Changing neighborhoods: Race and upward mobility in southeast Cleveland, 1930--1980

Racial residential transition dramatically transformed settlement patterns in the urban North following World War II. While incorporating recent research which has stressed the importance of underlying structural factors in this process, and particularly institutionalized racial discrimination in lending practices, the current study investigates and compares how neighborhood residents from different racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds subjectively perceived the accompanying demographic shifts with regard to the question of socioeconomic mobility. Two overarching themes inform the work: that individuals constantly seek to upgrade their living conditions as economic circumstances permit, and that housing---in terms of its location and type---is a key expression of socioeconomic status. The study focuses on an outlying cluster of neighborhoods in the southeastern section of Cleveland, Ohio, over the period 1930--1980; this area, with its comparatively newer housing stock, became the primary destination for the city's upwardly mobile black middle class in the postwar decades.;Notably, however, several African American residential enclaves already existed in Southeast Cleveland around the turn of the century, when the area first began to be developed and settled mainly by Southern and Eastern European immigrant families leaving older, central-city neighborhoods. Far removed from the downtown district where 90 percent of Cleveland's African American population was consolidated as of 1930, these enclaves not only offered footholds for black newcomers to the area, but additionally ensured that Southern and Eastern European residents---themselves on a trajectory of assimilation and upward mobility---had a degree of contact with African Americans from early on. Southeast Cleveland largely escaped the spectacular violence that accompanied racial residential transition in other locales, although unmistakable racial overtones were evident in struggles over zoning and the placement of public housing. The way this process played out in Southeast Cleveland suggests the need for a closer look at analogous cases that historians have so far passed over as "undefended neighborhoods." The study concludes by examining the class tensions that emerged after these neighborhoods became overwhelmingly African American, as expressed in the quality-of-life reform agenda through which active middle-class black residents attempted to stem the effects of the unfolding urban crisis.