The Shakerite VOL 91 ISSUE I

financing because of the changing racial character
of the community.”
William Sanborn described his experience when
he sought to purchase a home in Ludlow in 1961 to
Lee Burton, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
“A friend of mine at a savings and loan association
tried to dissuade me from moving into this ‘trouble’
area and I really had to pull some strings to get the
loan,” he said.
Attorney Joseph Finley also moved to Ludlow
at the height of this rapid racial change. “One lending
agency representative told me that I would be
a fool, and he used that word, if I bought a home in
the Ludlow area,” he said in an article published by
the Sun Press in 1960.
The response, Isaacs said, was to establish a
program to attract new white home buyers to Ludlow
while encouraging new Black buyers to settle in
other parts of Shaker Heights or in other eastern
suburbs.
In the Lomond neighborhood, Richter stated,
every effort was to convince white purchasers of the
dream of an integrated suburb. “The community
associations sent letters promoting the integrated
communities to professionals moving to Cleveland,”
she wrote.
Black and white children attending school in a Moreland
classroom, September 1970, shortly after the
voluntary busing program was created to maintain
diversity in the schools. Photo by Shaker Heights Public
Libray. Local Historical Society.
Lomond resident Marc Swartzbaugh spoke to
Richter about his memory of these efforts. “We sent
letters to everybody that we knew,” he said. “My law
firm was a good source. We had a number of people
move into Lomond. Every time that we would
hire somebody, they would get a packet from the
Lomond Association. We solicited doctors that way,
who came to the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western.”
This, however, is where fact deviates from myth.
Richter writes that the efforts for integration were
not “a proactive effort by an all-White suburb to
seek out Black residents,” as many believe. It was
“a reaction to the movement of African American
homeowners into the community and the perceived
threat of rapid resegregation, declining property
values, and inadequate city services that both
Black and White residents had witnessed in numerous
Cleveland neighborhoods as African Americans
moved in.” It was damage control.
This method of constantly recruiting white
Spring 2021 THE SHAKERITE 9