African American Political Participation and Mobilization before Black Lives Matter : Euclid, Ohio (1967-2008)

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to analyze the various forms of African American political participation and mobilization in Euclid, an inner-ring suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. Initially white, Euclid became by the mid-2000s a Black-majority suburb. Despite the rapid African American population growth in the 1970s onward, Euclid’s institutions of power – its city council, school board and police forces – remained almost entirely white. It was only after a lawsuit that the city lost in the late 2000s, and which uncovered profound racial dynamics similar to the ones in Ferguson, Missouri, that the first African American candidate was elected to the city council. The first objective of this research consists in documenting the ways in which the colorblind racial regime of the late 20th century blocked the political incorporation of African Americans while seriously undermining their capacities to mobilize. A second objective is to understand why issues surrounding racial inequalities failed to mobilize African Americans in spite of their omnipresence and devastating consequences in Euclid. Before the Black Lives Matter movement of the 2010s, which put anti-Black systemic racism back on center stage, the latter was largely marginal or even absent from African American public discourses as well as their individual and collective initiatives in Euclid. Combining archival work with oral history interviews with African Americans who were involved locally in the 1970s onward, this dissertation aims at analyzing African Americans’ particular relationship to and understanding of racial inequalities, and the discourses and forms of mobilization favored by them during the neoliberal and so-called post-racial age.