What Happens to a Dream Deferred: The School Desegregation Crisis in Cleveland, Ohio and the Rise of Carl Stokes

Abstract

School desegregation in the North was not as successful as the effort in the South. Civil rights activists in cities like Cleveland, Ohio, attempted to integrate the schools by applying the tactics of the Southern civil rights movement, most notably the use of direct action protests. But the residential or de facto segregation that prevailed in North allowed school boards to prevent change by establishing schools in segregated neighborhoods. The segregation did not arise from school district policy, so the Brown decision did not apply. Without the support of the Court, the effort to integrate the Cleveland public schools failed. Failure to integrate the school system did not end the civil rights movement in Cleveland. The civil rights community changed its tactics from mass protest to voter registration and political action. A crisis in Cleveland's schools created a grassroots political movement that increased voter turnout and block voting by the city's black community. The failure of the integration effort, combined with the success of campaigns to register black voters, led directly to the election of Carl Stokes as the Mayor of Cleveland in 1967. The campaign made Stokes the first black mayor of a major urban city in the United States, a feat Cleveland's black community could not have achieved without the movement to integrate the schools. [From Introduction]