Browse Exhibits (6 total)

As the African American population took shape in Cleveland, a new Black self-consciousness emerged.  It mirrored the developing ideologies of the day, from integration to nationalism.  Unfortunately, despite its cultural heritage, the city of Cleveland became a causeway for artists between the East Coast and the Midwest.  Despite this fact however, both individuals and organizations based in Cleveland have influenced those most identified with the Black Arts Movement.

This exhibit will discuss racism and segregation against African-Americans at Cleveland's Euclid Beach Park, a world-famous amusement park owned by the Humphrey family from 1901-1969.

The decision by the park's owners to prevent blacks from using certain attractions culminated in the summer of 1946 when protests and violence occurred.  Euclid Beach closed early that year, and the following spring Cleveland City Council passed an ordinance designed to prevent further discrimination at the park.  

Not only will this exhibit illuminate the kind of racial discrimination faced by African-Americans in the supposedly liberal North, but it will also seek to demonstrate that World War II played a major role in shaping race relations in Cleveland.  After the war ended, many white Clevelanders looked nostalgically to the years before the Great Depression and the war, seeking to return to normality and stability after so many years of disorder. Meanwhile, an increasing population of black Clevelanders, emboldened by their participation in the war effort and anti-Nazi rhetoric that seemed to discredit racist ideologies, sought to solidify gains made during the war and stake a claim to full equality in the postwar city.

These differing visions of Postwar Cleveland would collide at Euclid Beach. By looking at these events and their aftermath we can hope to get a clearer picture of how the fight for racial equality after World War II in Cleveland would develop, what resistance it would be met with, and why it seemingly failed.

Interstate highways forever changed the relationship between the city of Cleveland and her surrounding suburbs. This exhibit demonstrates the evolution of highway construction and how it changed the landscape of Cleveland.

Over 350,000 steel workers went on strike in 1919 across the United States.  On the heels of World War I, in the middle of a frustrating economic recession, and at the outset of the Red Scare striking workers demanded union recognition and wage increases.  Although the strike ended unsuccessfully at the beginning of 1920, it planted the seeds for later union organizing during the 1930s.

Cleveland, an industrial center in the Midwest fueled in part by steel by 1919, saw over 18,000 steel workers join the strike.  Sixteen of the city's eighteen steel mills became inoperable at the outset of the work refusal.  Two of those, American Steel and Wire and Otis Steel, were the location of much conflict between management and labor.  Two picketers were even shot outside of American Steel and Wire less than a month into the workers' campaign.

By January of 1920, however, Cleveland steel workers joined hundreds of thousands in going back to work without winning a single concession.  Using tough tactics that included violence and replacement workers, the behemoth steel industry had won both nationally and in the city of Cleveland.

It would be a mistake to view the defeat of the steel strike in 1919 as a total loss from the perspective of rank and file workers though.  One is hard pressed to imagine what life would have been like were steel workers not to mount some sort of organized push in a post-World War I economy wrought with hysteria about foreigners and communists.  Viewed through the lens of these workers and citizens one can see the ability for everyday people to shape history in a city built, literally, with steel.