"INTEGRATION DOES NOT JUST HAPPEN"
Don DeMarco,
who came to Shaker Heights to direct its Community Services
Department in 1982, gave a speech in April 1989 to Cleveland city
officials in which he articulated the race-conscious,
pro-integration approach that has guided him in his years of public
service. Among his observations:
Integration does not just happen. It takes
race-conscious, pro-integrative effort to effect and maintain.
Colorblind or race-neutral approaches simply do not work. They
almost always result in resegregation—or what I term
"American apartheid"....
We
fervently want to have integration happen and be maintained
"naturally." But as Kenneth Clark, the famed sociologist and expert
witness on the Brown v. Board of Education case, has
told us: "To be colorblind in a racist society is to be a
racist."
Developed at
the turn of the century for a wide range of income groups, Shaker
Heights' patterns of land use encourage population diversity. Its
neighborhoods include some districts in which half-million dollar
mansions are not uncommon and others in which the homes are
relatively modest—"starter homes" in the parlance of today's
real estate industry. This more modest kind of housing tends to be
clustered near the Cleveland city line. Families can, in theory,
move up the real estate ladder to the top of the Cleveland-area
market without ever leaving this suburban city of 30,000.
Until well
after World War II, developers enforced restrictive covenants in
Shaker Heights. Supported by the real estate industry and upheld by
some state courts, these covenants excluded Jews, Catholics, and
blacks. Even though restrictive covenants were struck down by the
Supreme Court in 1948, exclusionary practices continued for years
afterward, sanctioned by the Federal Housing Administration.
It was not
until the second half of the 1950s that blacks were able to buy
houses in Shaker Heights. The first black buyers were attracted to
the relatively modest neighborhoods in the area known as South
Shaker. This was an upscale move from the Cleveland neighborhoods
in which they had been living.
AN
ABSENCE OF PANIC
Among the
first black buyers in the South Shaker neighborhood of Ludlow was a
dentist named Winston Richie who had been raised in a predominantly
white neighborhood in Cleveland. Richie moved to Shaker Heights in
1956 when his children reached school age. He wanted his children,
he said, to learn that they could successfully compete with whites
in school so that they could go on to compete effectively in
college and in the business world.