Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity

Kathleen FitzSimons logged off her antiracism book club feeling despair. She was also confused.

That day, a mob of Donald Trump supporters had stormed the U.S. Capitol in a deadly and terrifying attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. So FitzSimons, who is white, was already shaken when she joined the Zoom call that evening to consider another gutting topic. The group, co-led by her daughter Molly, was discussing The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, about the devastating impact of the criminal justice system on Black men.

During the conversation, Molly recalled one of their Black neighbors from when she was growing up in the Lomond neighborhood of Shaker Heights and his later experience with police. Kathleen couldn’t remember what her daughter was talking about, and it bothered her. She went to sleep and then, in the middle of the night, woke up suddenly and started remembering.

Kathleen had tuned in to the conversation about race in America, about Black Lives Matter, about antiracism. She was trying to figure out what it meant to be an antiracist, and how that was different from simply not being racist. For her, this book club was helping in her hunt for answers. The idea for the book club had come to Molly when she was helping her mom clean out her apartment and found notes from conversations on race Kathleen had held with friends in the 1970s, after moving to Shaker Heights. “It was very moving to me to see she had been making that effort way back then and we were still in the same spot,” Molly said.

Indeed, for decades, Kathleen had considered herself a small part of the solution to America’s troubling relationship with race. Now she wondered if it was enough.
Similar antiracism groups had been organized all over Shaker Heights, all over progressive America, really. Lisa Vahey, who had helped lead an Equity Task Force for the Shaker Heights City School District, began a series of Waking Up White discussion groups in Shaker. She kept a public Google document updated with racial equity events and opportunities in and around the community. She regularly emailed several hundred people with information about pending legislation and community-building events around town. She helped distribute 550 Black Lives Matter yard signs, and with each sign, she signed up the recipient for a weekly email guiding them on “how to learn and act.”

“I continued to notice not enough white women were striving to be actively antiracist,” Vahey said. Too many, she said, “had bought into the promise of Shaker” and thought that it was all good because their kid had a Black friend in the fourth grade.

Kathleen and Dan FitzSimons very much bought into the promise of Shaker. She had been raised on the west side of Cleveland, which was almost entirely white and Christian, to parents who cared about social justice, though race was rarely mentioned. After college, Kathleen worked as a probation officer for the juvenile court and saw racial issues up close. Together, she and her husband were drawn to the idea of a racially diverse community.

They bought a home in Shaker Heights in the 1960s as the city was beginning to embrace and encourage racially integrated housing. Shaker was battling the real estate industry, banks and social pressures that all encouraged white flight as soon as Black residents arrived. The FitzSimons family moved into the Lomond neighborhood, looking to be part of something different.

In the middle of the night after that January 6, 2021, book club meeting, FitzSimons woke up recalling the incident her daughter had referred to involving their neighbor and the police and found herself overcome with memories about her relationships with her Black neighbors. Suddenly, she saw her decades in Shaker in a completely different light. In an email to the book group the next morning, she detailed her newly remembered experience.

Across the street lived a young Black boy, just a little younger than Molly. FitzSimons remembered, as her daughter had said, that he would later be caught up in the criminal justice system. (In fact, he’d been sentenced to ten years in prison after pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter, though she didn’t know that.)

Other stories that filled FitzSimons’s mind that night weren’t about crime. They were about everyday life. Living next door was another Black family, the Rushins. The mom was a teacher, and FitzSimons remembered that she had had to fight with teachers at Lomond because they kept putting her sons into the lowest-level learning groups. Yet all three of FitzSimons’s kids had been placed in upper-level groups without her having to ask.

“She had a hell of a time convincing the school that her boys deserved better, and was ultimately unsuccessful,” she wrote in her email. It never occurred to FitzSimons to advocate on her behalf, to say to the school, “What are we doing here?”

One of these boys struggled as he went on in school, a situation FitzSimons attributed to how he was treated at Lomond. Down the street was her babysitter. She was bright and caring and had such a hard time. Her dad was in jail and she had to give her babysitting money to her mom, who was ill and struggling to keep the household together.

“I am flooded with shame when I think now of how little I did to support these families,” FitzSimons wrote on the morning of January 7. “Not that I was so sophisticated or had it all together myself, but what is clear to me now is how little recourse or few resources they had to effectively navigate within the system. Ingrained attitudes, assumptions, and biases among teachers, community members and all the rest of us well-intentioned liberals, made up the invisible barriers that actually prevented their full inclusion.”

It’s not that FitzSimons had it easy. She and her husband had divorced, and she was a single mom with stretched finances. But looking back, she saw that she was better situated than these neighbors, simply because she was white.

It wasn’t just about money. She had been friendly “across the fence,” but never thought to include these neighbors in her wide social circle based on Lomond Boulevard and nearby streets. “We were committed to integration. We thought that was enough,” she said later. “It didn’t occur to me you have to go the next step, you have to invite them over.”

She remembered one experience more fondly. One day she went next door to Janice Rushin’s house to see some new furniture she had just bought. Rushin asked FitzSimons if she had ever heard the Black national anthem. She hadn’t. So Rushin sat down at her piano and played “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The pair sat together, tears streaming. The music was beautiful, hauntingly so. “It makes me cry to imagine what maybe we could have done together,” FitzSimons said, decades later. “I didn’t know how to go further.”

***

Janice Rushin died in 2017. Her two sons confirmed most of the basic facts of FitzSimons’s memories, and yet they saw things in a different light.

Michael Rushin, the younger of the two, said he was put into lower-level reading classes because that’s where he belonged. He didn’t love academics and didn’t want to do homework. It wasn’t until he was older that he found his calling: flying. His mom paid for flight lessons, the one thing he wanted to learn. And after college, he became a pilot.

The story was different for his older brother, Mark, who was also placed into the lowest group in kindergarten even though he was academically advanced. The teacher, he said, “had all the Black kids in the lowest group.” His mom had to fight to get him into the middle-level group, and then fight again to get him into the top group, he said.

As he made his way through the Shaker schools, he encountered racism periodically—like the time he took a typing class in summer school and ran into the vice principal, who delivered a lecture about how this was his chance to make up for his bad performance during the year. The vice principal had clearly assumed that Mark had failed a class, even though he had never come close to failing a class. “I said to him, ‘Umm, I’m here taking typing. I don’t need that speech.’ ”

But both Rushin kids had warm memories of Kathleen FitzSimons and her children.

Mark remembered a big party she hosted for all the neighborhood kids. He and her son, Danny, played together all the time. Once, he said, her ex-husband, who was in advertising, took them to an event where they met Mike Phipps, the starting quarterback for the Cleveland Browns Mark also remembered a time when he was in about fourth grade and had to leave school because he was sick with the stomach flu. FitzSimons picked him up and took him home with her, where he proceeded to puke all over her bed. “She can’t say she never did anything [to help]!” Mark said.

Michael said his mom thought of Kathleen FitzSimons as a friend. “My mother loved her,” he said.

Without doubt, Shaker launched both Rushins successfully into the world. Their mom’s battle to get Mark onto a higher academic track paid off. He graduated from Duke University, then the University of Michigan law school.

Michael, a successful pilot, looks back on his time in Shaker as a sort of bubble, in a good way. “Other places are so segregated,” he said. “That’s the gift Shaker Heights gave me—that diversity. It kind of spoiled me.” Now he is comfortable around other cultures. “I know the Jewish holidays. I know a good corned beef sandwich when I see one,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to have grown up anyplace else.”

Their mother died after years of living with Alzheimer’s disease. At the end, Michael said, when she could no longer remember anyone around her, she still played the piano.

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