Abstract
Debra Martin, a retired teacher and Beachwood resident, grew up in the Glenville neighborhood in the mid-1950s to mid-1960s, when her family moved to the Lee-Harvard neighborhood. She recalls that her Glenville neighborhood, which had become almost entirely Black by that time, had a politically active block club. She describes a childhood in which her parents sheltered her and set high expectations for her schoolwork. She describes being among the few Black students at St. Aloysius School and among the first Black students at Ursuline Academy of the Sacred Heart. She talks about how her experience of going downtown was limited and did not include most of the commonly cited nostalgic holiday shopping experiences often recalled by whites. She laments the decimation of the once-thriving Euclid-East 105th “second downtown” that accompanied the Cleveland Clinic’s expansion, as well as the east side’s loss of the Cleveland Aquarium that her family often visited when she was a child.
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Interviewee
Martin, Debra (interviewee)
Interviewer
Gabb, Julie (interviewer)
Project
Project Team
Date
4-30-2014
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
85 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Debra Martin interview, 30 April 2014" (2014). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 999120.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1046
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
