Constrained communities: black Cleveland's experience with World War II public housing.

Amid the World War II urban housing crisis that was particularly severe for African Americans, dozens of black Clevelanders wrote letters to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, explaining their predicaments in finding shelter. These letter-writers, most of them women, emphasized the crowded and often horribly deteriorated quarters in which they were compelled to live. "The place I have now is not fit for dogs to live in," wrote one woman, "it even rains in the Bath [and] all the Window Frames are Broken & when I speak to the Landlord about it she say I can move if I don't like it." Another stated that "my baby fell through a Hole in the Porch, w[h]ich the Landlord will not fix" and that "[w]hen I clean the House it don't [en]sure any Results Becouse [sic] the walls are in such a bad condition." A young, pregnant wife self-consciously wrote: "The house we live in now, well, I know it's going to be awfully hard for you to believe in such a thing, but it has no bath room. By that I mean not [a] bath tub, face bowl, hot water tank [n]or hot water faucet." Grateful to have even their "two rooms and a closet," she nonetheless worried: "what will I do about hot water when my baby is born.... My last one was born at home and ... it was awfully hard for me to try and heat enough water and sterilize the necessary equipment for the doctors too." Other letter-writers worried about negative impacts on the health of their children or reported being refused accommodations because they had children. One desperate correspondent captured the inconveniences and indignities faced by many, writing: "The place I am now living in there are twelve rooms and twenty use one bath room.... [W]e don't have any privacy.... I am now in defense work at night and can't rest in the day. I have tried every way to find a house[,] for the place I am in is a kitchenett[e], so see if there is anything you can do to help me." (1)

The letter-writers hoped for redress. Nearly all of them asked to be placed in the public housing, or so-called temporary war housing estates; many had been to the local housing authority multiple times, or had long-pending applications to get into the projects. As attempts by their writers to take charge of their lives in the face of desperation, these poignant letters appeal directly to the reader's sense of justice even today. (2) But the letters never reached their intended audience. Instead, they were passed along to housing officials back in Cleveland "with instructions to help you with your problem," as a form letter sent to each letter-writer stated--an approach that prompted Katharine T Patch, head of Cleveland's War Housing Service, to complain back to Washington: "I am asking you again please to change the wording you use in this letter.... There is nothing we can do for most of these Negro families, and they interpret this phrase to mean that you know we could help them and tell us to do so.... They are mad and disappointed enough anyway when their letter to the President gets right back to us!" (3)

Patch's assertion that "nothing" could be done for these black housing applicants stemmed directly from official policies defining race as a primary consideration in any occupancy decision--whether for guiding individuals toward available rental units or, on a larger scale, for site placement when temporary war housing projects specifically intended for African American tenancy began to be planned and built late in 1943. Cleveland housing officials were far from alone; all over the country, with hardly an exception, local housing authorities practiced formal or informal racial segregation. (4) In fact, Cleveland's war housing approach has been regarded as comparatively liberal in this regard, since at least token integration was achieved in several of the city's public housing projects without any of the attendant violence seen in some locales, notably Detroit. (5) Historians have disputed the extent and nature of culpability that federal and local housing officials bear for pursuing race-based policies--and specifically whether they can be accused of having had unabashedly racist intentions. While Kenneth Jackson, Arnold Hirsch, and others have held housing officials accountable for perpetuating racially discriminatory practices originating with the real estate industry, (6) Robert B. Fairbanks, notably, has attempted to explain their decisions as more a matter of balancing the demands of diverse constituents amid the intense anti-black animosity that many white residents harbored. (7) Indeed, while the actions of public housing officials clearly reinforced residential segregation by race, discrimination in the private housing market was unremitting and practically universal.

What is indisputable is that for African Americans, the consequences of Cleveland's World War II housing policy long outlasted the war, both in terms of the housing conditions many of them would experience, and in the subsequent shape and direction of the city's expanding black settlement. While mostly negative, at least one of these consequences ultimately proved to be beneficial. On the one hand, as John Bauman has concluded in the case of Philadelphia, siting and tenanting war housing projects on the basis of race "contributed toward firming the boundaries of the black ghetto." (8) In Cleveland, wartime policies not only constrained black housing options, but also enabled exploitative rental practices that ensured housing conditions in Cedar-Central, Cleveland's oldest and largest African American settlement, would deteriorate even further. But at the same time, black upward mobility benefited from the placement of a temporary war housing estate, the Seville Homes, at the urban periphery next to an existing black enclave--an outcome, in Andrew Wiese's words, "reinforcing prewar black residence on the suburban fringe and laying a foundation for new migration after the war." (9)

Considering such momentous consequences, it is surprising that historians have not devoted more attention to the wartime episode. As late as 1994, John Bauman declared that "Although it was significant, few have explored the impact of World War II on public housing," while Kristin Szylvian in her recent, first ever national-level overview of federal wartime housing policy similarly noted a general lack of interest in the period among historians and urban planners. (10) Among those few who have treated the racialized dimensions of wartime public housing policies in various locations, Rhonda Y. Williams is practically alone in having investigated what effects it had on actual black lived experience. (11) On the other hand, those historians who are initiating study of the "Second Great Migration" have not adequately considered how policy shaped outcomes for wartime migrants, nor how the black experience fit into the general housing shortage associated with World War II. (12) This essay aims to address these oversights by examining Cleveland's race-based war housing policies both from the top down as well as on the ground, with an eye on the links that wartime trends bore to subsequent developments in the postwar period--notably urban renewal programs, the "urban crisis" in general, and black population expansion into new areas of the city.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The wartime housing shortage in Cleveland, a key industrial center, affected all the city's residents, not just African Americans. Already in 1940, accommodations became increasingly scarce as local firms geared up for the profitable trade in war materiel. Housing officials expressed widespread fears that the city would be unable to absorb a flood of war workers; as Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) head Ernest J. Bohn put it: "If the industrial expansion is great, Cleveland's ability to get and fill defense contracts may depend on its ability to house the skilled workers who do the work.... With present low vacancies, no large, sudden increase could be accommodated." Dire predictions filled the air as experts looked back over the lack of housing built during the Depression years and took note of what, according to the 1940 census, was already a considerable number of sub-standard houses, some 50,000 of the metropolitan area's 330,000 (15%). Vacancy rates dropped further in 1941, and by mid-1942 had sunk below one percent; by December 1942, the War Housing Service was estimating that the vacancy rate for rentals in the much-sought-after middle range of $25 to $70 per month at a staggeringly low 0.3 percent. (13)

With the resident labor supply severely depleted, Cleveland, like many other industrial centers, came to rely on "in-migrant" labor to fulfill the growing need for workers in its war industries. In-migration was initially tightly controlled, being linked to estimated labor requirements for area industries and authorized on an individual basis with consideration given to race, sex, age, and family size. In a move directly related to the housing shortage that was said to have "beneficial social consequences," the local War Manpower Commission (WMC) attempted a two-month ban on in-migration in August 1943, threatening local industries with sanctions should they hire anyone who was not a "bona fide resident." Shortly thereafter, the WMC along with CMHA criticized the government's plans to expand Cleveland's industrial capacity, considering the state of housing availability. However, such efforts had to be abandoned when that December, Cleveland was officially designated as one of the nation's "critical labor shortage areas." On this about-face, Cleveland's WMC director Dr. William P. Edmunds commented explicitly: "Desirable as it is, the social consideration that argues for keeping in-migration to a minimum has to give way if it means that war production will be curtailed." (14)

As economic matters gained priority, laborers continued to move into the area, generally from the South, which had a labor oversupply. Although African Americans were among the earliest migrants, they did not make significant inroads into well-paid, skilled war production jobs until the available white (male) workers had been placed--the typical pattern evident all over the country, dubbed "last hired, first fired." (15) Not surprisingly, one defense industry category, foundry work, had from the outset seen heavy recruitment of African Americans. Looking back in 1944, CMHA would report: "Because the work was unpleasant, heavy, dirty, hot and with low wages, practically no one would take a foundry job except inmigrant Negroes. Because of the nature of the work the turnover in personnel was staggering." In fact, it was due to Cleveland's critical need for foundry, forge, and smelter workers that the temporary in-migration ban was immediately modified to allow for any migrant who would forego his right to seek work in other sectors after 60 days, or in the words of local WMC director Edmunds, to "take lighter, pleasanter work." (16) Foundries recruited black potential employees in the South, brought them to Cleveland, and to at least some extent advocated on their behalf by writing letters to housing officials. One personnel director wrote War Housing Service head Katharine T. Patch to say: "We are faced with the problem of losing many of our employees due to the lack of housing [open to blacks].... It is so very important to us that these men remain here to carry on our war production work and that we endeavor in every way to house them." But these concerns went only so far. In 1943, local public housing officials and city planners implored: "Industry must take an active interest in the living conditions of its employees. Only a few industrialists are doing so now. Yet, if industry insisted on adequate homes near its plants for its employees, health, morale, and production would be better than ever before." (17)

Amid the city's general housing shortage during World War II, African Americans suffered particularly, as the letters quoted earlier make abundantly clear. But even before the war, black Clevelanders were facing a dire housing situation. By 1930, 90 percent of the city's black population was living in a tightly bounded district stretching along Cedar and Central Avenues, from East 14th Street all the way to East 105th Street. Increased African American migration from the South during and immediately after World War I, which met with a rising tide of racism and exclusion during that period, had resulted in a proliferation in Cedar-Central of the earlier-mentioned "kitchenettes," tiny apartments with shared bathroom and cooking facilities that were created by subdividing single- and double-family homes. (18) This process of "conversion" to multi-family occupancy was continued with the renewed migration of the World War II era, and was not just sanctioned, but actually encouraged by the authorities as a way to accommodate more war workers. A research study of social conditions in Cedar-Central, conducted by the Welfare Federation of Cleveland from 1942 to 1944, noted among landlords "a considerable amount of opportunism in the multiple family uses to which 'investment property' was put to increase revenue to the limit," before going on to describe how wartime housing pressures were speeding deterioration in a number of ways:

  Conditions have become increasingly worse during the past two years
  due to the war needs which have made it difficult for the owners to
  secure materials for repairs. The rent control measures also have
  served to discourage repairs from being made even when materials could
  have been obtained. At the same time, overcrowding has steadily
  increased through efforts to accommodate in-migrant war workers....
  While multiple family structures need not be condemned from a social
  point of view, the relatively unrestricted conversion of structures to
  multiple family use has resulted in extreme crowding and loss of
  privacy for families who have to live under these conditions. (19)

African Americans of course experienced these effects firsthand. William O. Walker, a councilman for Cedar-Central and co-owner of the Call & Post, the city's foremost black paper, pointed out in early 1941 that while black tenants had to devote a proportionately larger share of their income toward rent for inferior accommodations, the social costs went farther:

  No community can permit a large number of its citizens to be
  ill-housed without paying the price for their neglect. Poor housing is
  costing this city thousands of dollars annually for medical care for
  those whose health is ruined by the unsanitary conditions prevailing.
  From these ill-housed families, hundreds of boys and girls graduate
  into lives of crime. The cost of fire and police protection in these
  areas adds much to the load the tax payers must bear. (20)

Even the mainstream Cleveland Press periodically reported on the housing plight of the city's black community. The newspaper carried a four-article expose on the topic in December 1941, and two years later, began another article solemnly:

  Cleveland is growing its own "Grapes of Wrath." ... This is the story
  of conditions in that section [(Cedar-Central)] where nearly 80,000
  Negroes are housed in homes for 30,000.... It is not a story of
  poverty, nor of inability to pay ... Many of the Negroes today are
  making top wages in war industries ... They have no place else to go,
  and because of that, most of them are paying rents far beyond the
  value of the homes they must occupy. (21)

As the war went on, the housing shortage for whites diminished considerably, yet remained in full force for African Americans. Late in the war, an otherwise congratulatory article on Cleveland's approach to the war housing crisis admitted that "Housing for non-whites, mostly Negroes, is [still] rated the most pressing need ... There is an inadequate amount of low rent public housing, some temporary war housing, some mobile units, [and] very little privately owned housing open to Negroes." Statistics from December 1944 reported a vacancy rate on Cleveland's East side of 1.3 percent for whites as compared to 0.7 percent for blacks. (22)

The two local agencies most involved in World War II-era housing were the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) and the War Housing Service. CMHA, established in 1933 as the first public housing agency in the country, managed four low-income housing projects as of 1940; two extensions at the Outhwaite Homes, the one original project with virtually all-black occupancy, would be added in 1941 and 1943. Cleveland's African American community had a long and vocal record of opposing discriminatory policies practiced by CMHA; this record continued into the wartime period as the first Outhwaite Extension provoked a furor because of the displacements it caused amid the growing housing shortage, and because the expansion entailed the seizure and demolition of black businesses. (23) Giving some indication of the animosity some African Americans reserved for CMHA, Councilman Walker would comment in his Call & Post amid this controversy: "the Metropolitan Housing Authority of Cleveland is one of the most despotic bodies operating under a public charter, I have ever seen. Its operations are more like Hitler's dictatorship than democratic America." (24)

Other factors besides resident opposition made "slum removal"--as practiced according to the 1937 Housing Act--impractical in the wartime context. A growing shortage of building supplies meant that of the projects planned as permanent, low-income public housing before the wartime housing crisis, hardly any besides those already under construction could get approval. Even where construction did continue, substitution of lower-quality building materials frustrated housing authorities; meanwhile, rising labor costs made construction increasingly expensive. (25) The war not only put the provision of more low-income housing on hold; it resulted in a drastic overhaul of tenanting policies. By 1941 the growing wartime housing crisis spurred the Federal Works Agency to intervene and ask local housing agencies including CMHA to reprioritize their admissions so as to favor defense industry workers. Thus, the Outhwaite Homes Extension which opened that year was rechristened "defense housing," required that applicants hold jobs in defense industries, and would become the first estate to institute a "graded" rent policy--where instead of strictly enforcing income limits, rent was calculated as a percentage of income. By the end of 1942, defense workers had priority in all CMHA estates, and graded rents were the standard policy. (26)

Besides CMHA, the other major player in Cleveland's World War II-era housing was the War Housing Service (WHS), initiated in late 1942 to coordinate the filling of vacancies and inform the public about housing needs. By early 1943, WHS had in place a conversion program--backed by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC)--and had taken on the responsibility of referring applicants to any available openings in the public or temporary war housing managed by CMHA. (27) The agency's conversion program deserves special scrutiny. HOLC funded conversion to multiple occupancy on a budget of $2500 per unit, while Cleveland's City Planning Commission obliged by loosening zoning regulations that would have otherwise made such conversions unlawful. Certainly, the Commission was wary as it expressed hope that the "most drastic," "nonconforming" conversions that "could not be designed so as to protect the neighborhood from permanent harm" would never have to be resorted to. "The long-range stability of our residential areas is important for it is a part of what we are fighting for. We cannot permit the war emergency to break down our standards more than is absolutely necessary for victory," was the Commission's final word on the matter. Yet in the end, war production trumped any stress to the housing stock or negative impact of overcrowding on social conditions. (28)

When HOLC discontinued funding for the WHS conversion program in 1944, it was reported that contracts for only 950 suites had been signed through the program. However, conversions were much more widespread than WHS even knew about, being financed by local banks and savings and loan associations. Just one month into the program, the local press carried an expose describing the apparently common practice whereby lending institutions acquired deteriorating properties, made nominal repairs as necessary, cut them into living units that violated even the relaxed building codes, and sold them to investors who could dodge responsibility by supposedly saying something like: "The Government is pleading for people to convert their attics into apartments, and to make other conversions to alleviate the housing shortage. And now you want to prosecute me for doing my patriotic duty." Some of the conversions transformed commercial properties into "dormitories." In one example that turned out to be something of a scandal, a grocery store was divided into five "stalls" made from cardboard and two-by-fours, intended for fourteen black foundry workers. Renting at $36 per month for room and board deducted directly from their paychecks, the conversion was evidently paid for by the employer, which said of the arrangement: "We have never made any promises to men coming here that we could provide them with nice places.... We wish we could." (29)

The WHS' overall record of assistance fell short of expectations and was considerably less successful after mid-1943. In May 1944, it was reported that of the 25,000 who had applied for assistance, 23,000 had sought family accommodations and of these the WHS had been able to successfully place only 9,000 (39%). (30) But for African Americans, the agency's efforts went beyond merely insufficient, to verge on totally ineffectual. In its first three months' of existence, the agency saw 73 black applicants, of whom only three were accommodated. With regard to African Americans, WHS mainly attempted to publicize the need for housing in the local black press and by networking with black community leaders. (31) As part of its dealings with HOLC, which along with the Federal Housing Administration institutionalized racial discrimination in its lending policies, WHS sought to place black occupants in conformity with established settlement patterns--poring over census statistics or even conducting door-to-door interviews to determine precisely where African Americans lived, how many of them lived there, and since when. (32)

In July 1943, the housing shortage for Cleveland's blacks got considerably worse when the Second Outhwaite Extension was filled nearly to capacity. "I wish you would build another Outhwaite, as we could easily fill your 1287 units all over again," WHS head Katharine T. Patch subsequently wrote the project's manager. A week later she was reporting to the National Housing Agency (NHA) that "we have been unable to place a single Negro family.... We tell them there is nothing." Mobile units provided for black occupancy later in the year were quickly taken up, so that with continuing in-migration the housing shortage was worse than ever. By May 1944, WHS had a staggering backlog of over 1,500 black applicants, of whom more than a third were employed in "vital foundries"; the previous month, the agency had successfully placed only fourteen black applicants. In light of the situation, Patch reported to the NHA: "We feel the only way we have been able to prevent riots is giving each one a hearing and a truthful explanation with each visit. This takes patience and is a very depressing job." (33) The severity of the housing crisis even led Patch to bend the rules regarding racially-segregated occupancy, as she sought to have small numbers of publicly-funded conversions transferred from white to black occupancy--provided they were in racially-mixed neighborhoods. However, even this approach proved too controversial for HOLC, to Patch's consternation. (34) As of mid-1945 there was still a wait list for African Americans at WHS, and the agency was pressuring NHA for 115 mobile units originally programmed for black occupancy on an emergency basis. (35)

"Temporary war housing," built with federal oversight under the Emergency Defense Housing program (Lanham Act), was the ultimate compromise settled upon to address the World War II housing crisis in Cleveland and elsewhere. The multiple factors prompting this shift in approach were summarized in 1942 by William K. Divers, the NHA's regional representative, when he predicted:

  During the coming year, my guess is that all the housing that is built
  will be built without regard to city planning as we know it. This is
  no cause for alarm; it will be of a temporary nature, a good part of
  it on leased land, with the lease to expire six months after the war.
  There is every reason to believe that this housing will be disposed of
  after the war.... All housing, if possible, will be built within
  walking distance of the plants. And it will be housing that will take
  the least amount of critical materials, placed in areas where
  utilities are already installed. (36)

The shift to temporary war housing was motivated by the real estate and building industries' mounting opposition to more permanent public housing. They were insistent that any publicly funded, war-related housing should be of the cheapest and most impermanent construction; by February 1943, the Cleveland Real Estate Board was expressing alarm at "basementless, concrete-floor suites of a 'permanent' type" which could "be vacated by factory workers' families after the war, creating new slums in the outlying parts of the city." This description of semi-permanent construction almost certainly referred to those war housing estates already being operated by CMHA on the city's outskirts and in some suburbs--all of which to date, it should be emphasized, were programmed strictly for white occupancy (recall Figure 1). Even without race as a consideration, these projects had generated controversy because of fears they would overburden utility lines and public school facilities, because their tax status was unresolved, and because they violated building and zoning codes and could presumably hurt property values. (37)

But some housing officials, among them Ernest J. Bohn of CMHA, were troubled by the idea of building shoddy housing slated for demolition so soon. "Temporary war housing must not be permitted to remain after the surrender of our enemies and the consequent end of war production," Bohn stated in mid-1943. "Much of it, however, does have a tangible salvage value," he subsequently equivocated, "[b]ut also, no false notion of economy should be permitted to result in permanent injury to the communities where temporary or overexpanded housing facilities have been provided because of the exigencies of war," he added. Justifying the existence of the war housing estates so strongly opposed by real estate agencies, builders, and suburban residents, Bohn pointed out that war housing "is presumed to meet a continuing need within the respective communities," and proposed that it "be offered for sale to local housing authorities" after the war. (38) Bohn had been frustrated when the Cleveland Real Estate Board, along with the Builders' Exchange, successfully pressured CMHA chairman Marc J. Grossman to recommend to the NHA that private industry build all subsequent war housing. And his worst suspicions would be confirmed when the Cuyahoga County Council for Civilian Defense subsequently determined that by the end of 1943, only 113 houses out of the thousands needed had been completed thusly, and these not in locations convenient for workers in defense industry plants. (39)

Bohn's understandable bitterness toward the building industry came through in CMHA's 1943 annual report. "To the private builder it apparently mattered little that the public housing for war workers merely supplanted what he was doing and was constructed for only those for whom private enterprise was not building," the report stated. "Whether tactically it was right or wrong for national and local public housing agencies to engage in war housing is beside the point," it concluded defensively. "The significant thing is that by so doing, thousands of houses were built in places where they were needed, for men who are producing the munitions with which the best army in the world is now winning the war." A year later, little had changed; the 1944 CMHA annual report would acerbically point out that while over the course of the year additional public funding for war housing had effectively been cut off, "the private war housing program only scratched the surface of meeting the need," and that "[m]any priorities issued to private home builders remained unused." Moreover, private builders could not be easily coaxed to build for African Americans. (40)

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

In the meantime, the city turned to a less-controversial kind of temporary war housing with important ramifications for the black housing situation in particular. Following the recommendation of the Cuyahoga County Council for Civilian Defense, housing officials in October 1943 ordered an initial batch of prefabricated mobile homes out of the 445 programmed for black occupancy, which were deemed as readily-erectable as trailer units but provided living conditions approaching those in the semi-permanent temporary housing developments. These two-bedroom units were each equipped with an oil-burning heater and hot water tank, kerosene stove, icebox, and shower (see Figure 2). Ingeniously, the roof, walls, and floors were hinged, so that the shells could be folded and transported by truck; they had to be placed in locations where electrical, water, and sewer lines were already installed. Other considerations made these portables attractive. Significantly, it was noted that "they will not compete with private building, because they can be put up on lots which would be too small for private construction" and that as for available vacant lots, "[s]ome of this property is in districts where Negroes could be housed." (41)

Site selection for the 445 mobile homes was revealing: 140 were scattered in Cedar-Central, while the rest were placed in or around the edges of the Kinsman-East 79th Street neighborhood, a tightly-defined area of racially-mixed settlement contiguous with Cedar-Central. This latter portion included two main components, "Kinsman Homes" (120 units) and "Woodland Dwellings" (85 units). When the first twelve units of Kinsman Homes were opened in mid-January, a local newspaper reported:

  Nish Thornton, his wife, Zelma, and their five children, were the
  first family to move in. He is a laborer at the Allyne & Ryan Foundry
  Co. When the family came here from Carleton, Ga., last spring, they
  were forced to live in an abandoned gas station at E. 61st Street and
  Woodland Avenue. Six weeks ago, when their baby, Margaret, was born,
  nurses and doctors stood in a foot of water. Today they are overjoyed
  in their new, snug home. (42)

Although the mobile homes were tenanted as quickly as they could be installed, the process lingered into the following summer--making painfully evident that even this expedited approach could not move quickly enough. In January 1945, at full deployment, these mobile home settlements comprised 447 units housing 1,873 persons. But it should be emphasized that unlike trailers, this type of housing received the designation "duration" rather than "stop-gap" and thus, according to CMHA, "made possible the cancellation of a corresponding number of the site-fabricated [(semi-permanent)] temporary units and resulted in obvious economy of funds, manpower and materials." (43) Revisiting conclusions from the earlier discussion of WHS, then, these additional units certainly helped, but did not come close to solving the wartime housing shortage for African Americans. (44)

By placing the mobile units in overwhelmingly black neighborhoods or those said to be "transitional," the question of white opposition was effectively rendered moot. Quite a different situation materialized in the last months of 1943, when the Federal Public Housing Authority (FPHA) filed condemnation proceedings for the right to lease 49 acres of vacant land near the city's southeasterly limits. FPHA intended to build on the land a more substantial, "duration" (semi-permanent) temporary war housing project for black in-migrant workers, similar to those already mentioned as having been built for white occupancy in outlying areas; not coincidentally, this land was adjacent to a small, semi-rural African American residential enclave. Established around the turn of the century by self-sufficient homesteaders who retained Southern folkways and in many cases built their own homes, this community with its considerable number of skilled workers has been described as middle-class in orientation. (45) During World War II, however, outside observers were characterizing the enclave as a "Negro slum," emphasizing its lack of sidewalks, paved streets, and storm sewers--as well as the absence in some houses of indoor plumbing or even electricity. Of the land on which housing officials intended to build, CMHA would report: "It is remote from any high-priced residential developments, but adjoins an old, cheaply constructed and run-down neighborhood ... in which values could not possibly be lowered by the proximity of temporary war housing." (46)

But the site was in the midst of an underdeveloped part of the city otherwise populated by whites and close to the municipal boundaries of several adjacent suburbs. When the project was announced in November 1943, the Cleveland Real Estate Board and members of the City Council went on record opposing it, with one white councilman expressing his belief that the project "within a few years ... would constitute a blighted area that would ruin the value of the entire neighborhood." In response to such concerns, black councilman William O. Walker editorialized in his Call & Post: "The fly in the milk of course, is Negro occupancy. If these synthetic patriots could be assured no Negroes would be housed in these temporary structures, the protests would cease as suddenly as a March wind." Walker went on to recommend: "These temporary houses should be built on sites already selected and occupied as scheduled. Anything to the contrary, is inviting serious trouble." When a contract was awarded the following month for the 440-unit project, named Seville Homes, residents of Cleveland and two nearby suburbs filed a taxpayers' lawsuit and won a temporary injunction. Although the injunction had been granted on the grounds that the project violated building and sanitation codes, some of the concerns expressed reveal underlying motivations that were obviously race-related. For example, one nearby suburban mayor said the planned Seville Homes "was bringing slums close to Maple Heights." For his part, the mayor of adjacent Garfield Heights declared that additional in-migrant labor "was no longer needed," directly contradicting the War Manpower Commission and the Production Urgency Committee. Similarly, one white Cleveland councilman expressed his belief that "cheap Southern labor" was being recruited to the exclusion of native Clevelanders. (47)

In spite of the organized opposition, FPHA had in the original ruling obtained transfer of the case to federal court. When it came up the following March, the federal judge dissolved the injunction, holding that "there was no ground for determining before construction that the project would violate the zoning ordinance or become a health problem." With the legal obstacle removed, the project went ahead days later, without any further formal opposition. Still, the delay hurt amid the ongoing housing shortage. CMHA would lament the "[t]hree precious construction months ... lost through this litigation," and accusingly say of the white residents' opposition: "One wonders how many G.I.'s lost their lives or were injured by the prolongation of the war due to this slowdown in production caused by the forces of intolerance and selfishness." (48)

Notably, this initial battle over temporary war housing prefigured racially polarized battles over land development and the resumption of the city's public housing program in the postwar period. In 1952 and 1953, white residents in the same vicinity would successively defeat more permanent public housing planned for the area as well as private apartment complexes that could potentially have led to open occupancy. At the same time, African American homeowners, hoping to preserve vacant land for future housing development, fought an uphill battle not to be hemmed in by industrial plants built in close proximity to their existing settlement. (49) The first 150 of the Seville Homes' 440 units were finished and tenanted in late October 1944, and the rest were slated for completion six weeks later. As of January 1945, 2,039 persons were housed there in 133 buildings. Racial tension apparently continued to simmer around the project, with the newly formed Cleveland Community Relations Board intervening in a 1945 dispute involving Seville Homes residents and nearby whites around the issue of inadequate public transportation. (50)

Admittedly, then, white resident opposition was a serious possibility to contend with. But another example leaves us to wonder whether Councilman Walker's advice to go ahead regardless, and supply needed housing for African American defense workers, may have been a workable course--at least during the war. In Berea, a suburb on Cleveland's southwestern border with a significant number of defense-related plants during World War II, seven black families employed at a factory were living on site in a decrepit barracks. When Berea's city government moved in September 1944 to shut down those accommodations as substandard, Ernest Bohn of CMHA made the unprecedented suggestion that the families apply at the nearby, partially-completed Berea Homes project. Despite angry editorials and supposed opposition by white residents, within a month the project switched to an open occupancy policy and a number of African American families moved in. Evaluating the situation at Berea Homes a year later when some seven percent of its families were black, Bohn preferred to think of the living arrangements there as "decent human relations" rather than "integration." He listed notable successes, including the project's integrated Boy Scout troop and an interracial mothers' club at the daycare center. Bohn did mention, too, that some white families had sought to move elsewhere because of the presence of blacks, and also cryptically made reference to some "unpleasant occurrences ... problems which have been settled with a minimum of furor." (51) Still, the outcomes at the Seville and Berea Homes reveal that in at least some cases, more assertive approaches could successfully contain white opposition.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

What was daily life like for the African American residents of temporary war housing developments like Kinsman Homes, Woodland Dwellings, and the Seville Homes? Ultimately outlasting the war by more than a decade, surviving newsletters from these improvised communities leave the impression that they were remarkably well-planned, organized, and cohesive, with a variety of recreational and social offerings. Both Kinsman Homes and Seville Homes had community center buildings. A variety of sports including baseball, football, basketball, and boxing were organized through these centers; while lacking its own building, Woodland Dwellings provided its residents access to the athletic facilities at the nearby Woodland Center social settlement. The community centers additionally hosted numerous youth activities including scouting troops and a proliferation of social clubs with names like the Flamingoes, Invaders, Ravenettes, or Mystic Knights. (52) Adult groups like mothers' and veterans' clubs also met there, and periodically they were used by adults participating in various neighborhood organizations or by' social service professionals. The centers also sponsored events like blood drives, as well as enrichment activities for adults and children including dramatics, singing, dance, handicrafts, and sewing and cooking lessons. In addition, the Kinsman Homes community center hosted the popular Kinsman Youth Canteen, which offered teenagers the choices of dancing or a quiet lounge with reading materials and board games on three nights of the week; similarly, the Seville Homes held weekly canteens with dancing and board games for its youth. Perhaps due to its large size, compact layout, and geographic isolation from the surrounding area, the Seville Homes in addition to its community center included a "store building" with grocery and drug stores, and beauty and tailor shops. (53)

Notwithstanding a token number of white families at the Seville Homes--some three percent of the total in Fall 1945 which never went above the seven percent high in Spring 1947--these temporary war housing communities were distinctively stamped by the wartime migration of black Southerners. Every issue of the Kin-Wood Messenger contained a feature showcasing an exemplary family residing in either the Kinsman Homes or Woodland Dwellings, in virtually every instance of recent Southern origin. Who among the residents was visiting family in the South was also frequently reported on. The evidence would suggest that some of the tenants brought, to the ubiquitous victory garden campaigns, agricultural expertise from their formerly rural Southern lives; one "urban farmerette" at the Seville Homes was reported to have grown in her plot "cabbage, onions, tomatoes, white potatoes, corn, okra and even black-eyed peas," as well as "a fine crop of collards, which she shared with her friends." Considering the traditional centrality of churches as institutions in black communities, the newsletters also testify to a large churchgoing population in the projects, as revealed by extensive reporting on the activities of the many diverse local churches and resident participation in vacation bible schools. The Seville Homes actually had its own official minister and conducted Sunday school in the community building's auditorium. (54)

As their opponents had feared, these wartime temporary housing developments persisted into the postwar period because of an ongoing housing shortage, especially for African Americans. From the outset, the question had been debated as to whether the approximately 100,000 in-migrant war workers would remain in Cleveland after the conflict, and as the war went on, the evidence increasingly indicated that significant numbers would indeed remain, particularly blacks. (55) Statistics from CMHA suggest that such predictions were accurate. Of those tenant families moving out of the temporary war housing projects designated for black occupancy (Kinsman Homes, Woodland Dwellings, and Seville Homes) from 1945 to 1950, 497 of 585 (85%) remained in the county. However, only 751 of 1644 (46%) tenant families moving out of the exclusively white temporary war housing estates during the same period remained in the area. (56)

The fact that black wartime migrants stayed--and that more continued to come seeking factory jobs after the war--combined with their exclusion from new housing being constructed in the suburbs to ensure that the housing shortage for African Americans would last well into the 1960s. Thus the war housing projects saw continued use to offset demand; but having been intended as temporary, they did not hold up very well. By 1948, many of the mobile units at Kinsman Homes and Woodland Dwellings had water damage, broken screens and windows, and faulty wiring, as well as rats. Even with constant efforts to keep the units in repair, they continued to deteriorate and some even burned down. A handful of units erected on scattered lots in Cedar-Central had by 1957 degenerated to the point where property owners blamed them for "a rapid depreciation of the area" and lobbied CMHA to have them immediately removed. Even the semi-permanent Seville Homes aged poorly. Protesting a rent raise there in 1952, angry tenants described their apartments as "rat-infested" and among other complaints, said the management failed to keep interior walls painted and repaired. (57)

CMHA insisted it wanted to demolish the temporary war housing projects, but simply could not because they were needed so badly. In its 1948 annual report, the agency would declare: "Temporary war housing has already been left standing longer than it was intended. It is an expensive and difficult operating problem to keep them reasonably fit for human occupancy. And yet, nothing is happening which would indicate that they can come down in the foreseeable future." The following year, CMHA head Bohn went on record as advocating that the remaining temporaries be "liquidated," at the same time appealing to the building industry to construct permanent homes for their more than 2,800 families. In 1950, however, it was announced that a number of the developments including Kinsman Homes, Woodland Dwellings, and Seville Homes would remain indefinitely--even as CMHA declared in the report for that year that temporary war housing had devolved into "a new type of slum" and was "a blot on the collective landscape of the country" that tarnished public housing's image. (58) 1953 found the projects still standing, and Bohn pushing urban redevelopment as their ultimate replacement. Not just the housing shortage, but the fair rents charged at the projects made them attractive to some tenants in spite of their deteriorated state, a situation which led an officer of the Apartment and Home Owners Association to comment snidely, with a clear racial insinuation: "They look around for two-bedroom units at $35 a month and can't find any.... It's like wanting a Cadillac for $1500." Not surprisingly then, the temporary war housing estates intended for African American occupancy outlasted all the others. Kinsman Homes and Woodland Dwellings were finally torn down over the course of 1956-1957, and the Seville Homes in 1958. (59)

Besides the continued presence of "temporary" war housing, Cleveland's World War II housing policy with its particular racial considerations had significant consequences extending into the postwar period. In Cedar-Central, housing stock deteriorated dramatically over the course of the war. In a government-sanctioned, racially-segregated housing market where the conversion of properties to multi-family occupancy was actually promoted by local and federal housing officials, landlords had every incentive to maximize their profits through exploitative rental practices and keep their maintenance expenditures to a minimum. Forced to bear the full brunt of the wartime African American population influx, Cedar-Central became increasingly overcrowded until, after the war, its bounds literally burst. By that point, however, much of the district's housing stock had been inalterably transformed and irretrievably worn down by the masses of humanity it had been made to shelter. Meanwhile, ghettoization subsequently spread to from Cedar-Central to Hough, an adjacent area that as of 1950 was still 95 percent white. Hough had also seen a spate of conversions during the war, and with the artificial shortage of housing open to African Americans, landlords now evicted white tenants in preference for black renters who could be made to pay more for less. Hough consequently saw a rapid demographic transformation and steep decline in social and living conditions that made it the site of a spectacular urban uprising in the summer of 1966. (60)

Cleveland's World War II housing conditions also bore links to its postwar redevelopment agenda and to the expansion of African American settlement into one particularly significant section of the city. After the mobile units in the Kinsman-East 79th Street district were finally dismantled, the city's first and most ambitious "urban renewal" project under the 1954 Housing Act, Garden Valley, was built on the site. This project ultimately foundered, largely because the comparatively prosperous black families its planners had hoped to attract could not be persuaded to remain amid declining living conditions when better housing was opening up in the southeastern reaches of the city. As the only section where nearly new and good quality housing was increasingly available to African Americans in a segregated housing market, Southeast Cleveland in the postwar decades became the preeminent destination for the city's upwardly mobile black middle class. In no small part this geographic expansion was guided by the presence of several preexisting black enclaves like the one the Seville Homes project had been built alongside. In this outlying area, former public housing tenants frequently remained and built or purchased homes, augmenting an established black presence that persuaded nearby whites to relinquish housing more readily. Thus housing officials' enforcement of race-based tenancy in Cleveland's World War II public housing had some unintended consequences, in this particular instance allowing the exercise of black agency and ironically promoting upward mobility. (61)

Department of History

New Orleans, LA 70118-5698

ENDNOTES

A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the American Historical Association's 118th Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, on January 11, 2004. Special thanks to Nicole D'Alessandro for editorial assistance.

1. Marie Taylor to "Dear Sir" [FDR], August 27, 1944; Mrs. John Collins Jr. to "Mr. President," June 7, 1944, attached to memo, Katharine T. Patch to W.K. Divers, June 27, 1944; Mary Bernice Staples to Mrs. Roosevelt, attached to Katharine T. Patch to Mary Staples, September 12, 1944; and Willie White to President Roosevelt, June 7, 1943, attached to Katharine T. Patch to Mrs. Rose White, June 18, 1943, all in Ernest J. Bohn Papers, United States War Housing, container 1, folder 4, Special Collections, Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University.

2. The letters also corroborate findings that rising expectations toward the federal government as a personalized intercessor were on the increase among those demographic groups forming the New Deal political coalition. See Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge and New York, 1990). On black women writing Eleanor Roosevelt, see Victoria W Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001), 207, 226-230. On citizens writing the Roosevelts more generally, see Leila A. Sussman, Dear FDR, A Study of Political Letter Writing (Totowa, NJ, 1963).

3. Memo, Katharine T. Patch to W.J. Braun, September 12, 1944, Bohn papers, U.S. War Housing, container 1, folder 4.

4. Robert C. Weaver, The Negro Ghetto (New York, 1948), 74, 141, 173. A notable exception was the Seattle Housing Authority, which did not segregate by race but nevertheless set a ceiling for non-white occupancy at 20 percent. See Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle's Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle and London, 1994), 169-170.

5. Dominic J. Capeci, Jr., Race Relations in Wartime Detroit: The Sojourner Truth Housing Controversy of 1942 (Philadelphia, 1984). Weaver regarded even Cleveland's token integration as significant; Negro Ghetto, 171-172.

6. Kenneth T. Jackson, "Race, Ethnicity, and Real Estate Appraisal: The Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration," Journal of Urban History 6 (August 1980): 419-452; Kenneth T Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York, 1985), esp. 219-230; Arnold R. Hirsch, "Containment on the Home Front: Race and Federal Housing Policy from the New Deal to the Cold War," Journal of Urban History 26 (January 2000): 158-189; Arnold R. Hirsch, "Choosing Segregation: Federal Housing Policy Between Shelley and Brown," in From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America, ed. John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian (University Park, PA, 2000), 206-225; Amy E. Hillier, "Redlining and the Home Owners Loan Corporation," Journal of Urban History 29 (May 2003): 394-420. For a wide-ranging critique of housing and redevelopment policy in Cleveland, see Daniel R. Kerr, "Open Penitentiaries: Institutionalizing Homelessness in Cleveland, Ohio," Ph.D. dissertation (Case Western Reserve University, 2005).

7. Robert B. Fairbanks, Making Better Citizens: Housing Reform and the Community Development Strategy in Cincinnati, 1890-1960 (Urbana and Chicago, 1988), esp. 3, 125, 145; Robert B. Fairbanks, For the City as a Whole: Planning, Politics, and the Public Interest in Dallas, Texas, 1900-1965 (Columbus, OH, 1998), esp. 2-3, 150-161 passim, 198-199.

8. John F. Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920-1974 (Philadelphia, 1987), 74-75.1 apply the term "ghetto" selectively, and only in reference to Cleveland's Cedar-Central district; on controversy surrounding this term, see Thomas J. Sugrue, "Revisiting the Second Ghetto," Journal of Urban History 29 (March 2003), 283.

9. Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago and London, 2004), 135. This and two other African American enclaves made the southeastern portion of Cleveland (and later the adjacent suburbs) the most significant and successful place for middle class black residents to enact their aspirations. This topic forms the subject of my dissertation; Todd M. Michney, "Changing Neighborhoods: Race and Upward Mobility in Southeast Cleveland, 1930-1980," Ph.D. dissertation (University of Minnesota, 2004).

10. John F. Bauman, "Public Housing: The Dreadful Saga of a Durable Policy," Journal of Planning Literature 8 (May 1994), 351; Kristin M. Szylvian, "The Federal Housing Program during World War II," in From Tenements to the Taylor Homes, 121-138. Roger W. Lotchin, in "World War II and Urban California: City Planning and the Transformation Process," Pacific Historical Review 62 (May 1993): 143-171, evaluates the war's impact on housing there, but barely touches on the subject of race.

11. Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality (New York, 2004), 57-71; see also Margaret Crawford, "Daily Life on the Home Front: Women, Blacks and the Struggle for Public Housing," in World War II and the American Dream, ed. Donald Albrecht (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 90-143. John F. Bauman's Public Housing, Race, and Renewal would be the best example of a work treating racialized policy in detail, but with no attention to black experience.

12. Note especially Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Chapel Hill, NC and London, 1996), 78-81; a more balanced approach can be found in Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War 11 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1993), 83-112. While the saga of African American migration to key wartime production centers is as of yet largely unwritten, some historians have begun using "Second Great Migration" to describe this population influx that continued into the 1960s. See, for example, Leonard N. Moore, Carl B. Stokes and the Rise of Black Political Power (Urbana and Chicago, 2002); and Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca and London, 2001).

13. Cleveland Press, September 3, 1940; Cleveland Press, September 4, 1940; Cleveland News, October 6, 1941; Cleveland Press, September 1, 1942; Minutes, War Housing Service, Public Relations Section, December 2, 1942, Bohn Papers, U.S. War Housing, container 1, folder 25.

14. Minutes, War Housing Committee, Cuyahoga County Council for Civilian Defense, May 7, 1943, in ibid., U. S. War Housing, container 1, folder 22; Plain Dealer, August 27, 1943; Plain Dealer, August 28, 1943; Cleveland Press, September 2, 1943; Cleveland Press, December 1, 1943; Plain Dealer, December 1, 1943.

15. Minutes, Organization Meeting, Mayor's Committee on Housing and Evacuation Problems, August 13, 1941, p. 5, Bohn Papers, U. S. War Housing, container 1, folder 22; Christopher G. Wye, "Midwest Ghetto: Patterns of Negro Life and Thought in Cleveland, Ohio, 1929-1945," Ph.D. dissertation (Kent State University, 1973), 142-160. Local black organizations fought this discrimination with mixed results; see the discussion in Kimberley L. Phillips, AlabamaNorth: African American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-1945 (Urbana and Chicago, 1999), 228-242. On wartime discrimination against African Americans in general, see George Q. Flynn, The Mess in Washington: Manpower Mobilization in World War II (Westport, CT, 1979), 149-168; and Karen Tucker Anderson, "Last Hired First Fired: Black Women Workers during World War II," Journal of American History 69 (June 1982): 82-97.

16. Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA), "Annual Report 1944," in Bohn Papers, CMHA Records, container 2, folder 17; Plain Dealer, September 2, 1943.

17. Frank O'Malley to Katharine T. Patch, June 30, 1944, in Bohn Papers, U. S. War Housing, container 1, folder 35; Cleveland Press, April 15, 1943.

18. Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana, IL, 1976), esp. 206-214; Kenneth L. Kusmer, "Black Cleveland and the Central-Woodland Community, 1865-1930," in Cleveland: A Metropolitan Reader, ed. W. Dennis Keating, Norman Krumholz, and David C. Perry (Kent, OH, and London, 1995), 265-282; Phillips, AlabamaNorth, 127-160; Wye, "Midwest Ghetto," 79-85 passim.

19. Research Committee, Welfare Federation of Cleveland, "The Central Area Social Study," March 1942-July 1944, pp. 42, 44, Katharine P. Williamson Papers, container 1, folder 4, Western Reserve Historical Society (WRHS).

20. Cleveland Call & Post, January 18, 1941.

21. Cleveland Press, April 7, 1943. The earlier series ran in the Press from December 1-4, 1941; more examples of coverage on this topic include Cleveland Press, April 8, 1943; Cleveland Press, April 13, 1943; and Cleveland Press, October 4, 1944.

22. Winifred Stallard, "How Cleveland Met Its War Housing Problems," Civilian Front (July 15, 1944), pp. 6-7; "Areas Included in Survey of Vacancy and Occupancy in Privately Owned Dwelling Units," December 1944-January 1945, attached to memo, Katharine T. Patch to Clemons M. Roark, April 14, 1945, Bohn Papers, U. S. War Housing, container 1, folder 42. Virtually the entire black population lived on the city's East Side in 1940; the West Side and suburbs were effectively closed to African Americans.

23. The earliest clash between CMHA and Cleveland's black community is treated in Christopher G. Wye, "The New Deal and the Negro Community: Toward a Broader Conceptualization," Journal of American History 59 (December 1972), 623-626. For more details and subsequent developments, see Michney, "Changing Neighborhoods," 99-104.

24. "Down the Big Road" (editorial), Call & Post, ca. September 1941, in Bohn Papers, Scrapbooks, vol. 6 (1941-1942).

25. CMHA, "Annual Report 1942," pp. [1], [11], [12], in ibid., CMHA Records, container 2, folder 17; William K. Divers, "Public Housing: Slum Clearance, Low-Rent and War Housing," p. 26, in Planning Our Cities: A Series of Lectures, ed. Regional Association of Cleveland (Cleveland, [1942]), at WRHS; Cleveland Press, May 4, 1943; Ernest J. Bohn to F. Charles Starr, October 4, 1941, Bohn Papers, CMHA Records, container 1, folder 10. Building materials rationing begun in early 1942 put virtually all construction under the purview of the FHA; see Thomas W. Hanchett, "Federal Incentives and the Growth of Local Planning, 1941-1948," Journal of the American Planning Association 60 (Spring 1994), 198, 202.

26. CMHA, "Annual Report 1941," pp. [1], [2], Bohn Papers, CMHA Records, container 1, folder 10; "Public Housing in Ohio" (editorial), Call & Post, July 1942, in ibid., Scrapbooks, vol. 6; Cleveland Press, December 11, 1942; CMHA, "Annual Report 1942," p. [15].

27. "Report of Activities of War Housing Service, October 16, 1942-August 20, 1943," Bohn Papers, U. S. War Housing, container 1, folder 22; Stallard, "War Housing Problems"; Katharine Treat Patch, "Cleveland Opens Its Doors to War Workers," Junior League Magazine (August 1943), 4. Philadelphia had a similar agency, the Homes Registry Office; see Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal, 64-65.

28. "Report of Activities of War Housing Service"; Patch, "Cleveland Opens Its Doors"; Ernest J. Bohn to Mr. Wallace J. Baker, March 8, 1943, Bohn Papers, U. S. War Housing, container 1, folder 18; Cleveland Press, February 12, 1944; Plain Dealer, February 10, 1943.

29. "Cuyahoga County Council for Civilian Defense, Housing Committee," April 6, 1943, Bohn Papers, U. S. War Housing, container 1, folder 49; Stallard, "War Housing Problems," p. 6; Cleveland Press, February 12, 1944; Cleveland Press, April 16, 1943; Cleveland News, June 12, 1943.

30. Cleveland Press, September 28, 1943; Cleveland Press, September 5, 1944; Stallard, "War Housing Problems," p. 6.

31. "Letter to the Editor," Call & Post, ca. March 1943, in Bohn Papers, Scrapbooks, War Housing Service Publicity Book #1 (October 1942-May 1944); Minutes, Public Relations Section, Housing Committee of the Cuyahoga County Council for Civilian Defense, January 20, 1943, in ibid., U. S. War Housing, container 1, folder 24; Call & Post, February 19, 1943; Katharine T. Patch to George M. Washington, October 26, 1943, in Bohn Papers, U. S. War Housing, container 1, folder 22.

32. See memo, Katharine T. Patch to W.F. Crawford, December 2, 1943, in ibid., U. S. War Housing, container 1, folder 13, for a revealing Kinsman-East 79th Street example. On the use of census data, see William F. Crawford to Katharine T Patch, November 23, 1943, in ibid.

33. Gordon H. Simpson to Katherine Patch, July 20, 1943, attached to Katharine T. Patch to Gordon H. Simpson, July 29, 1943, in ibid., U. S. War Housing, container 1, folder 37; Patch to Simpson, July 29, 1943; Memo, Katharine T. Patch to D.E. Mackelmann, August 5, 1943, in ibid., U. S. War Housing, container 1, folder 31; Memo, Katharine T. Patch to William K. Divers, March 20, 1944, in ibid., U. S. War Housing, container 1, folder 32; Memo, Katharine T. Patch to William K. Divers, May 22, 1944, in ibid.; Memo, Katharine T. Patch to William K. Divers, April 20, 1944, in ibid.

34. See Katharine T. Patch to Frank J. Lausche, December 13, 1943, in ibid., U.S. War Housing, container 1, folder 48; Inter-office memo, Willis G. Kemper to William K. Divers, June 1, 1944, attached to C.M. Roark to Katharine T. Patch, June 5, 1944, in ibid., U. S. War Housing, container 1, folder 14; Katharine T. Patch to Clemons Roark, June 5, 1944, in ibid.; and Memo, Katharine T. Patch to William K. Divers, June 20, 1944, in ibid., U. S. War Housing, container 1, folder 32.

35. Katharine T. Patch to Hon. Judge Meck, May 17, 1945, in ibid., U.S. War Housing, container 1, folder 18; Memo, Katharine T. Patch to William K. Divers, July 21, 1945, in ibid., U.S. War Housing, container 1, folder 28; Memo, E. L. Conant to Katharine T. Patch, July 25, 1945, in ibid.

36. Divers, "Public Housing," pp. 27-28. On the Lanham Act, see Szylvian, "Federal Housing Program," 124; and Hanchett, "Federal Incentives," 198. On the Act's significance for African American suburbanization, see Wiese, Places of Their Own, 135-138.

37. Cleveland Press, February 15, 1943. On the controversy surrounding war housing estates in the suburbs, see Plain Dealer, March 20, 1943; Cleveland Press, July 14, 1943; Cleveland Press, July 15, 1943; and the numerous other examples in Bohn Papers, Scrapbooks, vol.7 (1943-1944) and War Housing Service Publicity Book #1.

38. Plain Dealer, July 25, 1943. For a similar statement by the National Committee on the Housing Emergency, see Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal, 61.

39. Cleveland Press, March 14, 1943; Minutes, Executive Committee, Housing Committee, Cuyahoga County Council for Civilian Defense, December 9, 1943, Bohn Papers, U. S. War Housing, container 1, folder 24.

40. CMHA, "Annual Report 1943," pp. [1], [2], in ibid., CMHA Records, container 2, folder 17; CMHA, "Annual Report 1944," p. 1. Several builders actually did undertake to build housing for African Americans through WHS, but as of spring 1945 only 12 such homes had been completed while 60 more were in the process of being built; see Michney, "Changing Neighborhoods," 116-117. In Philadelphia, developers built 74 homes for blacks during the war; Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal, 87.

41. Minutes, Housing Committee, Cuyahoga County Council for Civilian Defense," September 3, 1943, Bohn Papers, U. S. War Housing, container 1, folder 22; Plain Dealer, September 10, 1943; CMHA, "Annual Report 1943," [12-13]; Brochure, "War Homes for War Workers: Kinsman Homes and Woodland Dwellings," n.d., Bohn Papers, CMHA Records, container 2, folder 4; "First of Nation's Mobile Homes Make Up Kinsman Dwell-'ings," Cleveland Herald, ca. September 1944, in ibid., Scrapbooks, vol. 7.

42. CMHA, "Annual Report 1943," pp. [10], [13]; Minutes, Housing Committee, Cuyahoga County Council for Civilian Defense, September 3, 1943; Plain Dealer, January 18, 1944; Cleveland News, January 18, 1944.

43. Minutes, Housing Committee, Cuyahoga County Council for Civilian Defense, February 11, 1944, Bohn Papers, U. S. War Housing, container 1, folder 23; "Report to the Kinsman-East 79th Street Area Project Committee," August 15, 1944, East End Neighborhood House Records, container 15, folder 4, WRHS; "Temporary War Housing (for war workers only)," January 1, 1945, attached to CMHA, "Annual Report 1944"; CMHA, "Annual Report 1943," p. [13].

44. Black Clevelanders' experience with war housing qualifies Kristin Szylvian's assertion that the latter half of the war "saw increased attention to the housing needs of African American workers." As she notes, 11.3 percent of all defense housing units were reserved for blacks as of 1944; but especially considering racial discrimination in the private sector, their needs far surpassed their proportion of the general population. Szylvian, "Federal Housing Program," 131.

45. Cleveland News, October 1, 1943. On this residential enclave's early history, see Wilbur H. Watson, The Village: An Oral Historical and Ethnographic Study of a Black Community (Atlanta, 1989); a recent dissertation by a former resident is Sylvia Hood Washington, "Packing Them In: A Twentieth Century Working Class Environmental History" (Ph.D. dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2000). For pertinent observations on another outlying Cleveland-area black enclave, see Andrew Wiese, "The Other Suburbanites: African American Suburbanization in the North before 1950," Journal of American History 85 (March 1999): 1495-1524.

46. Cleveland Press, April 9, 1943; Cleveland News, September 20, 1945; CMHA, "Annual Report 1943," p. [14]. Laying aside their judgmental aspects, these evaluations had at least some basis; the area was indisputably black (95.4%), while most dwellings had outdoor toilet facilities (75.6%) and had been built before 1930 (80%). On the other hand, relatively few (18%) properties were in disrepair, and there was a high level of owner-occupancy (76%). See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Housing: Supplement to the First Series, Housing Bulletin for Ohio, Cleveland Block Statistics (Washington, DC, 1942), 61-62.

47. Cleveland News, November 12, 1943; Cleveland Press, November 16, 1943; Plain Dealer, November 16, 1943; Call & Post, November 27, 1943; Plain Dealer, December 13, 1943; Cleveland News, December 14, 1943; Cleveland Press, January 2, 1944; Cleveland Press, January 3, 1944; Plain Dealer, January 3, 1944.

48. Cleveland Press, January 2, 1944; Plain Dealer, March 2, 1944; Cleveland Press, March 2, 1944; CMHA, "Annual Report 1944," 2.

49. These conflicts are treated at length in Michney, "Changing Neighborhoods," 149-164.

50. Minutes, Housing Committee, Cuyahoga County Council for Civilian Defense, October 24, 1944, Bohn Papers, U.S. War Housing, container 1, folder 23; "Temporary War Housing (for war workers only)." On the Community Relations Board dispute, see Plain Dealer, May 16, 1945; and "Special Meeting of the Cleveland Community Relations Board," June 5, 1945, Cleveland Mayoral Papers, container 1, folder 23, WRHS.

51. Cleveland Press, September 22, 1944; Berea Enterprise, October 6, 1944; Berea News, October 20, 1944; Weaver, Negro Ghetto, 171; Call & Post, September 8, 1945. See also the positive evaluation of an integrated Sunday school at the Homes' community center, in Cleveland Press, May 14, 1945.

52. Kin-Wood Messenger (March 1946), Bohn Papers, CMHA Records, container 4, folder 18; Broadside, "Grand Opening--Seville Homes Community Center," ca. June 19, 1945, in ibid., CMHA Records, container 3, folder 17; Kin-Wood Messenger (July 1947), in ibid., CMHA Records, container 4, folder 18; "Kinsman Homes-Woodland Dwellings," Cleveland Herald, ca. October 1944, in ibid., Scrapbooks, vol. 7; Kin-Wood Messenger (December 1946), in ibid., CMHA Records, container 4, folder 18; program, "Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority Open House, Seville Homes," [ca. June 19, 1945], in ibid., CMHA Records, container 3, folder 17; Seville Homes Bulletin #1 (February 27, 1945), in ibid., CMHA Records, container 5, folder 12; Cleveland Herald, March 17, 1950; Kin-Wood Messenger (February 1946), Bohn Papers, CMHA Records, container 4, folder 18; Seville Sentinel (March 1954), in ibid., CMHA Records, container 5, folder 12; Kin-Wood Messenger (January-February 1947), in ibid., CMHA Records, container 4, folder 18; Seville Sentinel (March 1953), in ibid., CMHA Records, container 5, folder 12.

53. Kin-Wood Messenger (February 1946); Seville Sentinel (March 1953); Seville Sentinel (February 1946), Bohn Papers, CMHA Records, container 5, folder 12; brochure, "Seville Homes," n.d., in ibid., CMHA Records, container 2, folder 4; Call & Post, January 25, 1947; "Report to the Kinsman-E. 79th Street Area Project Committee," November 15, 1944, East End Neighborhood House Records, container 15, folder 2; Kin-Wood Messenger (March 1946); Seville Sentinel (March 1954); Cleveland Herald, March 17, 1950; Program, "Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority Open House"; Seville Sentinel (January 1946), Bohn Papers, CMHA Records, container 5, folder 12; "Report to the Kinsman-E. 79th Street Area Project Committee," September 15, 1944, East End Neighborhood House Records, container 15, folder 4; Seville Sentinel 1:1 ([1945]), Bohn Papers, CMHA Records, container 5, folder 12; CMHA, "Annual Report 1943," [14].

54. Weaver, Negro Ghetto, 171, 197; Seville Sentinel (January 1946); Seville Sentinel (December 1946), Bohn Papers, CMHA Records, container 5, folder 12; Kin-Wood Messenger (August 1946), in ibid., CMHA Records, container 4, folder 18; Seville Sentinel 1:1 ([1945]); Seville Sentinel (June 1946), Bohn Papers, CMHA Records, container 5, folder 12.

55. Plain Dealer, July 25, 1943; Cleveland Press, September 19, 1944; Plain Dealer, October 26, 1944. Cleveland's black population grew from 84, 504 in 1940 to 147, 847 in 1950, a 75 percent increase. The Urban League estimated that the vast majority (75.6%) of the migrants arriving in this decade came between 1944 and 1950. Wye, "Midwest Ghetto," 91.

56. CMHA, "Annual Report 1945," p. 14; CMHA, "Annual Report 1946," p. 8; CMHA, "Annual Report 1947," p. 7; CMHA, "Annual Report 1948," p. 9; CMHA, "Annual Report 1949," p. 10, Bohn Papers, CMHA Records, container 2, folder 19; CMHA, "Annual Report 1950," p. 9, in ibid.

57. Cleveland Press, July 1, 1948; Plain Dealer, February 18, 1949; unidentified newspaper clipping, "Wartime Homes' Removal Asked," July 21, 1957, Bohn Papers, Scrapbooks, vol. 14 (1957-1959); Call & Post, January 19, 1952.

58. CMHA, "Annual Report 1948," p. 13; Cleveland News, April 11, 1949; Cleveland News, May 12, 1950; CMHA, "Annual Report 1950," pp. 12, 13. Despite such drawbacks, black Councilwoman Jean Murrell Capers wrote the Housing and Home Finance Agency years after the war, to inquire whether more portable units like those used at Woodland Dwellings and Kinsman Homes could be sent to Cleveland; Jean Murrell Capers to Frank Home, June 14, 1951, Frank Smith Home Papers, container 6, folder 19, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University.

59. Cleveland Press, June 22, 1953; Cleveland Press, July 30, 1953; Cleveland Press, July 31, 1953; Ernest J. Bohn to Anthony J. Celebrezze, January 31, 1958, Bohn Papers, CMHA Records, container 2, folder 1; Plain Dealer, July 12, 1957; Cleveland News, April 14, 1958; unidentified newspaper clipping, "Lee Project Smoke Stirs Up Neighbors," ca. July 1958, Bohn Papers, Scrapbooks, vol. 14.

60. Cleveland News, May 4, 1943; Kerr, "Open Penitentiaries," 333-360. For additional context and background on Hough, see Todd M. Michney, "Race, Violence, and Urban Territoriality: Cleveland's Little Italy and the 1966 Hough Uprising," Journal of Urban History 32 (March 2006), 414-417.

61. Michney, "Changing Neighborhoods," 145-209 passim. Andrew Wiese comes to a similar conclusion with regard to the Cleveland case; see Places of Their Own, 135, 138. In a further irony, Cleveland's urban renewal program met its end on the former site of the Seville Homes ten years after they were demolished. When CMHA embarked on a plan to build scatter-site public housing there in 1968, the surrounding black middle-class community scuttled the proposed project in a high-profile setback for the administration of black mayor Carl B. Stokes. See Leonard N. Moore, "Class Conflicts over Residential Space in an African-American Community: Cleveland's Lee-Seville Public Housing Controversy," Ohio History 111 (Winter-Spring 2002): 1-19.

By Todd M. Michney

Tulane University