Sat 2/13 @ 3PM
Segregated communities didn’t happen by accident. If people didn’t know “their place,” then it was often forcefully impressed on them, sometimes by violence. Other methods were less overt — redlining and blockbusting caused white people to flee communities as black people moved in, re-segregating them. It happened in cities across the country. It happened in my old neighborhood in Chicago.
Some communities resisted this seemingly inevitable pattern though, among them Cleveland Heights. When black people began to move into the almost all-white inner-ring suburb in the ’60s, citizens worked to try to insure that that the community was open and inclusive — and that white and black residents lived side by side.
Susan Kaeser tells the story of the community’s activism and the people behind it in her book Resisting Segregation: Cleveland Heights Residents Shape Their Community 1964-1976. She’ll talk about the book and the stories that drove it in a Zoom conversation.
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