Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity
(By Laura Meckler)
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| Author | Laura Meckler |
The Shaker Heights community has earned a national reputation as a pioneer in racial integration and a model for how white and Black Americans can not just coexist but thrive together. The way the story went, Black and white families had figured out how to share the elite community with excellent schools in Shaker Heights, a place most anyone would be proud to call home. But Meckler—herself a product of the town’s school system—reveals where the truth of this story ends, and the myth begins.
Shaker Heights was founded as an upper-crust refuge from the neighboring city of Cleveland, with racist housing covenants and exclusive country clubs. Meckler chronicles the history of this place—from its 1912 founding as one of America’s prototypical Garden Suburbs, created as an escape from the city, into an elite, parklike community; through the 1950s, when the first Black families arrived; to the 1970s, when school integration began; and into the 1990s and 2000s, when the community first confronted racial academic achievement gaps. Dream Town ends in the present, as school leaders strive for racial equity and confront underlying tensions that have been ignored for decades.
While telling the stories of the Shakerites who built and live in this community, Meckler probes questions that lie at the center of America’s long and painful history of race relations: Can a community of well-intentioned people fulfill the promise of racial integration in America? What does success look like, and has Shaker achieved it? What are Black Americans asked to sacrifice, and what will white people have to give up?”
