Neal Bradley Long was arrested in Dayton, Ohio, on the afternoon of September 19, 1975, after Charles A. Glatt, an Ohio State University professor appointed by the federal court to draw up a desegregation plan for Dayton's public schools, was shot and killed while at work on that plan. Within hours a Dayton homicide detective who saw Long in custody thought he recognized him. For three summers police had been looking for a gunman, known in the press as the "Midnight Slayer," who was shooting Black men on the city's West Side at night. In custody, Long told the detective that he had shot "25 or 30 people."
The Dayton Daily News says Long killed at least four people, Glatt the last of them. James Brogan, who prosecuted the state's case against him, called him "a very dangerous racist." The detective who took his statement, Dan Baker, later described him as "a cold-blooded racist killer." Long died in a federal prison in Minnesota in 1998.
Dayton in the mid-1960s was a sharply divided city. Housing segregation had concentrated about 60,000 Black residents on the West Side, in an area many saw as a ghetto with neglected schools and unequal city services, the Dayton Daily News wrote in its 2016 series on the period. In May 1966 the paper ran its own series, "West Side '66," on segregation, poverty, schools and police brutality, and Black leaders warned that the city could explode.
In the early hours of September 1, 1966, a Black man named Lester Mitchell was shot and killed in Dayton. A neighbor told the Dayton Daily News that the men involved were white. The shooting appeared to be random. Later that day the West Side erupted in what the Dayton Jewish Observer has called the worst riot in the city's history. About 1,000 National Guard troops were sent to the lower West Side and stayed five days. Fires and looting burned out much of the retail strip along West Third Street, and many of the merchants did not return.
No one was ever convicted of Mitchell's killing. Several months later Dayton's police chief told reporters that a jailhouse informant had named the shooter as a man who had since died in a shootout. Decades later Baker found little sign that police had worked to confirm that account, and the police file still lists the case as unsolved, the Dayton Daily News reported. Baker came to believe that Neal Long killed Mitchell. That belief has not been proven.
Long lived on Dayton's mostly white East Side. On Halloween 1966, two months after the riot, he walked into the Dayton police department and told officers that he had stabbed and possibly killed a Black man about twenty years earlier. According to Baker, detectives dismissed the confession.
Around the same time, Long crashed his car into a bridge while drunk. The officer who responded did not search the car, which Baker blamed in part on pouring rain. Long told doctors that he heard voices from God. He was committed to a state mental hospital as schizophrenic and homicidal, and was later released, after which he stopped checking in with his doctors. The FBI kept a file on him, the Dayton Daily News reported, after he sent a letter criticizing J. Edgar Hoover; the bureau tracked his mail and his interest in communism.
Baker later argued that officials missed several chances to stop Long, the 1966 crash among them.
In April 1972, the parents of Black children in Dayton filed a federal lawsuit against the Dayton Board of Education. The Dayton chapter of the NAACP was a driving force behind the suit, and it needed about $60,000 for legal fees, part of which was raised with help from Dayton's Jewish community, the Dayton Jewish Observer reported.
The case was heard by Judge Carl Rubin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. According to the U.S. Supreme Court's later summary, the district court found in February 1973 that the board had committed a "cumulative violation," citing racially imbalanced schools, optional attendance zones and the board's January 1972 rescission of earlier desegregation resolutions. The court approved a board plan in July 1973. The federal appeals court affirmed the findings but twice sent the remedy back as inadequate. The second time, in 1975, it directed the district court to adopt a systemwide plan for the 1976 to 1977 school year. A plan built around magnet programs, approved by Rubin in March 1975, did not satisfy the appeals court.
By the summer of 1975, Rubin had assigned Charles Glatt to devise and carry out a comprehensive plan for Dayton.
Glatt was a professor of education at Ohio State University and a specialist in school desegregation, and the court had given him the task of turning its order into a working plan for Dayton. The Dayton Daily News later called him the architect of the city's school desegregation plan.
He was killed in Dayton on September 19, 1975, while working on that plan. On October 2, 1975, a human relations newsletter in Worthington, Ohio, mourned him as a professor of education at Ohio State who had been slain while working on a desegregation plan for Dayton schools. Years later, Dayton City Commissioner Jeff Mims told the Dayton Jewish Observer that Glatt's killing gave the desegregation effort more purpose.
For three summers before Glatt's death, someone was shooting Black men on Dayton's West Side late at night. The Dayton Jewish Observer described the shootings as random and said they began in the summer of 1972. The press called the gunman the Midnight Slayer, and there was a composite sketch of the man police were looking for.
In 1999 the Dayton Daily News published a timeline of the shootings it attributed to Long, and the paper republished that timeline when it revisited his arrest in its series on historic front pages. The timeline lists:
August 21, 1972: shots fired at a man, who escaped.
September 26, 1973: Edward Tillman shot and killed.
Another night, not dated in the timeline: shots fired at a man, who was not reported killed.
May 23, 1975: shots fired at a gathering; one man was wounded.
July 15, 1975: Larry Romine, 27, shot and killed.
Later in 1975, not dated in the timeline: Robert Hoard, 21, shot and killed.
Later in 1975, not dated in the timeline: an attempt on another man's life that wounded him and his girlfriend, 20.
September 19, 1975: Charles Glatt shot and killed.
The Dayton Jewish Observer, in its 2016 history of the desegregation fight, put the toll higher, writing that over three summers Long shot at least 30 Black men and killed seven. The Dayton Daily News, in the same year, wrote that Long first said he had shot about 30 people over four years and that three deaths had been confirmed. The figures do not agree.
The shootings frightened the West Side. According to the Dayton Daily News's 1999 account, residents held all-night vigils, and organizations and companies offered a $10,000 reward for information. Black leaders asked the city to declare a state of emergency, and they were given 20 police radios for a citizens' patrol. Dayton police asked the FBI for help. The FBI declined.
None of it produced an arrest. Brogan, who later prosecuted the state's case against Long, told the paper in 1999, "If he hadn't shot Glatt in broad daylight, I don't know how long this would have gone on."
Glatt was shot on the afternoon of Friday, September 19, 1975. The Dayton Daily News timeline puts the end of Long's "hold on Dayton" at 2:45 p.m. that day. Long was arrested that day and held by the U.S. Marshals.
Baker, then a Dayton homicide detective, was out with his partner, Detective Gary Prugh, when Glatt was shot. The two went to the federal courthouse, where Long was being held. Baker recalled that Long looked up at them, and that he and Prugh "just gasped because he looked like the composite" sketch of the Midnight Slayer.
The next day Long's arrest filled the front page of the Dayton Daily News. The paper's photograph showed him being led into court by Chief U.S. Marshal Earl Pelfrey.
It was in that holding cell, the Dayton Daily News reported, that Long confessed to Baker. He told the detective that he had shot "25 or 30 people" while out on the West Side at night over several years. He said he drank beer and whiskey on those evenings.
Long explained the shootings in racial terms. According to the paper's account of his statement, he said there was "so much trouble between the colored and the white," that "it wasn't safe" for him to travel across west Dayton, and "that's why I first started." Of Glatt, he later said that he had killed him to keep his son from being bused to a Black school.
Long's account grew after his arrest. He later told a federal court psychologist that he had fired at about 100 Black people and possibly killed 20, the Dayton Daily News reported. Those figures rest on his own word.
James Brogan prosecuted the state's case against Long. "Nobody wanted this man, a very dangerous racist, on the street ever again," he told the Dayton Daily News in 1999.
Long spent the rest of his life in custody. He died in a federal prison in Minnesota in 1998, the Dayton Daily News reported.
Glatt's killing did not stop the case he had been working on. On December 29, 1975, the district court ordered a systemwide desegregation plan that it found would require transporting about 15,000 students, and on March 25, 1976, it approved the plan's details, according to the U.S. Supreme Court's summary of the case. The federal appeals court affirmed the plan in 1976.
On Thursday, September 2, 1976, Dayton Public Schools began classes under the court-ordered plan, and busing for racial balance began across the city. An Associated Press story described the start as "as smooth as silk," with no demonstrations, the Dayton Jewish Observer recalled. The first day of busing fell nearly a year after Glatt was killed.
On June 27, 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice William Rehnquist, vacated the appeals court's judgment in Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman. It held that a systemwide remedy required proof of systemwide discriminatory intent and effect, and it sent the case back while leaving the plan in place for the coming school year. The litigation went on for decades. Judge Walter H. Rice inherited oversight of the order when he joined the federal bench for southern Ohio in 1980, and in 2002 he presided over a settlement between the NAACP and Dayton Public Schools that formally ended desegregation and returned the district to neighborhood schools. By then Black students made up 73 percent of the district's enrollment, and enrollment had fallen from 60,633 in 1965 to about 14,000 by 2016, the Dayton Jewish Observer reported.
Baker, who was a rookie officer on the West Side beat during the 1966 riot, wrote about the period and about Long in Blood in the Streets: Racism, Riots and Murders in the Heartland of America, published in 2014 with his wife, the attorney Gwen Nalls. In 2016 he told the Dayton Daily News, "I was proud as a member of the Dayton police department to be part of bringing Long's reign of terror to an end."
The Dayton Daily News returned to Long in 2016, during its "Lasting Scars" project on the 1966 riot, and again in its series on historic front pages, where it reprinted the September 20, 1975, front page announcing his arrest.
The Lester Mitchell killing. Baker has said that Long's method and location matched the 1966 shooting of Lester Mitchell. "Everything is there. Every inch of the MO is there," he told the Dayton Daily News. The case remains officially unsolved, and police at the time pointed to a different man named by a jailhouse informant. The attribution is Baker's view and has not been proven.
The 1966 stabbing claim. Long's Halloween 1966 statement that he had stabbed and possibly killed a Black man about twenty years earlier was dismissed by detectives at the time, according to Baker.
The number of people shot and killed. The figures vary by source and by the time Long gave them: "25 or 30 people" shot, as he told Baker in 1975; about 30 shot over four years, with three deaths confirmed, as the Dayton Daily News summarized his early account; at least 30 Black men shot and seven killed, as the Dayton Jewish Observer wrote in 2016; about 100 people fired at and possibly 20 killed, as he told a federal court psychologist; and at least four people killed, the Dayton Daily News's own count in its historic front pages series. Only the killings named in the Dayton Daily News timeline are tied to specific dates and names.
September 1, 1966: Lester Mitchell is shot and killed in Dayton; the riot that follows brings about 1,000 National Guard troops to the West Side. The killing remains unsolved.
October 31, 1966: Long walks into the Dayton police department and says he stabbed and possibly killed a Black man about twenty years earlier; detectives dismiss the claim.
About 1966: Long crashes his car while drunk and is later committed to a state mental hospital, then released.
April 17, 1972: parents of Black children sue the Dayton Board of Education in federal court.
Summer 1972: the West Side shootings begin, according to the Dayton Jewish Observer.
August 21, 1972: first shooting on the Dayton Daily News timeline; the man escapes.
February 7, 1973: the federal district court finds a "cumulative violation" by the Dayton school board.
September 26, 1973: Edward Tillman is shot and killed.
March 10, 1975: Judge Carl Rubin approves the school board's magnet plan; it is later rejected on appeal.
May 23, 1975: shots fired at a gathering; one man is wounded.
July 15, 1975: Larry Romine, 27, is shot and killed.
1975 (not dated in the timeline): Robert Hoard, 21, is shot and killed; another man and his girlfriend are wounded.
By summer 1975: Rubin assigns Charles Glatt to draw up a comprehensive desegregation plan.
September 19, 1975: Glatt is shot and killed in Dayton while working on the plan; Long is arrested the same afternoon and tells Detective Dan Baker he has shot "25 or 30 people."
September 20, 1975: Long's arrest fills the Dayton Daily News front page.
October 2, 1975: a Worthington, Ohio, human relations newsletter mourns Glatt.
December 29, 1975: the district court orders a systemwide desegregation plan.
March 25, 1976: the court approves the plan's details.
September 2, 1976: busing for desegregation begins in Dayton Public Schools.
June 27, 1977: the U.S. Supreme Court decides Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman.
1998: Long dies in a federal prison in Minnesota.
1999: the Dayton Daily News publishes a retrospective timeline of the shootings, with interviews including James Brogan.
2002: a settlement formally ends court-ordered desegregation in Dayton Public Schools.
2014: Dan Baker and Gwen Nalls publish Blood in the Streets.
2016: the Dayton Daily News and the Dayton Jewish Observer revisit the 1966 riot, the Mitchell killing and Long's case on the riot's 50th anniversary.