Shaker Heights: One Suburb's Attempt to Build an Integrated Community

[Celerity]

https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/one-suburbs-attempt-to-build-an-integrated

If you care about social mobility and cohesion in America, you have to care about the enduring racial segregation—and rising income segregation—found in American neighborhoods and public schools. Yet these problems are so pervasive that they have in some ways taken on the air of inevitability. So it’s intriguing to come across a community that has taken a more hopeful path. That’s the subject of Washington Post reporter Laura Meckler’s fascinating new book, Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity. Why, she asks, has one upper-middle class Cleveland suburb tried, over several decades, to create something different: a racially integrated community and system of public schools? And how successful has it been?



Meckler, a Gen Xer who grew up and attended public schools in Shaker Heights, draws upon more than 250 interviews to tell the evolution of the town through a series of engaging vignettes about individuals from Shaker Heights’ black and white communities. She details what Shaker Heights got right, as well as where it fell short, or overreached. Throughout, she questions dominant narratives found on parts of the left that America is too racist to seek integration anywhere, and from parts of the right that school integration is a distraction from America’s “real” educational problems, teacher unions and single-parent families.

Located next to the City of Cleveland’s east side, Shaker Heights began in the early twentieth century as a classic exclusive American suburb that was socially engineered to include only “people of the right sort”—those who were white, Christian, and wealthy. Developers in the 1920s advertised that the town would offer “contentment, forever assured by protective restrictions.” Local developers and landowners used the tools then available: now-unconstitutional racially restrictive covenants and economic zoning rules that outlawed the construction of multifamily housing in most areas of town, zoning rules that remain pervasive today.

In Shaker Heights, the community’s builders noted, homes would be required to be two full stories in height, and residents would be safe from “flats, terraces, and double houses.” This policy kept working-class people of all races out, and when a few upper-middle class black families tried to buy in Shaker Heights in the 1920s, they faced intimidation and attempts to drive them out with stones and fire. By the mid-twentieth century Shaker Heights would grow to become one of the wealthiest communities in the country, one that remained overwhelmingly white.

Embracing Racial Integration........

snip