“Let Cleveland go up there with them”: St. Agnes founder criticizes white flight to suburbs3/31/2024 A small classified advertisement in the June 5, 1922 issue of the Cleveland Plain Dealer read: “ST. AGNES PARISH. $8,800. Owner leaving city, will sacrifice this beautiful home, 8 rooms, and finished wood floor, oak doors and finish; in finest condition throughout; about $3,000 cash needed. For real values, see H and H Properties Company, corner of Hough and Crawford Road.”
This was the beginning of the outmigration my grandfather was part of when his family moved to Cleveland Heights in 1918. This “white flight” – mostly white, middle-class families fleeing an increasingly diverse neighborhood – would only accelerate in the coming years. Black families began moving into Fairfax during the 1920s and 1930s, as more and more African-American families came north during the Great Migration looking for work and a better life. Initially, because whites with racist beliefs would not rent or sell to them in other areas, Blacks in Cleveland were largely restricted to the Cedar-Central area. That began to change in Fairfax as whites moved out of the neighborhood in the 1910s and 1920s, and Blacks moved in. Father Gilbert Jennings of St. Agnes Parish talked about his legacy as church founder in a May 30, 1934 interview in the Plain Dealer. Saying he’s lived a full life and would be a priest again if given the choice, Jennings reflects on his legacy on the 50th anniversary of the parish. One of his accomplishments was doing away with “compulsory giving,” he says: “The priests used to go around with pads and pencils. But I disliked it. I told them, they have recording angels in heaven, and that’s their business. We might not know all the circumstances of any given case. We might not be able to tell whether a man was being decent. But they know up there. And it worked.” As I learned more about Father Jennings, I began to appreciate him more. My grandfather remembered the important role he played in the neighborhood. As the founding priest of St. Agnes, he built up the church from a small group of families to thousands of members, and with it, the neighborhood flourished around it, as well. Still, Jennings tells the reporter that his greatest regret is that his parishioners are moving out of the neighborhood, comments that would prove eerily prescient since white flight would ultimately lead to the church’s unraveling. “This was the bon ton residence section when I came out here,” he tells the PD. “The suburbs were just beginning to be developed. We practically built the institution. We finished the new church eighteen years ago. Then an exodus started for the Heights. It used to wrench my heart to see my good people moving away – but now I’m used to it. It leaves a man kind of alone.” He doesn’t just stop there, either. Even as he touts the fact that the school has the largest enrollment in its history that year, Jennings takes direct aim at white men like my great-grandfather moving to the suburbs. “These are the men who have made Cleveland and who ought to be more interested in the city than anyone else,” he tells the PD rather pointedly. “They’ve gone into the Heights, into Lakewood, into other suburbs. I wouldn’t mind that so much if they’d let Cleveland go up there with them. But they won’t. Then they complain about the sort of government Cleveland gets. It’s their own fault. With no vision or foresight they always have voted themselves out. I can’t understand their view.” “To me it’s one of the most politically regrettable things in Cleveland,” he adds. “We’re here at the mercy of things as we know they are.” This is 1934, but somehow Jennings is making an argument not only against suburban white flight but also for regional government, an idea that was ahead of his time. He goes on to say that he favors a unified county government instead of individual suburbs each with their own separate systems of government. Seeing the writing on the wall, he recognizes that once his parishioners move to the suburbs, not only will St. Agnes have fewer neighborhood parishioners, but the city itself will have fewer middle-class residents. They won’t have the ability to vote or shape what happens in the city, but only to complain about it from their houses atop the hill. Again, these comments are eerily prescient, as the city-suburb divide would plague Cleveland, and just about every other city across the U.S., for the next century, and it remains a stubborn problem today. In his candid interview with the PD, Jennings bemoans the changes to the neighborhood. As the area was developed, the original houses on Euclid Avenue were torn down for larger, commercial buildings – banks, theaters, music halls, or department stores. “They can’t say that I moved, but they moved my parish,” he says. “Of the original 80 or 100 structures when we started, I don’t think there is one left. The entire character of my parish has changed along with the change in the community. Most of our people moved up to the Heights when that development was begun.” Yet he holds fast to the idea that the St. Agnes building will stand for many more years. “It was built to last for centuries,” he tells the PD. “It will be here long after I am gone and forgotten.” In a followup story on June 5, 1934, Jennings says the parish’s true legacy is its community, not the building itself, as glorious as it once was. “If I weren’t balanced by a lot of common sense I might be carried away with the idea that I amounted to something,” Jennings says. “Much has been said of these buildings. But if I should go out of this world thinking that I had just put up some buildings at Euclid Avenue and East 79th Street, if I had to tell my God that I’d done nothing but a building job, I’d think my life had been a failure. My real purpose was to build up the Christian faith, the spiritual St. Agnes. If I haven’t got that accomplishment to take with me, I’ll have nothing. And if I have that I’ll have everything.” It’s clear from the legacy of the church, and how many people it influenced, that indeed that legacy is quite secure. On Jennings’ 80th birthday in 1936, the PD relates the history of St. Agnes, which it says “he founded before the end of the century, when Euclid Avenue was the fashionable residences street of Cleveland.” In the story, the priest repeats his complaint about people moving to the suburbs. As the PD tells the story, “Msgr. Jennings walked to a window of his office in St Agnes church rectory. He stood looking out on Euclid Avenue. Blocks of store buildings stand where there only were residences when he founded St. Agnes.” Decrying the middle-class white community that was moving out and leaving the poor behind, Jennings toes right up to the line of talking about racism in the city. “Cleveland Heights didn’t exist then,” the priest says. “Nor did many other suburban cities which attract so many desirable citizens. They have their business offices in the city. They say they cannot live here because city taxes are high. But they are better able to pay than many who live in Cleveland.” The “many who live in Cleveland” were almost certainly lower-income white and Black families. Jennings goes on to decry the lack of religion in people’s lives, and the fact that people do not feel duty-bound to go to church, a grievance that he’d surely feel more acutely today in that trust in Christianity and church attendance are down. However, in my opinion, Jennings’ statement about taxes is perhaps the most prescient of anything he says in this series of interviews. Although he never mentions race and racism (and nor, by the way, do the mainstream papers), he recognizes that there is a social justice and equity issue at stake here. White flight and outmigration are leaving low-income residents stranded in an increasingly poor city. Indeed, as many have pointed out, this problem of the so-called inner city or the “donut hole” of poverty would become the central problem faced by Cleveland in the next century, and it remains so today. Outmigration only increased post World War II and in the latter half of the 20th century, to the point where the city lost nearly two-thirds of its population, going from a peak of 914,808 in 1950 to 372,624 in 2020, according to the US Census. On April 17, 1941, the Plain Dealer included an announcement of Jennings’ death at age 84, paying tribute to the man who had not only built a glorious edifice in St. Agnes parish, but had also shaped the lives of tens of thousands of Clevelanders. To my great-grandfather and my grandfather, he was a civic and spiritual leader, and it’s easy to see from his remarks how much he got what was happening in the city at the time. Postscript: On July 31, 1949, the PD published a charming, romantic story about parishioners saving the bell at St. Agnes, a story that seems ironic now given the fate of the church 30 years later. The article, headlined “Save St. Agnes Chime with 4 Bolts in Time,” relates how the bell, which had been blessed and anointed with oil when it was installed seven years earlier, was saved from destruction. “The bell at St. Agnes Catholic Church, 8000 Euclid Ave., will ring as usual this morning,” the Press article relates. “But behind its chime, as a sort of counterpoint to its melodious signal to mass, will be a tale of four bolts … The overture to the dilemma began Thursday when a clanking sound was heard between the bongs of the four-ton bell. Yesterday, when an attendance investigated after the bell could not be rung, three of the four bolts holding the bell were found to be broken.” With the bell in danger of crashing more than one hundred feet in the bell tower, church leaders sprang into action. The parish nun telephoned T. Pierre Champion, president of the Champion Rivet company and a former St. Agnes student, and told him they needed the bell repaired or it wouldn’t ring the next day. Champion called George S. Case, board president of Lamson and Sessions Company, and according to the article, “Case recognized the size of the bolt, 1 ¼ by 12 inches as uncommon, but thought that some place in the plant at 1971 W. 85 Street they could be found. He left his home at 17414 South Woodland Road, Shaker Heights, went to the plant and, after searching through several bins, came up with precious sizes. The search was made unaided, since the plant was closed for the day. He picked up six of the bolts weighing approximately five pounds each, and hurried across town to the church.” Once there, he found Charles Moore, who worked for the Cincinnati company that repaired and serviced the bells, waiting to help him. “Hoping that the one remaining bolt holding the bell to its yoke would not suddenly break, Moore edged close and replaced the three broken bolts with the new ones,” the article says. “For added safety, he replaced the fourth bolt also.” The story also attests to the strong connections St. Agnes parishioners and school graduates had to each other. “Champion, at his home at 2489 Coventry Rd., Cleveland Heights, was amazed that he should be remembered by someone at the church from his former schooldays,” the Press story relates. “Case, a member of Fairmount Presbyterian Church in Cleveland Heights, said the mission was ‘fun’ - pleasant proof that one aloof from a plant’s equipment could still do the job.” Presumably, these white men who swooped in like white knights to protect the parish were long gone by the time the church was torn down 30 years later (although the belltower was saved and remains standing today, though without the 5,000 pound bell).
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