Racial Discrimination At Euclid Beach

The NAACP also became involved in the mid-1930s controversy surrounding end of the year school picnics at Euclid Beach.  In 1935, the park decided to start offering free ride tickets to schoolchildren attending the picnics.  Park employees, however, following park policy, denied black children access to the dance floor and roller rink. In July 1935, Clayborne George and other representatives of the Legal Defense Committee of the Cleveland NAACP introduced a resolution to ban all future school picnics at Euclid Beach. The resolution passed unanimously, though the controversy over the picnics did not cease.

The next summer the park, promising to treat all children equally, was again granted the right to host school picnics. Once again, the park issued free tickets to all schoolchildren. However,  the coupons would not be good after 7 PM.  The skating rink and dance hall, the park announced, would not open until 7 PM on the days on which picnics were scheduled. In this manner, the park attempted to dodge the School Board’s 1935 resolution. Mary B. Martin, the sole black member of the Board of Education, voted against an NAACP resolution introduced by the board president to again ban all future school picnics from taking place at the park. Clayborne George, Chester K. Gillespie, and L. Pearl Mitchell - then President of the NAACP - attended this heated meeting, sponsoring the failed resolution. Yet another NAACP-sponsored resolution passed the following year, 1937, once more banning school picnics at Euclid Beach Park, though the issue would drag on into the next decade.