On a warm spring day in 1964, the Rev. Bruce Klunder walked onto the construction site for a school building in Cleveland's Glenville neighborhood, fully aware that what he was about to do was dangerous.
Civil rights activists had surrounded the construction site for the new Stephen E. Howe School for two days. Construction of the school, and two others, would create more capacity for overcrowded schools on the city's majority-Black East Side, but civil rights activists like Klunder, 26, argued the real purpose was to further separation of Black children from white children on the West Side.
Tired of their complaints falling on deaf ears, the Presbyterian minister and others were willing to put their bodies on the line. Breaking past police onto the construction site, several activists laid in front of a bulldozer. Klunder laid behind it.
"When he (the bulldozer driver) backs up, they're flailing, telling him don't back up, but he backs up and he buries Bruce Klunder in the ground," said North Carolina State University History Professor Nishani Frazier, who has studied Klunder's story.
Klunder's death, one of the only deaths in the northern United States related to the Civil Rights Movement, ignited outrage and a push for action across the city. Today, Bruce Klunder is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as one of 40 civil rights martyrs in the U.S., alongside Martin Luther King. Jr. and Emmett Till.
Klunder's story remains relevant today, 50 years after a federal judge in the landmark Reed v. Rhodes decision ordered the desegregation of Cleveland schools.
A push beyond desegregation
Frazier grew up hearing stories of Klunder from her family and family friends who were activists with the Cleveland chapter of CORE, the Congress on Racial Equality, one of the lead organizations in the fight against segregation in Cleveland.
Frazier, who also serves as the director of public history at North Carolina State University, wrote a book in 2017 about this period of Cleveland civil rights activism through the lens of the local CORE chapter. Klunder was a founding member and leader in the group, well-known and well-liked by Black activists throughout the city.
"Whether it's my aunt or my uncles or my mother, there was there was no way to talk about Bruce Klunder without a clear sense of who this man was, how important he was to people in CORE, and what it meant when they lost him," Frazier said, noting Klunder was unique at the time for the way he recognized Black activists should lead their own movement.
In the moments after Klunder's death, the construction site in Glenville erupted with outrage. Activists hurled rocks and bottles and bricks at police. The bulldozer driver lost several teeth as protesters charged him. Ultimately, authorities ruled the incident was an accident, a decision the Klunder family accepted. However, activists who were there firmly disputed that conclusion, Frazier says.
"I am willing to say that he may not have heard. I am not willing to say that fully it was a total accident, given the nature of what was happening all around him (the driver)," Frazier says.
Klunder's death galvanized the various Cleveland civil rights organizations which had already banded together under the umbrella name of the United Freedom Movement. The group included CORE, which pursued direct action like sit-ins and protests, and the Cleveland branch of the NAACP, which previously took a more "conservative" approach and tried to pursue change behind the scenes, Frazier explained.
The United Freedom Movement took out a two-page ad in the Cleveland Plain Dealer condemning the school district and school board, demanding change. Two weeks after the ill-fated protest in Glenville, the group organized a massive boycott of schools. Estimates vary in news articles, but at least 60,000 of the district's 75,000 Black children stayed out, instead attending various "freedom schools" organized at churches and other places across the city.
But in the following years, Klunder's death pushed them all in a new direction, one of active attempts to reform the system.
"In that moment, in '64, they're not going to push for desegregation of the school system. They're simply going to try to take over the school system," Frazier said.
The "catalyst" period
The history of school segregation and efforts to desegregate the system in Cleveland is on display through the end of September in an exhibition at Cleveland City Hall.
Campaign director Leah D. Hudnall is the campaign director of Relay Cleveland. She said the public history project defines 1961 to 1977 as the "catalyst" period. It was a time of great change, inspired by activists' constant pressure, lawsuits and new local leaders taking the stage. Cleveland, in 1964 alone, saw visits from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, who delivered the famous "Ballot or the Bullet" speech just days before Klunder died.
There's good reason that activists were willing to weather arrests and place themselves in dirt ditches at a school construction site, Hudnall said. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, she said Black children were placed on “relay” schedules, receiving just a half day of school in poorly maintained facilities due to overcrowding on the East Side.
"Among other injustices, right? Black teachers, the majority of them at that time had black students," Hudnall said. "Black teachers were not allowed assignments on the West Side. Like there was so much more that was going on than just relay, but it was a segregated school district."
Articles at the time quote activists alleging police brutality as dozens were arrested during protests. A documentary that's part of Relay Cleveland's exhibition includes interviews with the family of Booker T. Eddy, a local father who protested alongside Klunder. Eddy was beaten by police during the very protest Klunder was killed at.
Even after the relay policy ended, the district continued to segregate students via the policy of "intact busing," Hudnall said, where Black children and their teachers were placed on buses and moved to predominately white schools where they took classes and ate lunch only with their Black peers.
"We have video recordings, audio recordings of seniors now who were children then who still break down in tears about the racial slurs that they heard when they arrived at what they call the 'receiving school,'" she said.
Still, progress was being made, gained through sacrifices made by people like Klunder and the activism of thousands of parents and families on the picket lines and marching in the streets. Carl Stokes became the first Black mayor of a large American city when he was elected as Cleveland's mayor in 1967. Arnold Pinkney became the first Black president of the school board in 1971.
"He (Stokes) was able to get out there, boots on the ground, and stand with these activists on this issue of school desegregation," Hudnall said. "And he says himself he thinks that's what helped, among many other things, I'm sure, get him to that win two years later (after initially losing)."
Lawsuits from families of Black children in the school system ultimately led to the biggest change for the school system: a landmark 1976 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Frank Battisti that the district was segregated by policy and practice and must implement measures like busing to desegregate.
A family's continued pursuit of justice
Klunder was survived by a wife and two children.
His daughter Janice was just 6 when he died, and Douglas was 3. His wife, Joanne Klunder, was devastated by his death but turned her sorrow into a call to action. She penned a powerful 1964 column in Ebony Magazine that called for change in the wake of her husband's death.
"I pledge also to stay in this struggle — this struggle for racial justice and equal opportunity and freedom for men to be men — until the victory is won," Joanne wrote at the time. "I pledge this not only in Bruce's memory, but also because my conscience and my heart tell me it is the course I must take."
Janice Klunder, now 68, says her mother followed those words through the rest of her life, continuing to picket and march for racial justice and, later, against the Vietnam war and for women's rights. Joanne Klunder died in March at age 90.
"They (Joanne and Bruce) were jointly partners in the struggle and in the movement. So when people talk about her carrying on his legacy, it's really her continuing the work that they were partners in doing all along. And so for her... It was only natural that she would redouble her efforts," Janice explained.
North Carolina State University history professor Nishani Frazier said Joanne was as well respected as Bruce by fellow CORE members. Frazier said her involvement speaks to challenges women faced while participating in the Civil Rights Movement.
"They had to have three jobs: support the men in their lives who are engaged in this protest, participate in the protest, and then rear the kids and keep the household," she said.
The Klunder family created a fellowship with the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2023 in Bruce and Joanne's honor, to support the next generation of changemakers.
Echoes from the past
Aug. 31 marks the 50th anniversary of Judge Battisti's decision on school segregation in Cleveland.
Hudnall, a former Cleveland school board member who was born and raised in the city, says that presents an opportunity for the city to take stock of progress and challenges it still faces. The government-mandated busing in the city in the late 1970s and 1980s did achieve a more even racial balance in schools. But it also may have contributed to white flight as families left the city for the suburbs.
"No one can actually say whether busing worked or didn't. It will be a topic that will be debated on both sides, I think, until the end of time," Hudnall said. "But underneath those questions, 'what did it feel like for a student to be bused and where are they now? Are neighborhoods less racially segregated in 2024, five and six as they were in 1975, six, seven and eight,' right? So I think those are the underlying questions that we probably should be pushing more broadly."
Many of the issues that drove Klunder and so many others to action remain. Black children and other children of color still face systemic disadvantages in Cleveland and across the country. The city is one of the most segregated large cities according to the Center for Community Solutions. While the city is nearly 45.9% Black according to 2025 U.S. Census Bureau data, some schools like John F. Kennedy High School on the East Side have a 95% Black student body.
Race-based achievement gaps persist, especially in cities with high poverty rates like Cleveland. And a 2024 study from Stanford and USC shows schools across the country have re-segregated since the 1980s, and suggests that's due to the fragmentation of the school system as charter and private schools have spread.
The Cleveland Metropolitan School District embarked on an ambitious plan called "Building Brighter Futures" in 2026 in an attempt to bring high-quality education to all neighborhoods of the city. It involves short-term pain, closing and consolidating 29 schools this fall, and laying off dozens of staff. But the district argues that by consolidating resources, each school that remains will have more opportunities for all children — extracurriculars, electives, advanced placement courses and college prep classes.
The Stephen E. Howe School, the school Bruce Klunder protested, was ultimately built in the 1960s, It was closed in 2005 in a previous push to consolidate the district due to steep enrollment declines.
The building was torn down in 2013.
Now, the site on a quiet residential street in Glenville is just a grassy field.
There is a nod to history: a small plaque that includes Bruce Klunder's name. It’s a reminder of a significant moment that changed the trajectory of a city, and of past hopes for a better future for all children.
