Hazelwood Community Association

The community of Hazelwood, in Blue Ash, Ohio, is a small historical African American subdivision less than 20 miles north of Cincinnati. Although the subdivision was created in 1888, the communal values of civic responsibility and engagement were established formally in 1941 with the founding of the community’s first civic organization, the Brothers’ Civic Society of Hazelwood. Hence, for well over seven decades public rituals of monthly meetings, mobilization campaigns, annual reunions, and special programs have defined and articulated the character of the community. 

Largely unnoticed by historians, local community-based organizations like the Brothers’ Civic Society of Hazelwood have made significant contributions to the civil rights movement and to the process of African American suburban development. For instance, in 1949, six years before the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, residents of Hazelwod, as members of the Society, mobilized a campaign that resulted in the integration of White Oak School, the school that serviced their community. Its significance is that residents’ demands influenced the newly formed Sycamore Local School District to reverse its policy of educational segregation in the decade before Brown. During the 1950s and 1960s, a time of massive resistance throughout the North and South to school desegregation, Hazelwood residents made successful demands that resulted in a racially integrated school district that served as a model of school integration.

As important, the society’s success at community organizing ultimately saved the community from becoming an industrial park. When the City of Blue Ash annexed Hazelwood and the surrounding area in 1959 with the intent of developing a “balanced suburb with areas devoted to industry and commerce” and of eliminating substandard residential areas, Hazelwood residents were promised sewer lines in exchange for their incorporation signatures. After reneging on this promise for about a decade, the City of Blue Ash faced resistance from the organized Hazelwood community, which, with the support of a network of public officials and state legislative allies, secured the resources to install the sewages necessary for community survival. Hence the public rituals associated with effective community organizing are expressions of deeply rooted community values of self-determination and collective agency.

HAZELWOOD TODAY

Today Hazelwoood is great diverse community that is home to numerous cultures and economic backgrounds.  The community is one that is still centered around an equal opportunity for all Americans to live comfortably while pursuing the American Dream." Hazelwood is located in Blue Ash, Ohio which was once chosen as America's top 100 communities to raise a family". 

The Annual Hazelwood Community Day

Hazelwood is still home of the Hazelwood Community Day which brings back generations of Hazelwood residents who had the opportunity to experience this wonderful community.  The event is a festival with food, drinks and good times. 

BARACK OBAMA DAY

Three days after initiating its inaugural ceremony honoring the election of Barack Obama, on Tuesday, November 11, 2008, the Hazelwood Community Association held its monthly meeting and voted unanimously to recognize the first Saturday in November as a community holiday in commemoration of the election of the first African American president of the United States. The vote represented more than the creation of a new ceremony and was the continuation of a tradition of using public rituals in the service of community empowerment. The purpose of Barack Obama Day is to commemorate the election of the forty-fourth president of the United States and represents a continuation of a tradition of public rituals that has given identity, cohesion, and political voice to a historically African American community, the Hazelwood subdivision in Blue Ash, Ohio.