Black Sub-Urbanization: Moving Up in Cleveland Lee Harvard Tour with Dr. Todd Michney

Cleveland’s upwardly mobile African American middle class sought out living space at the urban periphery starting in the early decades of the twentieth century, in an attempt to escape the overcrowding that fostered an increasingly untenable quality of life at the city’s urban core. The earliest, and as of 1930 the largest outlying African American enclave took shape in Mount Pleasant, where African Americans bought land and built houses in an otherwise heavily Southern and Eastern European (mostly Jewish and Italian) area. An even further-outlying settlement emerged in the 1920s to the southeast, near the intersection of Lee and Seville Roads, in what was at the time the separate municipality of Miles Heights (which briefly had an African American mayor from 1929-32). After World War II, African American-owned construction companies – as well as a handful of white ones – built houses for black buyers in this vicinity on vacant land south of Miles Avenue, and in 1953, the first African American family purchased a house in the “suburbanesque” Lee-Harvard neighborhood. Building upon the Cleveland Restoration Society’s ongoing community history initiative in the area, tour leader Todd Michney – a Professor at Georgia Tech and author of Surrogate Suburbs: Black Upward Mobility and Neighborhood Change in Cleveland, 1900-1980 – will explain these various areas’ significance in terms of city planning and the built environment, the meaning they held for African American residents in terms of prestige, the record of black home- and institution-building, and the observable patterns of interracial encounter and race relations. The tour will conclude with a summary of Cleveland’s African American suburbanization into the present.