The Department of History will host Todd Michney, assistant professor in the School of History at Georgia Institute of Technology, as part of its Guest Lecture Series.
Michney will present “Best Unaddressed Location in the Nation: Mapping Cleveland’s Significance for African American Urban History” Thursday, Sept. 28, at 5:30 p.m. in the Iris S. and Bert L. Wolstein Research Building auditorium.
Urban historians have relatively understudied Cleveland—the country’s fifth-largest city as recently as 1920 and one of the most important destinations for black Southerners during the Great Migration.
In his lecture, Michney will build on findings from Surrogate Suburbs, his recently published history of the city’s African-American middle class. He will explore the validity of the mid-20th century slogan popularized by boosters—“Best Location in the Nation”—for black Clevelanders, particularly in comparison to patterns of race relations seen in the nearby Great Lakes metropolises of Chicago and Detroit.