Racial Discrimination At Euclid Beach

Euclid Beach Park closed in 1969. Today, little of the original park remains, though the arch that greeted visitors at its entrance has been preserved and still stands on Lakeshore Boulevard. The dancing pavilion and skating rink have been torn down. In Cleveland more generally, the postwar decades saw an increase in white flight to the suburbs and urban decline.  In 1966, a mere twenty years after the demonstrations at Euclid Beach, the Hough Riots demonstrated that race relations remained troubled. More recently, North Collinwood, the neighborhood where Euclid Beach Park once sat, became one of the centers of the subprime mortgage housing crisis.

It is hard not to regret, then, Euclid Beach Park's decision to dodge the 1947 ordinance banning discrimination at amusement parks.  The passage of this law, supported by a wide range of Clevelanders little over a year after the end of the earth-shattering events of World War II, signaled a genuine attempt to bridge the gap between blacks and whites in a city that had been scarred by racial animosity in the decades prior to the War. That it was allowed to be so blatantly ignored gave the lie to any genuine hope for progress in Cleveland's race relations. If, after World War II, black and white Clevelanders still could not be allowed to dance together, how could they ever learn to live together?