The Great Migration Reaches Cleveland

Between nineteen ten and nineteen seventy, approximately six million Black Americans left the South. They went north, and they went west, following the industrial jobs the First and Second World Wars opened to them, following the railroads, following letters from relatives who had already made the move. Cleveland received a substantial share of them.

The city's Black population grew from about eight thousand in nineteen hundred to over two hundred fifty thousand by nineteen seventy. Most of those families settled on the east side, in Hough and Glenville and the Central Avenue corridor, neighborhoods where residential covenants and real-estate redlining kept Black residents confined regardless of their income or occupation. The city that was opening its steel mills and refineries to Black workers was not opening its white neighborhoods to Black families.

What grew within those boundaries was dense and remarkable. Central Avenue, the neighborhood's main commercial and cultural street, was compared to Harlem's Lenox Avenue in the nineteen forties and fifties. Black-owned businesses, newspapers, law firms, medical practices, and social institutions created a parallel city within the city, operating under legal constraint and producing, despite that constraint, a cultural life of genuine vitality.

Karamu House was part of it. The Gilpin Players were part of it. The Black press in Cleveland documented it. The churches that had migrated north along with their congregations, bringing the music and the theology and the social infrastructure of the South, anchored it.

The constraints were real and severe. But what was built inside them, in Cleveland as in Chicago as in Detroit as in Pittsburgh, was not a consolation prize. It was the world as the people who lived in it chose to make it.