Late last month, an article by Stephen Starr in Great Lakes Now, a magazine-style website produced by Detroit PBS, featured Cleveland’s InterCity Yacht Club, one of the oldest Black-owned boating organizations in the United States. The article quoted CPHDH director Mark Souther and drew on the Center’s Green Book Cleveland digital history project to help frame the backstory for the club’s founding. Started in 1968 by Black boating enthusiasts at the East 55th Street Marina, the club responded to a longstanding problem facing Black boaters—a lack of access to the water on a lakefront whose marinas were privately operated and denied membership to African Americans. The club’s founders remembered how they had often traveled as far as Sandusky to put their boats into the lake.
As Green Book Cleveland documents through historical narratives about lakefront sites, the Cleveland area offered limited points of public access to Lake Erie, while racial discrimination further discouraged Black recreation. The city had a long history of racial conflict along the lake’s shores. Attempts to segregate facilities at Euclid Beach Park in the early and mid 20th century prompted the city government to pass the public accommodations ordinance introduced by Councilman Charlie V. Carr in 1947. Meanwhile, the Bratenahl-based Lake Shore Country Club‘s refusal to allow Black golfers on its course led to a landmark ruling in Gillespie v. Lake Shore Golf Club (1950) that shaped efforts to desegregate public golf courses in other cities.
The InterCity Yacht Club’s pioneering work to help Black Clevelanders claim their place in the increasingly popular sport of boating continued a longer tradition of Black efforts to secure recreational use of the lake. Earlier examples included the creation of the Black lakefront resorts of On-Erie Beach near Lorain in 1921 and the short-lived Burton’s Bathing Beach near Ashtabula in 1931. Recovering these earlier, largely forgotten chapters of the region’s history offers more than merely visibility to Black efforts to pursue leisure activities along and on Lake Erie. It also invites envisioning ways of pursuing a future lakefront where everyone feels encouraged to enjoy the water.
