Cleveland community activist pursues racial justice as her life’s work

By JULIE MINDA

One of the regular facilitators of the reverse ride-along program is a Cleveland resident who had some national prominence because of her efforts to build up challenged urban neighborhoods and fight against exploitation of people who are poor and vulnerable.

Barbara Anderson’s influence as a grassroots activist has been fueled by her personal experience of violent racism, and by her perseverance, and by pluck. “I’ll just keep moving forward. I don’t have all the education; no letters before or after my name; no degree, except for a high degree of mother wit, street sense, common sense and wisdom,” she told the author of the bio she provided to this reporter. It encapsulates the 40-plus years she has worked to build up Cleveland’s hardscrabble neighborhoods one overgrown lot at a time.

She turned her own pain into righteous action: “I’m just thinking that all my life I have had to experience certain things so that I could properly advocate for others that are struggling,” she says in the bio.

Repeated arson

With her second marriage and dual incomes, Anderson and her family bought a home in 1982 in Cleveland’s Slavic Village. The first Black family in what Anderson described as a “tight-knit ethnic community,” the Andersons were victims of numerous hate crimes.

One night, fires were set at all three exits to her house. “We weren’t meant to get out,” Anderson says in the bio.

The Andersons instructed their four children to take only one route on their walk home from school so Anderson and her husband would know where to find them. If they did not see their mother waiting on the porch when they got home, they knew to keep moving and get help.

Family tragedy

Anderson’s sister was in the final stage of terminal breast cancer around this time and she and her four children moved in with the Anderson family. The Andersons raised the children after the woman’s death.

Race-motivated violence escalated as more Black families moved into Slavic Village. In June 1985, an arsonist set a house fire that killed Mabel Gant, who was confined to a wheelchair. That night, Anderson answered the family phone to hear a racial epithet and a threat. The caller said they had gotten Gant and now they’d get her.

“I was fed up,” Anderson says in the bio. “It was no longer about me, it was about Mabel.”

Anderson’s outrage propelled her as she connected with a community-led initiative called National Neighbors that encouraged her to document the assaults on her family. That organization facilitated her appearance on Sally Jessy Raphael’s television show and helped her engage in political activism.

In the 1980s she spoke on racial justice and fair housing in Ohio’s statehouse and testified in Washington before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Financial travails

The mid-1990s brought crushing financial strain for the Andersons. The house was falling into disrepair and money was tight. The couple refinanced with an adjustable rate mortgage to free up home repair funds. But then Anderson’s husband’s health began to fail him and he had to quit his job. When the subprime mortgage crisis hit, the Andersons’ mortgage rate reset at an amount they couldn’t afford, and the home went into foreclosure.

Almost half the homes in Anderson’s neighborhood were in foreclosure. Yards became overgrown, people used the streets