Chocolate City Cleveland

Chocolate City Cleveland (CCC) is a creative labor of love. It is a multigenerational, multimedia, multidisciplinary experiment intended to preserve our collective memory of a better past, and to imagine a brighter future for Cleveland’s Black neighborhoods. Observations from CCC inform our multidisciplinary consulting practice centered on place, community collaboration, racial equity insights, and radical imagination.

We’re remixing stories—curating primary sources + cultural artifacts that represent the Black experience in Cleveland. We’re establishing new oral histories—capturing stories from people that live, work, play, and pray in the neighborhoods that constitute the Black East Side.

The project is an active exercise in community collaboration. We believe that the insights CCC surfaces about our past are critical to shaping our future. We don’t want to  celebrate solely the big names—the politicians, business leaders, and celebrities.

Rather, we want to uplift the many history-makers in our community whose stories shed light on what these neighborhoods—the physical landmarks, events, people, culture, and rituals—once were and, importantly, could become again.