American liberation movement of the 1960s and beyond. Their examples should be studied by all students of African American history during the 20th century. 

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Note: This author spoke on a panel with Don Freeman on July 30, 2011 at the McCall Hotel in East Cleveland. The theme of the panel was centered around comparing the rise of revolutionary movements in Cleveland and Detroit during the 1960s and in subsequent decades. Later this author attended a book signing at the Dr. Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit where Don and Norma Jean Freedom discussed “Reflections of a Resolute Radical" after its publication.