The Making of Cleveland's Black Suburb in the City

Book excerpt: Our story starts just west of the intersection of Lee and Seville Roads, where a Black enclave took shape in the 1920s. By establishing a foothold in Cleveland's far southeastern reaches, African Americans laid the successful groundwork for this vicinity to develop as a Black "suburb in the city." This book, the first-ever published history of these neighborhoods, documents and celebrates a success story, a Cleveland case of Black community-building. The making of Lee-Seville and Lee-Harvard unfolded under remarkable circumstances and against considerable odds, thereby offering an instructive example of the life possibilities that some Black Americans in earlier generations were able to create at the city's outskirts.The Cleveland Restoration Society, a regional historic preservation non-profit, has worked for the past several years collecting community history, interviewing and filming residents of the neighborhood and scouring archives and private collections for historical images that help tell the story of this remarkable place.