www.teachingcleveland.org
Cleveland Magazine article about Charles V. Carr. “Charlie Carr, city councilman for 30 years, got his start by promising to protect the numbers racket. The skillful, wily leader also helped make Cleveland the birthplace of the black political rights movement. “
The link is here
Cleveland Magazine article from April 1989. “A generation of young and successful black adults has begun to challenge the power and prestige of the forefathers who made their lives better and the expectations greater. “
The link is here
“Straddling the Color Line: Social and Political Power of African American Elites in Charleston, New Orleans, and Cleveland, 1880-1920” by Kim M. Carey, Doctoral Dissertation, 2013
Kent State University
The download is here (1.6mg)
By Minorities living in Cleveland confront an “opportunity chasm” in high-tech entrepreneurship and education that freezes many out of today’s innovation economy, a recent study found. But 160 years ago it was a different story.
On the eve of the Civil War, Cleveland was a mecca for black entrepreneurs and scholars from a handful of towns in North Carolina where free African-Americans could acquire skills, businesses and property — or just purchase their own freedom, or that of family members.
These families’ journey to Cleveland is more than just an interesting historical footnote.
It also carries potential lessons on how a zeal to excel in education and business born of deep historical wrongs can help elevate individuals and sometimes even entire communities.
By 1860, 39 of Cleveland’s 176 “mulatto” or mixed-race families were from North Carolina, the HeritageQuest database at the Cleveland Public Library reveals. These new arrivals represented a combined wealth of nearly $21,000 — roughly $600,000 in today’s money — the census data show. That’s doubly astounding given that those assets would have mostly been acquired in the slaveholding South.
Of the 28 mixed-race North Carolina families with working-age men in Cleveland by 1860, 27 worked skilled trades, including as plasterers, shoemakers, barbers and tailors.
Descendants of John Carruthers Stanly, one of the wealthiest black Americans in pre-Civil War North Carolina, were among those drawn in the 1850s from the port town of New Bern, N.C. — lured in part by Oberlin College and its educational opportunities for young black women and men.
Stanly, who died in 1845, had been freed in 1795 by white owners Alexander and Lydia Stewart, who were friends and neighbors of the man widely believed to be Stanly’s father — wealthy privateer and plantation owner John Wright Stanly.
The Stewarts ensured their former slave was trained as a barber so he could support himself. According to a 1990 article by Loren Schweninger, “John Carruthers Stanly and the Anomaly of Black Slaveholding,” (pdf) Stanly turned proceeds from his highly successful barber shop into profitable investments in plantations, land and slaves — and, starting in 1800, bought his five children and wife out of slavery and freed them.
One of the first he freed was his son John Stewart, born in about 1799, whom he middle-named for his former owners.
John Stewart Stanly eventually ran a popular school for free blacks in New Bern — education being a powerful beacon for previously enslaved black Americans who by law had been denied the right to learn to read or write.
In 1852, John Stewart’s daughter Sarah enrolled in Oberlin, leaving two years later without graduating. She later became a Cleveland schoolteacher and anti-slavery activist.
Sarah was the first of a handful of other “New Bernian” women of color to attend Oberlin, including Ann N. Hazle and her sister Elizabeth, daughters of New Bern’s free blacksmith and baker, Richard Hazle (also spelled Hazel).
Ann N. Hazle, daughter of free black baker and blacksmith Richard Hazle of New Bern, N.C., became only the third African-American woman to complete Oberlin College’s literary course in 1855. The Hazle family moved to Cleveland two years later. This photo of Oberlin College graduates of 1855 is from the Oberlin College Archives. Hazle is third from the left in the middle row. Ann Hazle was only the third black woman to complete Oberlin’s “literary course” when she graduated in 1855.
This Oberlin connection proved telling as anti-black attitudes hardened in New Bern. In about 1857, John Stewart Stanly moved his entire family to Cleveland in company with many of his free black neighbors of means.
John Patterson Green, the first black politician elected in Cleveland, who’s credited with inventing Labor Day, also moved from New Bern with his family in 1857, when he was 12. Green later noted in his evocative, wryly written memoirs, “Fact Stranger than Fiction,” that blacksmith-baker Richard Hazle — also part of this migration to Cleveland — was one of the few dark-skinned blacks to attain wealth in New Bern during the period of slavery; typically the path to money-earning apprenticeships was eased by a white relation.
Green recounts vividly what life was like in New Bern for an inquisitive, impoverished but free black boy in the early 1850s — full of injustices that no doubt contributed to his later decision to become a politician and lawyer in Cleveland.
John Patterson Green was 12 when his widowed mother moved the family from New Bern, N.C., to Cleveland in 1857. In 1873, he became the first African-American elected to political office in Cuyahoga County, as justice of the peace, and was later the first black to serve in the Ohio Senate. In his memoirs, “Fact Stranger Than Fiction,” he wrote that his father’s parents were John Stanly Jr., the white North Carolina congressman, and a slave named Sarah Rice. This uncredited photograph is taken from his memoirs. Green’s mother, Temperance Durden Green, was so light-skinned that on most census sheets she was demarcated as white, a consequence of the complex and exploitative race relations of the era. In fact, her son’s surname should not have been Green at all. He was actually a Stanly.
As John Patterson Green tells it in his memoirs, his grandfather was John Carruthers Stanly’s white half-brother, John Stanly Jr., a federalist congressman who also was a fierce political opponent of Richard Dobbs Spaight, a signer of the Constitution — whom Stanly later killed in a famous 1802 duel that caused North Carolina to outlaw dueling. Spaight was also the white slaveowner of Sarah Rice, with whom the congressman had fathered a child — so Rice found it prudent to give their son the last name of Green, not Stanly.
Sarah Rice was eventually freed by Spaight’s descendants. But her son, Johnnie Rice Green, remained in slavery, learning the trade of tailoring — and earning enough to buy his own freedom for $1,000 in 1837, when he was in his mid-40s, and about to marry Temperance Durden, a free black woman, as his second wife.
Temperance Durden Green’s free black relations from what is now Fayetteville, N.C., also journeyed north as part of this 1857 migration to Cleveland.
Among them was the father of Charles Waddell Chesnutt, who was born in Cleveland in June 1858 and later returned as a married adult to pursue his career as a writer and activist for African-American rights.
Chesnutt’s brilliant books and short stories reflected the complex racial identity of men like himself, with feet in both the white and black worlds.
An inscription by John Patterson Green inside a copy of his memoirs, “Fact Stranger Than Fiction,” which he presented to then-Ohio Gov. Myers Y. Cooper in 1930. It includes his rendition, in the Greek alphabet, of a saying he attributes to James Hadley, a 19th-century Yale professor of Greek. The arrival in the 1850s of a large number of free black families from North Carolina with money to spend and marketable skills made an immediate impact on Cleveland, as many bought homes and opened small barbershops, bakeries, carpentry and masonry shops, tailoring establishments and the like.
Barbering had become a key vector to prosperity for a whole generation of free black men — as chronicled by historian Douglas Walter Bristol Jr. in his 2009 book, “Knights of the Razor; Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom.”
And what these barbers craved — as did John Carruthers Stanly’s descendants in Cleveland — was education for their children, the education that most of them had been denied.
The first black man to receive a degree from Oberlin College was George B. Vashon, son of a successful Pittsburgh barber and prominent abolitionist, John Vashon.
The first black woman to complete Oberlin’s literary course, Lucy Stanton, was born in Cleveland to a black barber. Her stepfather was wealthy barber John Brown, who left a fortune estimated at $40,000 when he died in 1869, making him Cleveland’s wealthiest black resident of the era, according to scholar Bessie House-Soremekun in “Confronting the Odds: African American Entrepreneurship in Cleveland, Ohio.”
Frances Stanly, the younger sister of Sarah, married two wealthy barbers in succession. Her second husband, James E. Benson, parlayed political connections to become one of the earliest black trustees of Ohio University.
One of the barbers who worked at Benson’s barbershop in the fancy Weddell House hotel was George Myers — who used that job to befriend some of Cleveland’s wealthiest movers and shakers, including The Plain Dealer’s Liberty Holden, who helped him buy the barbershop in the newly-opened Hollenden Hotel in the late 1880s. Myers’ political influence became so extensive, according to historian Bristol, that his detractors called his patronage system “Little Black Tammany.”
For many of these craftsmen, an overarching goal was for their children to reach the professional ranks that had been largely barred to them — an ambition that carried through to later generations as well.
One Stanly descendant — Dr. Catherine Deaver Lealtad, born in 1895 in Cleveland — became the first black graduate of Macalester College in Minnesota, earning a double degree with honors in chemistry and history in 1915. Lealtad got her medical degree in France and at the outbreak of World War II was commissioned as a major in the U.S. Army.
All four of Charles W. Chesnutt’s children graduated from college, including his three daughters, who all became teachers. His son became a dentist. Chesnutt’s oldest child, Ethel, a Smith College graduate, married Edward Christopher Williams, the valedictorian of his Western Reserve University Adelbert College class in 1892, who was widely acknowledged before his untimely death in 1929 to be the best-trained black professional librarian of his day.
But the world has changed. So it’s this enduring tilt in the African-American community toward professional aspirations over entrepreneurism and the sciences that Randell McShepard, the RPM executive who is board chairman of the PolicyBridge think tank in Cleveland, is trying to counter. A study the think tank did last year revealed that minorities in Cuyahoga County are grossly underrepresented in high-tech fieldspoised for explosive growth, such as the biosciences, advanced energy and propulsion.
“Twenty percent of the population in the county is minority; less than 2 percent are represented in those high-growth sectors,” McShepard said in an interview last week.
“Back in those days, if you were frugal and managed your money well, you could maybe amass a little bit of real estate and open up a few barber shops and make yourself a fortune,” he added. “But in today’s economy, those opportunities are few. The technology field is literally exploding; we need to make sure that we are inclusive.”
McShepard does take one lesson from the saga of the Stanly and Chesnutt families, however: “We need to want it as much if not more as they did back then. The irony is with all the gains we have made, we find ourselves as dependent as ever on high-quality education to compete, and to be the entrepreneurs the DNA tells us we can be.”
Sullivan is The Plain Dealer’s editorial page editor.
To reach Elizabeth Sullivan: esullivan@plaind.com, 216-999-6153
From the Ohio Historical Society
These articles are based on this 2011 Master’s Degree Thesis written by John Baden. The thesis is here (4.3mg pdf download)
RESIDUAL NEIGHBORS JEWISH-AFRICAN AMERICAN INTERACTIONS IN CLEVELAND FROM 1900 to 1970
Part 1
Getting by Together: African American-Jewish Interactions in Cleveland 1900-1938
by John Baden
Although there are many excellent works of Cleveland history, they tend to portray its ethnic groups in isolation from one another; as do Cleveland’s numerous ethnic events and landmarks. Despite widespread racism and segregation, though, ethnic groups often interacted with and relied on each other. This essay examines some of the once widespread interactions between African Americans and Jews in Cleveland proper between 1900 and 1938. While some interactions between African Americans and Jews were deliberate (especially partnerships created to combat racism), most were unintentional products of daily life. Yet, as we will see, historical forces profoundly shaped even the most mundane interactions like going to the store.
Large-scale African American – Jewish interactions began in the early nineteenth century. Prior to this time, African Americans and Jews had miniscule populations in the city. Jews, on the other hand entered Cleveland in large numbers during the late eighteenth century and twentieth century. By 1910, there were 60,000 Jews in Cleveland and only 8,448 African Americans.[1] On the eve of World War I (1910-14), most of the city’s African Americans and Jews congregated around Central Avenue, which is located just east of downtown. The neighborhood that bears this avenue’s name, Central, was a diverse and integrated urban community. Apart from being home to the largest number of Jews and African Americans, it was also home to Big Italy and other ethnic groups as well.[2] Thus, residents needed to interact with each other at neighborhood institutions like grocery stores for sustenance.
Figure 1 A mapquest.com map of Cleveland’s Central neighborhood.
Each migrant brought with them the talents and trades they acquired in their previous home. The capital and social status each person brought with them to the neighborhood often influenced their interactions with others. Some of these trades like small-scale store managing transferred well to life in urban Cleveland. Others, like agriculture or mining were much harder to convert into a viable trade in such a dense urban environment. Anti-Semitic laws made it rare for Jews to engage in agricultural work in Europe, while African Americans had been forced to perform it for several centuries. Although most Jews were not wealthy, a few brought significant wealth with them to the country, and invested in community programs like the Hebrew Free Loan Association. These all gave Jews a number of assets that allowed many of them to transition into life in Cleveland more successfully than many other groups. Before long, many Jews had found success in the retail and the garment industry. African Americans, on the other hand, had few of these advantages, and faced even more discrimination, which shackled social mobility for most. Despite these differences, African Americans and Jews often lived in the same neighborhoods for much of the early twentieth century.
Because of the aforementioned advantages many Jews had, African American – Jewish relations often unfolded as client-patron relationships. African Americans often relied on Jewish leaders for commercial goods, credit, jobs, political patronage, and “protection” in the underground economy. Many Jews in Cleveland, in turn, relied on African American customers and employees at their establishments for their livelihoods.
World War I was a turning point for African American-Jewish interactions. The war caused great labor shortages, and factory owners began employing African Americans. After this, thousands of Southern African Americans left their homes for new ones in Cleveland’s Central neighborhood. Consequently for African American – Jewish relations, African Americans entered Central in large numbers at the very time (roughly 1914-1925) most Jews were leaving.[3] Most Jews had lived there for some time, and were now able to move on to better neighborhoods by the 1920s. Their residences were then occupied by African American migrants from the South who became the area’s new residents, and customers.[4] Many Jews who left Central, however, held on to assets and businesses that they operated in their old neighborhood. This included many grocery stores, shops, and property. For example, 62-73 percent of grocers on Central Avenue were still Jewish in 1920, and 45.5 to 58 percent in 1930, after most Jews had left the neighborhood.[5] Prejudice from white society in general made it very difficult for African Americans to open competitive institutions. As a result, African Americans continued to use Jewish-owned services in the neighborhood, ensuring such businesses would be profitable for decades after most Jews had moved out.
Selling conditions in segregated communities were not consumer friendly. Unfortunately, prices were often high for the quality of goods or property rendered. For instance housing prices were high, largely because non-Jewish whites had shut African Americans out of most of the city’s housing market, and refused loans to African Americans. Therefore, supply was short for commodities and services in high demand. Like nearly everyone who owned property or stores, most people in Central probably sold for the highest price they could. It was a coincidence of history and socioeconomic factors, that Jews owned much of Central’s businesses and property, and were disproportionately selling to African Americans. In effect, Jewish business and property owners often became middlemen between African Americans and white Christian society.[6]
Patron-client relationships between Jews and African Americans also developed in the spheres of politics and organized crime. Until African Americans had enough voters to elect their own councilmen, Republican political boss Maurice Maschke (who was Jewish) developed a patronage partnership with several notable African Americans. Maschke allied with vice-king Albert “Starlight” Boyd, an African American, to deliver black votes to the Republican Party in exchange for modest patronage and other favors. Maschke also supported African American Thomas W. Fleming’s successful bids for city council and allowed Fleming to dispense a modest amount of patronage into the black community. In turn, Maschke played a role as an advocate for the Republican Party to take a stronger civil rights stand, and played a role in the appointment of Fleming’s wife, Lethia to the Republican National Executive Committee and Colored Women’s Bureau of the Republican National Committee.[7]
The client-patron relationship between African Americans and Jews also extended to organized crime. Aspiring criminals in Central had to either push out existing crime networks or become their clients. One of the most contested under-ground niches during the 1930s was the “numbers “racket in Central’s African American economy. Somewhat mirroring the Maschke-Boyd relationship mentioned above, Jewish American crime boss Shondor Birns helped bring African American numbers runners and prostitution workers under his patronage. At this time, Birns represented the Cleveland mafia which was a product of a merger between the local Jewish criminal syndicate and local Italian mafia. Around 1932, Birns helped secure an agreement where the Cleveland mafia would no longer harass African American numbers runners and secure police protection for them in exchange for a forty percent take in gambling operations and three dollars a week from each prostitute.[8][9] This arrangement appears to have lasted until the 1950s.
These examples in the underworld demonstrate that many African Americans who interacted with one another often did so for self-interest. Most were likely making the most of a situation that prejudice had dealt them. Shondor Birns, for example, grew up as an impoverished orphan, and in many ways was a victim of the generations of anti-Semitism that wrecked devastating poverty on many Jews. In the United States, though, lighter skin tone and a measure of social acceptance allowed many Jewish-Americans to earn a living by rendering services to an ethnic group more marginalized than themselves. Similarly, African American gangsters did not necessarily “choose” to be Birns’s clients. The existing mafia, however, had too many weapons, political alliances, and connections with drug suppliers for African Americans to compete. Therefore, African Americans gangsters became clients of “off-white” patrons in order to scratch out a living in a racist society. As had been the case in commercial and political spheres, Jews often served as “middlemen” between white society and the marginalized African American community.[10]
Although the patron-client relationship that developed in Cleveland and other cities throughout the North helped many African Americans with services, some grew resentful of their predicament. Racism continued to severely limit most African Americans’ opportunity, and most likely believed they would no longer need “middlemen” if racism ended. Evidence suggests that most of these critics acknowledged Jews had not created the situation, but resented that the profits made from such arrangements.[11]
Cleveland’s African American newspaper, The Call & Post, offered complaints about relying on non-African American businesses throughout the 1930s. One article for example complained that the lack of African American businesses in Cleveland meant that African Americans would receive little benefit from the upcoming nation Elks Lodge convention. The columnist stated, “the Jew…in his typical way will foresee the coming of the Elk money and start planning for them…while the colored man will sit by watching him.” Thus, African Americans needed to “open up a decent colored night club where we and the Elks can go so we can stop patronizing the Jew who in reality want us but only our money so that he can build himself a fine home on the heights and then not permit you to live next to him but only work in the kitchen.”[12]
Despite these anti-Semitic comments, the article resulted in more ambiguity than hostility. The following week, the columnist apologized. He wrote that many people were “rightly” offended by his column and that he should have used the word “white” rather than “Jew” which “singled out the race that is closer and more able to understand the Negro.”[13] A columnist had expressed anti-Semitic remarks out of frustration, but presumably African Americans readers had demanded a retraction. Despite calls like this to patronize “their own” establishments, Jewish-owned establishments proved just as popular among African American customers, even when they directly competed.[14] Some African Americans who worked in Jewish-owned establishments also gained valuable skills. Future Congressman Louis Stokes, an African American, was among those grateful for his experience at one such store during the early 1940s. In an interview with Teaching Cleveland, he even recalled his employer escorting a potential customer out of the store who refused service from Stokes.[15]
During the 1930s, activists formed campaigns throughout the Northern United States urging African Americans, “don’t shop where you can’t work.” These campaigns encouraged African Americans to not shop in establishments that did not hire African American employees. Since Jewish Americans owned many of the businesses in African Americans communities, they were often the targets of these protests and boycotts.
Cleveland’s “don’t buy where you can’t work” campaign was organized by the Future Outlook League, and headed by activist John Holly and The Cleveland Call & Post (Cleveland’s black newspaper) editor William O. Walker. The Future Outlook League’s leadership appears to have recognized many of the businesses they targeted were Jewish owned, and did not want their organization engaging anti-Semitism. For instance, a 1938 article of the league’s newspaper, The Voice of the League stated, “Don’t spend your money where you can’t work. And don’t let your boycott against local merchants lead you into an anti-Semitic campaign. Do not curry favor with anyone by showing them how much you hate the Jews or anyone else.”[16]
The Future Outlook League also sought to encourage African Americans to patron stores that hired black employees. Many of these businesses appear to have been Jewish-owned. For instance, an article from the The Voice of the League urged people to “pay Stall No. 32 [at the Woodland E. 5th St. Market] a visit when you do your shopping this Saturday,” because its owners, Mr. Baumeister and Mr. Schmiedl, “kept a black butcher on the job with full pay after he broke an arm.[17] Businesses such as Rosenberg’s Drug Store, Hoicowitz Dept. Store, Cohen’s Southern Food Store, and Kritzer Bros Bakery also advertised their business’ hiring practices in the Voice of the League as an inducement to patronize their business.[18] Thus, African Americans were able to engage in criticism of some local establishments that may have happened to be Jewish, but appear to have restricted such criticism to these businesses, and not Jewish store owners in general.
Figure 7 Some advertisements found in the Voice of the League telling readers that they hire African Americans. These advertisements appeared on the same pages, but were spliced together for the benefit of the reader[19]
The 1930s and 1940s, of course, was a tumultuous time period for African Americans and Jews. Anti-Semitism was growing to new levels in Hitler’s Germany, and Jewish immigration to the United States had virtually been shut off since 1921. Paradoxically, however, many Jewish Americans were finding some measure of success in the United States, despite the hardships of the Great Depression. This made it difficult for many African Americans to understand why many Americans were so condemning of Hitler’s anti-Semitism during the Nuremberg Law era, when African Americans faced similar restrictions in the United States.
Many Call & Post articles mentioned this irony. For instance, a 1935 article reported that Hitler had deflected criticism of his persecution of the Jews by telling Americans to “tend to your own lynchings of Negroes.”[20] The article ended by reminding readers that the United States had still failed to pass an anti-lynching bill, and that “America has a lot of housecleaning to do before she can start finding fault with other nations.”[21] Thus, it appears that many African Americans felt a degree of racism at play when white Americans decried the situation in Germany, but made little effort to improve African Americans lives in their own country.
Another Call & Post column in 1938 took some Cleveland Jewish business owners to task for discriminating against African Americans, while Jews faced similar persecution in the Europe. In this article, a fictional street-talking African American stated that “Mose could feel sorrier and could cry louder and longer [for German Jews] if’n he hadn’t experienced der same treatment from der same Jewish race.”[22]
Despite this column, most articles about Jewish persecution appear to have ceased to note alleged hypocrisy by late 1938. That November, German authorities had forced some 25 to 30,000 Jews into concentration camps, destroyed thousands of businesses, and burned over two-hundred synagogues during Kristallnacht. These events appear to have convinced many Call & Post writers that something unique was happening to Jews in Germany. After these events, nearly every article appears to have portrayed Jews as allies against racism, and perhaps sought an opportunity to link American sympathy for German Jews with African Americans’ freedom struggle in the United States.[23] For example, Call & Post articles entitled, “Anti-Semitism, A Weapon of the Lynch Lords,” “Racial Persecution is Contagious,” “Negroes are Not Opposing Haven for German Jews,” “The Plight of the Jews,” expressed both sympathy for persecuted Jews, and the hopes that the two communities could unite against racism.[24] As a Call and Post article entitled, “The Negro and the Jew, Partners in Distress” saw it, “This partnership [Jews and blacks] in distress inevitably brings about a fellow feeling between these two persecuted races. The writer continued, “The Negro is in a large measure the beneficiary of Hebrew persecution,” and that “the vial of wrath which was poured out upon the head of the Negro alone, is now spread out so as to cover the Jews as well.”[25] The article concluded by saying that their partnership will triumph over evil, and Christianity and democracy over irreligion and dictatorship. A somewhat awkward if not ambiguous hope, given that an article calling for increased cooperation between African Americans and Jews concluded by heralding the inevitable triumph of Christianity.
Similar conclusions were reached by African Americans and Jewish leaders throughout the country. Indeed, after World War II, Jews and African American leaders would form a civil rights alliance that would go on to dismantle most the nation’s de jure racism, and transform the nation. Yet, ironically, relations between most African Americans and Jews changed little through the 1930s and 40s. Gentile white prejudice against African Americans continued to cripple most African Americans’ ambitions to enter the middle class. As a result, Jews in cities like Cleveland would continue to serve as patrons or middle-men of sorts to African Americans for decades to come. As we will see in the next segment, though, this relationship would be heavily altered if not jettisoned altogether during the civil rights era.
[1] Judah Rubinstein and Jane Avner, Merging traditions: Jewish life in Cleveland (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2004), 29. Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 1978), 10.
[2] Gene P. Veronesi, Italian Americans and their communities of Cleveland (Cleveland State University, 1977).http://www.clevelandmemory.org/italians/Partiii.html
[3] Levy, Donald, A Report on the Location of Ethnic Groups in Greater Cleveland, (The Institute of Urban Studies, 1972), 24.
[4] For the purposes of this essay, Jews will be referred to as whites, as this was their legal classification. Although a case has been made by many scholars that Jews were not perceived as entirely white, or white at all, this issue is beyond the scope of this paper.
[5] John Baden, “Residual Neighbors: Jewish-African American Interaction in Cleveland from 1900 to 1970” (master’s thesis, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, 2010), 23
[6] The term “middlemen” is taken from the Middleman minority theory. For an overview of this, see Pyong Gap Min, Caught in the Middle: Korean Merchants in America’s Multiethnic Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 21-22.
[7] Randolph C. Downes, “Negro Rights and White Backlash in the Campaign of 1920,” ” Ohio History, 88, vol. 75 (Winter 1966) , http://publications.ohiohistory.org/ohstemplate.cfm?action=detail&Page=007588.html&StartPage=85&EndPage=107&volume=75&newtitle=Volume%2075%20Page%2085.
[8] Daniel R Kerr, “’The Reign of Wickedness’: The Changing Structures of Prostitution, Gambling and Political Protection in Cleveland from the Progressive Era to the Great Depression,” 1998, (M.A. Thesis, Case Western Reserve University, 1998), 45.
[9] (Kerr 1998, 45-47) Services were paid for “protection” from authorities, but often meant protection from their gang attacking the numbers operators.
[10] For a discussion of “middle man theory,” see Pyong Gap Min, Caught in the Middle: Korean Communities in the New York and Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). A more in depth discussion of Jewish-African American relations in the underground economy can be found in Baden, “Residual Neighbors: Jewish-African American Interaction in Cleveland from 1900 to 1970.”
[11] For a fuller discussion of this, see Baden, 29-45. Once notable essay expressing these views is James Baldwin, “Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White (1967).” in Paul Berman, Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments (New York: Delacorte Press, 1994), 31-41.
[12] T.D.S., “ON THE AVENUE:DAMON TURNS SPEED DEMON,” Cleveland Call and Post, April 8, 1937, http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed November 18, 2009).
[13] T.D.S., “ON THE AVENUE: MY APOLOGIES,” Cleveland Call and Post, April 15, 1937, http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed November 18, 2009).
[14] “ON THE AVENUE:WITH TDS NITECLUB LULLABY,” Cleveland Call and Post, April 30, 1936, http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed November 18, 2009). A good discussion on African American customers and Jewish businesses in Chicago can be found in St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, “The Growth of a ‘Negro Market,’” in Strangers & Neighbors: Relations Between Blacks & Jews in the United States, ed. Maurianne Adams and John H. Bracey (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 358-60.
[16] J.M. Dowden, “Boycotts,” The Voice of the League, July 16, 1938.
[17] “untitled article,” The Voice of the League, July 16, 1938.
[18] The Voice of the League, March 2, 1936 and January 27, 1940.
[19] The Voice of the League, date unknown.
[20] “THE NAZIS POKE FUN AT AMERICA,” Cleveland Call and Post, August 22, 1935, http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed November 18, 2009).
[21] (Ibid.)
[22] “MOSE of the ROARING THIRD: MOSE WEEPS.” Cleveland Call and Post, December 8, 1938, http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed March 15, 2010).
[23] Kelly Miller, “The Negro And The Jew, Partners in Distress,” Cleveland Call and Post, November 17, 1938, http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed March 21, 2010).
[24]Proquest searches of historical Call & Post articles, http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed March 21, 2010)
[25] Kelly Miller, “The Negro And The Jew, Partners in Distress,” Cleveland Call and Post, November 17, 1938, http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed March 21, 2010).
These articles are based on this 2011 Master’s Degree Thesis written by John Baden. The thesis is here (4.3mg pdf download)
RESIDUAL NEIGHBORS JEWISH-AFRICAN AMERICAN INTERACTIONS IN CLEVELAND FROM 1900 to 1970
Part 2
Neighbors Then Strangers: African American-Jewish Postwar Interactions 1950-1970
by John Baden
Various forces shaped where African Americans were able to reside in northern industrial cities like Cleveland during the first half of the twentieth century. Racist housing deeds, real estate practices, and violent intimidation forced most African Americans in Cleveland to live in only a handful of neighborhoods. These neighborhoods, however, were not particularly segregated prior to the 1950s. Residents attended the same schools, shopped in the same stores, and lived in a remarkably diverse community. Ironically, historically African American neighborhoods in Cleveland became homogenous, and more segregated during the civil rights era, a time associated with progress towards integration. Despite efforts to empower African Americans to reside in a neighborhood of their choice, inner city African Americans found themselves more segregated than ever. To understand why inner-city neighborhoods like Cleveland’s Central became increasingly segregated during the civil rights era, it is important to investigate why whites stopped living and working near African Americans, as many had done in the past.
This essay will address these issues by discussing the decline of community interactions between African Americans and Jews from 1945 to 1970 in the city of Cleveland, Ohio. These interactions give us some understanding of the process of neighborhood transformation because Jews and Africans often lived in the same areas throughout the early twentieth century. Moreover, Jews who retained business in the neighborhood continued to play important roles in the community for several decades. As time passed, though, fewer Jews had a presence in these neighborhoods, and these spaces became more homogenously African American. As a result, African American Jewish interactions waned in Cleveland proper (although some significant interactions continue in the suburbs).
One should not dismiss the civil rights movement or wax nostalgic about earlier ethnic relations; opportunity has risen for most African Americans, and about half now live in suburbs.[1] Still, inner-city African Americans that made up what sociologist William Julius Wilson called “the truly disadvantaged” in industrial cities like Cleveland, however, often lived more isolated lives than ever between 1950 and 1970.[2]
One of the most important communities examined for this study is Central, a neighborhood located just east of downtown Cleveland. As discussed in the first segment, from roughly 1900 to 1920, the neighborhood was the heart of the city’s African American and Jewish community. But these communities only comprised part of the neighborhood’s diversity. It was also home to Big Italy and other ethnic groups as well.[3] African Americans and Jews interacted with one of another in many different spheres, and by no means lived isolated lives. Even after most Jews moved out, many Jews held onto businesses in the area. For example, in 1930, 46.5 to 58.1 percent of grocers on Central Avenue were Jewish even though nearly all Jews had moved out of the area.[4] Thus African Americans often worked and shopped in Jewish-owned businesses.
After Congress passed immigration restrictions in the 1920s, hardly any new European immigrants moved into Central. Instead, their places were filled by African American migrants from the South. Cleveland’s African American population increased from 8,448 in 1910 to 34,451 in 1920, and then 71,899 in 1930.[5] As whites’ views hardened about the desirability of segregation after World War I, it became nearly impossible for African Americans to live outside of Central or a select few small communities, which were usually also located near Jewish populations.[6] As a result, the Central neighborhood became increasingly African American and segregated.
This, however, did not need to be permanent. World War II provided an opportunity to re-integrate Cleveland neighborhoods. Americans frequently invoked the wartime rhetoric of democracy and a battle against racial supremacy during World War II, which could have spurred changes in attitudes and laws. Cities like Cleveland could have been an asylum for the refugees of World War II and the Holocaust. Instead, segregation remained as harsh as ever, and immigration restrictions largely prevented Jews and other Europeans immigrants from fleeing to the United States during the Nazi and Stalin eras. These refugees and displaced people could have helped maintain a racial balance in old immigrant neighborhoods. Instead, white ethnics and African Americans would live further apart in areas more isolated from each other.
By 1950, most of Cleveland’s 148,000 African Americans in 1950 still had little ability to live anywhere but Central. Most African Americans were relegated to the lowest paying jobs in a given industry, and often had the lowest seniority. White home owners often refused to sell to African Americans, and African Americans who managed to find a home in a new neighborhood were often violently harassed by whites.[7]
It was extremely rare, however, for Jewish Americans to violently resist African Americans moving in, and Jews even gained a reputation for selling or renting property to African Americans.[8] As the Association for Jewish Communal Relations’ president, Sidney Vincent, commented in 1962, a “substantial share of housing in the Negro area-with all the attendant irritation-is owned by Jews, partly because the neighborhoods are largely formerly Jewish,” and observed that when blacks did move to suburbs, “in almost every case, it has been a leap into a Jewish neighborhood.”[9] One disgruntled white opponent of integration complained, “the Negro follows the Jews in housing; no Jews, no Negroes to follow.”[10] This ensured that African Americans and Jews would have a measure of interactions with one another in these newly opened up neighborhoods for decades to come. Yet, prejudice would continue to affect the scope and form of these interactions.
Figure 3 Previously Jewish neighborhoods are shaded in blue, and compared to African American neighborhoods in 1950.[11]
Unfortunately, after African Americans moved into their neighborhood in substantial numbers, many Jewish residents (like other European ethnic groups) moved out almost immediately. For example, Glenville, a neighborhood just north of University Circle, went from being predominately Jewish (over 70 percent in 1936) and over 90 percent white in 1940 to nearly 50 percent African American in 1950, and predominantly African American by 1960.[12] Unfortunately, after a neighborhood transitioned to a predominately African American one, few whites wanted to live in it. Thus, demand for that housing decreased after most whites no longer wanted to live there. As a result, African Americans often saw little or no equity gains once they bought a house in a previously white neighborhood because area-wide demand for housing in the neighborhood would plummet. Indeed, the falling value of a house in an integrating neighborhood convinced many whites to leave.[13] Without equity, banks were hesitant to extend credit to property owners, thus exacerbating the wealth gap between African Americans and whites. Reporting in fall of 1950, a Call & Post team headed by Marty Richardson wrote that in the area between Ashbury and Parkwood to St. Clair and East 99th in Glenville, over twenty churches along with five synagogues “have either recently been sold to Negro congregations, are reportedly or actually for sale,” and a building on Kimberly Avenue “that would cost more than a half-million dollars to build…is reportedly on sale for $75,000.”[14]
It should be noted that not everyone who moved to a suburb did so because of racial anxieties. There were many advantages of moving to a suburb like better funded school districts and more space to live in. Moreover, the federal government’s support of highways and segregated suburban neighborhoods at the time, made suburbs a feasible, if not more economical option.[15] Furthermore, many people enjoyed higher incomes in the post-war economy and were able to buy a nicer home in a new neighborhood. White departure from the largely working-class Jewish sections of the Kinsman neighborhood was much slower, and harder to classify as “white flight.”[16] Indeed many more affluent African Americans have moved to the suburbs as well.
Regardless of motivation, though, white departure contributed to a more segregated city. Before long, African Americans in Glenville, and eventually Kinsman, found themselves in neighborhoods as segregated and deprived of capital as their previous residences. As a result, African American–Jewish interactions in places like Glenville would largely be between residents and business owners, rather than as neighbors.
Since many of the neighborhoods’ African Americans lived in had once been Jewish communities, there were a disproportionate number of Jewish-operated businesses there. Determining the number of Jewish-owned businesses in African American neighborhoods during the 1950s and 60s is difficult. According to a 1968 government study of “ghetto” businesses in fifteen non-Southern cities, 39 percent of “ghetto merchants” (52 percent of white merchants) were Jewish, although the number in Cleveland was probably higher due to the intense overlapping of African American and previously Jewish neighborhoods. Since the study was taken after most of the nation’s urban unrest, the percentage of Jewish owned stores was probably higher in the years immediately preceding these events.[17]
The presence of so many white and often Jewish-owned businesses in now predominately African American neighborhoods caused consternation among some of its African American residents.[18] New York-based African American intellectual James Baldwin voiced these concerns by writing,
“It is bitter to watch the Jewish storekeeper locking up his store for the night…with your money in his pocket, to a clean neighborhood, miles from you, which you will not be allowed to enter.”[19]
Such occurrences were reminders of how racism picked who could succeed and who could live where. The point is particularly poignant, because where one lives in the United States has often increased one’s chances of succeeding. Yet, Baldwin’s latter point seems a bit reductionist given that many Jews, at least in Cleveland, did sell their homes to African Americans, and participated in suburban integration efforts in places like Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights.[20]
On top of being perceived as “outsiders,” non-African American store owners faced criticism for high prices. According to a supplemental study for the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, prices were in fact higher in African American neighborhoods in the North than other neighborhoods. This was because it was risky to operate a business that relied on impoverished residents who had to purchase goods through installment plans or on credit.[21] As a result, prices had to be high to account for the losses incurred by customers who were unable to finish their payment plans. Moreover, it was much more difficult for small independent stores to buy at discounted bulk volumes from suppliers. Nevertheless, these high prices were a source of frustration for customers who were often hard-pressed for cash.
African Americans did not universally condemn Jewish businesspeople that had a large African American clientele. As mentioned in first segment, some African Americans had positive experiences working in Jewish-ran stores. Moreover, figures like the disc jockey Alan Freed won a large devoted African American audience. Former Cleveland resident, W. Allen Taylor, who worked at both an Italian and Jewish-owned grocery store in the mainly middle-class Lee-Harvard area, recalled that
“There was some tension, especially during the mid to late sixties as black folks became more vocal about their demands for respect. For the most part, however, the Jewish retailers who maintained a presence in my mostly black neighborhood, understood how to relate to black folks with a minimum of tension, so it was fairly peaceful.”[22]
Conversely many notable African Americans found significant Jewish support. The most notable of these was Mayor Carl B. Stokes, who became the first African American elected mayor of a major city in 1967. Since most Jews no longer lived in Cleveland, they were not a significant part of his voting coalition. However, a number of Jewish Americans supported his campaign.[23] Marvin Chernoff, for example, was a key volunteer organizer on the campaign who helped put together Stokes’ impressive grassroots network. In the preface of his 1968 book, Black Victory, Jewish-American Kenneth G. Weinberg (who was from the Cleveland area) expressed the hope that many white intellectuals and businessmen held for a Stokes mayoralty.
“The significance of the election of a Carl Stokes lies elsewhere. He has, for the time being at least, demonstrated that black political activity can provide a viable alternative to violence in our cities… ‘The Fire Next Time’ has become a prophecy fulfilled, and the mind reels under shrill cries of separatism, nationalism, Malcom Xism, and a sad prediction by the President of the United States that our cities will almost surely experience several more summers of violence.”[24]
Thus, to Weinberg and others, encouraging African American municipal leadership was both good policy, and good for business.
The same could be said for many of the attempts to integrate Cleveland’s businesses. It was the right thing to do, but also expanded one’s customer base. Cleveland’s nightclub scene provided one of the most dramatic attempts at integration. A number of the key nightclubs in these integration efforts were owned by Jewish businessmen. One club, the Jewish-owned nightclub, Leo’s Casino, so thoroughly integrated that comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory, called it, “the most fully integrated nightclub in America.”[25] This club, however, was located in heavily African American or transitioning sections of town.[26] Nightclubs that welcomed African Americans in the traditionally exclusive University Circle area met far more resistance.[27] In March of 1952, a bomb exploded at the Towne Casino, an integrated nightclub located near University Circle. Although a perpetrator was never found, it was widely believed that opponents of integration were responsible.[28] The club closed after two additional bombings.[29] Another nearby Jewish-owned nightclub, Playbar, was also forced to close after liquor board harassment and a bombing.[30] These events and other racially motivated bombings across the city helped bifurcate the city’s neighborhoods and commercial districts into either predominately African American or white.
Jewish owned business in African American neighborhoods faced an increasingly difficult climate for doing business in the 1960s. Business owners faced competition from chain stores, and crime rose during the decade in nearly every category.[31] Moreover, urban unrest broke out in Hough in 1966 and 1968 in the Glenville neighborhood which damaged 63 businesses and left surviving white-owned business in a precarious state.[32] After the unrest in Glenville, the neighborhood’s main commercial artery of Glenville went from having twenty-two grocery stores in 1966, to fourteen in 1971, a 37 percent loss.[33]
Table 2 This graph shows the decline of inner-city grocery stores on selected roads. It should be noted, though, that the 2010 Yellow Book does not appear to include most convenience stores as grocers. Also, Lorain is a longer street than the other mentioned streets, and a portion of Hough Avenue changed its name. Still, one can see an overall pattern.[34]
Crime, white flight, unrest, and racism, however, are only some of the reasons for the disappearance of white-owned businesses. Many businesses closed because Jewish families were able to enter different professions and work in different locations. Many Jewish grocers who grew up in Glenville during the 1930s and 40s retired in the post war years. Their children were often raised in more affluent households than their parents, and preferred to enter into other vocations or to work in other neighborhoods.[35] Furthermore, one large chain store could encompass the services of many small independent grocery stores for lower prices. Even before the fore-mentioned social turmoil of the 1960s and 70s, the number of grocery stores on Central Avenue, the historical center of Cleveland’s African American community declined from forty-three in 1930, to twenty-four in 1960.[36] Thus, we can say that the era of Jewish-owned small businesses in African American neighborhoods was already coming to an end, but that urban unrest, chain-stores, and higher crime rates during this time period expedited this process.
Examining the rise and fall of Jewish interactions with African Americans in inner-city neighborhoods gives perspective into how African American neighborhoods like Central and Glenville have become so predominantly African American and devoid of many white-owned businesses. Any number of events could have prevented the segregation, or re-segregation of Cleveland neighborhoods. Had the United States been a safe-haven for migrants during the World War II era, had there not been so many bombings to enforce the color line, had crime not been so high during the 60s and 70s, or had African Americans been able to live where they could afford and wished to live, Cleveland’s neighborhoods would have looked very different. Despite recent progress in integrating Cleveland’s West Side and East Side suburbs, many of Cleveland’s historically African American neighborhoods remain highly segregated, and devoid of much capital, businesses, and opportunity.
[1] “Black Flight,” The Economist, March 31, 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/18486343.
[2] William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, Second Edition (University of Chicago Press, 2012). See also Douglas S. Massey, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Harvard University Press, 1993)
[3] The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, “Big Italy,” The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, http://ech.case.edu/cgi/article.pl?id=BI2.
[4] This estimation is based off entering the names of grocers listed on Central Avenue in the 1930 Cleveland City Directory into a necrology search on the Cleveland Public Library to determine where they were buried.
Cleveland Directory Co., Cleveland City Directory [microfilm], (Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications). Cleveland Public Library, “Cleveland Necrology File,” Cleveland Public Library, http://www.cpl.org/necrology.
[5] Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 1978), 10.
[6] For a discussion on hardened attitudes on segregation, see ibid..
[7] Sidney Z. Vicent, “MEMORANDUM ON HOUSING SITUATION, LEE-HARVARD AREA,” in Remembering: Cleveland’s Jewish Voices, ed. Sally Wertheim & Alan Bennett (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2011 (citation taken from manuscript copy). Probably the best source of examining bombings against African Americans is a proquest search for “bomb” in the ProQuest Historical Newspaper: Cleveland Call and Post (1934-1991), accessed 2010, http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy2.cpl.org/hnpclevelandcallpost/index?accountid=1810 and Cleveland Call & Post, and “Bombs,” Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio. Discussions of this issue in other cities can be found in Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960 (University of Chicago Press, 2009). David M. P Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Douglas S. Massey, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Harvard University Press, 1993).
[8] Sidney Z. Vicent, “MEMORANDUM ON HOUSING SITUATION, LEE-HARVARD AREA.” Sidney Z. Vincent in Eugene J Lipman, A Tale of Ten Cities; the Triple Ghetto in American Religious Life. (Union of American Hebrew Congregations.) ,1962 John Baden, “Residual Neighbors: Jewish-African American Interaction in Cleveland from 1900 to 1970” (master’s thesis, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, 2010). This issue in Boston is discussed in Gerald Gamm, Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed (Harvard University Press, 2001).
[9] Vincent, A Tale of Ten Cities; the Triple Ghetto in American Religious Life, 58.
[10] Ibid., 72.
[11] Donald Levy, 24., Howard Whipple Green, Jewish Families in Greater Cleveland (Cleveland: Cleveland Health Council, 1939) and Socialexplorer, “1950 County and Census Tract,” Socialexplorer, http://www.socialexplorer.com/pub/maps/map3.aspx?&g=0. “Google Maps,” Google Maps, accessed October 16, 2010, https://www.google.com/maps/.
[12] Rubinstein and Avner, 111. Marty Richardson, “Sweeping Population Shift Hits Glenville Churches Hard: Falling Congregations Close Up Many Institutions; Values Drop,” Cleveland Call and Post, September 2, 1950, http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed November 18, 2009), Socialexplorer, “1960 County and Census Tract,” Socialexplorer.
[13] This issue in Detroit is discussed in David M. P Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America.
[14] Marty Richardson, “Sweeping Population Shift Hits Glenville Churches Hard: Falling Congregations Close Up Many Institutions; Values Drop,” Cleveland Call and Post, September 2, 1950, http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed November 18, 2009).
[15] Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford University Press, 1985); Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (Random House LLC, 2009); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University Press, 2010).
[16] For a discussion of neighborhood transition in this area, see Michney, Todd Michael, “Changing Neighborhoods: Race and Upward Mobility in Southeast Cleveland, 1930-1980,” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2004).
[17] The percentage of Jewish-owned businesses in these neighborhoods was probably higher because most African American businesses were not targeted during the riots; meaning that their percentage probably went up, while the percentage of non-African American businesses went down.
[18] Determined by entering names of grocers in Central from 1930 into a search of Ancestry.com, 1910-1930 United States Federal Census [database on-line] (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2009).
[19] Baldwin, 34.
[20] Charles Bromley, Interview by author, Cleveland, OH, July 2009.
[21] National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, New York Times ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), 275-276.
[22] W. Allen Taylor interview, interview by author, email, March 2010.
[23] Robert Gries, interview by author, phone, November 2014.
[24] Kenneth G Weinberg, Black Victory; Carl Stokes and the Winning of Cleveland (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), 8.
[25] The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, “Leo’s Casino,” The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, http://ech.cwru.edu/ech-cgi/article.pl?id=LSC.
[26] Leo’s Casino was located in the heavily African American Central district before moving to the Hough/Fairfax district which as transitioning into a predominantly African American area. Ibid., Socialexplorer, “1960 County and 1970 Census Tract,” Socialexplorer, http://www.socialexplorer.com/pub/maps/map3.aspx?&g=0.
[27] One such club was the Towne Casino, located near Euclid and East 105th street and owned by Jack Rogoff and Edward Helstein. Rogoff, like Leo Mintz, had grown up in a racially mixed block in Central, before moving to Glenville.
[28] Howard Drechsler, interview by author, notes, Beachwood, OH, August 2009.
[29] John Fuster, “Tips FOR THOSE INTERESTED N ENTERTAINMENT,” Cleveland Call and Post (1934-1962), August 8, 1953, sec. B, proquesr.com
[30] “RAIDED! Black and Tan Club Charges Persecution,” Cleveland Call and Post, May 16, 1953, http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed November 18, 2009). “Tips FOR THOSE INTERESTED IN: =ENTERTAINMENT=,” Cleveland Call and Post (1934-1962), August 22, 1953, sec. B, http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy2.cpl.org/hnpclevelandcallpost/docview/184249208/abstract/AC99276D1D3A422DPQ/1?accountid=1810.
[31] U.S. Census Bureau, “Crimes and Crime Rates by Type of Offense: 1960 to 2002,” U.S. Census Bureau, http://www.census.gov/statab/hist/HS-23.pdf.
[32] The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, “Glenville Shootout,” The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, http://ech.case.edu/cgi/article.pl?id=GS.
[33] Cleveland Directory Co., Cleveland City Directory [microfilm], (Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications).
[34] Ibid. For 2010, Yellowbook, Cleveland: Greater Cuyahoga County Area (Yellow Book Sales Distribution Company, Inc., 2010). Note that Yellow Book does not appear to include most convenience stores as grocers.
[35] Bill Rogoff, interview by author, notes, phone-call, March 2010.
[36]Cleveland Directory Co., Cleveland City Directory [microfilm], (Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications)., (Cleveland: Cleveland Public Library, Preservation Office, 1990).
“Save the Young People”: The Generational Politics of Racial Solidarity in Black Cleveland, 1906-1911 by Michael Metsner, Department of History, CWRU