There’s a handsome new
flower bed in Hildana Park on
Chagrin Boulevard.
Built in the shape of a 9-point star, it was designed and
created by George Eaton in collaboration with his Baha’i
faith community.
At the heart of Baha’i is the unity of all people
and religions, and the explicit rejection of racism
and nationalism. George’s involvement is a fitting
representation of a lifetime spent in reconciliation of ideas
and experiences.
George is an architect and a builder, but he’s had such
a wide variety of jobs and life experiences that you could
fairly call him a Renaissance man too.
He spent his earliest years in Birmingham, Alabama,
before moving to Cleveland as a toddler. In the summers,
George would visit family and friends in Birmingham,
including his father’s best friend’s family. The families were
so close that George thought Uncle Stumpy’s daughter,
Carole, was his biological cousin. During those years,
George struggled to understand race, especially as he saw
it play out on his visits to the South.
One of his earliest memories of Cleveland is of being
asked, “Are you white, or are you colored?” George was
only a little boy when a Glenville neighbor asked him
this question, but he remembers it very clearly as he tells
Donna Whyte the story many decades later in his Witness
to History interview.
44 WINTER 2022 | WWW.SHAKER.LIFE
“I was just learning my colors – purple, red, orange,
green – and I knew I wasn’t any of those, so I figured I must
be white.”
When his young friend Carole was murdered along
with three other Black girls in the 1963 KKK bombing of
the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, George was
again forced to reckon with race – painfully.
By the time he graduated from Glenville High School
in 1966, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to follow his family’s
long legacy of college attendance. But after acquiring a
draft deferment, he decided to attend Knoxville College
in Tennessee. There, he struggled to reconcile the
Presbyterian faith of the college with the Black Power
movement of the 1960s, whose leaders often sought to
discredit religious faith as a means of keeping people
passive. Could religion co-exist with opposition to racism?
George wasn’t sure. He decided to leave school.
Around this time, George met his first wife. He
returned to school, this time at the University of Tennessee,
where he studied architecture. He was also working as a
draftsman for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and he and
his wife had a daughter.
But difficulties emerged, first with his health. The eye
ailment keratoconus forced him to again leave school,
quit his job, and eventually, he became legally blind.
With the help of the American Society for the Blind, in
time George was fitted with contact lenses that enabled
him to see again, and he returned to architecture.
GEORGE
EATON
Embracing
a
Higher
Faith
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