ABSTRACT
Karamu House-a settlement house, neighborhood center, and complex for the fine arts and performing arts in Cleveland, Ohio-has served the city and helped launch the careers of numerous African American artists since the era of World War I. It was organized as the Playhouse Settlement in 1915 and later renamed Karamu, Swahili for “place of joyful gathering.” The center was an outgrowth of committee work done in 1914 by members of the Men’s Club of the Second Presbyterian Church, who had sensed that the cultural and social needs of the neighborhood-the Central Avenue District, at that time a community of “Jewish, Colored, and Italian peoples”—were being neglected. The committee discovered that “the better class of colored people” there were also interested in establishing a racially integrated social settlement. Early supporters of the idea included the African American author Charles Waddell Chesnutt and the Cleveland Association of Colored Men.
