The East Woodland urban renewal project was proposed in the late 1950s, though it was officially approved in 1960. The area between East 79th Street, East 71st Street, the Nickel Plate Road, Platt Avenue, and the Pennsylvania Railroad was in a sorry state in the middle of the 20th century. This particular urban renewal project is unique because it was rezoned to make the land available for industrial use, and then back again to its original intent of renewing the urban neighborhood for residential use. East Woodland represents the tension between two big needs in the city of Cleveland in the mid-20th century: conserving residential neighborhoods and maintaining industry within the city limits.

The East Woodland Project saw very little activity for ten years after its inception. Problems that faced the earlier Longwood urban renewal project, located farther west on Woodland Avenue, raised concerns over whether the East Woodland project would be successful. The major concern was how the project would attract people back into the city. People were already flocking to the suburbs because there were lower crime rates as well as better opportunities for employment. The concerns grew so much that the project was halted and reframed to address another concern. Industry was leaving to suburbs as well and, in an effort to attract new industry and keep manufacturers that were already in the area, East Woodland was to change its purpose in 1965 to become an industrial renewal area.

The change created a new problem, however. The eighty residents within the proposed area had already put money into fixing up their homes on the promise that federal funding was going to rejuvenate the area as a place of residence. Changing the land to industrial use would also evict them from their homes. Despite their outcries and a legal battle led by James Scribner and his wife, a court ruled that the project was to be industrial. Nevertheless, the people of the neighborhood won a pledge from Mayor Carl B. Stokes in 1968 to return the intent of the project to residential in nature. Mayor Stokes was sympathetic to the cause of the people because he grew up only a few streets away in the Outhwaite Homes and was well aware of the poor state of East Side neighborhoods because he drove daily on Woodland Avenue between his Larchmere Boulevard home and City Hall. Land development would not officially start until 1971, more than a decade after the original announcement of the project.

Industrial space within the city was still a concern as the 1970s dawned. Industrial leaders in the area took action to work with their community and formed the Woodland East Community Organization (WECO) in 1971. Some of these businesses included Van Dorn Iron works, Empire Plating, Eaton Industries, and Ramsey Labs. The original charter included around 500 acres between Woodland Avenue and Buckeye Road to the north, Kinsman Road to the south, East 93rd and Woodhill Road to the east, and East 75th to the west. WECO was dedicated not just to reviving the neighborhood economically, but to keeping the area safe for residents and businesses. The WECO safety patrol in conjunction with the Cleveland Police reduced crime in the area. WECO was also successful in keeping business in the area. Orlando Baking was persuaded by Mayor Dennis Kucinich and WECO to stay in the area when the firm was considering a move to suburban Solon in the late 1970s. The WECO project was not funded publicly with tax dollars, but rather from the private means of the industries involved. The efforts of WECO helped revitalize industry and community in East Woodland but ultimately could not halt the broader problem of suburban, Sunbelt, and overseas competition for manufacturing that decimated the industrial base of Cleveland and other Rust Belt cities.

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Cleveland at the end of the 1960s saw entire neighborhoods change radically in only a few years. Collinwood is a neighborhood that went through such a transition. Collinwood, like much of Cleveland, as ethnic communities and whites left for the suburbs, African Americans and white Appalachians arrived to fill industrial positions. Racial tension and race-based violence became a major concern in Collinwood. In 1966, the Hough riots erupted in Cleveland demonstrating conclusively that race relations were at a low point.

The year 1967, which was a year after the Hough Riots, brought a great success for black Americans: Carl Stokes became the first black mayor of a major city. Stokes strove to improve the living conditions of Clevelanders through the use of his flagship program, Cleveland: NOW!. The Stokes administration applied the Cleveland: NOW! brand to a variety of initiatives related to community development. Stokes planned to use $177 million in funds to redevelop Cleveland and planned for the program to use over $1 billion during a ten-year period. Many of these programs from Cleveland: NOW! worked from neighborhood multi-service centers.

However, the Cleveland: NOW! program hit a snag early in development. The Glenville Shootout, a battle between black nationalists and the police, occurred on July 23, 1968. This battle and subsequent riots severely hampered the Cleveland Now! project and dashed the public’s enthusiasm for Stokes. The situation became even worse when it was discovered that Fred Ahmed Evans, the leader of the group that fought the police in Glenville, had purchased the weapons using money from the Cleveland: NOW! program. Most examinations of the Cleveland: NOW! program end here. Some works on the topic argue that the Glenville Shootout "killed prospects for the success of Cleveland: NOW!” However, the program did not officially end until after 1971 and continued to work successfully towards rebuilding Cleveland even after the riots. An example Cleveland: NOW!’s programming success is the Collinwood Community Services Center (Collinwood CSC).

The Collinwood neighborhood had many of the same issues on a smaller scale as the city. Collinwood experienced extreme demographic changes that led to racial conflicts at the time. The Collinwood CSC’s report shows 90% of the population of South Collinwood was ethnic Europeans and 5-10% was black in 1965. By 1968, they estimated that the black population had grown to 30%, the ethnic population had fallen to 40% and Appalachian whites had established themselves with 30% of the population. The area also saw a dramatic rise in crime rate. The Center associated the rise with violent conflicts between young Appalachian and African American men.

In this volatile scenario, the Collinwood CSC was established. Initially a project of the Alta House, it quickly signed up for the Cleveland: NOW! program. This pairing of settlement house and city government to establish a multi-service center was common. These multi-service centers all provided a variety of general social service functions. These functions ranged from job counseling, juvenile court office, city health offices, officials from county welfare, legal aid, and classes in health and safety. Many others included health care services and daycare. They drafted specific proposals for programs directed towards their community.

One of the first multi-service centers was in the Collinwood. The direct predecessor to the Collinwood CSC was the Collinwood Youth Association which began in 1967. The Center started operating in January 1968. It stood initially at 742 East 152nd Street. The multi-service center operated multiple locations in the area other than the main office. These were two drop-in centers on East 140th St and two other centers at Five Points (the intersection of St. Clair and 152nd St.). They proposed to move their main center to the Five Points area, and, in the end, it was moved to 813 East 152nd St. The community center became the Five Points Community Center sometime after 1989 and exists there to this day.

The Collinwood CSC was oriented to combatting the rising crime rate in the area through social programing and helping Appalachian migrants find employment. To accomplish this, the Collinwood CSC designed programs to engage young people and to provide job assistance and training. They developed programs specifically targeting job training, community programing, and drop-in centers for youths. These programs had good participation and a high success rate. The drop-in centers were places to gather for young blacks and Appalachian whites.

The Collinwood CSC, like many of Cleveland: NOW!’s programs, has been written off as a failure. The writers who declare this are usually only examining Cleveland: NOW! via the effects of Carl Stokes political career, or its ability to prevent race-based conflict, or the popularity of the program. Examining the Collinwood CSC by looking at the successes of its programs and the number of people affected by it tells a different story. The Collinwood CSC is representative of the whole of Cleveland: NOW! in that it is pronounced dead with the Glenville Shootout, but is only getting started serving the community.

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The vacant lot at 8127 Superior Avenue N.E. sits quietly in the midst of an East Side neighborhood that has seen a great deal of upheaval and civic unrest. In the late sixties, the lot was the home of the Afro Set Black Nationalist Party for Self Defense storefront as well as the headquarters of the group of the same name. Founded by Harllel Jones (later Harllel X) in late 1968, the Afro Set was largely a response to the rise of Black Nationalist sentiment due to escalating racial and socio-economic tensions that were prevalent not only in Cleveland but across the country. Jones had grown up in the East Side neighborhood of Hough, and his experiences there helped shape the Afro Set’s Nationalist core.

Cleveland’s East Side was a victim of the migration to the suburbs that most urban centers suffered in the post-World War II era, and more critically, of the economic policies of the 1950s and 1960s that caused the rapid dereliction of what had become a series of predominantly black neighborhoods, with Glenville and Hough (the neighborhood where the Afro Set was located) suffering some of the worst decay and lack of governmental aid. Administrations prior to the election of Mayor Carl Stokes were marred by a racially conservative tendency to ignore urban neighborhoods, often tying up (or underfunding) desperately needed resources as well as ignoring the overpopulation, poor sanitation, and high unemployment rates in such areas. While Mayor Stokes’ programs such as Cleveland: NOW! were intended to address these issues, tensions in neighborhoods like Hough produced increasing levels of hostility towards even their own residents, with riots breaking out in the late 1960s following racial confrontations. Black Nationalists like those of the Afro Set would argue that such instances were almost inevitable given the charged atmosphere of the era.

Black Nationalism began as a movement predominantly among urban African Americans who focused on the belief in self-regulated black agency within the larger nation. As with the Civil Rights movement of the same era, Black Nationalists were concerned with the rights and discrimination that dominated postwar America, but the Nationalists were generally convinced that a nonviolent approach to the tensions between black communities and the establishment was ineffectual at best. Therefore Nationalist groups such as the Afro Set, while promoting black community values and a return to African culture, were more militarily inclined and also included a focus not just on black agency but also on separation of black society from the national whole.

The Afro Set was a beneficiary of the Cleveland: NOW! program, which represented Mayor Carl Stokes’ attempt to help blighted communities through a series of grants that were used in hopes of promoting a more positive urban experience. Jones’ Afro Set was not only a storefront that sold African cultural items and gave urban black youths a place to work, it was also meant to be a community and cultural institution where area people could come and hear lectures on prominent blacks such as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, as well as receive lectures on black culture in general. However, the message of black cultural identity tended to get lost in the coverage that men such as Jones received in the press: Black Nationalists were generally seen as overtly violent and communistic militants who threatened the status quo, and interviews from Jones and his compatriots tended to verbally confront the press and authority figures such as the police with thinly veiled threats and rhetoric. That is not to say that all Nationalists were focused on violent revolution, and even Jones did eventually move his focus to helping men reintegrate into the society that he had vehemently opposed; but the legacy of violence, and the bias shown towards groups like the Afro Set means that today’s urban blacks have little to show from an era that caused so much upheaval and social change; there are far too many vacant lots that are fading back into the landscape with their stories fading from memory.

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On the morning of April 6, 1970, 350 to 400 whites, mostly students, gathered outside of Collinwood High School and began throwing rocks at the school, breaking 56 windows. Teachers told the 200 black students who attended school that day to go to the third-floor cafeteria for their protection. At 10:30 a.m., the white mob entered the school and went to the second floor. They damaged furniture, broke windows, and threw clubs at the school's music director. Afraid, the black students began breaking off the legs of chairs to arm themselves and blocking the stairs leading to the third floor with tables and chairs. Luckily, the white students left the school and the black students were escorted to buses to take them home. Teachers and policemen had to form a line in order to block the whites from attacking the students who were boarding. This was just one of many serious, racially motivated confrontations that took place in Collinwood over a fifteen-year period.

The first major incidents at Collinwood High School occurred in 1965, the same time the rest of the country was seeing racial clashes in schools. After the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional in the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, many schools in the South became places of protests and violence. Northern schools saw the same disturbances when they began to make efforts toward greater integration. In the case of Collinwood, industrialization not only increased its population, but also its diversity. According to a Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist, "with the passage of each year, the western fringes of the Collinwood area [were] being occupied by the Negro overflow from Glenville." This change in demographics, coupled with civil rights demonstrations, caused racial tensions to surface and intensify in Collinwood, particularly at the neighborhood's high school.

Finally, after fifteen years of violence in the country's schools, radical measures were being taken in some schools and by the federal government to stop the dangerous episodes once and for all. In a New York school, a committee was formed by the mayor to prevent future violence. Other schools suspended or expelled large groups of students for any racial confrontations and hired security force guards to keep the peace. In April 1969, Senator Robert C. Byrd asked Congress to pass a law that would make the disruption of any school that received federal aid a federal crime.

Cleveland's mayor Carl Stokes was prompted to follow these examples after the dangerous episode of April 1970. The mayor kept the school open but protected it with policemen backed by National Guard units in case a severe situation should arise. Nevertheless, Collinwood High School was still the scene of other racial clashes, the worst occurring in the fall of 1974. Three black students were stabbed in September of that year, and the next month another student was fatally shot by a sixteen-year-old white student. After these disturbing incidents, the racial violence at the Collinwood school began to dwindle.

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While the CSU College of Law has been a part of Cleveland State University since 1969, its history as a Cleveland-area law school dates back to the late nineteenth century. In 1897, Cleveland Law School was established, becoming Ohio's first evening law school. It also became the first law school in Ohio to admit women and one of the first in the state to admit minority students.

In 1946, Cleveland Law School merged with John Marshall School of Law, which had been founded in 1916 by several Cleveland attorneys. The new Cleveland-Marshall Law School moved into the Ontario Building at 1240 Ontario Street, where it remained for several decades until the law school building was demolished to make room for the Cuyahoga County Justice Center.

In 1969, Cleveland-Marshall officially affiliated itself with Cleveland State University, becoming the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. The new CSU college held classes in several buildings on campus, including Rhodes Tower and the Chester Building, before it moved into its own building on the corner of East 18th Street and Euclid Avenue in 1977. The building was dedicated that year by Prince Charles of England. A major addition to the building, including a state of the art law library, was added in 1997. In 2022, the CSU Board of Trustees voted to approve changing the school's name, dropping its namesake, who was a U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall but also a slaveholder.

The Cleveland-Marshall College of Law sits on grounds that were at one time occupied by the Millionaire Row mansions of two of Cleveland's most prominent nineteenth-century businessmen—E.W. Oglebay, the co-founder of Oglebay-Norton Mining Co., and Truman Handy, president of Mercantile Bank and promoter of the early railroad industry in midwest America.

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The story of the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969 - the event that sparked pop songs, lit the imagination of an entire nation, and badly tarnished a city's reputation - is built more on myths than reality. Yes, an oil slick on the Cuyahoga River - polluted from decades of industrial waste - caught fire on a Sunday morning in June 1969 near the Republic Steel mill, causing about $100,000 worth of damage to two railroad bridges. Initially the fire drew little attention, either locally or nationally. The '69 fire was not even the first time that the river burned. Dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century, the river had caught fire on several other occasions.

The picture of the Cuyahoga River on fire that ended up in Time Magazine a month later - a truly arresting image showing flames leaping up from the water, completely engulfing a ship - was actually from a much more serious fire in November 1952. No picture of the '69 river fire is known to exist.

Throughout much of Cleveland's history, water pollution did not trouble the city's residents very much. Instead, water pollution was viewed as a necessary consequence of the industry that had brought prosperity to the city. This attitude began to change in the 1960s as ideas associated with what would become known as environmentalism took shape. In 1968, Cleveland residents overwhelmingly passed a $100 million bond initiative to fund the Cuyahoga's cleanup. Also, by this time deindustrialization was somewhat alleviating the pollution problem, as factories closed or cut back operations. Ironically, the city and its residents were beginning to take responsibility for the cleanliness of the river in the years before the infamous fire of 1969.

The '69 fire, then, was not really the terrifying climax of decades of pollution, but rather the last gasp of an industrial river whose role was beginning to change. Nevertheless, Cleveland became a symbol of environmental degradation. The Time article contributed to this, as did the notoriety of Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes. Stokes, who was the first black mayor of a major city when elected in 1967, became deeply involved with the issue, holding a press conference at the site of the fire the following day and testifying before Congress - including his brother US Representative Louis Stokes - to urge greater federal involvement in pollution control. The Stokes brothers' advocacy played a part in the passage of the federal Clean Water Act of 1972. In Cleveland, a number of Cleveland State University students celebrated the inaugural Earth Day in 1970 by marching from campus to the river to protest pollution.

Even though it has been misunderstood, the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire did help bring about positive change. The river's water quality improved during the following decades, and business investors capitalized on this by converting parts of the Flats' abandoned industrial landscape into an entertainment district featuring restaurants, nightclubs, and music venues.

Much of the industry that both made Cleveland rich and caused its river to burn may never be coming back, but Clevelanders are meeting this challenge by reshaping their city to reflect its current realities.

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By the 1960s, Lake Erie had become extremely polluted, in part due to the heavy industry that lined its shores in Cleveland and other cities. Factories dumped pollutants into the lake and the waterways that flowed into it (like the Cuyahoga River) without much government oversight. Waste from city sewers made its way into the lake too, as did fertilizer and pesticides from agricultural runoff.

As a result of these pollutants, Lake Erie contained increased levels of phosphorus and nitrogen, which contributed to eutrophication - a process that encourages the development of algal blooms. Dead fish littered the shoreline as a lack of oxygen in the water led to massive fish kills. Episodes like this led to the coining of the phrase - more sensational than factual - "Lake Erie is dead," which started to appear in national publications in the late 1960s.

In 1969, the Cuyahoga River caught fire, bringing more negative national publicity to Cleveland and its polluted waterways. Even though pollution in Lake Erie was a regional problem, Cleveland bore the brunt of the negative publicity.

The burning river and the "dead" lake were major impetuses for the Federal government to step in and deal with water pollution in Cleveland and across the nation. In 1972, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, a measure that tightened regulations on industrial dumping. That same year, the United States and Canada signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in an attempt to lower the amount of pollutants entering the Great Lakes.

Locally, the city took steps to improve its sewer system and better monitor water quality. Mayor Carl Stokes led the way, pledging to clean up Cleveland's waterways. He appeared before Congress (and his brother, United States Representative Louis Stokes) in 1970 to discuss the issue and seek federal aid. Carl's involvement brought significant media attention to the problem and contributed to the national movement against water pollution.

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The Outhwaite Homes Estates, along with the Cedar Apartments and Lakeview Terrace, were the first three public housing projects to be completed in Cleveland. The three projects were also among the first in the nation to receive approval and funding from the federal government's newly created Public Works Administration in 1935.

Outhwaite's brick Art Deco buildings, grouped around grassy courtyards, originally contained 557 units. Expansion occurred only a few years after Outhwaite's 1937 opening as demand for public housing in Cleveland continued. The need for new housing was particularly great within the African American community, whose growing numbers were leading to overpopulation in the Cedar-Central neighborhood, the city's Black enclave. Initially, African Americans seeking public housing could only live at the Outhwaite Homes – in Cedar-Central – as officials sought to keep each housing project racially homogeneous.

In 1938, brothers Louis and Carl Stokes, who went on to noted political careers, moved to the Outhwaite Homes with their mother, Louise. Louis Stokes was a U.S. Congressional Representative for nearly three decades and his brother Carl became the first African American mayor of Cleveland in 1967. Both brothers credited their time at Outhwaite with having a role in their success.

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