Review | ‘Dream Town’ looks at how one city integrated and what came next

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In 1905, Cleveland brothers Oris and Mantis Van Sweringen began to develop a swath of land still covered in the dams and mills of the Shaker community that once lived there. (The Shakers had founded a utopic religion, grounded in principles of equality and simplicity. Their no-sex policy had not, unfortunately, helped their longevity.) The Van Sweringens envisioned a different kind of utopia: a garden suburb of Cleveland.

Consummate micromanagers, they controlled everything from architecture (colonial, English Tudor or French country) to paint colors and roof materials (never tar). Buyers poured in. “The wealthiest city in the United States boasts practically no unemployment, no slums. Backyard swimming pools are commonplace, nearly everyone belongs to a country club and most kids have new cars,” Cosmopolitan wrote in 1963. It was, the article said, “an American dream town come true.”

What happened when this Ohio district rushed to integrate schools

What the Van Sweringens did not plan for was Black people. The Masons, a Black family, arrived anyway, building a home on the edge of the suburb in 1956. As Washington Post education reporter Laura Meckler describes in her engrossing new book, “Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity,” not one but three neighbors called the police when Ted Mason, his surveyor and his contractor viewed the lot. Before the Masons had even moved in, the house next door went up for sale.

This begins as a classic White flight story: Black family moves in, White families move out. The great surprise is that this story, unlike others, ends in integration. Indeed, how the residents of the neighborhood lured White families to buy alongside Black ones through ingenuity, determination and potluck suppers is just one fascinating story this book tells. As Meckler, who grew up in Shaker Heights, writes: “The city realized it could fight a losing battle to resist integration, or it could remake its own image — to itself and to the world — as an integration pioneer. It chose the latter.”

But “Dream Town” focuses as much on what happens after integration as how the city achieved it. Meckler turns her sharp reportorial eye to the schools. Shaker Heights voluntarily started busing students to promote racial balance long before courts began to mandate it. And yet, classrooms did not seem integrated. White elementary school students were more frequently included in enrichment programs. (Asked where the White kids were, a Black student replied: “The White kids — they’re enriched.”) Divisions were more pronounced in the prestigious high school, where White students filled advanced classes while Black students largely languished in the lower levels.

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Meckler deftly explores how miscommunication, arrogance and flat-out racism sometimes thwarted good intentions as she chronicles many initiatives aimed at closing the academic gap, such as combining advanced and regular classes and finding ways to aid those “on the economic edge.” And to her enormous credit, her dives into educational policy never feel dull. Meckler, who conducted hundreds of interviews for this book, so compassionately tells the stories of superintendents, principals, teachers, parents and students of all backgrounds that policy reads like biography.

And indeed, “Dream Town” is a kind of biography. Shaker Heights emerges as the charismatic but flawed hero undertaking the quest for racial inclusion that the title of the book describes. Meckler vividly narrates how often the city tries, fails, but tries again, even as others give up. Is this surprising? Its land once hosted two utopic ideals: one of Shaker equality and the other of suburban prosperity. Is it possible to reconcile these visions? I suspect Shaker Heights is the one place we might find out.

Deirdre Mask is the author of “The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power.”

Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity

Henry Holt. 400 pp. $31.99

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