Surrogate Suburbs

Black Upward Mobility and Neighborhood Change in Cleveland, 1900–1980

Todd M. Michney

• Éditeur: The University of North Carolina Press
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469631950
• Sujet: Scienze sociali
• Sous-sujet: Studi afroamericani

The story of white flight and the neglect of Black urban neighborhoods has been well told by urban historians in recent decades. Yet much of this scholarship has downplayed Black agency and tended to portray African Americans as victims of structural forces beyond their control. In this history of Cleveland's Black middle class, Todd Michney uncovers the creative ways that members of this nascent community established footholds in areas outside the overcrowded, inner-city neighborhoods to which most African Americans were consigned. In asserting their right to these outer-city spaces, African Americans appealed to city officials, allied with politically progressive whites (notably Jewish activists), and relied upon both Black and white developers and real estate agents to expand these "surrogate suburbs" and maintain their livability until the bona fide suburbs became more accessible. By tracking the trajectories of those who, in spite of racism, were able to succeed, Michney offers a valuable counterweight to histories that have focused on racial conflict and Black poverty and tells the neglected story of the Black middle class in America's cities prior to the 1960s.

1: The Roots of Upward Mobility

OUTLYING BLACK SETTLEMENT BEFORE 1940

Fully one-third of the approximately 350 African American families living in Cleveland’s outlying Mount Pleasant neighborhood owned their own homes in 1930, a reminder that some black Southerners who came to Northern cities during the Great Migration acquired land and homes fairly quickly. The challenging nature of property record research, however, has impeded sustained historical inquiry. In fact, only three of the property-owning Mount Pleasant households listed in that year’s census are readily traceable in the public record.¹ Fortunately, these three families were fairly typical; details of their lives mirror the experiences of African Americans on the urban periphery, at a remove from the dense and increasingly segregated inner-city districts solidifying at this time. All three couples were Southern-born, as were 70 percent of all black Mount Pleasant spouses in 1930. All three husbands occupied upper-working-class positions, thereby providing a scaffold for economic security and upward mobility unavailable to most black families at the time. Two of the three wives also worked for wages, further bolstering their families’ economic security, as did approximately one-fifth of black Mount Pleasant wives in 1930. All three couples obtained mortgage financing to build their new homes, as did virtually all African American homeowners in this outlying enclave. In addition, one bought additional vacant lots and rental properties elsewhere, also not unusual for middling black families prior to the onset of the Great Depression.

William G. Slaughter, born around 1872, was the first to arrive in Mount Pleasant, getting a building permit in September 1916 for his two-story house at 3303 East 130th Street worth $2,200. The downtown Citizens House Building Co. contracted to build the house, as it did for other black owners in the neighborhood. Slaughter’s first listing in the 1916 city directory was as an “auto operator” (chauffeur) for a presumably white household in the still-posh Hough neighborhood. Over the next three years, his occupation was listed variously as “houseman,” “butler,” and, as of 1920, “chef” in a private home. The census additionally reveals that his wife, Gladys, worked as a maid, that they had no children, and that they were both born in Virginia. Slaughter worked as a chef for the next several years, but in 1924 he was listed as a porter. In 1926, he tried his hand at insurance, before returning to work as a chef for two more years. In 1928, he first entered carpentry, and he was classed as a carpenter in the 1930 census; Gladys by then worked as a cook for a private family.² Slaughter’s work history reveals both versatility and also suggests something of a restless personality, while his experience typifies the overall striving for economic security by upwardly mobile black families of this era.

Clarence Scott, born around 1890, arrived next, filing a building permit in January 1917 to construct his two-story wooden house at 3255 East 128th Street, valued at an estimated $1,600. His name first appears in the 1918 city directory, as a teamster. Scott was listed variously as a teamster, a driver, and a carpenter for the next five years. The 1920 census reveals further that like many black Mount Pleasant residents, he was a garbage worker for the city; his wife, Mattie, was listed as having no occupation, and both of them were born in South Carolina, as were the oldest two of their four children. In 1925, Scott entered cement work, and he appeared in the 1930 census as a cement contractor. Although their household now included eight children, Mattie still did not work for wages.³ Like Slaughter, Scott sought entry into the more remunerative building trades, in his case leaving a strenuous and dirty occupation, sanitation work, in which African Americans nevertheless had a relatively secure foothold. Scott was economically successful enough to support his large family on a single income, even acquiring additional properties.

Last to arrive was Luther P. Smith, born around 1882, filing a building permit in May 1923 for his two-family house at 3234 East 130th Street. A carpenter by trade, Smith listed himself as both architect and contractor for the property worth an estimated $5,000. Smith listed his home address as 10622 Arthur Avenue, another house he had purchased that same year in the eastern reaches of the Cedar-Central district, home to some 90 percent of Cleveland’s black population in 1930. In November 1923, Smith also applied for a permit to build a “garage and lumber shed” on his Mount Pleasant lot, where his house must not yet have been finished because he still listed Arthur Avenue as his address. Smith may have arrived in Cleveland as early as 1916, when a laborer with his name first appeared in the city directory living at 3646 Central Avenue, in the heart of the city’s largest black settlement. According to the 1920 census, Smith was working as a carpenter, living as a roomer with his wife, Margaret (who had no occupation), at 10919 Cedar Avenue in the vast black residential district’s far eastern end; both of them were native Georgians. By 1925, Smith was listed as both a carpenter and a contractor. As of 1930, census records showed that Margaret worked as a caretaker in a fraternity house.⁴

The property transactions made by these three households illuminate important dimensions of their lives and suggest a nascent black middle-class experience heretofore little explored by historians. As was typical in the pre–New Deal mortgage market, these owners were repeat borrowers, taking out a total of fourteen mortgages before 1930 on the three Mount Pleasant houses mentioned above. The Slaughters had the fewest, at three. In April 1915, they signed a note for $300 with Blanche M. Mach—the previous white, Protestant owner and wife of a local lawyer—to acquire the lot. Interest on the loan was 6 percent, and the Slaughters paid it off by February 1916. That August, prior to initiating construction, the couple borrowed $2,620 at 6 percent, from the Citizens Home Building Co., the general contractor; they paid it off in February 1924. But that January, they took out yet another mortgage for $1,400 with the Cleveland Trust Co., the city’s largest bank, also at 6 percent; this one would not be paid off until 1937.⁵ As for the Scotts, they took out five mortgage loans, starting in November 1917 before construction began, for $800 at 6 percent with Broadway Savings & Trust. They must have used part of this money to pay off the remainder of their original land contract of July 1916, with the Walton Realty Co., which had subdivided the allotment containing the Mount Pleasant black enclave; this is borne out by the fact that Clarence Scott acquired official title to the land the very next day. The couple then had a succession of loans with the Union Trust Co., all at 6 percent interest: in March 1924 for another $800; in March 1925 for $1,500; in January 1927 for $1,700; and in January 1930 for another $1,700. In each case, they paid off the loan in one to four years.⁶

But the Smiths proved most ambitious of the three couples in their real estate acquisitions and related transactions. Willing to carry more debt, they took out five mortgages, starting with two loans at 7 percent from the black-owned Empire Savings & Loan Co.—in June and September 1923, for $5,500 and $7,000, respectively. Although the couple paid off the first in August 1923, they were still paying on the second in June 1925, when they borrowed $1,200 more at 7 percent from an M. F. Clark whose identity cannot be established. Perhaps they took out this supplementary loan because they needed cash, Smith having purchased an adjoining lot at a public auction (sheriff’s sale) the previous month, which he would hold onto for three years before reselling. The Smiths still owed Empire $6,784 and were on the verge of paying off Clark when they took out a fourth loan, in April 1926, for $2,500 at 7 percent interest. This one was from a Sam Cohen, whose common Jewish name makes it impossible to positively ascertain his identity; this the Smiths paid off by early 1929. The couple took out yet another loan with Empire in July 1927, for $1,000 at 7 percent.⁷ As mentioned, Smith had purchased on Arthur Avenue while in the process of building in Mount Pleasant, and in 1926, he acquired title to a property on Cedar Avenue as security for another loan. As of 1935, Smith owned at least one rental property in Cedar-Central, at 2315 East 59th Street. After turning over management of this building to the black-owned J. E. Branham Realty Co., Smith literally came to blows with his manager the following year, following a bounced check and the revelation that Branham had withheld some of the rent monies collected.⁸

Prior to World War II, Mount Pleasant was Cleveland’s fastest-growing outlying cluster of black settlement, though it contained only about 5 percent of the city’s African American population in 1930 (dwarfed as it was by the vast residential district running along Cedar and Central Avenues). However, it was not in inner-city neighborhoods like Cedar-Central—which historians for years followed convention in referring to as “ghettoes”⁹—that the future and aspirations of Cleveland’s upwardly mobile, black middling classes lay, but rather in a handful of settlements on the urban periphery like Mount Pleasant. Not only did these clusters offer life opportunities unavailable in Cedar-Central; they powerfully affected the direction of subsequent black population expansion. During and after World War II, Mount Pleasant in the southeast and Glenville in the northeast would emerge as black middle-class strongholds where families achieved homeownership at levels far surpassing the black average. But the groundwork for this accomplishment began decades earlier, reaching back to the turn of the century.

Making Communities

Mount Pleasant in 1900 was little more than a “tiny country business center” six miles southeast of downtown Cleveland’s Public Square, on the streetcar line following Kinsman Road to the town of Chagrin Falls and beyond. Contained within the village of Newburgh, the area was not annexed to Cleveland until 1913, by which time developers had begun to lay streets and subdivide farmland and orchards into city lots. Homes on side streets and the entire area east of the future East 140th Street were not built up until the 1920s, largely with two-family “mortgage lifters” that allowed owner-occupants to rent one suite and defray mortgage payments. Like many of Cleveland’s outlying neighborhoods, Mount Pleasant saw rapid population gains between 1910 and 1930, in marked contrast to older districts with declining populations. In 1923, when the Cleveland Public Library first opened a “station” at 3335 East 118th Street, staff described the area’s ethnic composition as “almost entirely Jewish, [with] some Hungarians, Italians, and a few Negroes.” In the 1920s, Mount Pleasant became the second-largest Jewish settlement in Cleveland, after Glenville, with approximately 22,000 Jews by 1927; Italians were the next-largest population group in the area. Newcomers from both these groups arrived in Mount Pleasant from older neighborhoods closer to downtown that were being consolidated into increasingly black Cedar-Central. Jewish dispersal from their community centered around Woodland Avenue and East 55th Street began during World War I, while some Italians arrived in Mount Pleasant even earlier from the “Big Italy” Sicilian settlement on the southern edge of downtown.¹⁰ Thus both Jews and Italians had previous contact with African Americans upon coming to Mount Pleasant, a fact worth noting, though of ambiguous significance when considering subsequent patterns of race relations.

African Americans established an early presence in Mount Pleasant. According to a 1930 newspaper article, black settlement dated to 1893, when an insolvent white contractor paid his workforce by giving them “title to a number of lots in the section north of Kinsman and in the neighborhood of E. 126th to E. 130th Streets.” While this story cannot be verified, the location is accurate. As of 1900, only one African American family had erected a house in the area, but by 1907 black real estate promoter Welcome T. Blue was advertising forty-by-fifty-foot lots there for as low as $200, encouraging potential buyers to “Get Away from the Crowded, Smoky City. Own Your Own Home. Raise Garden Fruit. Chickens, Hogs, Cows.” Blue’s ad claimed both that “100 Afro-Americans Own Choice Lots There” and “100 Afro-American Families Live There To-Day.”¹¹ The latter, at least, was a blatant exaggeration, for the 1910 census documented only twenty-four black families living in the settlement, nineteen of them owners. And judging by the rate at which African American families acquired their deeds, the process of land acquisition remained slow before 1915. While one mortgage banker’s recollection that “only tents for [black] war workers from the deep South” stood on the land by World War I is clearly overstated, it nonetheless suggests that the early community had an improvised feel. Mount Pleasant’s black enclave grew to include 124 households by 1920, with at least 67 homeowners (54 percent of the total).¹²

Newcomers were drawn by Mount Pleasant’s rustic feel, and families’ abilities to supplement food through subsistence production, a characteristic pattern of early working-class suburbanization that was particularly important for African Americans.¹³ Semirural features characterized portions of the area well into the 1920s. As one black woman whose aunt moved there recalled, Mount Pleasant was “considered the country” because “only Kinsman Road was paved,” the “rest of the streets . . . [being] more or less country black top roads.” Railroad man James Susong, who bought in 1923, similarly recalled “pastures and large vacant lots separating the few houses which stood on the unpaved streets.” With its low population density of just thirty-three persons per acre as of 1930, Mount Pleasant had more open space than any existing black settlement except for the extreme outliers of West Park and Miles Heights (later known as Lee-Seville). In contrast, the older sections of Cedar-Central housed sixty-three persons per acre.¹⁴

Other sources confirm the pattern of informal and sporadic construction in early black Mount Pleasant. Contemporary fire insurance atlases reveal that many lots in the enclave remained vacant while families saved money to build their houses; at the same time, the widely differing frontages, designs, and various outbuildings testify to the widespread practice of “self-building,” as noted in similar outlying areas. Confirming this pattern, assessors for the government’s Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) in a 1939 survey of Mount Pleasant noted a “heavy percentage of ‘Jerry-Type’ construction throughout,” leading them to disparage the black, Jewish, and Italian occupants and give the neighborhood the lowest grade, a “D” rating.¹⁵ Despite a fragmentary public record, the identifiable building permits taken out by thirty-three black Mount Pleasant property owners from 1913 to 1929 suggest specific strategies and timelines. At least two built their own homes, including carpenter Luther P. Smith and ironworker Marion LeGrand, and at least three others employed black tradesmen or contractors. Although three black owners started construction almost immediately after acquiring title, the median interval between acquisition and commencement was four months. One owner, slate roofer Emmett Meade, took over ten years to initiate construction after acquiring title in July 1908, despite soon thereafter founding a prosperous roofing business. It took at least four other lot owners between two and five years to start building.¹⁶

By 1930, 349 African American families lived in a compact cluste...