The 1945 Cleveland Buckeyes and the African American Community

This article was published in From Setbacks to Success: The 1945 Cleveland Buckeyes (SABR, 2025), edited by Vince Guerrieri, Thomas Kern, and Bill Nowlin.

As World War II came to a conclusion, the African American community in Cleveland looked to the future with a cautious degree of optimism. African Americans had contributed significantly to the Allied victory both by serving in the still-segregated military and by playing a vital role on the home front. “The Double V for Victory” campaign launched by the African American newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier had planted the seeds for what would become the modern civil rights movement. The Fair Employment Practices Committee established by executive order in 1941 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt represented the first federal commitment to civil rights since the end of Reconstruction. (FDR issued the executive order to head off a march on Washington planned by the Black leader A. Philip Randolph). Though the FEPC expired with the end of the war, some industrial and retail jobs had opened up to African Americans for the first time. A new union movement, the Committee for Industrial Organization, had welcomed African Americans as members.1 Many African Americans hoped that the old policy of “last hired and first fired” would be ended.

Cleveland in 1945 was a proud, bustling, self-confident industrial city. Part of the Great Lakes region, which also included Buffalo, Detroit, Toledo, Chicago, and Milwaukee, Cleveland was home to iron and steel, electrical, automotive, machine tools, paint, clothing, and many other types of manufacturing, Cleveland factories had very successfully converted to wartime production. By 1943, tanks and airplanes rather than consumer goods were pouring out of Cleveland factories. Many plants worked around the clock and by 1944 women, often referred to as Rosie the Riveter, moved up the employment ladder to fill industrial jobs that opened for them. Neither Nazi Germany nor Imperial Japan had understood how well the United States would fulfill its role as the “Arsenal of Democracy,” as FDR put it.

Most Cleveland industrial workers resided in ethnic neighborhoods like Collinwood, the South Side (today known as Tremont), and Broadway-Fleet in close proximity to their workplaces. These neighborhoods housed the immigrants who had poured into Cleveland from Eastern and Southern Europe between the 1890s and 1924 (the date of a major federal immigration restriction law). Most belonged to Catholic or Orthodox churches and had strong ties to their parish. The women shopped at neighborhood stores and the men drank at neighborhood saloons. Many neighborhoods were badly polluted and run-down because little new housing had been built since the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929.

The residential patterns of African Americans were quite different. During the first Great Migration (1916 to 1918), African Americans had not been able to find housing outside of the Central-Woodland area. The racist housing practices enforced by landlords continued during the 1920s when migration from the Deep South, and especially from Alabama, resumed. And the pattern remained in place between 1941 and 1945 when hundreds of thousands of migrants once again came north seeking a better life. Even if some jobs opened up for them, the new arrivals could not find housing outside of the expanding and densely populated “ghetto” as African American areas of cities had come to be called. Though the new federally sponsored public housing offered an upgrade, it too was segregated.

The rigid segregation actually enhanced African Americans’ efforts to establish a separate institutional life. The church was the most important institution. More established African Americans worshipped at large institutional churches like Antioch Baptist Church and Cory United Methodist Church; the poorer, most recent migrants often attended storefront churches. African Americans also owned barber shops which provided places to socialize and exchange news, and residents often purchased insurance from community residents. Most stores in the ghetto remained White-owned through a Cleveland organization known as the Future Outlook League, headed by John O. Holly, had some success in gaining employment for Blacks with “Don’t shop where you can’t work” campaigns. Big-time racketeers benefited the most from “policy,” as the numbers game was known, but many of the numbers runners were local residents. Wartime earnings meant that many workers had money in their pockets for the first time. The House of Wills served as a community center as well as a funeral home. East 55th Street, where the House of Wills was located, served as a community hub and the center of what became known as the “Black downtown.” Local jazz clubs and juke joints were often packed on weekends. When established in 1942, the Cleveland Buckeyes provided a point of community pride. All of the community events received extensive publicity in the Call and Post, edited by William O. Walker, one of a number of African American newspapers that flourished in the 1940s.

The neighborhood entertainment venues were important because many of Cleveland’s hotels and restaurants would not serve African Americans. As evidence of the racist practices at this time, the popular Euclid Beach Park would admit African Americans only on certain days (the park became the target of militant protests in 1946).

Jesse Owens, Chester Himes, and Langston Hughes had all graduated from Cleveland high schools. Owens had embarrassed Adolf Hitler by winning four Gold Medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Hines authored a number of cutting-edge novels and Hughes became one of the nation’s best-known poets and playwrights. Many of Hughes’ plays were performed by the nationally known Gilpin Players at Karamu House, a settlement house that also provided workshop space for a number of talented African American artists and printmakers.

Despite the extent of the segregation, Cleveland had not had a race riot comparable to East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917, Chicago and many other cities in 1919, Harlem in 1935, and Detroit and New York in 1943. And there had not been the “hate strikes” (protesting the hiring of African American men and women) that occurred in Detroit and Philadelphia in 1943 and 1944.

The Cleveland Cultural Gardens (though lacking an African American garden) symbolized the city’s pride in multiculturalism as did the Anisfeld-Wolf book awards, given annually to books promoting ethnic and racial understanding. The Cleveland City Club hosted speakers representing a number of different perspectives. Not surprisingly, Cleveland in 1945 became one of the first American cities to establish a human relations council.

Thus, it seems appropriate that the Cleveland Buckeyes won the 1945 Negro World Series as the industrial powerhouse on Lake Erie reached its peak population of 900,000. Having celebrated the defeats of Germany and Japan, local residents now celebrated achievements on the playing field.

DAVID J. GOLDBERG received his BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his PhD from Columbia University. He is the author of A Tale of Three Cities: Labor Organization and Protest in Paterson, Passaic and Lawrence (Rutgers University Press, 1989) and Discontented America – The United States in the 1920s (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). He has also written numerous articles related to labor and immigration history. He is currently a professor emeritus at Cleveland State University and is working on a new book dealing with Boston, baseball, and American life in the mid-1950s. He teaches upper-division courses on US history in the twentieth century, US foreign policy, and the history of immigration.

Sources

Drake, St. Clair, and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Life in a Northern City, (New York: Harper and Row, 1945, 1962).

Duneier, Duneier, Ghetto, Invention of a Place: The History of an Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2016).

Hammock, David C., Diane L. Grabowski, and John J. Grabowski, Identity, Conflict and Cooperation, Central Europeans in Cleveland, 1850-1930 (Cleveland: The Western Reserve Historical Society (2002).

Kennedy, David, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Phillips, Kimberly L., AlabamaNorth: African American Migrants Community and Working Class Activism, 1915-1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

Van Tassel, David D.,  and John G. Grabowski, Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1996).

Williams, Regennia N., Cleveland, Ohio (Chicago: Arcadia Press, 2002).

Notes

1 The organization became later known as the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and affiliated with the American Federation of Labor.