The Shakerite VOL 91 ISSUE I

According to Richter’s work, the story of integration
began two centuries ago. “Residents of
Shaker Heights have aspired to create an ideal community
since the 1820s when a Shaker community
developed on this site,” she wrote.
At first, Shaker Heights comprised members of
The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second
Appearing, more commonly known as “The Shakers.”
A Christian sect founded circa 1747, they believed
in the public ownership of land and equality
between men and women. They were also against
marriage and sex, and very few are alive today as a
result.
Decades later, two wealthy
brothers named Oris Paxton
and Mantis James Van
Sweringen began buying land
in Shaker Heights. Throughout
the early 19th century,
they developed their land into
a planned community. Their
supposedly utopian plan excluded
Black, Catholic and
Jewish people.
The Van Sweringen Company
emphasized its ideals
through a series of ads in
an old newspaper called the
Cleveland Topics. “On every
family’s horizon is a rainbow,”
read one ad, “and for many the
pot of gold at the rainbow’s
end is Shaker Village.”
The ads were nestled among articles on golf and
polo, opera and art, bridge, antiques and wedding
announcements. The Cleveland Topics catered to
wealthy and aspiring middle-class readers — precisely
the sort of people who were buying suburban
homes in record numbers in the 1920s.
However, race truly became a factor in Shaker’s
history when the Great Migration began. The Great
Migration, spanning the entire 20th century, refers
to the mass-migration of 6 million Black southern
Americans from the south to the north of the United
States. “The Great Migration had a dramatic effect
on Cleveland,” Richter wrote. “In the ten years
“These southern
negroes are not
welcome here.
Please do not delude
yourself, or delude
them.”
between 1910 and 1920, the African American population
of Cleveland increased 308 percent.”
The dissertation cited The Cleveland Advocate,
a Black newspaper, which reported on the migration
in 1917. “It is a REGULAR EXODUS. It is without
head, tail, or leadership,” the paper published.
Before the Great Migration, Cleveland had been
known for its progressive history of abolitionism,
civil rights work, lack of residential segregation
and integration of public schools. However, historian
Kenneth L. Kusmer dates the sharp increase
in racial tension and institutional discrimination in
Cleveland to 1915 because of the Great Migration.
White Clevelanders, particularly
those in suburbs
such as Shaker Heights,
were alarmed by the Great
Migration. For example,
in 1925 an editorial was
published in the Cleveland
Topics. “Cleveland’s colored
population has increased
from 8,500 to 50,000 in the
past ten years. More are
on the way. Cleveland’s colored
population in the old,
regular, well ordered days
affords absolutely no key to
or suggestion of the nature
of this new population or of
the problem it presents. . .
It is the serious problem of
a vast accretion of new and totally different people
of an opposite race…These southern negroes are not
welcome here. Please do not delude yourself, or delude
them,” the author wrote.
As a result of this racial tension, Clevelanders
gradually began to segregate. “We can see increasing
concentration of African Americans in certain
areas of the city resulting in a crisis-level housing
shortage, dramatically inflated rents, and deteriorating
housing conditions in this section,” Richter
wrote.
Richter included the words of poet Langston
Hughes, who moved to Cleveland in the early 1920s:
“We always lived, during my high school years, ei-
1925 Editorial
Cleveland Topics
Spring 2021 THE SHAKERITE 7