Epilogue

By the mid-1970s, upwardly mobile middle-class African Americans were increasingly departing neighbourhoods like Glenville, Mount Pleasant, and Lee-Harvard for a number of nearby bona fide suburbs. As a result, such former “surrogate suburbs” began to lose their lustre, although a core (generally elderly), home-owning black middle class still remains in these outlying city neighbourhoods to this day. Starting in the 1990s, Cleveland experienced a wave of predatory lending that culminated in the 2008 foreclosure crisis. Although middle class blacks in Cleveland as elsewhere have been disproportionately impacted by this trend, they have continued their historic strategy of outward geographic mobility in search of acceptable living conditions, even to the farthest metropolitan limits.

Urban Change and Reform Agendas in Cleveland’s Black Middle-Class Neighborhoods, 1950–1980

This chapter looks at the ambitious reform agenda that black middle-class activist residents went on to mount in these outlying city neighbourhoods, encompassing housing upkeep, business revitalization, traffic safety, trash removal, and efforts to reduce liquor availability, juvenile delinquency, vice, and crime – all in an attempt to maintain what they considered an acceptable quality of life. Perhaps the most ambitious effort along these lines was a venture in which a group of African American investors purchased and renovated the Lee-Harvard Shopping Center, making it during its existence from 1972-1978 the “largest black-owned commercial complex in the nation.” Sometimes these reform efforts involved moralizing or exhibited an explicit class bias; upwardly mobile middle-class blacks did not always recognize that less well-off newcomers were motivated by similar concerns with liveability. In the end, however, their various attempts to take charge of their lives and communities contributed to the long-term vitality of these neighbourhoods and the city as a whole.

Mobility and Insecurity

This chapter considers the structural factors and life dilemmas upwardly mobile black Clevelanders faced even after achieving geographic mobility, and explicates the dynamic whereby less-affluent African American families steadily moved into new, outlying black middle-class neighbourhoods. Topics discussed include lending discrimination, the unfavourable financing arrangements available to African American homebuyers and the associated economic setbacks they experienced, the role of black professional real estate brokerage associations, the phenomenon of isolated white families remaining in post-transitional neighbourhoods, and the forces driving lower-income African American families into outlying neighbourhoods, mainly downtown redevelopment and ongoing migration from the American South. It also investigates black middle class notions of status and the intra-racial, cross-class frictions that ensued around issues of property upkeep, personal comportment, child rearing, and leisure-time practices.

Racial Residential Transition at the Periphery

This chapter compares the process of racial residential transition and patterns of interracial encounters in Glenville and the various neighbourhoods of Southeast Cleveland, finding differences mostly traceable to the white residents’ ethnic and class composition as well as the built environment. With most Jewish residents having left these areas, African Americans’ interactions with Roman Catholic Southern and Eastern Europeans took on greater significance. Aggressive real estate tactics seeking to promote rapid housing turnover became increasingly systematic and racial clashes (notably in the public schools) more common – including violent incidents which nevertheless remained on a low level overall, compared to Detroit and Chicago. Attempts at interracial neighbourhood mobilization continued, although the remaining white ethnics proved less receptive and demographic transition proceeded to the point where the population of these areas became overwhelmingly African American.

Expanding Black Settlement in the 1940s

This chapter follows Glenville and Mount Pleasant from World War II into the early post-war years. As increasing numbers of African Americans moved into these historically heavily-Jewish neighbourhoods, racial tensions escalated and the phenomenon of panic selling first emerged, even as upwardly mobile black buyers expressed satisfaction and hope at their expanded housing choices. Into the early post-war period, interracial community councils seeking to stabilize population turnover counter-mobilized against exclusionary white homeowners’ associations attempting to choke off black housing access. Jewish residents were more active in these interracial neighbourhood mobilizations, but at the same time Jews departed for the suburbs at above-average rates, to the point where their demographic and institutional presence had diminished to an insignificant point by 1950.

The Roots of Upward Mobility

This chapter uncovers how middling black families gained access to the outlying neighbourhoods of Glenville and Mount Pleasant, documenting these communities’ socioeconomic structures and their residents’ lifestyles. Representative of Cleveland’s black population on the whole with a large majority consisting of migrants from the American South, the nascent black middle class included not just professionals, but also postal workers, tradesmen, and service workers like chauffeurs. Topics explored include self-built housing and how these upwardly mobile black families got mortgage financing, as well as their patterns of interaction with nearby whites. Interracial social contact was limited but generally benign, except when African Americans attempted to use swimming facilities – which catalysed violent white opposition that in turn provided a spark for left-wing, interracial political activism. A final section assesses these black families’ considerable success in maintaining a toehold at the urban periphery, despite the economic setbacks of the Great Depression.

Introduction

You can squeeze ’em in the ghetto, An’ with written covenant, Make ’em live in teeming hovels Where they pay excessive rent. You can threaten banks an’ bankers An’ make money hard to get, But there’ll always be some fishes Who escape the jim-crow net....

Zoning, Development, and Residential Access

This chapter shifts focus to Cleveland’s far south-eastern corner to probe the origins of the Lee-Seville enclave, investigating several land development battles that materialized between and among black and white residents, as more upwardly mobile African American families moved to the vicinity after World War II. Despite being united in opposition to public housing, black homeowners fought to preserve vacant land for residential use, while whites attempted to hamper African American influx through zoning changes enabling industrial projects. The topics of black contractors and builders are covered, as well as the emergence by the late 1950s of white developers willing to build for African American clients, along with how African Americans successfully navigated white opposition to gain access to the quasi-suburban Lee-Harvard neighbourhood. The first black family’s move there in 1953 was effectively mediated by the city’s Community Relations Board and personally by the mayor himself – in contrast to Detroit and Chicago where city leaders deferred to white prejudice.