Surrogate Suburbs: Black Upward Mobility and Neighborhood Change in Cleveland, 1900–1980

By Todd M. Michney

The story of white flight and the neglect of Black urban neighborhoods has been well told by urban historians in recent decades. Yet much of this scholarship has downplayed Black agency and tended to portray African Americans as victims of structural forces beyond their control. In this history of Cleveland's Black middle class, Todd Michney uncovers the creative ways that members of this nascent community established footholds in areas outside the overcrowded, inner-city neighborhoods to which most African Americans were consigned. In asserting their right to these outer-city spaces, African Americans appealed to city officials, allied with politically progressive whites (notably Jewish activists), and relied upon both Black and white developers and real estate agents to expand these "surrogate suburbs" and maintain their livability until the bona fide suburbs became more accessible.

By tracking the trajectories of those who, in spite of racism, were able to succeed, Michney offers a valuable counterweight to histories that have focused on racial conflict and Black poverty and tells the neglected story of the Black middle class in America's cities prior to the 1960s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781469631950

Todd M. Michney

Todd M. Michney is associate professor in the School of History and Sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Book preview

Introduction

SECOND GHETTO OR SURROGATE SUBURB?

BLACK MOBILITY IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY OUTER CITY

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.

So in free an’ liberal Cleveland

Where the bigots hide their hand

There has been a constant movement

To the East Side promised land

’Cause the lure of ready money

An’ the yen to make a buck

Is what trips the race-containers

Who are simply out of luck.

Sure the banks refuse you money,

An’ the neighbors start to yell,

An’ the bigots stir their stooges

Into raisin’ lots of hell.

But the movin’ finger’s writin’

An’ the words are plain as day,

An’ the courts have spoken plainly

That jim-crow is dead to stay.

An’ us Negroes on the sidelines

Have to give a silent cheer,

To the Negro who is willing,

To become a pioneer

On the road that leads away from

Rotten houses in the ghetto

An’ who’re deaf to racial discord

Of the bigots liberetto [sic].¹

Penned in mid-1953 by Charles H. Loeb, the managing editor of Cleveland’s main black newspaper, this Editorial in Rhyme expressed confidence that housing opportunities for African Americans were improving, even as it underlined the unacceptable living conditions still faced by many. In writing these verses for the Call & Post, Loeb alluded to recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings that had begun to address decades of legally sanctioned residential segregation: Shelley v. Kraemer, the 1948 landmark decision that invalidated deed restrictions against racial minorities, as well as Barrows v. Jackson, which had reaffirmed Shelley just one month earlier. Such progress notwithstanding, Loeb simultaneously emphasized the economic underpinnings of the ghetto, where an artificial housing shortage ensured that many African Americans had little choice but to pay exorbitant prices for overcrowded and dilapidated housing. But on the general direction of the black freedom struggle, Loeb was an optimist. He had reported on civil rights gains as a World War II correspondent for the Negro Newspapers Publishing Association, and in a 1947 book he had chronicled the successes of the Future Outlook League—a militant local pressure group to which he belonged—dedicating it to the new generation of American Negroes, who are no longer content with second-class citizenship, and who intend to do something about it. In another rhymed editorial from earlier in 1953, Loeb had exhorted readers, Don’t be a dope an’ give up hope / When vic’try’s close at hand / I can remember when the world / Was rougher on the colored man, and then gone on to enumerate some of the Jim Crow indignities he had witnessed prior to his relocation north during the Great Depression.²

Loeb satirized Cleveland’s supposed exemplary race relations record while evincing a shrewd understanding both of racially inflected housing market dynamics and an increasingly visible shift in the geographic setting for black upward mobility. In fact, the opening poem took its inspiration from a move by the first African American couple into Lee-Harvard, a still partially undeveloped neighborhood in the city’s southeastern corner with new ranches and colonials resembling those on the nearby suburban streets of posh Shaker Heights. This event did not transpire without controversy, but with the city providing adequate police protection to the couple, Wendell and Genevieve Stewart, and after two weeks of mediation presided over by the mayor himself, Cleveland successfully preempted the violent retaliation that white residents not uncommonly mounted in response to black residential expansion in other cities—hence Loeb’s sarcastic yet accurate characterization of free an’ liberal Cleveland / Where the bigots hide their hand.

That the Stewarts deserved praise for standing up to white prejudice and taking on the role of pioneers—a term commonly applied at the time to the initial African American families crossing residential color barriers³—may seem obvious. But Loeb tactfully declined to mention that the couple was motivated to leave their previous neighborhood, Glenville, because an influx of less-affluent African Americans and subsequent overcrowding was fostering what they regarded as increasingly untenable living conditions there. Thus the Stewarts’ move away from an erstwhile black middle-class stronghold to all-white Lee-Harvard could be celebrated as unambiguous progress, as a collective step On the road that leads away from / Rotten houses in the ghetto, only if it served to expand black Clevelanders’ housing opportunities on the whole. Indirectly, such moves did hold that potential, of which Loeb was certainly aware. At the time, whites typically fled neighborhoods as African American buyers gained a foothold—an increasingly common outcome considering the interplay between rising black middle-class incomes and white suburbanization after World War II. Despite generally having to pay more (hence Loeb’s reference to the lure of ready money / An’ the yen to make a buck), such moves by pioneering families like the Stewarts did sometimes unlock entire new areas for African American occupancy. Indeed, this is exactly what happened as Lee-Harvard, like Glenville before it, transitioned to become almost entirely black in little more than a decade. Strikingly, increasing numbers of aspiring African American families repeated this cycle of outward movement in search of an improved quality of life as they began departing Lee-Harvard for several nearby suburbs in the mid-1970s.

This underlying context for Loeb’s editorial forms the subject of Surrogate Suburbs, which recovers the numerous ways in which African Americans dynamically and creatively engaged with space at the urban periphery, thereby transforming it into a critically important locus of black middle-class social, economic, and political life over the course of the Great Migration era. From the turn of the twentieth century, until its final decades when the tide of Southern migration reversed and black suburbanization began in earnest, outer-city places increasingly supplanted older, central city neighborhoods as the context and focus for African American individual and collective aspiration, for economic and social mobility, for class and status formation, and for politics, protest, and reform. In short, the outer city can tell us a great deal about the meaning of life for African Americans over much of the twentieth century, and it needs further consideration as a counterpoint to inner-city ghettoes⁴ and the reigning scholarly tendency to generalize life in those settings as constituting the quintessential black urban experience. As my subtitle suggests, the meanings of neighborhood change must be broadened to consider the lives and choices of more African American outer-city dwellers. While demographic turnover frequently correlated with decline in the minds of both white and upwardly mobile black observers, I refer to changing neighborhoods as a strategy of outward geographic mobility historically used not just by middle-class blacks but by members of numerous racial and ethnic groups in search of better living conditions.⁵ In another and even more profound sense, however, changing neighborhoods for African Americans has meant attempting to improve and transform their living environments in order to maintain an acceptable quality of life.⁶ While both of these senses of the verb to change demonstrate African American agency and a dynamic engagement with urban space, they also suggest converse approaches: either to stay put and confront the existing conditions, or else to move on.

Recent scholarship on race and inequality in U.S. cities has underlined the numerous constraints African Americans faced in the housing market, from federal policy that institutionalized inequity in mortgage lending, to the violent resistance of white homeowners, to the mass population displacements caused by urban redevelopment.⁷ Such works have uncovered the roots of white working-class illiberalism that divided the New Deal constituency long before the tumultuous 1960s and also thoroughly debunked popular explanations implying that black residents themselves bear the blame for post–World War II urban decline. But notwithstanding its many valuable insights, this scholarship often has downplayed black agency—sometimes even tending toward portraying African Americans as hapless victims of structural forces beyond their control.⁸ To the extent that class differences among African Americans have been treated in these works, blacks with comparatively more resources have not uncommonly been faulted for wanting to move to areas of the city with newer, better housing. While fully acknowledging and continuing to investigate the inequities that even better-off African Americans endured, the present study extends the conversation with its prioritization of personal agency and dignity, demonstrating how African Americans went about living and striving in spite of serious and continuous discriminatory barriers. Instead of a government-abetted second ghetto, I follow upwardly mobile blacks in reimagining as surrogate suburbs the newer, outlying city neighborhoods to which they moved in pursuit of their aspirations.⁹ By documenting the patience, persistence, pragmatism, and frequent success such upwardly mobile residents had in improving their life circumstances, I offer a less pessimistic perspective on the postwar city, a potential counter-weight to renditions emphasizing urban decline and black victimization. And, by carrying the story past 1965 during a period when localized class relations between African American residents took on greater and largely unacknowledged significance, my work resists the implication that white departure was the most salient development in the history of postwar U.S. cities.

The present work builds upon studies of African American urban communities emphasizing agency and creative forms of resistance,¹⁰ while extending the insights of this scholarship in several important ways. By turning our focus to upwardly mobile families of middling economic status—families headed by postal workers, tradesmen, and chauffeurs, as well as professionals—unexamined strategies and successes of a nascent black middle class emerge. Notably, these outlying black families succeeded in getting financing in the pre–New Deal mortgage market, even borrowing from nearby whites in some cases. African Americans were always present in small numbers at the edges of cities—including in suburbs, a phenomenon most extensively explored by historian Andrew Wiese. However, the outer city held far more significance for upwardly mobile African Americans prior to the onset of mass black suburbanization starting in the 1960s. First, the numbers gaining access to outlying city neighborhoods up to that point were more substantial. Second, early African American suburbanization was generally a working-class survival strategy marked by rudimentary living conditions, so blacks moving there were motivated primarily by reasons other than status.¹¹

Cleveland is an important yet relatively understudied locale for such an inquiry. In 1920, it was the nation’s fifth-largest city and a primary producer of steel and automobiles, alongside Chicago, Detroit, and many smaller industrial centers of the Great Lakes region. When Cleveland’s population peaked in 1950 at nearly 915,000 residents, it had a growing black population of more than 147,000, the tenth largest in the country and not far behind that of Los Angeles, which ranked eighth at the time. African Americans living in Cleveland that year outnumbered those in Memphis, Birmingham, Atlanta, Newark, Norfolk, Oakland, San Francisco, Miami, Boston, and Milwaukee—all of whose communities have received more scholarly attention. But despite upswings in production associated with World War II and the Korean War that bolstered a continuing influx of black Southerners, Cleveland entered a slow but steady economic decline in the postwar decades. Capital flight by industries seeking lower labor costs increasingly subsumed the city along with the rest of the formerly robust region into what became known as the Rust Belt. By 1980, population loss had dropped Cleveland from the ten largest American cities, its rank falling precipitously to eighteenth.¹² African Americans fared disproportionately worse amid deindustrialization, and while those with middle-class jobs were less directly affected, a contracting local economy both impeded the overall potential for black upward mobility and had neighborhood-level ramifications.

The general pattern of black residential expansion in Cleveland resembled that in many Northern cities, including Chicago and Detroit. In the early twentieth century, relatively small numbers of African Americans successfully established footholds in outlying neighborhoods like Cleveland’s Mount Pleasant, Glenville, Lee-Seville, and West Park, typically settling in compact enclaves.¹³ Their life experiences and opportunities correspondingly diverged from those of the vast majority of black Clevelanders, who were confined to a large, increasingly overcrowded, single contiguous residential district extending dozens of blocks to the east of downtown, known as Cedar-Central (after its main thoroughfares). To the extent that their relatively well-off inhabitants could build or acquire newer and better-quality housing, outlying black settlements held the potential, at least, to visibly refute the stereotypes that increasingly linked African Americans with the decline of inner-city neighborhoods. While definitely the exception at the outset of the period under study, the experiences of African Americans living in the outer city became more and more mainstream in the decades after World War II, when the existing boundaries of black settlement burst and dramatically expanded—a process driven in large part by white departures to suburbs from which African Americans were largely excluded for decades. A complicated dynamic somewhat simplistically rendered as the result of white flight, this postwar expansion of African American living space included both incremental growth at the edges of existing black settlements and the rapid demographic turnover of entire formerly white neighborhoods like Lee-Harvard.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a racially segregated, dual housing market emerged that constrained black housing options, which in turn fostered overcrowding and the deterioration of housing stock—a trajectory that became a virtual self-fulfilling prophecy in most African American neighborhoods. In an effort to maintain an acceptable quality of life, upwardly mobile blacks frequently felt compelled to move beyond established areas. While sociologist William Julius Wilson famously asserted in The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) that 1960s civil rights reforms enabled middle-class blacks to spatially disassociate themselves from their less-fortunate brethren, scholars going back to W. E. B. Du Bois in The Philadelphia Negro (1899) have noted the phenomenon of geographic class stratification in African American communities, even if this amounted to nothing more than the well-to-do clustering together at the edges of settlements of poorer black residents. Clearly, black middle-class aspirations have historically depended on constantly expanding housing options. Though invested in the expansion of civil rights protections, most upwardly mobile African Americans nevertheless adapted to the racially structured housing market by accepting incremental gains. At the same time, middle-class blacks had fewer means available to maintain geographic distance, and so this separation often proved temporary with African American neighborhoods exhibiting a greater admixture of socioeconomic levels than white ones.¹⁴

In accomplishing residential mobility at a time when the force of segregation was reshaping entire metropolitan areas, African Americans like those examined in this study utilized a variety of strategies over time, although their motivations for moving remained remarkably consistent. In the earliest decades, they purchased land before race-based restrictions could be inserted into deeds, and in many cases built their own houses. Prior to the Great Depression, they borrowed from a handful of black-owned institutions and sought out profit-minded whites willing to issue them mortgages. After World War II, they tapped African American contractors and a small but growing number of white-owned construction firms willing to service the black housing market. Increasingly, they depended upon African American and white real estate brokers to expand the available housing options, even when this entailed aggressive and controversial sales tactics (blockbusting) and despite having to pay a premium. Over the entire period of this study, upwardly mobile African American Clevelanders moved to areas populated by Southern and Eastern Europeans, and especially Jews, who did not typically respond with violent resistance. In addition, they bolstered their economic security and cemented middle-class status by engaging multiple family members, including wives, in work for wages. Practically without exception, African Americans of middling status moved to the urban periphery to escape (or preempt) worsening living conditions in older neighborhoods. To them, outward geographic mobility meant better opportunities, more pleasant surroundings, more space, and newer and better schools and shopping facilities, as well as more prestigious housing and prosperous neighbors that made for showcase communities.¹⁵

In the economic, social, and political life of the city’s black middling classes, outer-city spaces and places—as well as the people they encountered there—played a variety of roles and distinctly shaped their identities. African Americans living on the urban periphery were initially outnumbered by whites and so faced greater difficulty negotiating through formal political channels for access to public facilities—such as swimming pools—than did their counterparts living in Cedar-Central. Therefore, they were even more likely to demand fair treatment and protection from city officials by emphasizing their rights as citizens, homeowners, and taxpayers. While some black observers in the earliest decades expressed resentment at city officials’ seeming favoritism toward Southern and Eastern European foreigners who had made earlier inroads into local Democratic Party politics, others formed strategic alliances with whites from these same ethnic groups in protesting racial discrimination, whether under Communist Party auspices or through membership in liberal intergroup relations organizations. Many more participated actively in block clubs and neighborhood councils with white residents similarly interested in maintaining high standards of property upkeep and personal comportment. Some black homeowners on the urban periphery even joined forces with whites living nearby to oppose postwar plans for public housing, although this alliance, in Cleveland as elsewhere, proved to be a brief and pragmatic one. But for the most part, upwardly mobile African Americans’ feelings on racial integration ranged from ambivalence to indifference, as they and their white neighbors typically maintained a formal social distance. As their outlying neighborhoods became increasingly African American into the postwar decades, middle-class blacks continued to develop their already rich organizational life and worried that the increasing numbers of less-prosperous newcomers arriving from the inner city or the American South might be unable or unwilling to maintain lifestyles resembling theirs. Setting forth self-congratulatory explanations for their own comparative success, many proved more likely to criticize their new neighbors’ property stewardship and parenting skills than to interpret neighborhood living conditions in the larger structural context of a contracting local economy.

In effect, outer-city neighborhoods for much of the twentieth century served upwardly mobile blacks as surrogate suburbs—places offering newer, better-quality housing and amenities compared to the inner city, where the African American masses had long been residentially confined. As certain bona fide suburbs like Shaker Heights, East Cleveland, and Warrensville Heights (among others) became increasingly accessible to the black middle class, the outer city began to lose its luster. African Americans of middling means who were increasingly able to move to the urban periphery—particularly in the decades following World War II—recognized the limits of their own agency in the face of institutionalized racial discrimination and structural inequality, but surely did not consider their new neighborhoods as the second ghetto theorized by historians following Arnold Hirsch. While this historiography has been valuable for its many insights into the larger macroeconomic and policy contexts fostering racial inequality, we should listen to the very different, neighborhood-level assessments of black agency made by upwardly mobile African Americans themselves, who were often more successful than the existing literature has implied.

Expanding the available housing options for African Americans often meant moving into solidly white neighborhoods, with the attendant potential for racial conflict. Accordingly, historians examining the growth of black settlement have emphasized the collective, violent retaliation whites not uncommonly visited upon African Americans who dared to cross the color line, in an attempt to halt (or at least delay) racial residential transition. Such violence was particularly intense in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Dallas, and Atlanta—not to mention Birmingham, where the ferocity of white resistance earned that city the nickname Bombingham. White resistance was especially rife over two particular intervals: in the years immediately following World War I and in the early 1950s, with Arnold Hirsch terming the latter period in Chicago an era of hidden violence.¹⁶ But on this question, too, Cleveland points toward a somewhat different model for understanding race-based demographic change in twentieth-century U.S. cities. Considering Cleveland’s reputation through the 1950s of supposed racial liberalism, the question of violent resistance deserves particular scrutiny.¹⁷ While Clevelanders’ tolerance was certainly exaggerated by the city’s political and business leadership as well as its social service establishment, the city did not experience anything remotely approaching the sustained and highly organized violence mounted by white residents in cities like Chicago and Detroit. While isolated incidents (mostly of vandalism) did indeed accompany the process of neighborhood demographic transition in Cleveland, none of these escalated into the massive resistance against residential integration that some scholars imply was practically as fierce toward residential integration in the urban North as to dismantling Jim Crow segregation in the South.¹⁸

Peripheral neighborhoods resembling the ones I study have been previously described as undefended¹⁹ in terms of how whites responded to demographic change, but this descriptor does not capture the complex dynamics at play, nor how these outlying black middle-class expansion areas fit into larger patterns of race relations on the metropolitan level. Whites reacted to black residential expansion on Cleveland’s urban periphery in a variety of ways over the course of the twentieth century, but in two distinct phases. In the earliest decades, the most common white response was indifference, although some whites did extend formal neighborly relations to blacks in these areas. However, when African Americans tried to use nearby public recreational facilities like swimming pools, whites commonly resorted to collective intimidation and violence. Early cross-racial encounters took these forms because outlying black residential enclaves were small and comparatively insular, and also because African Americans were settling on the still-developing urban periphery simultaneously with (or sometimes even before) white arrivals. Deed restrictions proved impractical in many of these vicinities, in part because Southern and Eastern Europeans living here were also considered undesirable by the mainstream real estate industry into the 1930s. This situation enabled African Americans both to acquire property and to gradually expand their existing settlements, which in turn convinced whites in the surrounding areas to more readily relinquish housing amid the slack Depression-era market. From World War II into the 1960s, as the presence of African Americans increased dramatically in these neighborhoods, a new set of white responses emerged. These included collaboration with black neighbors in organized efforts to stabilize communities and promote intergroup tolerance; the implementation of zoning changes to cordon off established African American settlements; scattered incidents of low-level violence, including property vandalism and fistfights among teenagers; expressions of resentment and withdrawal from participation in community life; and, most commonly, suburban flight. Thus, while neighborhood demographic transition in Cleveland was certainly characterized by tension, the process unfolded in a considerably less violent manner than in better-studied Chicago and Detroit.

A number of factors help explain Cleveland’s divergence from patterns seen in these nearby cities. First, in striking contrast to Chicago and Detroit, Cleveland’s civic and business leadership proved proactive and remarkably evenhanded in mediating race-based controversies, perhaps surprising considering assessments of the first several postwar mayors as mere caretaker figures presiding over a parochial, ward-based political process in a city where business elites often held considerable decision-making power.²⁰ Even before Cleveland established its Community Relations Board in early 1945—following the example of numerous other U.S. cities but the first to do so by means of an ordinance passed by city council—its mayors had a fairly good record of providing police protection for African American residents who dared to move into white neighborhoods or who sought access to public recreational facilities, in part due to pressure from local black leaders, activists, and journalists. The Community Relations Board repeatedly proved its efficacy in mediating racial conflicts, the most serious of which was the aforementioned 1953 Wendell and Genevieve Stewart case in which Mayor Thomas Burke personally intervened. This hands-on approach stands in stark contrast both to Detroit, where conservative Republican mayor Albert Cobo hamstrung the Mayor’s Interracial Committee in 1954 as a favor to exclusionary homeowners’ associations, and Chicago, where the Commission on Human Relations abandoned its former activist approach and acceded to white homeowner prejudice in the 1950s. Cleveland’s civic-business leadership approach produced far less contentious outcomes and served to burnish Cleveland’s national reputation at the time for comparatively placid race relations.²¹ Even as racial tensions subsequently mounted and ultimately broke out in the form of a 1966 riot in the city’s Hough neighborhood, business leaders made the bold choice to support Carl B. Stokes in his successful 1967 campaign to become the first black mayor of a major American city. In order to facilitate more rapid and effective responses to incidents of racial tension, Cleveland’s political and business leaders also worked closely with the local social service establishment and human relations groups, which over the years had institutionalized and coordinated their organizational infrastructure to a much greater extent than in other cities.²²

Second, ethnic and religious factors among white residents in Cleveland’s outer-city neighborhoods contributed to a less fractious pattern of demographic transition. Whereas many scholars have found uniformly negative white responses and argued that opposition to black incursion served to unite whites of different backgrounds—indeed, to solidify the category of white identity itself ²³—in Cleveland, ethnic and religious divisions shaped divergent responses and decisions. Whites of different backgrounds reacted more or less disconcertedly, some departing sooner and others later, with patterns hardly resembling unanimity. When interviewed by journalists and other contemporary researchers, some white residents (especially Jews and Protestants) claimed they had anticipated eventual demographic transition, and so were relatively unfazed. Others were cognizant of socioeconomic distinctions among blacks, which helped moderate their anxieties and extend the timing of their plans to move, even if this ultimately proved insufficient to convince them to stay. Even homeowners’ associations, often described as powerful gatekeepers inhibiting African American access and which typically included whites of diverse ethnic origins, proved largely ineffectual in Cleveland. In fact, whenever organized white homeowners did attempt to thwart black entry, city officials and the local social service establishment—along with African American and white resident activists—successfully countermobilized to offer alternatives in the form of interracial community councils, or else intervened to steer antiblockbusting efforts in nonracist directions. To be sure, racial tensions clearly accompanied the process of neighborhood demographic transition in Cleveland, with racialized anxieties sometimes finding expression in both politics and policy (for example, in battles over zoning and land development plans). However, these complex dynamics suggest we should pay more attention to such neighborhoods, instead of essentially footnoting them as undefended.²⁴ Indeed, Cleveland’s preponderance of neighborhoods where racial transition proceeded relatively smoothly should halt any notion that a prevailing, violent white solidarity was the norm.

The significance of Cleveland’s historic Jewish neighborhoods as potential areas for African American residential expansion cannot be underestimated. As of 1920, Cleveland’s Jewish population was the fourth largest in the country and was approximately twice the size of much-larger Detroit’s; at an estimated 100,000, some 13 percent of the city total, Cleveland’s proportion of Jewish population was second only to New York City’s at the time.²⁵ Numerous observers have noted that Jews did not violently resist black influx, in contrast to ethnic Roman Catholics whose more permanent, less portable religious edifices (to mention one factor) made them more prone to territoriality.²⁶ My study adds considerably to our knowledge of black-Jewish relations, a history that has been investigated with regard to the leadership and decades-long collaboration between both groups on civil rights issues, but that could certainly benefit from closer scrutiny at the neighborhood level.²⁷ Thorny topics receive detailed attention herein, including the presence of Jewish-owned businesses in African American neighborhoods, the role of black domestic workers in Jewish homes, black-Jewish collaboration in Communist Party activism, mutual prejudices between the two groups, and the scapegoating of Jewish residents by other whites for their decisions to relocate. Furthermore, this study confirms that Jews were generally more willing than other white ethnics to participate in community-based efforts to improve race relations, a commitment which sometimes outlasted their own departure for the suburbs.²⁸

As the white presence in these outer-city neighborhoods diminished into the mid-1960s, the predominant focus for tension increasingly shifted from interracial to intraracial and became specifically class-based. To understand the potential for social friction along these lines, a necessary first step is to briefly outline the complications surrounding African Americans’ historic understandings of the category middle class. Prior to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the class structure of black communities differed significantly from that in the white-dominated society at large. African Americans were almost completely shut out of white-collar work and were hindered from practicing skilled trades, apart from whatever employment black-owned businesses and communities generated. In cities, including Cleveland, a small number found positions in government service, notably at the Post Office. African American proprietors, as well as professionals like doctors and lawyers, typically earned less than their white counterparts because their clientele was poorer. Jobs that lacked overall societal prestige, such as waiters, chauffeurs, and doormen, were considered high status because these positions offered far better pay than the unskilled labor to which most black men were relegated, entailed direct responsibility and a degree of personal autonomy, and necessarily involved close contact with wealthy and powerful whites. Self-employment, even of a marginal sort, enabled some individuals to circumvent the racially discriminatory job market; for example, owning a truck could make one a small-scale, hauling entrepreneur. Income-pooling also characterized African American households early on, because most black women worked for wages; earnings contributed by wives not only boosted economic security but also worked as a potential lever of upward mobility. Thus families where the wife held a respectable position like schoolteacher were often deemed middle-class even if the husband worked at a menial job.²⁹ In considering these factors, I have borrowed Burton J. Bledstein’s descriptor middling to describe the class position of the black families studied here—thereby hoping to encompass the most flexible range of comparatively remunerative work available to some African Americans while recognizing that black class formation cannot be reduced simply to occupational structure, with the additional complication that what constituted middle class was simultaneously evolving in the society as a whole.³⁰

Homeownership was an increasingly significant marker of middle-class status in the early twentieth century, and a crucial goal for African Americans of middling status—even though its growing importance was in part premised on their formal exclusion from the newest, more heavily capitalized housing developments springing up in outer-city neighborhoods and suburbs during the 1910s and 1920s. Middle-class interest in housing as a long-term investment took shape in the context of government campaigns promoting new, modern housing; novel financing methods (notably mortgage bonds) that enabled pricier, larger-scale developments with houses preconnected to electrical and sewer grids; proliferating building code regulations aimed at curbing improvised, self-built housing; and a professionalizing real estate industry that sought to standardize assessment practices across markets, in no small part by defining African Americans (regardless of class) as a detrimental influence on housing prices and long-term neighborhood stability.³¹ But the reality was even more complicated. While Margaret Garb, in her study of Chicago in the decades leading up to World War I, does mention that property rights in housing, even in a racially segregated block, had become a mark of status for the black middle classes by the turn of the century, for the most part her findings underscore that not just middle-class whites, but even working-class immigrant homeowners increasingly internalized the dramatic shift in the social function of property rights in housing described above.³²

Amid solidifying antiblack assumptions with regard to property acquisition—and to a considerable degree as a result of such sentiments—African American homeowners pursuing upward mobility faced a fundamental predicament in the Great Migration era: the increasingly segregated, overcrowded, and deteriorating living conditions that accompanied the influx of Southern migrants into inner-city districts like Chicago’s Black Belt, providing a powerful incentive to relocate to the urban periphery insofar as this was possible. Mapping the locations of Cleveland’s 1,521 homeowning black households in 1930 (nearly 9 percent of the total) makes their situation immediately obvious, both confirming the enormity of racial segregation and highlighting those places where it was breached (Map I.1). Clearly, the vast majority of black homeowners remained concentrated in Cedar-Central,³³ the eighty-block district containing nearly 90 percent of the city’s African American population in that census year, particularly in its eastern reaches beyond East 79th Street. The houses here were newer, many built around the turn of the century by the prior Czech immigrant residents, although even in this portion of the neighborhood less than one-quarter of all black families owned their homes. In the Depression decade that followed, Cedar-Central’s ghettoization continued as Southern migrants kept arriving, as homes were further and further subdivided to accommodate more tenants, and as the city’s initial redevelopment projects in the district’s western portion displaced poorer residents eastward. In 1939, Home Owners Loan Corporation evaluators noted a concerted effort by the section’s better class colored to relocate to Glenville, where small numbers of African Americans had successfully purchased during the previous two decades.³⁴ Thus, even as they themselves were targeted by the new real estate regime, African American homebuyers were not immune to its logic; the future aspirations of upwardly mobile black Clevelanders lay in the city’s outer wards, where they would encounter working-class Southern and Eastern European settlements as well as modern subdivisions with race-based deed restrictions, at a time when the meaning and potential of homeownership was changing for everyone. That African Americans sought to act like any other property owners despite the discrimination directed against them is further illustrated by the fact that many of those who left behind neighborhoods like Cedar-Central retained their former homes as investment property.³⁵

Map I.1 Black Homeowners in Cleveland, 1930

Sources: U.S. Manuscript Census, 1930; Cleveland City Directory, 1930 (Cleveland City Directory Co., 1930); Property Deeds, Cuyahoga County Recorders Office, Cleveland, Ohio.

Two concepts offer deep insights into the historic worldviews and lived experience of African American middle-class homeowners in neighborhoods resembling the ones examined here: Earl Lewis’s home sphere and the politics of respectability as discussed by Victoria Wolcott, among others³⁶—although this book makes clear that these concepts continued to have relevance for much longer than scholars have allowed. For Lewis, the home sphere held special significance for black Southerners facing political and economic setbacks under Jim Crow and essentially represented an introspective turn to concentrate energies on improving the material living conditions in African American neighborhoods over which blacks had more control. However, he concludes, simmering discontent during the Great Depression and subsequent gains during World War II led to a reawakening of black interest in formal politics and labor union activism, ultimately shifting attention away from the home sphere. As discussed by Wolcott, respectability was the basis of a long-standing though eventually discredited agenda whereby prosperous African Americans—and especially women—from the national leadership down to the neighborhood level attempted to uplift the black masses by promoting behavior consistent with norms of white middle-class propriety, a strategy through which they simultaneously hoped to garner increased respect within the wider society. With a timing neatly paralleling Lewis’s study, Wolcott traces the decline of this emphasis to the 1930s and 1940s, a result of black working-class resentment at attempts to police their behavior, the fact that the strategy ultimately failed to earn African Americans much more respect from whites, moves by upwardly mobile black families to outlying neighborhoods where they were more exposed to white racism than to their less-fortunate brethren, and, finally, the rise of a more confrontational, masculinist black protest politics from the New Deal into World War II.

My research makes clear that a black middle-class emphasis on respectability extended well into the postwar decades, at least on the local, neighborhood level, and that the home sphere continued as a locus for reform efforts. Most important, even after escaping inner-city neighborhoods like Cedar-Central, the dynamics of racialized housing markets ensured that middle-class blacks as early as the 1950s were confronted with the reality of less-affluent African Americans moving to the periphery. In the outlying neighborhoods of Cleveland, middle-class African Americans developed innovative new organizational forms and means of defining what constituted proper behavior; furthermore, women continued to play particularly important roles here.³⁷ Having limited suburban options before the 1980s, black middle-class residents formulated an amazingly broad and consistent reform agenda aimed at preserving acceptable living conditions. By extending Lewis’s concept of the home sphere, we can trace the long arc of this reform agenda and accompanying worldview and connect the various efforts to mobilize neighborhoods around quality-of-life issues that subsequent scholars have so far discussed only in piecemeal fashion, or else have imagined to be a far more recent development.³⁸ Place-based reform across Cleveland’s outlying black middle-class neighborhoods encompassed housing upkeep, business revitalization, traffic safety, trash removal, and efforts to reduce liquor availability, juvenile delinquency, vice, crime, and more. On some such matters, reform-minded residents chalked up notable successes; on others, the underlying structural factors proved too immense to be overcome. Sometimes these efforts involved moralizing or exhibited an explicit class bias; at other times the approaches were more pragmatic and the analysis of underlying causes astute. Upwardly mobile middle-class blacks did not always recognize that less well-off newcomers to their neighborhoods were often motivated by similar concerns with livability. But in the end, their various attempts to take charge of their lives and communities contributed to the long-term viability of these neighborhoods and the city as a whole. Even today, well past the point where certain suburbs opened wide to African American homebuyers, these areas retain a core, though generally elderly, middle-class and homeowning component.

The structure of the book is as follows. Chapter 1 uncovers how middling black families initially gained access to the outlying neighborhoods of Glenville and Mount Pleasant, with descriptions of their communities’ socioeconomic structures and their residents’ lifestyles and interactions with nearby whites. A final section assesses their ability to successfully maintain a toehold at the periphery despite the economic setbacks of the Great Depression. Chapter 2 follows these same two neighborhoods from World War II into the early postwar years, examining wartime racial tensions, the organization of community councils seeking to mobilize residents along interracial lines, and the departure of many Jewish residents and institutions up to about 1950. Despite the tense racial climate, Glenville and Mount Pleasant avoided overt racial conflicts to emerge as black middle-class strongholds. Chapter 3 shifts even further to the periphery to probe the origins of the Lee-Seville enclave, before 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 in the two decades after World War II. The topics of black builders and developers are covered, as well as the emergence by the late 1950s of white developers willing to build for African Americans, along with how African Americans managed to gain access to the quasi-suburban Lee-Harvard neighborhood. Chapter 4 compares the various patterns of racial residential transition and the race relations accompanying the process, in Glenville and the various neighborhoods of Southeast Cleveland, finding variations mostly traceable to the white residents’ ethnic and class composition as well as the built environment. Chapter 5 considers the structural factors and life dilemmas upwardly mobile black Clevelanders faced even after achieving geographic mobility, and investigates the dynamic whereby less-affluent African American families steadily moved into new, outlying black middle-class neighborhoods. It also investigates the intraracial, cross-class frictions that ensued around issues of property upkeep, personal comportment, child rearing, and leisure-time practices. Finally, chapter 6 looks at the ambitious, nearly all-encompassing reform agenda that middle-class activist residents of these various neighborhoods went on to mount, in an attempt to maintain what they considered an acceptable quality of life.

1: The Roots of Upward Mobility

OUTLYING BLACK SETTLEMENT BEFORE 1940

Fully one-third of the approximately 350 African American families living in Cleveland’s outlying Mount Pleasant neighborhood owned their own homes in 1930, a reminder that some black Southerners who came to Northern cities during the Great Migration acquired land and homes fairly quickly. The challenging nature of property record research, however, has impeded sustained historical inquiry. In fact, only three of the property-owning Mount Pleasant households listed in that year’s census are readily traceable in the public record.¹ Fortunately, these three families were fairly typical; details of their lives mirror the experiences of African Americans on the urban periphery, at a remove from the dense and increasingly segregated inner-city districts solidifying at this time. All three couples were Southern-born, as were 70 percent of all black Mount Pleasant spouses in 1930. All three husbands occupied upper-working-class positions, thereby providing a scaffold for economic security and upward mobility unavailable to most black families at the time. Two of the three wives also worked for wages, further bolstering their families’ economic security, as did approximately one-fifth of black Mount Pleasant wives in 1930. All three couples obtained mortgage financing to build their new homes, as did virtually all African American homeowners in this outlying enclave. In addition, one bought additional vacant lots and rental properties elsewhere, also not unusual for middling black families prior to the onset of the Great Depression.

William G. Slaughter, born around 1872, was the first to arrive in Mount Pleasant, getting a building permit in September 1916 for his two-story house at 3303 East 130th Street worth $2,200. The downtown Citizens House Building Co. contracted to build the house, as it did for other black owners in the neighborhood. Slaughter’s first listing in the 1916 city directory was as an auto operator (chauffeur) for a presumably white household in the still-posh Hough neighborhood. Over the next three years, his occupation was listed variously as houseman, butler, and, as of 1920, chef in a private home. The census additionally reveals that his wife, Gladys, worked as a maid, that they had no children, and that they were both born in Virginia. Slaughter worked as a chef for the next several years, but in 1924 he was listed as a porter. In 1926, he tried his hand at insurance, before returning to work as a chef for two more years. In 1928, he first entered carpentry, and he was classed as a carpenter in the 1930 census; Gladys by then worked as a cook for a private family.² Slaughter’s work history reveals both versatility and also suggests something of a restless personality, while his experience typifies the overall striving for economic security by upwardly mobile black families of this era.

Clarence Scott, born around 1890, arrived next, filing a building permit in January 1917 to construct his two-story wooden house at 3255 East 128th Street, valued at an estimated $1,600. His name first appears in the 1918 city directory, as a teamster. Scott was listed variously as a teamster, a driver, and a carpenter for the next five years. The 1920 census reveals further that like many black Mount Pleasant residents, he was a garbage worker for the city; his wife, Mattie, was listed as having no occupation, and both of them were born in South Carolina, as were the oldest two of their four children. In 1925, Scott entered cement work, and he appeared in the 1930 census as a cement contractor. Although their household now included eight children, Mattie still did not work for wages.³ Like Slaughter, Scott sought entry into the more remunerative building trades, in his case leaving a strenuous and dirty occupation, sanitation work, in which African Americans nevertheless had a relatively secure foothold. Scott was economically successful enough to support his large family on a single income, even acquiring additional properties.

Last to arrive was Luther P. Smith, born around 1882, filing a building permit in May 1923 for his two-family house at 3234 East 130th Street. A carpenter by trade, Smith listed himself as both architect and contractor for the property worth an estimated $5,000. Smith listed his home address as 10622 Arthur Avenue, another house he had purchased that same year in the eastern reaches of the Cedar-Central district, home to some 90 percent of Cleveland’s black population in 1930. In November 1923, Smith also applied for a permit to build a garage and lumber shed on his Mount Pleasant lot, where his house must not yet have been finished because he still listed Arthur Avenue as his address. Smith may have arrived in Cleveland as early as 1916, when a laborer with his name first appeared in the city directory living at 3646 Central Avenue, in the heart of the city’s largest black settlement. According to the 1920 census, Smith was working as a carpenter, living as a roomer with his wife, Margaret (who had no occupation), at 10919 Cedar Avenue in the vast black residential district’s far eastern end; both of them were native Georgians. By 1925, Smith was listed as both a carpenter and a contractor. As of 1930, census records showed that Margaret worked as a caretaker in a fraternity house.⁴

The property transactions made by these three households illuminate important dimensions of their lives and suggest a nascent black middle-class experience heretofore little explored by historians. As was typical in the pre–New Deal mortgage market, these owners were repeat borrowers, taking out a total of fourteen mortgages before 1930 on the three Mount Pleasant houses mentioned above. The Slaughters had the fewest, at three. In April 1915, they signed a note for $300 with Blanche M. Mach—the previous white, Protestant owner and wife of a local lawyer—to acquire the lot. Interest on the loan was 6 percent, and the Slaughters paid it off by February 1916. That