Episode 25: The Parkridge Community Center and the Fight for Racial Equality

The Parkridge Community Center on Harriet Street opened in December 1945 as a recreation center for Southside residents. It was funded through a World War II program that built recreation centers for war workers and their families. But, the story of how the Parkridge Community Center came to be located on Harriet Street as a segregated facility for African American families has been mostly forgotten. In this podcast, historian Lee Azus recounts the struggle by residents of the Southside to build an interracial community center on what was called the "buffer strip" between white and black Ypsilanti near Michigan Avenue. Their story illustrates their vision and its limits as it came up against the power and the purse-strings of Federal bureaucracies and the Ypsilanti City Council.

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