The West End: What Urban Renewal Destroyed
Ohio
By the nineteen twenties, the West End was the center of Black Cincinnati. It had a YMCA, Black-owned banks, barbershops, churches, newspapers, and small businesses that had been built by people who had largely been excluded from the city's white commercial districts. It was not wealthy. Parts of it were crowded and aging. But it was a community with its own economy, its own institutions, and its own internal architecture of belonging.
The city saw something different when it looked at the West End. In nineteen forty-eight, Cincinnati adopted an urban renewal plan that designated large portions of the neighborhood for clearance. The plan was called the Kenyon-Barr Renewal. Officials described the housing as substandard, used language that described residents as degenerate, and promised that demolished families would be relocated to equivalent housing. The promises were not kept.
Between nineteen fifty-nine and nineteen seventy-three, roughly four hundred fifty acres were demolished. Interstate Seventy-Five was built directly through the heart of the neighborhood. Approximately twenty-seven thousand people were displaced. Ninety-seven percent of them were Black. The displaced residents were told their move was temporary. The neighborhoods they were sent to, Mount Auburn, Avondale, Walnut Hills, were not equipped to absorb them. The city did not build the replacement housing it had promised.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Cincinnati NAACP documented what was lost. A nineteen fifty-eight letter from the NAACP executive secretary to city officials noted the casual approach to resettlement and the refusal of banks and developers to build for Black families. The displacement was legal. It was also the deliberate destruction of generational wealth that had taken half a century to accumulate.
In June twenty twenty-three, Cincinnati City Council formally apologized for the West End demolition. The families who were displaced are not gathered to receive it. The wealth that was lost has not been restored. The highway is still there.
