Discrimination in Cleveland - the Consequences of Racial Discrimination on African-Americans in Cleveland

...

Discrimination and the Consequences

By this time in the early twentieth century, African Americans were starting to get discriminated against in more ways than one. The timing after World War I was especially an important time for African Americans in Cleveland. This timing when life for African Americans in Cleveland would start deteriorating and Cleveland would start “laying the ground work for the ghettoization of the black population” (Kusmer, 1995, p. 267). With this ghettoization, they would lay the groundwork for African Americans to become stuck in impoverished areas of the city for decades with little hope of escaping its wall. An outside reporter wrote about it in a news article saying, “the largest of Cleveland’s walled villages has its gates barred from the outside. It is the Negro slum of the east side of the Cuyahoga River… its people stay there because the surrounding ethnic neighborhoods and suburbs will not let them out” (Skow, 1967). Even after World War I the effects of starting to ghettoize blacks in certain areas of the city was still being felt when that article was written in 1967. He also stated in his article that the abandonment of downtown Cleveland by whites is what made the African American housing decline a classic (p. 41). Whites fled downtown to suburbs and left African Americans with the east side of the river to decay in isolation together. This concludes that racial discrimination, not economics, is responsible for Cleveland’s segregated housing (Keating, 1995). Today, much of this isolation that African Americans experience is still very concentrated on the East side of Cleveland.

The biggest blow to the African American community in Cleveland during this time though was discrimination in the work force by whites. With more and more white employers starting to look past African American workers, this helped bring African Americans in the city into poverty. From 1870 to 1910 the amount of African Americans in skilled trades dropped dramatically from 32% to 11% and the economic progress for African Americans began to slow the rate of home ownership with a parallel drop from 28% of African Americans owning homes in 1870 to only 11% in 1910, a direct result of fewer skilled trade jobs (Kusmer, 1995, p. 269). These results are an exact consequence of discrimination starting in Cleveland and laying groundwork for these trends to continue. Unions started to no allow African American making it hard for them to get any kind of Steel job and restricted them to very unskilled labor. W.E.B. Dubois described job discrimination as morally wrong, politically dangerous, and socially silly (1899). This discrimination prevents the city itself from benefiting from all of the great skills and different point of views that African Americans could have brought to the table. This also contributed to African American men having fewer financial resources to allocate to addressing their basic needs (Doom, 2005). With African American men not able to provide for their families, women started working more and more as domestics instead of staying home to focus on family like their white counterparts. This would continue for decades and with this, African American boys had little to do, fewer and fewer places to go, and the streets became their home (Skow, 1967). African American men who were eventually able to establish themselves and own a business and home like Thomas Boddie, who bought property in the ghetto to build his record business, were eventually bought down by the neighborhood itself. Boddie lost business after white clients feared coming into the community to get records made by him after the Hough race riots (Putre, 2012).

Not only were African Americans in Cleveland being discriminated against with housing and jobs after World War I, they were starting to become segregated from white people in every day life. Soon they were starting to be discriminated against in the most menial of places like the YMCA. By 1915, the YMCA adapted a “whites only” policy excluding blacks from using its recreational facilities. This led to a lone YMCA being opened on Cedar Avenue for blacks only but was inadequate compared to the white facilities (Kusmer, 1976, p. 59). Soon hospitals started to segregate into white and black wards and the Women’s Hospital would only see African American patients on Saturdays. While schools remained integrated, it was made very clear to African Americans that they were being set apart as inferior to the rest of the population. Even with the Civil Rights Act that was passed in Ohio in the 1880’s, discrimination was becoming a bigger and bigger problem in restaurants, theaters, public transportation, and other aspects of daily life. This did not get better as time went by either. In 1966 the Hough riots were over African Americans not being served water at a restaurant in Hough, which led to a six day riot were four African Americans were killed and many were injured. There were many accounts of citizens of the Hough area being discriminated against by cops as well. Skow states in his new article written right after the Hough Riots, “the feeling expressed for the police force is cynicism” and that Carl Stokes referred to Police Chief Richards as “completely unsuited for the job. He is a man eaten up by racial animosity” (1967). Looking at current times you can see that the racial tension between whites and African Americans in Cleveland is still relevant. The consequence of this discrimination has led cops in the area to still have racial animosity and handle situation like the Tamir Rice shooting unethically and dishonestly.

The Blame for Consequences of Discrimination

The only place for the blame of the consequences of racial discrimination against African Americans in Cleveland is on whites. Whites are single handedly responsible for African Americans socioeconomic status as of today and the reason why African Americans have never been the majority of the middle class (Kellogg, 1996) (Kellogg, 1996). With not giving African Americans a chance at a good job in skilled labor and continuing to discriminate against them in the workforce because whites deemed them inadequate in the labor force, that indirectly set up African Americans for poverty throughout their lifetime. The negative attitudes and prejudice on the part of the whites limited all opportunities for black keeping them poor, undereducated, and segregated thereby confirming the “big lie” sold to whites and African Americans so long ago was extremely effective (Mrydal, 1944).

No everyone agrees that whites are to blame for the African Americans downfall throughout Cleveland history though. Kasarda believes that there was an industrial restructuring of America