THIS RELAY WAS ABOUT RACE: Fighting to Segregated Schools in Cleveland, Ohio
To many, "Black Lives Matter" is a necessary response to the multiple killings of African Americans by police across the country. Most victims were men, unarmed, and did little to provoke their unnecessary deaths. But Black Lives Matter is not just about police killing Black citizens. It is about the historical belief, dating back to seventeenth-century Virginia, that Black lives did not matter. Killing a slave was met with a collective shrug since authorities claimed that no master would intentionally destroy his property.
Almost nothing about a slave's life mattered, including an education since it was against the law to teach him to read and write. The idea that African American education matters was not a large part of the public discourse. From the Colonial America period through the twentieth century, cities across the country were more concerned with maintaining segregated schools than seeing students of color receive a quality education. In the twentieth century, white covenants, bank redlining, and real estate steering helped segregate city schools. Therefore, school boards that claimed to adhere to neighborhood school policies while preserving segregation were presumably in the clear. Yet, if white families were unable to move from racially mixed areas, "arrangements" were made to get their children out of that neighborhood school. In the twentieth century, a city regarded as one of the country's most progressive joined the rest of the nation in deciding that only the white mind was a terrible thing to waste. Constant legal and political obstacles met efforts to stop African American minds from being wasted. The only way for Black students to gain quality and equal education with whites was for them to learn in the same classrooms. Integrating the schools became the goal. A case in point is the city that was nationally known as "racially progressive" and billed itself as "The Best Location in the Nation."
In the 1950s, the Cleveland, Ohio, School District, like other large systems, needed to adjust to the many rapid social changes following the end of World War II. Social disorganization and school overcrowding resulting from the Great Migration had become especially acute in the mostly Hough area and some of its adjoining neighborhoods. A significant percentage of migrants from the South were from Alabama, so Cleveland became known as "Alabamanorth." As in other cities, so many African Americans moved into white neighborhoods like Hough, residents moved to the suburbs or other parts of the city where persons of color were not welcome.
The Great Migration, at times temporarily, integrated several districts within the city. The Cleveland Board of Education had the option of allowing for further integration or to let white students transfer, thereby creating a more segregated school system. The school board chose the latter option. By allowing students to transfer out of neighborhood schools to avoid integrated classrooms, the board violated its claim of support for them.
One reason for this hypocrisy is that the board of education consisted of politically ambitious individuals. They showed little commitment to the fair treatment of the city's African American and poor white populations. Faced with overcrowded classrooms and not willing to end segregated schools to relieve the problem, the board in 1953 instituted relay classes. A relay student attended school for one half of the school day. Those who attended morning classes went home at noon. Another set of students attended afternoon classes. To make matters worse, the preponderance of kindergarten age school children necessitated a waiting list.[1]
The relay system made it difficult for some Black students to attend school until they were six years old – an age when they should have been entering first grade. Meanwhile, white students attended classes all day in schools where several classrooms were empty. Teachers at the mainly "Black schools" taught two sets of classes called "double assignments."
Since the Hough area was the first neighborhood subjected to this sharp Black population increase, most of the early overcrowding problems occurred there. Given the happenings in other cities, Cleveland could have been a leader in school desegregation. The city's leaders, however, chose not to go in that direction. Instead, they decided to maintain what was mainly a political status quo. It was a segregated city that, through discrimination in housing and education, became even more segregated.[2]
As previously mentioned, white families not willing to subject their children to the possibilities of school integration or inferior educational facilities left the increasingly uncomfortable confines of Cleveland for suburban comfort.[3] Those unable to leave the city stunted any attempt at progressivism in the city's educational system. In other words, feeble attempts by the school board to integrate schools were met by protests. By the early 1960s, weary from waiting for the school board to end the "temporary" solution of relay classes and respond to their concerns, parent groups began to protest. Organizations in the middle--class Glenville and lower--class Hough areas were active, but the school board stonewalled their protests, preferring not to listen. White parents who opposed integration, however, had the board's ear.[4]
Individuals and groups that opposed integrating the schools were concerned with the possibility of having, as one parent put it, "Black grandchildren."[5] Others were more subtle in their approach. Statements were couched in terms that tried to hide racist intent while appearing to show concern for students of color. For example, these groups argued that the educational lag of Black students was a significant reason for postponing integration. African American students were so far behind white students that it would do them more harm than good should they share the same classrooms. Carefully putting the lag's onus on the lack of quality of predominantly Black schools, spokespersons suggested integration should not become a reality until there was educational equality in the schools.[6] This self-serving premise maintained that balance was possible in segregated facilities, but it would take time to accomplish it.
This argument admitted that school facilities were unequal while carefully avoiding the claim that Black students were not as bright as their white counterparts. Also left publicly unspoken was the idea that Black students were so far behind that helping them catch up could slow down white students' advancement. Privately, this, too, was a significant concern for white parents. Finally, though they encouraged raising the quality of the schools, the same parental groups opposed spending the money to enhance the buildings and educational opportunities for African Americans.
The arguments ignored and opposed the reasoning in Brown v. Board that even if children of color were offered improved education, it would not solve the underlying problem. When a school reflects society's rigid color line, the child cannot expect to be highly motivated. Apathy demonstrates the recognition of obstacles to achievement that segregation and discrimination pose. Continuing segregation regardless of educational quality will always be unequal. So, Thurgood Marshall and his team argued with Supreme Court concurrence, and thus, Cleveland's segregationists still opposed.
Studies conducted in the late 1950s show that Marshall's argument was correct. From 1956 to 1958, Black children in Louisville, Kentucky, achieved higher academic accomplishments when integrated with white children. The 1960 United States Commission on Civil Rights report stated that in cities where school segregation was eliminated or diminished after 1954, there was "evidence that the scholastic achievement of Negroes in (desegregated) schools has improved and no evidence of a resultant reduction of white students." Twelve southern administrators admitted that there was no lowering of academic standards after integration and that Black students had increased their academic success. It is not to say that the South had become an integrationist's utopia. [7] Quite the contrary.
Most southern Black children still attended schools with facilities that could be generously described as "ramshackle," while their white counterparts enjoyed far superior schools and classrooms. In the ten years following Brown, less than two percent of the former Confederacy's school systems were integrated. Yet, after Brown, school boards in Louisville, St. Louis, and Baltimore desegregated their schools.[8] This did not happen in Cleveland. Alabamanorth may as well have been Alabamasouth.
In September 1961, a group of parents and children decided that enough was enough. While carrying placards, they marched around the Cleveland Board of Education building. Others entered the board's meeting room as board members conducted business. The demonstrations were small and restrained but, after three such marches, generated sufficient impact to move the board to accept a solution that many believed to administratively impossible. The Relay Parent's March to Fill Empty Classrooms Committee ended relay and double assignment classes by busing Black students to all-white schools.[9] By accepting the responsibility for transporting students from overcrowded schools to buildings with unused classrooms, the Board of Education publicly recognized the necessity of responding to legitimate parental pressure. The board faced other forces as well.
The problems the Cleveland school board faced in the early 1960s were affected by its fiscal policies as well as changes occurring in the city. More than any other factor, the board's persistent advocacy of "Pay as You Go" (PAYGO) affected the adequacy of education in Cleveland.
PAYGO began in1925 when the board, alarmed by high-interest rates, persuaded the state legislature to legalize the use of money received from tax levies for building purposes. Since 1939 the board avoided borrowing and achieved a tax rate that was one of the lowest in Ohio. In 1958, school board president Charles Mooney said, "In our drive against debt, our boys and girls have not been shortchanged. There has been no skimping on school construction or in instruction in the classrooms. Our school programs and standards are right at the top of the nation."[10] Mooney may have been residing in Fantasyland, but he knew that the board was able to maintain this policy despite considerable opposition because the Chamber of Commerce, the newspapers, and "other strong allies" supported it.
In 1960, Estel Sparlin, executive director of the Citizen's League, commended the board for saving money.
This is not to say that Cleveland does not have the utmost needs or that we should not
Continue to push for improved housing, particularly in certain areas. It does mean that
your policy of securing funds for the housing program through current levies without borrowing is a good one and should be continued. The imbalances within the system are recognized as uncomfortable but somehow inevitable…It has gone on for decades and will go on for decades to come.[11]
Ms. Sparlin's statements, in effect, conceded that African American students were at a facility disadvantage. That imbalance had to be corrected to gain and maintain a thriving community was lost in her desire to maintain a balanced budget.
However attractive this system of financing was to taxpayers, it clamped a rigid ceiling on capital outlays and prevented any fulfillment of immediate or long-range needs. By 1962 the Cleveland school system was at the bottom of the heap on almost every count when compared to
Other large systems in the United States. It was last in teacher-pupil ratio, lowest in its use of special classrooms, and highest in the continued use of old and unsafe facilities. Aside from the fact that the system had no bonded indebtedness and the lowest tax rate in the county, Cleveland spent less of its tax dollars on schooling and was getting an increasingly smaller percentage of state support than other systems in the metropolitan area.[12]
In one study, the school board's housing committee estimated that it would take a quarter of a billion dollars for Cleveland's schools to meet "minimum acceptable standards." These standards included "better school housing and physical equipment, more trained educators to eliminate overcrowded classes, half-day sessions, and undue shuttling of children to distant schools."[13] Ironically, the committee's financial conservatism stimulated the need for increased taxes. Money was needed, so the board decided to ask the public to approve taxes to raise the necessary funds.
Levy supporters appealed to civic pride. Columbus, Detroit, and Los Angeles were all building new schools, and it would not do for Cleveland to lag too far behind. After all, Cleveland was eleventh of twenty-two cities in its county on spending per pupil. Shaker Heights had a terrific school system and spent twice as much as Cleveland to maintain it. Even if the levy passed, Cleveland would still have the lowest tax rate in Cuyahoga County.
To gain support from segregationists, levy supporters noted that there were 180 empty classrooms in white schools. Given the long distances some Black students would have to travel, and given high transportation costs, it was not economically feasible to transfer them to white schools. It would be better to build new schools and upgrade old ones rather than bus African Americans to white schools and initiate integration.[14]
Passing the tax increase was especially critical for Cleveland to meet minimal school housing needs in the future. Eighty-two school buildings were over fifty years old, and most of them were built in the nineteenth century. Of the eighty-two, forty were at least seventy-five years old. The Case School, for example, was built in 1875. Bolton Elementary School was built in 1858 and was still in use over one hundred years later.[15]
The Case and Bolton Schools and dozens of others were falling apart. The bathrooms at several predominantly African American schools were sub-par. Urinals were little more than holes in the floor, and piping was old, rusting, and inadequate. Many lacked proper lighting, and in Cleveland's cold winters, forced students and teachers to wear sweaters and coats because the heating systems did not work. Forty-six homerooms were judged substandard, and thirty-two of them were located in basements. Many classrooms were poorly ventilated with inadequate lighting. Others had small windows or no windows at all. Most schools lacked science rooms, gyms, music rooms, art rooms, and auditoriums. Newer buildings had many of these needed facilities, but overcrowding forced school officials to use them as homerooms, which prevented their use as initially designed.[16]
Despite the apparent need for enhanced school housing, many organizations opposed the 1961 school levy. The board asked for tax increases to help operate the schools and additional money, approximately four million dollars, for new housing and facilities expansion. As the board prepared for a public vote, it was advised by the Citizen's League to ask for only a modest increase. The Chamber of Commerce opposed the levies, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper did as well.[17]
The Federation of Realty Interests appeared to be the most active opponent of the levy. Although the Federation opposed relay classes, it also opposed integrating white schools. Such moves were bad for the real estate and mortgage businesses, it believed, and so the Federation was most active in opposition to ending PAYGO. Though expressing opposition to building new schools, the Federation supported building additional classrooms to existing overcrowded schools. Arguing that Glenville and Hough were "fluid population areas," the Federation claimed that these areas were losing population as other underdeveloped Black areas were building up.
Rather than build new schools to replace aging buildings that, in many cases, were well over fifty years old, the Federation argued that rehabilitation was less expensive. This argument was important since their whole point was to reduce the amount of money originally asked for in the levy. Tax increases rarely come down, and the Federation worried that the combination of taxes and abandoning PAYGO would amount to financial difficulty for Cleveland.[18] Not surprisingly, the levies were defeated in May. Passing the levy was of the utmost importance, and it was a devastating loss when Clevelanders voted it down in May. A short time after the May vote, the board and levy opponents reached an agreement to reduce the building millage to prevent opposition when re-submitted for a vote in November. This time the levies passed.
Before the levy's defeat in May, area civil rights leaders took grim pleasure in noting that their situation was not as bad as in other cities. Bad as it was in Cleveland, for example, Boston was worse. Helping to contribute to that city's title as the most racist in America, the 1961 Boston School Committee, a five-person elective body, refused to acknowledge the existence of de facto segregation in the city's schools. There followed demonstrations that included an all-night sit-in at school committee headquarters and a city-wide program that encouraged parents of about 3,000 pupils to keep their children home. In November's election, Boston voters re-elected four of the five members. The fifth, Committee newcomer Louise Day Hicks, was an ardent segregationist. The chairman won by a landslide and even out-polled the incumbent mayor.[19]
Cleveland, however, was not supposed to be Boston, so tempers were high, patience was short, and political leaders played the blame game after the levy's defeat. Cora Patterson, president of the Hough Area Council, criticized the school board for overcrowded schools and relay classes, necessitating the levy vote in the first place. Stung by this charge, board president Ralph Findley, who was raised in the Hough area, blamed Hough itself for the loss by claiming that residents did not comply with zoning and building restrictions.[20]
Newly elected board member Walter Davis placed the blame on the Board of Education and the Chamber of Commerce. Accusing the school board of caving in "to the wishes of the Chamber of Commerce," Davis stated that levy opponents used a 1960 housing report that was "ready-made for the Madison Avenue distortion to which the Chamber of Commerce and its satellites subjected it." Furthermore, claiming that the Chamber of Commerce "declared war on the children of Cleveland" by desiring less money than needed to improve city schools, Davis predicted that the 1962-63 school year would have a "combination of at least 300 relay and double assignment classes."[21] Davis' prediction may have overstated the numbers of upcoming relay classes, but he was correct that the approved levy was not enough.
For several years attempts to reach a consensus with the board by relay parents and concerned organizations failed. In 1958, the NAACP and Doan Elementary School PTA approached the board with requests to use empty classrooms in white schools for children attending relay sessions. Although there was a kindergarten waiting list of 1,314 children and thirty-four relay classes, the board refused to consider this possibility. The next year, a year after Charles Mooney declared, "our boys and girls have not been shortchanged," there were 118 relay classes.[22]
Meanwhile, two new elementary schools opened in Cleveland's Hough area, Crispus Attucks and Daniel Morgan, but they were not enough. Now, Hough area parents requested an end to relay classes but, like the Doan School PTA, was denied. By 1960 the kindergarten waiting list had increased to 1,700. Relay classes affected 8,340 children, and 131 teachers were assigned double classes. With an even greater increase in relay classes on the books in 1961, the Hough area Mother's March took place.[23]
In the process of planning for the March, the Relay Committee found a friend in television station KYW. When the marchers were ready, KYW's cameras were rolling. Subsequent favorable publicity played a part in mobilizing public opinion in their favor. The Plain Dealer, which tended to side with the school board on issues dealing with race, reported on the March but made no editorial comment. But KYW editorials hammered the school board, forcing it to face up to serious issues.
KYW was relentless. Its editorials blasted the school board and relay classes. A September 1961, editorial compared the conditions and quality of education between white and Black students. Comparing the intransigence of the Cleveland Board of Education to the one in Chicago, KYW pointed out that 24,000 school children in that city were on double-shift classes. But it agreed to transport students to schools with empty classrooms.[24]
Comparisons made by KYW could not have been more stark. Cleveland's white students attended excellent facilities while it's African American pupils attended overcrowded schools that were falling apart. Chicago's school system, much larger than Cleveland's, accommodated its Black students (after some protests of their own) while the local system did not. Finally, after three marches and numerous KYW editorials, the Board of Education relented by approving the long-requested busing program.[25]
Life is not a television show where everything is wrapped up by the end of the program, and everyone lives happily ever after. It was certainly not the case in Cleveland. Despite approving the school busing program, plans on achieving it still had to be made. Which schools will the students attend? How will they get to school? What will the board do to make sure that the bussed children felt welcome? As it turned out, the board was not all that interested in the logistics of the program. The board was responsible for planning the logistics, but it washed its hands of the project by handing it off to School Superintendent William Levenson. When he revealed his plan, the board unanimously approved of it despite there being no public discussion.
The plan was full of flaws. For example, it called for Black children, armed with a bus pass provided by the city and a brown bag lunch, to ride a bus at least two miles from home. The obvious problem was that few parents would allow their elementary school-aged children to ride public transportation without adequate supervision. Amid a storm of criticism, the board ducked all responsibility by blaming Superintendent Levenson. It made no improvements to the plan until mid-November. In January 1962, Black children were bussed to white schools, effectively ending relay classes.
White parents were not happy, but board members assured them that their children would remain apart from the other. The upgraded plan called for using school busses to carry students and their teachers to the receiving schools. In their attempts to please everyone, board members pleased no one. Attempts to segregate African American pupils from whites reached the heights of absurdity. All Black children had to report to their originating schools where they boarded a school bus. Parents could not drive their children to the receiving school, and no one was allowed to walk, even if they could. Teachers rode the bus with their students. Upon arrival, they ventured into a veritable ghost town since no one was outside playing. All white students had to be in their classrooms when the busses arrived. Incoming students had to go straight to their classrooms and stay there. It gets better.
Once Black students arrived in their classrooms, true to the board's promise, there was no interaction. Blacks and whites went to the bathroom at separate times. Black students could only use the bathroom at 10:30 am. Bathrooms were off--limits the rest of the day. At recess, they could not play on the playground. Every student had to bring his or her lunch to eat in the classroom. Garbage had to be taken back to the originating school rather than discard them in the receiving school's garbage can. If there was a special program in the gym or auditorium, Black students could not attend. On one occasion at the Brett Elementary School, a Christmas program in the gym was for whites only. The school's principal "generously" told Black teachers they could keep their classroom doors open if the "kids wanted to listen."[26]
Such treatment was intolerable to many as the idea of segregated classrooms simply did not sit well with them. By spring 1963, protests resumed. For a while, the school board did little to help, but, again, community pressure began to wear it down. Rather than deal with the problem head-on, the board ducked, dodged, and stalled as if it were a boxer on the verge of being knocked out.
The Cleveland Board of Education eventually sided with white parents. First, after giving in to the demands of integrationists, all classrooms were integrated in January 1964. To appease white parents, the board immediately hired architectural and engineering firms to build three new schools in predominantly Black areas to resume school segregation in September 1964. The new schools were finished in time for the new academic year. At that point, African American children were removed from the white receiving schools and placed in the newly built facilities. Cleveland had re-segregated its classrooms. Years later, court-ordered busing re-integrated the city’s schools.
School integration was a long, uphill climb in Cleveland. Once integrationists reached the mountaintop, however, they realized that there were others to climb. A pair of violent race riots in the 1960s forced many white families out of Cleveland and into the suburbs. More affluent Black families followed as the quality of the schools never improved. Meanwhile, board members with political ambitions beyond the school board never attained their goals. Galvanized Black voters remembered who supported them (almost no one) and who did not (everyone else).
Black and white activists made politically ambitious board members pay for their lack of concern for students of color and poor whites. By the hundreds, if not thousands, potential voters moved to the suburbs leaving board members vulnerable to an electorate that was seeking vengeance. The ballot box was their ultimate payback. Ironically, most of Cleveland's suburban school systems were integrated by the early 1970s. The same families who left Cleveland to avoid school integration found their children attending integrated schools in the suburbs. For them, there was no escaping integration.
Julian Madison, is an Associate Professor of History at Southern Connecticut State University
Notes
[1] Neighborhood libraries and church meeting rooms were used as kindergarten classrooms to slightly alleviate the waiting list.
[2] Interview with Joanne Klunder Hardy, February 19, 1997, Oak Hill, Vermont. Mrs. Hardy was the widow of Reverend Bruce Klunder, a white minister killed in 1964 taking part in a civil rights protest. In a moving display of love and respect for the Klunders, African Americans refused to let a hearse take Reverend Klunder’s casket to the church. Instead, they carried the casket to the church, a 1.8-mile walk.
[3] Most white families that moved away were in the economic middle and upper class. The flight to the suburbs hurt the school system financially and took away some of its most important advocates.
[4] Interview with Mildred Madison, March 23, 1997, Cleveland, Ohio. Mrs. Madison was president of the Doan School PTA.
[5] Proceedings of the Cleveland Board of education, March 5, 1962.
[6] Interviews with Joanne Hardy Klunder, Mildred Madison, and Arthur Evans, March 23, 1997. Mr. Evans was a Cleveland area civil rights activist.
[7] United States Commission on Civil Rights (Washington, DC: United States Government, 1960), pages 14-15.
[8] Ibid., 17
[9] Interview with Betty Younger, May 14, 1997, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ms. Younger lived in Hough and was the chair and spokesperson for the Mother’s March. She and her husband were among the few white parents who voluntarily remained in the Hough area and kept their children in integrated schools.
[10] Noel Wical, “Cleveland Saves Millions on Cash Schools,” The American Mercury, September 1958, pages 76-77. Mooney’s assertions were contradicted in the 1961 School Housing Report by Richard Matia, Assistant Superintendent for School Housing. Said Matia, “The trouble is that we have never dome enough to catch up and have always fallen further behind.” School Superintendent William Levinson agreed. In the 1963 School Study Housing Report, Levenson wrote, “Our school facilities are not only sub-standard – they rank lowest in the nation.”
[11] Proceedings, March 16, 1960.
[12] Report of the School Housing Committee, op, City of Cleveland Board of Education, page 14.
[13] Over 2 billion dollars in 2020.
Ibid., 14.
[14] Interview with Betty Younger, May 14, 1997.
[15] “These Schools were Old When Grandpa was a Child,” Cleveland Press, August 20, 1960, p. B1.
[16] Notes from the Betty Younger Files, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
[17] Cleveland Plain Dealer, editorial, January 30, 1962.
[18] Letter from the Federation of Realty Interests to the Board of Education, April 12, 1960. The voter turnout in May was predictably low but the levy’s opponents were able to get their supporters to the polls.
[19] Interview with Betty Younger.
[20] “Board Blames Hough area for Crowding in Its Schools,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 18, 1961, p. 23.
[21] “Board Pressured, Davis Charges,” Plain Dealer, May 30, 1962, pg. 1
[22] Notes from Doan Elementary School PTA Meeting, October 8, 1959, Mildred Madison files.
[23] Interview with Betty Younger.
[24] KYW editorial, September 22, 1961.
[25] KYW editorial, September 29, 1961
[26] Interview with Stanley Tolliver, January 1998, Cleveland, Ohio, Betty Younger, and Mildred Madison. Mr. Tolliver was an attorney for several Cleveland area civil rights organizations.
