All are welcome to attend, and light refreshments will be provided. An annual report from board and staff members will be followed by “Historic African American Settlements Facing Shaker Heights: Mount Pleasant, Lee-Harvard, and Lee-Seville,” a keynote presentation from Dr. Todd M. Michney:

Several historic African American settlements arose in close proximity to Shaker Heights from its early history onward, with one of them — located in Cleveland’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood, formerly in the Village of Newburgh — actually predating the city’s founding in 1912.  Not only did the presence of these African American communities factor significantly into subsequent patterns of population dynamics, as Shaker itself got its first Black residents starting in the 1950s.  These settlements also shared economic ties to Shaker, served as distinctive models of suburban-style living, and in the case of Mount Pleasant saw an earlier attempt at interracial, neighborhood-based mobilization that later made Shaker Heights nationally-famous as an example of ‘managed’ racial integration.

About the Speaker: Todd M. Michney is an Associate Professor in the School of History and Sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  He was born and raised in Cleveland and is the author of Surrogate Suburbs: Black Upward Mobility and Neighborhood Change in Cleveland, 1900-1980 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017).