The City Series: Toledo’s Dorr Street

In the mid-20th century, disinvestment and discrimination — from redlining to highway projects to so-called urban renewal — hollowed out scores of Black neighborhoods in cities from coast to coast. Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Rondo in St. Paul, Minnesota; Overtown in Miami; Albina in Portland, Oregon; Jackson Ward in Richmond, Virginia; and many other Black business districts around the country were wiped out. Urban redevelopment and renewal displaced more than 40,000 predominantly Black-owned businesses nationwide, with many more lost to urban highway construction. While they all have their own histories, these communities, where Black business, culture, and politics converged, suffered similar fates from the same racist policies.

Here, we tell the story of Toledo’s Dorr Street, where decades of racist policies left the corridor physically unrecognizable from its mid-century heyday as Black Toledo’s home for community and commerce. It is a story of destruction and one of resilience as the community works to rebuild a promise that was stolen decades ago. The podcast series is produced using interviews from ILSR’s 50th Anniversary Racial Justice Storytelling Project. For the project, Ron Knox and Susan Holmberg of the Independent Business Initiative spotlighted Toledo in exploring how the intertwined forces of discrimination against Black communities and economic policies that favor corporate dominance combined to erase the economic, political, and cultural vitality of Black business districts around the country.

View ILSR’s Dorr Street Storymap