SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio — Last week, Loganberry Books hosted author Laura Meckler to mark the release of “Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity” – a new book which takes a hard look at the complicated history of Shaker Heights and its decades-long efforts around racial integration in housing and schools.
Meckler grew up in Shaker Heights, and is currently an education reporter for the Washington Post, where she's written several articles about her hometown. "Dream Town," released on August 22, is her first book.
"There's a lot of ways to interpret this title. You might think of it as an adjective like this is a dream town, the perfect place, but that's not really how I think of it. I think of it as a verb dream. This is a town that is dreaming," Meckler told 3News anchor Russ Mitchell. "It's not a place where all the dreams have come true, not by a long shot, but it is a place that has them, and I think that's important."
As Meckler recounts in the book, for decades, Shaker Heights has been held up as a national model of successful suburban integration. Yet, this inner-ring “streetcar” suburb of cleveland, developed in the 1920s by brothers and property developers Otis Payne (O.P.) and Mantis James (M.J.) Van Sweringen was originally founded on very different ideals.
"It's fair to say they did not have diversity on their mind. They were not interested in the races living in harmony, quite the opposite. They were in fact, building an exclusive community for the right sword of people, and that meant wealthy white Clevelanders sort of escaping the city," Meckler said. "And so to me, understanding... that's where it started, and yet where we are now, it makes the transformation all the more interesting."
Meckler’s book delves deep into that history and follows the stories of early integration pioneers in the city’s Ludlow neighborhood in the mid-1950's, who took action to fight back against the kind of blockbusting practices that encouraged white flight. From there, community activism eventually extended into the school system.
"I knew from a very young age that Shaker had done some extraordinary things. It had voluntarily integrated the schools when other communities were fighting court orders to do the same. It had a very progressive housing policy that was working to try to integrate and maintain integration in neighborhoods," Meckler reflected.
The book also details the movement’s detractors, and they everyday citizens grappling with the many struggles to maintain racially balanced neighborhoods and schools.
"You can teach people about kids about race...but it's different when you grow up next to family that is racially different than your own and you're all part of the same block and the same world, that goes deeper," Meckler said.
"Dream Town" also takes a hard look at the city’s ongoing challenges, including a new effort to address a persistent “achievement gap” between white and black students.
"It's up and down...across the board....these gaps are just pronounced, and they have been for years, for decades, really, we've seen this gulf between white students and black students. Now, that's not just true here in Shaker. That's true all across the country," Meckler said. "There's a very controversial effort going on right now to combine kids of different ability levels into the same classes. That's an effort to get at those academic inequities that have persisted for so long."
Despite it’s many missteps and mistakes, Meckler writes that Shaker Heights is a place that has continued to defy the odds over and over again.
"I'm optimistic in general about the future, and that is because this is a community of people who are committed to working on these issues. This is not a problem that's just going to be solved one day. I don't think it will be. Can it be improved? Yes, I do think it can be improved," Meckler said. "I came away at the end of the day feeling like it was something more hopeful because in a country with hundreds of thousands of places, most of whom are not even trying, they're not even living with people who are different than themselves. This is a place where that work is still going on."
You can learn more about "Dream Town" and upcoming local events here.
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