Nearly 50 years after Cleveland’s controversial desegregation plan started, people still debate its effects on generations of city school children. 

Court-ordered busing ended close to three decades ago. Yet today, few know that the desegregation plan was a response to a school district strategy designed to keep students racially segregated. It was known as the “relay” policy. The plan that was in effect in the 1950s and 1960s has had damaging and long-lasting consequences, says Leah D. Hudnall, a nonprofit consultant and former vice chair of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District board. 

At the time, schools in many Black neighborhoods were severely overcrowded. In many of the white neighborhoods, there were vacant classrooms. Instead of sending Black students to fill classrooms in the white neighborhoods, the district decided that Black students in jam-packed schools would attend school only for a half day. The plan addressed overcrowding, but it put these students at a disadvantage because they did not get a full day of instruction like their white peers.

The relay policy set up a racial achievement gap that haunts us to this day, Hudnall said.

“Now you have 70-year-olds, some of them started kindergarten late, or only were given three hours of instruction in elementary school,” she said. “This has affected the opportunities they have had in life and even the opportunities their children have had.”

Hudnall leads Relay Cleveland, a public history campaign focused on raising awareness about the policy and exploring the “deeply personal and profoundly political journey of school desegregation” in Cleveland. The campaign recently released Relay Cleveland Report: Half a Century of Change. 

An exhibit designed by Jason Garrett opens today at the Martin Luther King Jr. branch of Cleveland Public Library, 10601 Euclid Ave., and runs through Feb. 28, 2026.  The branch is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday. 

Busing is often looked at in the context of whether it was a good or bad fix for addressing segregated schools. For example, many say the 1976 Reed v. Rhodes decision ordering desegregation hastened white flight from Cleveland, a trend that had begun at least a decade earlier. 

The report and exhibit don’t focus on whether busing was good or bad. They look at the “iconic mandate” by a federal court and other strategies aimed at desegregating Cleveland schools. This is viewed in the context of Cleveland’s journey of education equity that spans more than two centuries, Hudnall said.

Public education for Black students in Ohio is a 220-year history fraught with segregation and inequality

To understand the persistent flashpoints at the intersection of race and public education in Ohio, one has to consider the Black laws, Hudnall said. Beginning in the early 1800s, these laws sparked the creation of segregated school systems because only white schools could receive public funding. 

In 1832, John Malvin, a prominent Clevelander who was an Ohio Canal boat captain and Baptist minister, organized a local committee to fund Black schools. The committee would eventually become the School Fund Society, which opened schools for Black students in Cleveland, Columbus, Springfield and Cincinnati. 

Though the Black laws were repealed in 1849, “segregation in education persisted through underfunded and separate Black schools,” the report states. The Black laws begin a 220-year timeline compiled by Relay Cleveland that focuses on Black education in Ohio. Segregation and inequality are common themes in the timeline that will be part of the exhibit. The timeline was compiled by Derrick Holifield, a former CMSD principal now working on his doctorate at Harvard University.

Hudnall, a former Cleveland State University professor, said her students were often shocked to learn about discriminatory statutes and practices such as the Black laws and the relay policy. And it wasn’t only students. Hudnall said associates and even mentors, some of whom had attended Cleveland schools, also couldn’t believe it. During slavery and even during the Great Migration in the 20th century, many Black people in the South viewed the North as the Promised Land.

“The narrative around Ohio is that once you cross over Kentucky, this is freedom,” she said. “That is true in some respects. But there’s also this other part of the narrative, in which you have state legislators following their peers in a national trend to create policies that were specifically restrictive to Black people.” 

Cleveland schools started discriminatory half-day school policy for Black students after Brown v. Board of Education 

As in many Northern cities, Cleveland’s Black population exploded during the post-World War II Great Migration. In 1940, the city had about 85,000 residents, but by 1960 there were 251,000, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Though the number of Black Clevelanders steadily increased, unofficial segregation confined them to Central and a handful of other East Side neighborhoods.This often resulted in crowded schools.

The 1954 landmark U.S. Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education ruling declared state-sponsored segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Still, the discriminatory relay policy was taking shape in Cleveland. While the policy officially began in 1957, Hudnall said, half-day schedules were being used in some Black schools a few years earlier.

The report and exhibit highlight people who fought the relay policy and other discriminatory practices. Daisy Craggett and Clara Smith, two Hough parents, were among those who lobbied against the policy. This included the two women organizing a 1961 march against half-day schedules for Black students. In a 1961 letter to the editor in The Plain Dealer, contained in the report, they wrote that relay parents “have banded together to fight this cancerous disease of overcrowding and part-time education in our schools.” They condemned the school board for refusing “to consider even temporary measures such as open transfers, re-districting or bus transportation to empty rooms that exist in other [predominantly white] schools.”

More than six decades later, Hudnall said their letter stands as a shining example of fearlessly confronting those in authority with honest and uncomfortable truths.

“I don’t know if many would have the courage to write that today and give their address,” she said, remarking on the practice back then to include the address of a letter writer. “But the school district was playing with their greatest possession – their kids.”

Classes of Black students were sent to white schools, but they couldn’t interact with white students

Intact busing was a strategy related to the relay policy. Individual classes of Black children were bussed to white schools, but they spent the school day in what amounted to a bubble. The Black students were prohibited from interacting with white students. They were even required to eat lunch in the classroom, for fear they would mingle with white students in the cafeteria.

The Relay Cleveland campaign includes oral histories. One is from Rochelle Gilbert-Cage, whose class at a Black Glenville elementary school in the early 1960s was sent to a white school in Little Italy. In the video, she recalls some of her experiences. 

“What I remember the most, is that while children in the South were integrating in Birmingham and other cities and those children were being sicced with dogs and rocks,” she said in the video. “We didn’t have no dogs on us, but we did have [white] parents throwing rocks at us.”

The relay policy lasted fewer than 10 years. The school board decided the best way to address overcrowding was to build more schools in Black areas. Many who opposed the relay policy also opposed this approach because they saw it as a form of segregation. They viewed the board’s motivation as wanting to contain Black students to Black areas, rather than create  a desegregated school system.  

As new schools went up in Black areas, protests erupted. In 1964, the Rev. Bruce W. Klunder, a Presbyterian minister and founding member of the Cleveland chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), became a martyr for the cause of school desegregation. He was among the protestors who laid in the path of construction at the Stephen E. Howe Elementary School in Glenville to prevent the school from being built. A bulldozer operator killed Klunder in a death that was ruled accidental.

The Relay Cleveland report includes an oral history from Booker T. Eddy, now in his 90s. In 1964, he was a Glenville parent who had recently moved with his family from the South. He knew Klunder and had protested at the school construction site a day before the minister’s death. Eddy and two of his daughters appear in the video. They speak for their father, who has speech difficulties. The daughters tell of how police beat their father until he was bloodied and injured him so badly that he still bears a scar on his face from that day.

Hudnell is moved by Eddy’s determination in fighting for educational equality.  

“I was so starstruck to meet him because of the level of courage that it takes to do what he did,”  she said.

By the 1970s, the struggle to desegregate Cleveland schools had turned to busing. The court-mandated policy ended in 1998.

Visiting historical sites of the Civil Rights Movement in the South sparked Hudnall’s idea for Relay Cleveland. She saw parallels in the systemic resistance to desegregating schools. As a third generation CMSD alumna, former vice chair of the school board and former professor who has studied different educational policies, she believes she has a distinct vantage point from which to see such parallels.

Hudnall wants the Relay Cleveland campaign to spark action.

“I feel uniquely situated to be able to lead and grow this relational campaign to invite others to reflect on the legacy of school equity and desegregation and to spark a new conversation amongst a new generation about advocating for the best for all of our students,” she said.