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Philip Spiess
Herewith I submit: CINCINNATI’S AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY: Part V: “Cincinnati’s ‘Colored’ Schools”:
Schools for the "Colored"?: As you may assume, the Cincinnati schools for African-American children were, from the first, what we would call “segregated.” Indeed, that they existed at all in the very early days of the city was something of a miracle, for Cincinnati, a northern city and therefore “free,” was, however, close to the slave-holding South, and therefore, having Southern sympathies (for mainly economic reasons), would have (I believe) inclined to the slave owners’ idea that no slave should intentionally be educated – in reading, in writing, or in religion – because doubtless that would lead to thoughts of possible personal advancement, and hence a desire for freedom. [N.B.: I use the term “colored” in many passages here, because that’s the term that the African-American writers of the 19th-century period were using themselves.]
Nevertheless, in 1825 or 1826, when the black population of Cincinnati was calculated at 250 (!), the first school established for colored persons in Cincinnati was commenced by Henry Collins, a black man, in “Glen’s Old Pork House” on Hopples Alley near Sycamore Street (some say it was a carpenter shop, and the location was the south side of Seventh Street, between Broadway and Deer Creek), but it did not last long. That same year another was established by a black man named (appropriately enough) Schooly [Israel Schooley, an early organ builder?]; it was held somewhere near Sixth and Broadway, which was then known as the “Green” [see “the Little Red Church on the Green” in the previous installment]. Slightly later, a Mr. Wing (it seems he was a white man) kept a school near the corner of Sixth and Vine Streets; he admitted colored youth to his night school. And Owen T. B. Nickens, a black man from Virginia, who later taught (in the 1870s) at Mount Pleasant, kept a school at intervals, starting in 1834 in “King’s Church” [see the previous installment]. In 1836 Mr. Nickens moved his school to New Street near Broadway. There he was succeeded a few years later by John McMicken, a natural son [I assume this means he was a bastard, i.e., illegitimate] of Charles McMicken, the founder of the University of Cincinnati. In short, no school was regularly kept for black children, because teachers were few and there were not many regular scholars.
The Cincinnati public school system (for white students) was established in 1829. Thus in 1830 the colored people of the First Ward in Cincinnati asked that a school be opened for the benefit of its colored children – here was segregation at an early date. It is recorded, however, that there was no distinction on account of color in the private schools of those years. (This is hard to believe, but evidently colored children “of light hue” – doubtlessly mulattoes – were accepted into private schools as late as 1835, when Mr. Funk kept such a school at the southeast corner of Sixth and Vine Streets.)
In 1834 the faculty of Lane Presbyterian Seminary [see Installment II of this series], alarmed by threats of Kentucky slave-owning mobs, forbade its students to discuss the slavery question. Rebelling, many of its students went to Oberlin College in upstate Ohio [see Theodore Weld in Installment II]. But some of these students returned to Cincinnati: commentators of the time tell us that the “beginning of the anti-slavery excitement” in Cincinnati (i.e., the rise of the local Abolitionist movement) was around 1835: a number of young men and women (white), “filled with the spirit of hatred to slavery, and a desire to labor for a downtrodden race, came into the city and established schools.” They were all excellent teachers, and “are remembered with gratitude by those who received instruction” from them, but they were subjected to much abuse by the local populace. Boarding-house keepers refused to accept them, telling them that they had no accommodations for “teachers of n*****s” (i.e., the “N-word” – I only use it here (just the once) to emphasize the local populace’s hateful attitude). Thereupon these worthy young people rented a house and boarded with each other; part of their salaries was paid by an educational society supported by benevolent white folk. Later on, in the same vicinity of “the Green” (Sixth Street just east of Broadway), Baker Jones allowed two of his houses to be used as schools; in one, Augustus Wattles taught an advanced class of boys, and in the other, Miss Bishop taught a primary class of boys. But frequently the students would be unable to meet because of mob violence (there is good evidence that the mobs were drunken rabble, who should have been ashamed of themselves for terrifying little children!), although these schools continued, with varying success, until 1844. [N.B.: One of these teachers, Mr. Fairchild, eminent in educational and theological work, and later a professor at Oberlin College, eventually became president of Berea College in Kentucky.]
In 1841, Mr. Goodwin and Mr. Denham opened a colored school in Baker Street Church. This was the largest of all the colored schools, having an enrollment of 200-300 students. In 1844, the Rev. Hiram S. Gilmore, “a philanthropic gentleman of considerable wealth,” as well as one of “fine talents and rare benevolence,” established the Cincinnati High School, which was, it is said, the best school ever established for the city’s colored people. Gilmore spared no expense to make it a success. He built a building of five large rooms and a chapel at the east end of Harrison Street. Gilmore was principal, and he employed good teachers who taught English (presumably this means literature, and possibly elocution), Latin, Greek, music, and drawing. In the yard, a complete (!) set of gymnastic apparatus was supplied. Pupils were prepared for college, and many of them went to Oberlin and other colleges that accepted black students. Such students as demonstrated proficiency in singing, declaiming poetry, etc., traveled during vacation through Ohio, New York, and Canada giving concerts. The profits realized by these trips were devoted to furnishing clothing and books to the poorer students of the school. Sometimes the number of students in this school was as high as three hundred, but the income never equaled the expenses. In 1848 the principal of the school was Dr. A. L. Childs, previously a teacher, who was its principal at the time it closed. [Space does not allow the inclusion of distinguished alumni who went on to positions of national prominence, but they were significant, given the size and duration of the school.]
Black Schools Established -- Segregation: In 1849, an Ohio State law was passed authorizing the establishment of colored schools at the public’s expense (i.e., “public schools”); thus in 1850 an attempt was made to organize such schools under the law. But the Cincinnati city authorities declared that the colored trustees, elected to run the schools, not being electors, were not, and could not be, qualified as office holders; therefore, the colored School Board could not draw money from the city treasury to pay for any of its expenses. Peter H. Clark [see Part VIII], therefore, taught in the colored schools for three months to have a legal case against the city (it is said that Peter H. Clark trained all of the teachers in the colored schools between 1859 and 1895). A white lawyer, Flamen Ball of Clifton, law partner of Salmon P. Chase, took the case, and, by a writ of mandamus (wherein the court, so petitioned, orders a government official to perform a ministerial act), compelled the white School Board to honor the financial drafts of the black School Board. The black folk won the case, and their schools were opened accordingly.
However, in 1851, the city funds being low, it was declared that the colored School Board could not build a school house. And then, after a change in the law (1852-1853), the colored schools were placed under the control of the Board of Trustees and Visitors of the public schools of Cincinnati. Colored trustees could now manage all matters except auditing the accounts. The colored trustees demurred on this, and in 1856 the law was altered, thereby restoring the rights of the elected colored trustees to control their schools. Thus in 1858 the first school house for the colored schools (a brick one) was built and occupied; located on Seventh Street, it had four classrooms, the Superintendent’s office, a large hall on the third floor (presumably for meetings and assemblies), and a basement (occupied by the janitor). The following year (1859) another colored school building was erected on Court Street. A bit later two smaller buildings were erected on the same lot, these being occupied by a part of the district school.
In 1866, following the Civil War, as more African-Americans migrated to Cincinnati, Gaines High School, the first specifically public colored high school in the city, was erected on Court Street west of John Street, known originally as the Western District School, and later as the Gaines and Western School; Peter H. Clark was principal. The school was named after John Isom Gaines, a black merchant on the Cincinnati Public Landing who supplied provisions for steamboats on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, selling to the colored stewards found on most of the boats; he was known from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. He was noted as “one of the early friends of education in this city,” a man who labored in the early days for “the education of the colored youth.” (He was for many years the clerk of the Colored School Board; he died in 1859, and the African-American citizens of Cincinnati erected a monument over his grave in the Colored American Graveyard, Avondale.) In 1870 Gaines High School graduated its first students, a class of six. The school included an “Intermediate Department” (which I take to be a Junior High or Middle School); it offered courses (as of 1874) in spelling, definitions, grammar, reading, penmanship, composition, arithmetic, algebra, geography, American history, physiology, drawing, music, and German (the last being an almost necessary requirement for students of any race in order to be able to converse with many of their fellow Cincinnatians at that time). The High School Department curriculum (as of 1874) included arithmetic, bookkeeping, algebra, mensuration, geometry, trigonometry, astronomy, philosophy, botany, geology, physiology, chemistry [notice a large emphasis on the sciences, surprisingly advanced for the 1870s, particularly at an African-American school], universal history [I assume that this is what we now call “world history”], rhetoric [this would be what today we would call “public speaking”], Latin, German [see note above], drawing, music, and English literature [one wonders if this was the literature of England or America, or both].
In 1870, the Walnut Hills school house was erected, it being the finest belonging to the Colored School Board. It had four large classrooms, “a fine hall” on the third floor, and a large yard in front, paved with brick. For four years Thomas J. Good was president of the Colored School Board; he succeeded in securing for his race both its rights to the public schools and the school houses themselves. By 1873-1874, there were three Cincinnati Colored Public School districts: the Eastern District (schoolhouse on Seventh Street east of Broadway), the Western District (west of Vine Street), and the Walnut Hills District, each with its own board of trustees; there was also a Third Street Colony School. All teachers in the Cincinnati Colored Schools were required to pass an exam in some twenty-one subjects (i.e., most of those listed above in the high school curriculum, but also Theory and Practice of Teaching, Natural Philosophy [Science], Anatomy, Ancient and Modern History, and Constitution of the United States) in order to be certified to teach (suggesting that there was a small number of actual teachers, and that each taught a wide variety of subjects). [I wonder how many teachers in the Cincinnati school system today – or elsewhere – could pass exams in all of these subjects!]
A (Very) Gradual Integration: But in 1874 management of the colored schools was once again placed under the white Cincinnati Board of Education, and the Colored School Board was abolished, never to be reinstated. Two years later, the position of Superintendent of Colored Schools was abolished, and in 1887, when the Arnett law (abolition of Ohio’s “Black Laws”) went into effect [see Installments I and IV], separate black schools as a class were abolished, for the law now permitted black children to attend white schools. One immediate result of this abrupt change in the law, and therefore in the schools, was that participation in the colored schools fell dramatically; for example, at Gaines High School, enrollment fell in three years from 130 students to 5 – the end, of course, was that the school closed shortly after 1890. By 1925, these were the colored schools remaining in the Cincinnati area (as you can see, not all under the Cincinnati School Board): Newport School; Wyoming School; Lockland School; College Hill School; McCall Industrial School; Douglass School; and Harriet Beecher Stowe School (there was also the Lincoln-Grant School in Covington, Kentucky). And by 1926 all of the colored schools had closed except for Douglass School and a one-room Jackson Colony (Fifth Street west of Mound Street; part of the Stowe School).
The first real colored Kindergarten in Cincinnati was established in the Dabney Building (420 McAllister Street -- see Part VI) some years after the Civil War by Miss Annie Laws, who bore all of its expenses for rent, teaching, and janitorial services. One of the distinguished white women of Cincinnati, heavily involved in education and philanthropy (she helped found what are now the University of Cincinnati’s College of Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services, and the College of Nursing and Health), she was deeply interested in the mental development of children. [N.B.: The concept of the “Kindergarten” (“children’s garden”), and its subsequent movement, was the inspiration of the German educator Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel, who, influenced by the Swiss educator Pestalozzi, emphasized play, self-activity, and “learning by doing,” in other words, the spontaneous interests and creative experiences of children. He founded the first school of this kind in 1837 and named it “Kindergarten” in 1840; thereafter the movement spread throughout the Western world. As a German movement, needless to say, it held great sway in Cincinnati.]
I think we all have some idea of what happened with black education in the public schools of Cincinnati in our own time. Although segregation did not exist per se by law in the public schools, the far more subtle segregation by geography, i.e., neighborhoods, existed simply by the boundary lines drawn by the school board for the school districts: if you lived in a predominantly black neighborhood, you went to a predominantly black school (and vice-versa). (I recall hearing stories of white parents on the edges of those neighborhoods petitioning the school board to allow their child to go to a predominantly white school in a different district nearby.) And if you look back through the earlier posts on this “Forum,” you will find accounts by Mr. Lounds and others about “segregated swimming classes” at Walnut Hills High School (verified by my mother, who graduated from Walnut Hills in 1939). Yes, times have changed, but the beat goes on – only the “scenery” and the individual incidents change – and then none too often [see Installment I for the “Cincinnati Race Riot of 2001”].
[See Proceedings of the Semi-Centenary Celebration of the African Methodist Episcopal Church of Cincinnati, Held in Allen Temple, February 8th, 9th, and 10th, 1874; With an Account of the Rise and Progress of the Colored Schools; also a List of the Charitable and Benevolent Societies of the City (Rev. B. W. Arnett, ed.; Cincinnati: H. Watkin, 1874; 135 pp.); Wendell Phillips Dabney: “Colored School History to 1902, by Shotwell – Teachers in Colored Schools, 1925,” Cincinnati’s Colored Citizens: Historical, Sociological and Biographical, 100-111 (Cincinnati: The Dabney Publishing Company, 1926); John B. Shotwell: History of Schools of Cincinnati (Cincinnati: 1902); and Walter McKinley Nicholes: “The Educational Development of Blacks in Cincinnati from 1800 to the Present” (1977 thesis).]
Part VI: “Wendell Phillips Dabney and Cincinnati Machine Politics” will be posted soon.
[to be continued]
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