Metropolitan Cleveland is one of the most segregated communities in the country. The Cuyahoga River splits the city of Cleveland into a virtually all-white West Side and an East Side that includes—besides the central business district and older industrial areas—many neighborhoods that are almost entirely black.

Descendants of European immigrants attracted to Cleveland's heavy industries in the late 1800s live in predominantly white neighborhoods west of the Cuyahoga. Surrounding suburban areas conform to the same pattern. The population of 37 of 51 suburban communities in Cuyahoga County was at least 95 percent white in 1986. In that same year 11 urban neighborhoods to the east of the river were more than 90 percent black. Some of these were communities in which black families, newly arrived from the South to work in Cleveland's factories, settled during World War II. This segregated pattern was perpetuated in the postwar surge of suburbanization.

By the early 1960s the process known as "white flight" had begun in some eastern suburbs bordering Cleveland. As large numbers of whites moved out, blacks moved in. In that way communities were resegregated. Two of Cleveland's eastern inner-ring suburban communities are 80 percent black today; others are predominantly black in certain census tracts.

This bleak picture of residential segregation by race might appear bleaker were it not for the determination of a group of residents of one eastern Cleveland suburb. Shaker Heights, home to many of the area's decision makers, has for nearly three decades devoted its resources to promoting integration in its housing and schools. Moreover, in cooperation with other communities in the Greater Cleveland area, Shaker Heights has been instrumental in organizing a metropolitan-wide effort to encourage racial diversity in a number of Cleveland's suburbs. Today, this