The Fantasy of Integration in Shaker Heights, Ohio

By Jay Caspian Kang

Can the good intentions of affluent liberals create integrated and equitable communities? This is the implied question that underlies so much of the current discourse on race and education. Over the years, we’ve seen dozens of experiments, from school busing to intentionally integrated housing developments, that tell us the answer is no: even the most progressive communities can’t seem to quarantine themselves from our country’s endemic inequalities.

In “Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity,” the Washington Post education reporter Laura Meckler tells the story of a Cleveland suburb that appeared to be an exception. Meckler grew up in Shaker Heights and as a child felt “enormous pride” that she was in a place where Black and white people lived alongside each other. But the racial diversity that Meckler saw in Shaker’s neighborhoods and schools wasn’t a happy accident of the market: dozens of white and Black families worked together for decades to create what they hoped would be an integrated, progressive, upper-middle-class community—one where their children could attend school and prosper together. This, of course, was not a universally held goal in Shaker Heights, but the town did better than most. “We played together. We had sleepovers at each other’s homes,” Lynne Adrine, who was one of the first Black children to move to Shaker Heights, says in the book. “We sometimes had lunch at each other’s homes and it didn’t matter who it was.”

Like many suburbs outside large industrial cities, Shaker Heights started out as the front line of segregation in the Cleveland area. In the opening chapters, Meckler provides what has become a familiar saga of redlining, deed covenants, and intimidation, all carried out in the interest of keeping Black residents out of white neighborhoods. Around the turn of the twentieth century, two brothers and real-estate prospectors, O. P. and M. J. Van Sweringen, began developing the land to the east of Cleveland that had once been occupied by the Shaker religious group. Taking inspiration from Riverside, a suburb of Chicago designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the Van Sweringens laid out a network of looping, oval-shaped neighborhoods with houses set deep back in spacious lots. They marketed their civic creation to “people of the right sort”—which, at the time, meant upwardly mobile white families.

The Van Sweringens would spend the rest of their lives insuring that only those same “people of the right sort” could ever live in Shaker Heights. At first, this effort mostly took the form of the restrictive NIMBYish zoning that’s still common today. Saloons, factories, and flats were all banned from Shaker Heights. But as more Black people began to move to Cleveland during the Great Migration of the twenties—between 1910 and 1930, the Black population in the city went from eighty-five hundred to seventy-two thousand—the Van Sweringens, who still held tight control over real-estate transactions, began to actively block prospective Black buyers from moving in.

Integration came to Shaker Heights in the mid-fifties, when a handful of Black families finally established a foothold in the town’s Ludlow neighborhood. White families began to sell their homes, spurred by aggressive real-estate agents who told them that it was only a matter of time before their block flipped from white to Black. Those houses, in turn, were mostly sold to Black families. White families who wanted to buy in Ludlow were routinely denied loans because the banks believed that the entire neighborhood was just a few years from turning into a ghetto.

What happened next may very well be the only heartwarming story involving a homeowners’ association in the history of this country. A collection of (predominantly Jewish) white and Black families formed a series of organizations with the explicit goal of maintaining an integrated neighborhood. By the early sixties, Ludlow had, indeed, become majority Black: in 1963, less than a decade after the first Black family moved into Ludlow, seventy-two per cent of the students at Ludlow Elementary were Black. Ironically, then, integration mostly meant discouraging Black buyers and getting white families to move in.

The gambit worked for about a decade. As more Black families moved into other neighborhoods in Shaker Heights, the town began to embrace integration. Ludlow’s grand experiment was featured in newspapers and magazines, and luminaries such as Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, and Martin Luther King, Jr., made appearances. The integrationist good will spilled over into Shaker’s schools, which would spend the next half century involved in experiments that aimed to produce fairer educational outcomes across racial lines. Shaker Heights bused students as early as 1970 to break up the racial homogeneity of some of its schools; later efforts would include targeted tutoring for minority students and “detracking”—placing students of differing abilities in the same classrooms until they reached high school. Throughout the town’s years of experimentation, Meckler shows, both white and Black parents displayed an uncommon resolve in trying to rectify inequalities.

Shaker Heights’s commitment to a shared educational system became all the more notable because of the number of accomplished people who hail from there. Paul Newman was from Shaker Heights, as are the comedians David Wain and Molly Shannon, the rappers Machine Gun Kelly and Kid Cudi, and Gary Cohn, a former director of the U.S. National Economic Council. Shaker Heights High School counts among its graduates the novelist Celeste Ng and the Los Angeles Times journalist Jamil Smith, and my colleagues Susan Orlean, Andy Borowitz, and Kathryn Schulz. If you live in New York City and work in a creative field, seemingly every person you meet from the Cleveland area is from that community of around thirty thousand people.

But, starting in the seventies, the fantasy of Shaker Heights and its abundance of cultural and academic wealth started to rupture. Meckler recounts the introduction of public-housing units to the Ludlow neighborhood in 1970—which was fiercely contested by residents, both white and Black. As the gap between the richest and poorest families in the area increased, the schools became more internally segregated, and the conversation shifted from integration to an arguably more contentious fight over the racial achievement gap. This problem certainly was not specific to Shaker—nearly every community that commits itself to integration comes to realize that it is effectively running two schools at once. Meckler writes:

Shaker increasingly became two school systems within one. Bothacademically and socially, Black and white students were together—andalso apart. They were arriving at the same high school, but thesouth-side entrance was colloquially dubbed the “Black door,” and oneon the north called the “white door.” (Since Black students wereconcentrated on the south side of Shaker, many arrived at that door.)Students ate lunch in the same cafeteria, but one side was mostlyBlack students and the other mostly white. And, perhaps mostimportant, as time went on, the upper-level courses were filled withwhite faces, while the lower-level classes became dominated by Blackones.

For the past forty or so years, Shaker Heights schools have focussed their attention on reducing the achievement gap between Black and white students. Black students in Shaker Heights do better than Black students elsewhere, but they have not kept up with the “uber achievement” of Shaker’s white students. The achievement gap has become a constant and pernicious source of conflict in the community; there have been countless initiatives, meetings, and committees on the topic. To date, nothing has really worked to shrink the disparities.

The second half of the book introduces us to many of the Shaker Heights residents who have tried to tackle these issues; Meckler provides us with character sketches of seemingly every superintendent, teacher, and student in town. In this way, the book suffers from a problem common to books about education: much of the story is told at an anecdotal level, through an admittedly charming cast of characters who have tried very hard to solve the city’s racial inequalities. Economic conditions are discussed, but not at much length until the end of the book. “The challenges facing Shaker Heights today are enormous and they are driven by economics as much as by race as well as by the complex intersection between the two,” Meckler acknowledges.

What emerges from Meckler’s reporting, even if she doesn’t say it explicitly, is that the Black and white homeowners who integrated Shaker Heights weren’t just united by their morals; they wanted to protect their property values. White residents who did not want to move when a Black family arrived needed to maintain a reasonable white presence on the block to keep their homes valuable. The new Black families also realized that their new houses would keep their value if the neighborhood was “integrated” rather than fully resegregated. Despite the good intentions of the residents of Shaker Heights, both Black and white homeowners used the same tools as thousands of other communities across the country to keep poor people outside its borders. They barred apartment buildings, told Black families to move elsewhere, and hid real-estate listings from “undesirable” buyers.

“Dream Town” shows that neighborhood integration necessitates class homogeneity, but even then it requires tireless effort to maintain. “I feel strongly that people ought to be economically integrated also, but I think if you bring that into this mix, then you’re going to hurt this mix,” one of Shaker Heights’s middle-class Black pioneers says in the book. “I mean, you know, somebody needs to do it, and I support it. But I think the more you water down what we’re trying to do, the more difficult it’ll be.” He was, in his way, ultimately proved correct.

Meckler seems conscious of her position as a white journalist writing about integration in her home town. “I have tried to be as comprehensive in this telling as I could, to include as many perspectives as possible, to pick this place up and examine it from the back and around the side,” Meckler writes in the book’s final chapter. “But, of course, this is not the definitive take. No take can be. In particular, a Black author looking at these same events likely would have her own interpretation of what unfolded and what is still unfolding.” Her unexplained assumption that a Black author would see things differently is strange, given how much of the reporting points to shared class interests between Shaker’s Black and white homeowners. It shows the inherent problem of writing about system failures through sympathetic character profiles, rather than following the bigger fault lines.

The book’s limitations become especially clear in a chapter about a Black superintendent named Greg Hutchings, Jr., who came to Shaker Heights a decade ago with a host of ideas for making its schools more equitable, including detracking and ditching popular science programs for gifted students. Hutchings kicked up discontent among many of the families in town, and Meckler points to his poor interpersonal and communication skills as the source of the discord. “I wish that Greg Hutchings Jr. had been able to mix his passion for his work with more humility and respect for those who didn’t see things his way,” Meckler writes. It’s likely that Hutchings did rub the residents of Shaker Heights the wrong way, but I’d imagine that they had more of an issue with his policies than with his personality. Affluent liberal parents might be willing to share their schools with equally wealthy people of other races, but they rarely relinquish advantages for their own children. School-district dramas are rarely as personal as this telling makes them seem.

Despite being “far from perfect,” Meckler writes in the epilogue, Shaker Heights is “far ahead of most of the country and offers lessons for places and people who want to try to do better.” I have spent most of my life in places like Shaker Heights: I spent my childhood in Chapel Hill and currently live in Berkeley. I have little doubt that the liberals of Shaker Heights do more to stave off segregation and inequality than the vast majority of people living in wealthy American suburbs. But it’s also clear that the dream of Shaker Heights—expressed, as in so many places like it, through the cause of “good schools”—is primarily one of upper-middle-class solidarity. It is interesting and even commendable that such solidarity could cross racial lines in one suburb of Cleveland, but the latter part of the Shaker story is far more instructive: the dream falters once poorer people move into town. ♦