It's not that simple. Cleveland always had a large black populations, back to the days when escaped slaves got to Cleveland on the way to Canada, then couldn't get across Lake Erie. Keep in mind that Jesse Owens came out of an established and viable black community in Cleveland. There are other successes.
Cleveland is a manufacturing city. When those factories closed, generations of people couldn't find work. The downtown stopped being a viable center of anything and the population collapsed, as those that could headed to the suburbs.
Over eight years ago, when I moved to a near-suburb, people categorized Cleveland with Detroit and Newark. It hasn't had that fate. There has been construction and new businesses and the city can pay its bills. Losing that hub is huge, considering the initiatives to bring convention business and manufacturing back.
It's a shame that with all of the construction and attempts to upgrade Cleveland, more wasn't done to make sure the hub was going to stay put. Everthing is focused on the next project. Not enough is done to make sure the positives stay that way.
Granted jobs and manufacturing were lost,many moved to the suburbs.Any guess as to why?.
Even as a child of 8yrs I was reading the Cleveland Press and remembering reading stories of unmarried women with 8 children migrating from the south with no job prospects no money and begging for help.This was late 50’s before Johnson’s Great Society.The problem then exacerbated.
.The black population of Cleveland was concentrated in the Scovill area.
The ethnic neighborhoods of the Lithuanians,Poles,Hungarians,Czechs were decimated by the influx into these communities.The inner city rotted.
What were once vibrant areas,became crime ridden and the housing collapsed.
I watched my parents pay for a home only to have to give away.As a child ,I was spat on by grown men.The prospect of me staying and thriving in Cleveland dimmed.My parents and all my relatives left for the “burbs”,with that went jobs and a once thriving neighborhood that I can never go back to and say “that’s the house I used to live in”.
It’s gone, torn down because of the “wonderful diversity” that enveloped Cleveland.