My grandparents played a pivotal role in shaping my upbringing. My grandfather worked as a factory laborer at Midland Steel, while my grandmother was a homemaker. I am the product of their love and care, just like the batch of chocolate brownies my grandmother used to cook for me as a child.

I named my company CHARP Education Consulting in tribute to my late grandparents. We hail from the Southeast side of Cleveland, an area annexed to the city during the late 1920s and early 1930s. This region was primarily farmland and only started developing after World War II. The GI Bill offered white veterans the American Dream, giving them a sense of suburbia in the Lee-Harvard neighborhood. The early inhabitants of this area were primarily of Southern and Eastern European ancestry. It was a place where they could embrace their cultural heritage and traditions.

My maternal grandparents, born in the 1920s in Cleveland, had parents who migrated from Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina to escape the Jim Crow South. My grandmother attended Central High School, where notable figures like Industrialist John D. Rockefeller, Poet Langston Hughes, and Congressman Louis Stokes also studied. She enjoyed modern dance classes at the Karamu House. On the other hand, my grandfather attended East Technical High School and later enlisted as a sailor in the U.S. Navy during World War II.

With the veterans' return from World War II, they had hoped for compensation for their sacrifices, but many, like my grandfather, were left disillusioned. The Servicemen's Readjustment Act, or the G.I. Bill, mainly benefited white veterans by giving them a pathway to generational wealth. They received financial assistance to purchase a home and get a college education. Although my grandfather helped to defeat Adolf Hitler, he felt like a half-American on his home soil because of racial discrimination.

My grandparents met during the 1940s through a mutual friend, coinciding with the development of the Lee-Harvard neighborhood. Before settling there, they lived in Glenville, known as the Gold Coast, in a multigenerational house headed by my maternal great-grandfather. The house on Columbia Avenue off 105th Street represented more than a physical structure but a cherished home and the birthplace of countless family memories. My great-grandfather migrated to Cleveland from Sandersville, Georgia, in the 1920s, and my great-grandmother came from Alabama with her parents and siblings. My great-grandfather's brother, Uncle Jimmy, moved his family from Augusta, Georgia, twenty years later. Furthermore, this house in Glenville provided shelter and the opportunity to achieve the American Dream.

Their dream of home ownership came true in Lee-Harvard in 1961, a testament to their determination to raise their four children. This neighborhood, initially white, became predominantly black by the late 1960s.

As the neighborhood changed, my family's loyalty remained unwavering. We still own the house today, honoring my grandparents' legacy and the history of Lee-Harvard, a place with a rich history of immigrant settlement and black individuals striving for the American Dream.

Community Curation

Charesha Barrett