Scholarship on the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) has typically focused on this New Deal housing agency’s invention of redlining, with dire effects from this legacy of racial, ethnic, and class bias for the trajectories of urban, and especially African American neighborhoods. However, HOLC did not embark on its now infamous mapping project until after it had issued all its emergency refinancing loans to the nation’s struggling homeowners. We examine the racial logic of HOLC’s local operations and its lending record to black applicants during the agency’s initial 1933-1935 “rescue” phase, finding black access to its loans to have been far more extensive than anyone has assumed. Yet, even though HOLC did loan to African Americans, it did so in ways that reinforced racial segregation—and with the objective of replenishing the working capital of the overwhelmingly white-owned building and loans that held the mortgages on most black-owned homes.

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The infamous “security maps” made in the 1930s by the Home Loan Owners’ Corporation (HOLC), rating supposed mortgage lending risk in urban neighborhoods across the United States, have long been considered the quintessential expression of racist redlining policy. However, a number of misunderstandings and unwarranted speculations about how these maps were made and used have proliferated. Using previously unexamined correspondence, this article establishes that HOLC could not have used the maps for loan denials, did share them with the Federal Housing Administration but not with private industry, and highly improvised their production with numerous methodological inconsistencies, including with regard to race.

The story of white flight and the neglect of black urban neighbourhoods has been well told by urban historians in recent decades. Yet much of this scholarship has downplayed black agency and tended to portray African Americans as victims of structural forces beyond their control. In this history of Cleveland's black middle class, Todd Michney uncovers the creative ways that members of this nascent community established footholds in areas outside the overcrowded, inner-city neighbourhoods to which most African Americans were consigned. In asserting their right to these outer-city spaces, African Americans appealed to city officials, allied with politically progressive whites (notably Jewish activists), and relied upon both black and white developers and real estate agents to expand these "surrogate suburbs" and maintain their liveability until the bona fide suburbs became more accessible. By tracking the trajectories of those who, in spite of racism, were able to succeed, Michney offers a valuable counterweight to histories that have focused on racial conflict and black poverty and tells the neglected story of the black middle class in America's cities prior to the 1960s.

As one of the country's first urban renewal projects under the 1954 Housing Act, Cleveland’s Garden Valley featured private apartments intended for middle-class African Americans. However, it was built on a landfill and offered living conditions far below what its residents expected. Analysis of where tenants moving into the project came from and where they moved afterward underlines their suburbanizing aspirations. Into the 1960s, Garden Valley came under increasingly harsh criticism for reinforcing segregation. Poor living conditions at the project catalyzed tenant activism, and it can additionally be regarded as a striking example of what is now called environmental racism.