Oak Hill and the African American History of Cedar Rapids

The neighborhood east of downtown known as Oak Hill Jackson holds one of the less-told chapters of Cedar Rapids history. In the early decades of the twentieth century, as the city's industries drew workers from across the country, Black Americans arriving from two primary places, the coal-mining town of Buxton, Iowa, and the Deep South, settled in Oak Hill and built a community under conditions of deliberate restriction. By the nineteen twenties a prominent Cedar Rapids businessman described Oak Hill as the area where the Negroes have been confined.

Housing in the rest of the city was effectively closed to Black residents through custom and covenant. Within those limits, the neighborhood developed its own institutions: the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Mount Zion Baptist Church, and roughly a dozen other congregations. A community formed around what was available.

Work, for most Black men in Oak Hill by the nineteen forties, meant Wilson Meat Packing, where they were assigned the most physically demanding and least desirable positions, the labor others refused. This was a recognizable pattern across Midwestern meatpacking cities, where the hierarchy of the kill floor reflected the hierarchy outside it. Urban renewal in the late nineteen sixties brought demolition to Oak Hill, as it did to Black neighborhoods in dozens of American cities, clearing blocks under federal antipoverty programs that too often replaced community with vacancy.

Residents were dispersed and buildings leveled. Today Oak Hill Jackson is experiencing a measured return, new housing, returning businesses, community investment. The African American Museum of Iowa, which documents the full arc of Black life in the state, keeps the record of what was there and why it mattered.